The next day, Ktheg!lik decided to spend a while familiarizing herself with everything Nik!eh had already built—not just the rooms and supplies, but the automata themselves, and how expensive they were in materials and in time. There was a dizzying amount of information available.

  She grew very worried when she realized that it had taken dozens of days for Nik!eh to assemble the carriage. Then her worry eased a bit, when she realized that they did not need a miraculous carriage to fly above the ground at vast speeds. An ordinary one with wheels would do just fine for most parts of the trip. They would need to cope with any ravines or other obstacles, of course.

  There were literally millions of designs somehow crammed into tiny Petra. The information must be piled up in the same magical space it uses to store materials, she concluded. Somewhere, there were vast warehouses full of designs, which Petra could somehow access and get glowing copies of, copies that grew and shrank and translated between languages, if imperfectly.

  Ktheg!lik determined that making more Makers was better in the long run but terrible in the short run. The fuak!a had too many urgent needs. Petra needed to keep making medicine for everyone, since sooner or later the hoonan sicknesses would make the rounds. They desperately needed food. And they badly wanted to find more survivors and rescue them, if possible.

  The decisions were endless and exhausting. Petra currently had 456 units of magnesium, for example, and could get another fifty per day at her usual rate of excavation. One wagon design used none, another used 20, and another used 800. Those same designs used different amounts of iron, and aluminum, and so on. There were hundreds of others to evaluate.

  It was hard to keep from being distracted by the wonders on offer. Petra had designs for flying ships, for devices that could talk to everyone on the planet at once, for guns that could shatter the moon. Petra could even make a copy of herself, but the material cost...There were too many zeroes in those numbers. How all that material disappeared into something as tiny as Petra was a mystery of the aliens.

  Ktheg!lik told Petra to stop showing her any designs that needed more than double the resources currently stockpiled. Many thousands were hidden, but many thousands remained. She asked about machines that could build more machines, and nothing appeared. She checked, and there were many designs—they just were much too expensive.

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  How do aliens cope with all this? How is anyone supposed to be able to use this much information? Are they all geniuses?

  She took a break to clear her head, and when she came back, she sat down with a few fresh ideas. She looked into the capabilities of the “flying searcher” under construction, and decided that finishing it would help with mapping, planning the route in either direction. That meant that she and Odaual had to figure out how to assemble the pieces.

  Odaual surprised her by cheerfully volunteering to do that part. Grateful to have one task taken off her plate, Ktheg!lik told Petra to give her the cheapest, fastest-to-produce transport capable of carrying a fuak!a. The result had numbers that sounded absurdly low. When she checked the design, it looked like little more than a suspended mesh, that the poor fuak!a would have to cling to for dear life while all their limbs were stretched out—presumably to help hold the flimsy thing together!

  That must have been a children's toy, or used for a sport, or something like that. Not helpful.

  Finally she told Petra to build her a large omnibus without windows, specifying the perfectly ordinary transport in great detail. If I have to force Petra to build an omnibus that wouldn't have looked out of place downtown in the capital, then that's what I'll do. All this alien technology does no good if it takes a year to build, or a mountain of material, or ridiculous things like that.

  Petra responded with a short list of designs. Ktheg!lik picked one at random, and checked what it could do, what it couldn't, and what it needed to work. Then she had to ask how long it would take Petra to make fuel. It came out to several additional days.

  “How do I make the fuel for this thing cheaper and faster to make, Petra?” She had to rephrase that a few times to get it across.

  Petra replaced the design with a nearly identical structure that ran on completely different engines. These were electric, and actually shortened the build time slightly. The roof was covered in sun catchers, and there was a compact engine on each wheel.

  "Can it make the round trip at full speed on one charge?"

  "Yes."

  There had to be a catch. "How long will it take to charge this?"

  "Zero."

  “Petra, I don't understand. How is this so much faster to make?”

  “Parts are here.”

  “What?”

  “Parts are here.”

  “You have a room full of spare parts somewhere, Petra?”

  “No.”

  “Then where...?” Ktheg!lik got it. “Petra...how much of your capacity will you lose if we build this?”

  “75% power loss, 95% energy storage loss.”

  “Will you still be able to function?” She shook her head and tried again. “If we build this, can your makers continue working?”

  “Makers will stop for night, work for day.”

  Roughly half the production, then. The price for building this thing in days instead of dozens of days. Kek!ooa probably doesn't have dozens of days.

  “Petra, will you be all right?”

  “...Yes.”

  Ktheg!lik froze. Did I just overtax Petra's translation gears somehow, or did Petra just hesitate before answering the question?