"Hmm. So there are definitely things that we want to show you, but I also don't really care what day they happen. I am happy to do whatever you would like most. So if you want to sit here and keep people-watching that's fine with me, I just wanted to confirm that explicitly," he explains.

In the park the group of people playing a game apparently finish and start congratulating each other. Some of them break off, doff their robes, and go jump in the pond to cool down.

He does expect he'll feel like he's had enough of this for the day at some point this morning, but he's not there yet, yeah. He's interested in their megaprojects and trading system, too, for later or if Vesherti gets bored before he does.

(He fairly obviously notices the people stripping to swim, not in a way where he seems surprised about the nudity but in a way where he's conscientiously not looking too much at it.)

"Since I've seen the city before, I expect to find it less interesting to watch than you do," Vesherti admits. "But that's why I brought a book — I'm perfectly content to spend time reading if we run out of things to talk about."

Vesherti is not really sure why Traveler would care about the swimmers. Perhaps just because it's not usually a group activity for Crafters?

"Swimming is also something we tend to do with other people, mostly for safety reasons. People do swim alone, but I think it's less common than swimming in a group."

Crafters don't swim together very often, and usually not in the nude; it's safer if they have some crafting material on them that they can turn into a boat or at least a flotation device in an emergency. It's a little uncommon to go naked in public in general, too, a fair portion of Crafters feel private about being seen that way, and different Crafter communities have different expectations about how people will handle that.

"Oh, I see. We do have flotation devices, but it would be inconvenient to take them everywhere, so they're mostly used when you know ahead of time that you will be going out on deep water," Vesherti explains. "Different cities also have different expectations about wearing clothes. In this city, the default is to assume that someone not wearing clothes outdoors is blue and not pink, until you get a chance to explicitly ask. Indoors in public spaces it's the same, but indoors in private spaces they're assumed to be red until they clarify. Except that some public indoor spaces have more specific expectations that people going inside are told."

Vesherti recenters himself before he goes down an unnecessarily detailed tangent about different kinds of indoor communal spaces.

"Some people feel private about not wearing clothes, but those people just don't take off their clothes and that's fine."

That does help to know, he appreciates it. Though he's not sure of the exact boundary between blue and pink, or for that matter the difference between blue and green. Or he's fine with just continuing not to look at people if it's an uncomfortable topic; it would be for a lot of Crafters.

For all that Vesherti has gotten plenty of practice with the Crafter language at this point, he's still constrained by the cruel whims of vocabulary.

"Now that we have more words I can try to give you a more detailed description of those colors. Let me see ... Blue, green, and pink are all social colors," he begins. "But they are ... focused on different things. Blue is mostly about wanting to talk to people. Not just being open to being near people, but wanting to interact with them. Pink is similar, but it's more about wanting a specific subset of interactions with people. The subset is kind of fuzzy, but it's things like ... wanting someone to be your partner, or wanting someone to have sex with, or wanting someone to kneel at your feet. Green is open to being near people, but not specifically seeking out either of those kinds of interactions, because you're focused on something else, like learning or physical activity."

"People get very elaborate with these things, but ... anyone in a social color, it is fine to talk to them or interact with them if you want to. Someone in blue would prefer that more than someone in green would, unless you're joining the green person in some shared activity. Someone in pink is like someone in blue, except that they're letting you know that they're interested in that particular subset of interactions, so that you know to ask about it if you feel similarly."

"The color system used to be simpler, but when we came up with ways to make more colors, and people could have more clothes, it got more detailed. And unfortunately there's some drift between cities," he admits with some chagrin. "But as long as you have the basic red-vs-not-red the rest of it is really just extra information that you don't necessarily need to care about. I'm not sure what topic might be uncomfortable here, though?"

Crafters tend to feel even more private about sex-related things, even just as a conversational topic, than about nudity, though he feels somewhat less that way than most and this conversation is fine. (Not that he's comfortable enough to look away from the screen as he replies, though.) A Crafter wearing pink in the local sense in public would definitely have their neighbors talking about them, back home.

It is good, in a sense, that it's different here, but that's not a conversation he wants to have today and really not a conversation he wants to have at all.

"Okay. Then we don't have to talk about it."

Vesherti makes a mental note to avoid the parts of the city zoned for public sex; they're pretty small and easily evitable, for obvious reasons, although it does mean that they'll have to take the long way around if Traveler wants to see the waterfront.

If someone with less tact were conversing with Traveler, they might make comments about how þereminians view intimate relationships, but he just said he doesn't want to talk about it and Vesherti has more self-control than that. The people on the diplomatic team have sort of been waiting for the shoe to drop on something that Traveler will dislike about their society; it was really a matter of time.

"Is there any kind of pattern in the colors that Crafters choose for their territories?" he asks instead. "Obviously it won't be something as ephemeral as how they feel at the time, but maybe there are still trends?"

Hm, there's not really a lot of patterns, but there are a few, mostly that very unsociable Crafters tend to choose very plain colors for themselves - he's actually seen territory markers that were just monochrome, a time or two - and more sociable Crafters tend to choose patterns that are fancy in some way; the glitter in his indigo and the reflectiveness of his gold are examples of that. His fleshcrafter friend who's very sociable has a peach themed triple ombre going on, as another example, orange and yellow and purple. Sometimes Crafters who aren't that sociable do pick fancier designs, especially when they're young - younger Crafters tend to be more sociable anyway but it's also more common for them to guess wrong about themselves in the more-sociable direction - but a really plain design is a pretty reliable sign that someone would rather not be bothered.

"How interesting! Can people change their chosen colors if they don't fit, then?"

Yep. Usually not all at once, for teens and adults, but it's not especially uncommon for Crafters to make minor changes to their personal designs that add up over time. He used to incorporate a white border into his design, for example, and then eventually decided he liked it better without that. Sometimes Crafters make changes to demarcate major life events, too; he did that when he took up traveling, he had the indigo and a shiny bluish green back then and added the glitter after a couple months when he was sure he'd been right about it.

"Huh, interesting! And the colors themselves are just what appeal to you?"

Pretty much, yeah. Crafters do avoid having designs too similar to their neighbors' - that's one of the things he's getting used to right now, it's very weird to see so many people in similar colors - but that's the only limitation.

"That makes sense. I do think our personal glyphs are maybe a bit more flexible there, because it's easier to distinguish similar designs and know they're definitely different. My glyph is Vesherti, but if someone else had Wosherti, that's an obviously different person even though parts are similar."

That does seem like a clever system, and obviously the Crafter way of doing it fails immediately if you have this many people in one place all doing it. He likes being able to identify people at fifty yards' distance, though, and he's not sure how he feels about the idea of people being able to see what mood he's in at that range - it's not the kind of thing he thinks of as being intimate, exactly, but he's used to it being more intimate than that.

Huh.

Vesherti imagines what it would be like to live in a world where you couldn't tell whether someone wanted to be bothered, or what the general mood of a crowd was except by asking. Probably you'd just get ... a lot of people never speaking to anyone in public places, and only making friends through existing connections?

"To me, since I'm used to the way we do it, not being able to tell if someone wants to talk before you approach them sounds stressful," he replies. "But I can see why you'd feel that way."

He can usually tell by looking, can the locals not? It's harder for him with other Crafters than with animals but not that hard.

"... sort of? Some people are better at that sort of thing than other people are. I'm unusually good at it, which is one reason I do things that involve a lot of working with people. But even then, I think a lot of people are —"

Vesherti erases the partial sentence and tries again.

"One of the somewhat common ways for someone to be when they're red is: everything is perfectly okay, they're calm, happy, doing what they want to be doing. But if anything goes wrong, they will instantly not be okay. And talking to people is frequently a source of stress that can cause that. So if I were relying on body language, I would have to look at each person with calm, happy body language and make a guess about whether they're blue or red. And I might do better than chance, perhaps by a lot, but it would still be a risk. So people would be less likely to try to strike up a conversation, because they don't want to take that risk. And someone who was feeling red in that way might not leave their territory, because that would also be a risk."

"So it's not that we couldn't make pretty good guesses in many cases — especially the obvious cases where somebody's body language is closed off or unhappy — it's that the negative effects of having to guess are not proportional to the accuracy of the guesses. Does that make sense?"

That makes sense, yeah. It's a species difference, he thinks - he's pretty sure Crafters aren't fragile like that regularly at all. But if it's common for the locals it makes sense that they'd take precautions about it.

"It might not be a species universal — it may be a cultural thing. There have been places in the past where people don't attest to that state as much, and there are cities that actually don't have a clothes-colors system. But comparing these sorts of things between times and places is notoriously difficult, because both people's feelings and how people talk about their feelings is influenced by so many different factors."

"That said, I'm sort of getting this picture of ... Crafters seem to be lacking some of the mental stuff we have that makes being in groups easier, in exchange for maybe being more robust in other ways. I wonder if with more time and study we'll be able to find evidence that that's a particular tradeoff in brain designs. Or maybe I'm just seeing false pictures based on too little interaction."

It could be either, yeah, he really did only just get here and they haven't written to any other Crafters yet or read any books. Which reminds him, the fleshcrafter friend he mentioned a minute ago is interested in meeting Vesherti (or whoever's going to be his main point of contact with the locals, but he's under the impression Vesherti has taken the project on in at least the medium term?) over the ansible at some point.

"Yes, I've taken on the project of being the point of contact for Crafters. If we turn out not to work well together, or once we end up with too much contact for one person to handle, I can pass the project on to other people. But I would be delighted to talk with your fleshcrafter friend! Do you know if there are times of day that would work better for them?"

She's most readily available in the evenings - the time of day is roughly the same here as for her. She's willing to make time earlier in the day if she needs to but it'll take her a few days to arrange for it, she's usually fairly busy.

"The evening should be fine," Vesherti agrees.

He's going to be working long days for a while, probably. But that is so totally worth it to be the point person for alien contact.

"Are all of your ansibles from one person to another person? There's no pebbleclinker for sorting letters to different people? I'm pretty sure there isn't, but I ask because our pebbleclinker people are working on a prototype for connecting an ansible to our phone system, so if there were something like that I could talk to your friend without having to bother you for the use of your ansible."