Being in England is kind of weird. But good weird. Mira's never actually been out of the country before, but when Dad had an alumnus thing at Oxford he offered to bring her with him, and she said yes.
It's both more and less different from the States than she was imagining.
She nods along.
"It seems a logical development of simpler wheeled vehicles. And simple enough to produce. What of the others you mentioned?"
"Well, I don't know as much about how the others work..." She draws a picture of a car and an airplane. "These are much more complicated and burn strong oils for fuel."
Marcella asks a few more questions, until she feels she understands the uses, if not the workings, of the machines.
"The prospects for reproducing these, unfortunately, seem much lower. Was there no intermediate stage before cars, which might be easier to construct?"
"Not recently enough for me to be especially aware of them. I mean, wagons and carriages and so on, but the earliest actual cars still had enough of their internal workings inside the chassis that one can't figure them out on casual inspection, and I didn't anticipate ending up somewhere the knowledge would be useful."
"A pity," says the Queen, rising from her seat to pace around the room absently.
She thinks for a minute or so.
"Were you the ruler of Wonderland," she starts, every word slow and deliberate, "and you knew of the surface world and its innovations, which would you think the most pressing to adopt? Where would you begin?"
"Well, that depends a lot on things I don't know about Wonderland. What are the most pressing problems, the most common causes of death? If people frequently die of diseases I would say vaccines, if people go hungry very often I would say agricultural technology..."
"Why don't you tell me about agricultural technology?" she invites, sitting back down.
"There are fancy fertilizers but I think mostly it's machinery to make various aspects of farming more efficient."
Marcella takes out paper and a pen of her own, and starts making notes based on what Mira has already told her.
"I realize you are by no means an expert in this field, any more than you are in transport, but it would be helpful if you could provide me with as much detail as you can remember," she requests.
"There's machines that plow fields easily and quickly, which means you can have much bigger fields, and machines that sow seeds, and machines that help harvest things--called threshers? Or maybe threshing was something else. Uh, tractors are a thing, they work sort of like cars and replace horses for farm work, I think."
"And all of these are powered by the same complicated mechanisms and oils as those which power cars?"
She sounds disappointed, but continues to make notes.
"I think some of it's electricity. ...Which is lightning that goes through wires and makes things do things, usually via magnetism."
The Queen leans forward, fascinated.
"What kinds of things, exactly, can 'electricity' accomplish?"
"I know more about this than about agriculture! Okay, so to start with, what do you know about magnetism?"
Marcella favours her with a wide, pleased smile.
"I have heard of the concept, I believe..." she muses. "A property of certain ores, which makes them attractive to some types of metal?"
"Okay, so this is a standard bar magnet," she says, drawing a rectangle and labeling the ends "North" and "South". "The metal doesn't naturally come in this shape but it's convenient. So the short version is that any magnetic metal has two "poles," north and south, and either end will attract nonmagnetic magnetically responsive metal, or the other pole of a magnet, but repel the same pole."
She listens.
"What it is which makes some metals magnetic, and others magnetically responsive?"
"I don't know what makes some metals magnet-relevant and others not, but the difference isn't 'this kind of metal is magnetic, this kind is magnetically responsive,' it's 'this kind of metal is magnetically responsive, and this piece of that metal is a magnet.'"
"Ah, I see. There is presumably, then, a way to create one from the other?"
She's started making notes again.
"If you stick a piece of metal to a magnet--" she draws another rectangle attached lengthwise to the first "--then it acts as a magnet while attached. I...think if you leave it attached long enough it stays like that for a while but I'm not sure. Another way of doing magnets is electricity. If you wrap a piece of metal in wire and then run electrical current through the wire then the metal is a magnet while that's happening; that kind of magnet is called an electromagnet."
"And we are back to the question of electricity," Marcella remarks.
"How does one generate or harvest this...substance?"
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