At that she's practically giddy with delight. "This is like chalk!! Except as precise as ink!!" And she fixes the drawing, elaborates on it; the eldest of the children wears his hair in golden braids, the second is reading, the younger two are playing on the floor with glimmering precious stones.

It is so good to be able to give people nice things.

"My mother," she says when she's done. "She turned back after the Kinslaying. And my little brother Arakáno, he's dead."

"I'm sorry."

"They aren't."

Miles... finds he has nothing to say to that. He doesn't have enough information to agree or disagree, and this doesn't seem like the time to start an argument anyway.

She's drawing something else now anyway. A series of elegant curving figures. "These are the letters," she says. "I can tell you the sounds that go with each of them."

"Yes please, I haven't actually found the time to become literate in Quenya yet."

So she reads off the sounds. "It's written exactly as spoken, and all the dialects follow the same transcription rules."

"That's amazingly convenient, no wonder everyone complains about English. I apologize on behalf of my native language."

He fiddles with the comconsole to extract the glyphs, then starts keying in an assortment of sentences in the newly recognized alphabet. "Tell me if I make any mistakes."

He makes a couple of typos but corrects them almost immediately; his actual command of the rules as described is perfect.

"And this is how you write books so quickly," she says, awed. "It's less of an art, but it's easier to value art for its own sake in Valinor than here. Can I try?"

"Absolutely."

So she does. She gets distracted by checking how fast you can type if you do characters at random (quite fast!!!!!!) and how the characters line up - "see, this is no good, the vower markers are supposed to be centered on the consonants and in some cases it means something different when they're off on the edge like that."

"This is fixable!"

He dives happily into the text-rendering software and corrects it of its misapprehensions.

This involves several new panes appearing in the holographic display, most of them filled with largely-incomprehensible English text and other symbols, some of them with individual characters and vowel marks displayed in guideline-filled rectangles. With frequent reference to a couple of panes off to the side that may be some sort of manual, Miles uses his light-pen to drag the symbols around and occasionally types or edits quasi-English text in yet another pane.

"What does this do, and how does it work?"

"This is the system that controls how text is displayed. This part controls the positioning of the synbols," he points to the many rectangles with various Quenya symbols in them, "and this part controls the more complex rules, like which things are vowel marks and how they should be treated differently from the consonants," the pane of weird text.

"Can I try it? To teach the system the sarati, for example, the runic alphabet we used before Fëanor developed his."

"Go for it."

She works at it intently for about an hour, asking him questions occasionally.

Miles is happy to decipher manuals and offer advice and explain what a programming language is.

"This is very clever," she mutters when she has it finished. "Such an odd thing to do, develop something that just lets you write faster, but here it is."

"It's not quite accurate to the mindset, but it might clear up a lot of your confusion about human inventions to think of our little efficiencies as reducing the fraction of our finite lifespans we will spend on particular tasks. In the final accounting of my life, I don't want to have to say that a third of it was spent delivering ink to parchment because no one had invented comconsoles. You know?"

"I'm surprised you didn't just fix the finite life-spans."

"We've tried, some of us anyway. The problem is fairly intractable, and some of the attempted solutions have been gruesome."

"You can travel the stars. That seems much harder than not slowly rotting."