Meanwhile, a bidding war is happening. This isn't particularly unusual for þereminia, but this one is unusual for attracting so much interest from the average person.

Because the uplink inside Traveler's printer just came online.

The Archive is managing the whole thing, naturally, and they exercised their discretion to begin by downloading the library's index of available books, for obvious reasons. But the ansible link is painfully low-bandwidth — which is to say, it's actually on par with the speed of internet access available in many rural areas, but trying to run an entire planet's curious desire for alien books through a single connection makes it look pitifully under-powered.

The Archive will download and redistribute all of the books; that's not in question. The thing that has to be decided is the order.

So people pool their money to move books that interest them higher in the queue. The redundant servers inside the Archive's datacenters process an unusually high volume of financial transactions. And inside Traveler's printer, the uplink begins gently, politely requesting books.

The Archive isn't the only þereminian institution exercising some level of discretion over access to limited bandwidth, though. So the next visitor Traveler receives is Kharet, a plant biologist who is interested in talking about how it is that plants can grow in crafting material.

He is also a reasonably fit and handsome switch who is attracted to men and visits the pink district semi-regularly. Traveler might run into a mildly disproportionate number of those, going forward.

He wasn't told why the diplomatic team suggested that he meet with Traveler directly, instead of passing off his proposal for a crafting-material-fertilizer randomized trial indirectly, but he assumes it's for good diplomatic reasons. And it is, just not for good diplomatic reasons that he would guess if he were pressed to make a guess.

He's happy to discuss how crafted fertilizer works, and give samples and demonstrations. (He can grow plants in normal soil, too, it just gets depleted and that limits things.) And if Kharet gets the impression, midway through the visit, that the friendly alien is paying a little more attention to him than he might otherwise be, well, that could just be an impression he's getting through his own intuition, at least if he has a Crafter-typical inclination towards intuitions of that sort.

Luckily, þereminians have a roughly comparable level of intuition in this area to Crafters. So mid way through thoughtfully tasting a leaf off an exemplary tea-bush as a rough field test of soil chemistry, he pauses, and looks at Traveler for a moment.

"Two questions — what happens if you grow a plant in an air-tight container? Plants actually get most of their mass from air, not the soil, so I wonder if crafting material can also substitute there, or if you'd have to aerosolize it. Second question: would you want to come see a music performance with me tomorrow? And have a chance to talk about—"

He stumbles over Crafters' lack of job-related vocabulary.

"— a broader set of topics?"

He's never heard of someone trying to grow a plant in an airtight container before, that sounds worth trying - he knows that growing a lot of plants in quick succession in caves with poor airflow isn't the best of ideas but he's not sure what the exact problem is, that might be related. Also a music performance sounds great, he's been wanting to check out the local options and he'd love to have someone to go with.

Kharet smiles.

"Great! A music group I particularly like is playing tomorrow; I'll get us reserved space in the audience. The performance is at — oh, shoot, it doesn't have a timekeeping conversion."

He consults an astronomy app.

"Ah. When the lower edge of the sun is 15 degrees above the horizon. I can meet you here at 20 degrees and we can walk together?"

That sounds good to him. Is it indoors? He'll want to do some object design beforehand if so.

"Yes, it is. It's in a music hall near the center of the city. The space is pretty open, though; I'm not sure how big you're used to indoor spaces being, but it's about the size of this field."

He really can't guess whether Crafter architecture would tend toward being larger (because of impossibly strong materials), or smaller (because of living less densely) than Helper architecture.

That might be fine depending on the size of the audience; he's worried about the density of the crowd. His instincts around touch do tolerate some frequency of accidents but he doesn't want to test their limits with regard to that, so he's going to want to design some kind of personal space bubble that he can deploy if he needs to, especially if he's not going to be able to escape upward in an emergency.

"That makes sense. The crowd at these kinds of events is usually close enough that you could reach out an arm and touch the people on either side. I'm sure people will give you more room than that if asked, but having your own device to be sure is probably a good idea," he agrees. "And the ceiling is pretty tall in the music hall, because the shape of the space changes how things sound. So you probably could go upward if it came to it, you'd just have to land by the doors to get outside."

That sounds fine, then, yeah. He'll look forward to it.

"Great! For right now, though, would you be willing to try growing a plant in an air-tight container? I'm pretty curious about what will happen ..."

By the time Kharet leaves, he has a good number of notes, lots of hypotheses, and a spring in his step.

And Traveler will be waiting for him the next evening in a slightly better fitting robe with fancy gold trim, a floppy gold hat that fades to indigo where it droops, and a heavy decorative shoulder piece made of small overlapping circles of material in a few different shades and textures of gold. He's also wearing a crossbody bag - he's got cookies and nuts in it in case they want a snack while they're out - and carrying a walking stick.

Kharet steps off the train and waves to him. He's wearing a long blue fashionable dress — which, in this particular time and place, means colorful chest ruffles — with twisting pink flame designs on the sleeves and a nice leather sporran. He carries a communication screen tucked under one arm.

"Hello!" he greets, once he's close enough. "I like your ... mantle?" he says, gesturing at Traveler's decorative shoulder piece.

He's pleased to hear that! He likes Kharet's ruffles, they look like they'd be fun to play with. 

He smiles and pats at them.

"Well, they're in fashion, at least. How has your day been so far?"

It's been good! He's got the chickens' pen set up and they're getting used to the space, he doesn't quite trust the flock with the separate one yet but it's looking promising there, and he should have his food garden all set up by the end of the day tomorrow. He's still thinking about what he wants to do in terms of dogs - his has some genetic modifications that it seems like it'd be a shame to pass up the opportunity to introduce here but he's not sure he wants to commit to raising a litter with everything else going on, and he doesn't really want to be separated from her either - possibly he should ask about getting a couple other dogs and once they're trained he'll feel better about letting her go for a while, but that's a significant commitment too. He's sure he'll figure out what he wants to do sooner or later, though.

... huh! He gestures in the direction of the city, and starts leading the way. They have plenty of time to get to the music hall before the concert starts, but they might as well walk while they chat.

"I don't know much about raising dogs," he comments. "But I wonder if you could get people to do that surgery where you take out an animal's eggs, fertilize them, and then plant the embryos in another animal. That way your dog could stay with you and someone else could raise the puppies."

Huh, he didn't know that that was a thing! He's not sure he wants to subject her to surgery, but it's nice to know that the option exists.

Probably what he ought to do is find out who'd want the puppies and what they think of the whole thing, actually; at home they'd just join the local stray packs and people would pick them up from those as they needed more dogs but that's obviously not how things work here.

"No, I think usually people who have a litter of puppies get in contact with places that need them," he agrees. "What genemods does your dog have that you would hope to share?"

The ones he knows about are that she can differentiate red/yellow/green colors and safely eat anything a Crafter can (though she still needs a high protein diet), both of which are rare among other animals. There might be other stuff that he doesn't know is modified, though, too.

"Huh! I can see why that would be handy," he agrees. "I'm sure a lot of people must have asked you this, but what is it like, living with a dog? I went and saw some sheepdogs at the Coastal Sheep and Wool Festival a few years ago, but I didn't really interact with them much other than watching their performance."

In some ways it's like living with any other person, just, less? Dogs aren't as smart as, say, crows; crows understand what it means that Crafters are smarter than they are, and they'll come to a Crafter with problems or things that they'd like to work on together, but dogs aren't really smart enough to notice that they might want to do that, they just kind of do their own thing most of the time unless you ask them for something. They're just as able to notice emotions and schedule stuff and practical concrete things like that as anyone else, though; if you usually go out for a walk with a dog in the afternoon and they like that they aren't liable to let you forget, and if you're sad or something they can be quite comforting.

"Do you find it stressful? Like, if your dog can't do her own problem solving that means you need to keep an eye out for her, right?"

He doesn't, no - in practical terms it doesn't really work that way, he does need to make sure she's cared for but she doesn't really have problems that he needs to worry about all that often. He meant, like, if he had a crow friend who hung out with him a lot, or a kid, and they got bored, they might come bother (affectionate) him about it, whereas his dog will just go chew something up to keep herself occupied and as long as she has things to chew and he doesn't leave anything important lying around where she might get confused about whether she's allowed to chew on it that's not a problem.