Sometimes it was inscrutable, like the fact that substrate-level entities were difficult to refract through rich-light. That was the most interesting example, because Cara understood what the substrate was, and what refraction meant in that context, and the nature of rich-light, but the whole body of knowledge didn’t connect to anything. There was no shared context with anything like food or trees or water. Any human knowledge. It was, Elvi thought, like finding a sea turtle who thoroughly understood Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but didn’t have any sea-turtley application for it. That kind
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