“Mahschin,” he said at last, and Imbry switched his translator back on. “Go on, Imbry.”

“A machine is a number of levers, working together. It is built by perfectly ordinary artisans—not gods, Iano, but men like yourself and myself—who have a good deal of knowledge and skill. With one lever, you can raise a tree trunk. With many levers, shaped into paddles, men can push the tree trunk through the water, after they have shaped it into a canoe.

“So a machine is like the many levers that move the canoe. But usually it doesn’t need men to push it. It goes on by itself, because it—”

Here he had to stop for a minute. These people had no concept of storing energy and then releasing it to provide motive power. Iano waited, patient and polite.

“It has a little bit of fire in it,” Imbry was forced to say lamely. “Fire can be put in a box—in something like two pots fastened tightly on top of each other—so that it can’t get out. But it wants to get out-—it pushes against the inside of the two pots—so if you make a hole in the pots and put a lever in the way, the fire rushing out pushes the lever.”

He looked at Iano, but couldn’t make out whether he was being believed or not. Half the time, he had no idea what kind of almost-but-sadly-not-quite concepts the translator might be substituting for the things he was saying.

“A machine can be built to do almost anything that would otherwise require a lot of men. For instance, I could have brought another man with me who was skilled at learning words that weren’t his. Then I wouldn’t need the little black pot, which is a machine that learns words that aren’t the same as mine. But the machine does it faster and in some ways better.”

He stopped, hoping Iano had understood at least part of it.

After a time, Iano nodded gravely. “That’s very ingenious. It saves your ancestors the inconvenience of coming with you and fatiguing themselves. I had no idea such a thing could be done. But of course, in your country there are different kinds of fires than we have here.”