"I know how to eradicate some diseases they probably have on an Earth during this year."

"...that's a worthwhile benefit."

Nod.

"Do you have recommendations? ...And may I have some relevant languages?"

"The language thing goes both ways? I didn't realize. Uh, recommendations for what? The place seems - substantially culturally different than the Earth I'm used to, recognizable but socially peculiar..."

"I come from what seems to be a vastly different cultural context and would probably benefit from even slightly wrong information. Yes, the language thing goes both ways."

"Here is a political globe of my Earth circa this year -" Globe! "Most of the rich countries are republics. Some countries are misleadingly named 'democratic republic' and are actually attempts at Communism, unfortunately executed. I'm from this one," tap, "and know less about the others which is inconvenient because disease priority one is endemic to this continent," tap. "If you can get the languages without getting anything else from my head, you're welcome to all of them, but a few of mine are not spoken on Earth and a couple are dead; your priorities are probably going to be English and then, hmmm..." He comes up with a priority list for another dozen.

"You would have to send the languages to me deliberately, and I would get only what you sent. It works like sending anything else, but takes longer and requires less focus on the details - I didn't need to explicitly remember my entire Eivarne vocabulary and so forth. A little like when you sent me how to operate this device."

"Okay. That's probably going to be easier to do without leakage for languages I got from summons - so you're going to speak a different dialect of English than I do but it'll be mutually intelligible -"

Push push push.

He waits patiently, then switches to the dialect of English that Cam gave him.

"Thank you. This will be very useful. What are all the problems you could solve there? Would I be able to solve them as easily with my copy of your power, or are some of them based in knowledge you have that I don't?"

"They are significantly based on that. I have medical and engineering training and I know how to use all the software that would help me keep track of what I was doing. I could probably direct you remotely for a lot of the low-hanging fruit though, since the power's pretty good at working from plans and labels."

Thoughtful nod.

"Do you recommend that I claim responsibility for rescuing you, or separately go and do useful things and wait for whatever interference might result, or do you not have enough information to predict which will be more effective?"

"Not enough information. I don't know why they grabbed me - there were uniforms but not ones I recognized - I only think I was in the United States because they put the TV on in English, it was warmer than I expect Canada" (globetap) "to be in November, and when the TV mentioned an airtime the clock on the wall indicated we were in the central time zone. So they might object to people with wings, or spontaneous appearances except they missed you for some reason, or - who knows."

"In that case I think I'll try the 'independently doing useful things' approach and see what comes of it, on the basis that I'm likely to get more useful things done faster than if I first stopped to talk about their habit of imprisoning unexpected interdimensional visitors."

"Entirely fair. Okay, so the diseases - there's one with an exclusively mosquito vector, you can wipe it out by making sterile male mosquitoes of the correct species over the relevant continent, but let me just - I'm going to see if this Earth has a Wikipedia." ...It does. "Oh joy! Okay... yep, malaria exists and is carried by the same bugs and is currently an African problem. So get some decent coverage of the continent -" He does some math, comes up with a figure for how many mosquitoes need to go where.

Korovai studies the relevant information and nods.

"And in the meantime I'll read Wikipedia and adjust plans for things other than that, as they may involve interacting with humans. Can you find me again if I've been drifting around in space and the Earth has moved and so on, should I go to Mars -?"

"I expect it to be easier to find you if you go to Mars. And I think I'll leave a copy of the flying canoe with you, in case something happens to the one I bring with me to Earth. I don't expect them to destroy it, but it's not as immortal as I am and it would be time-consuming to rebuild it from scratch."

"Sure. If you want to save me a trip, how about the top of Olympus Mons -" It is this very high mountain on Mars.

Here they are atop Olympus Mons.

Korovai duplicates his canoe. It takes about a minute, and involves the new canoe shimmering gradually into existence next to the old one.

"Nifty."

He makes his less-unhappy face again, and then gets in the duplicate canoe and goes to Earth to distribute mosquitoes.

(I expected my communication to work at these distances; was I correct? he sends.)

Seems so!

Convenient.

Mosquitoes ensue.

Cam does research.