Fire and Ice

Illustrated by Ron Chironna

It didn’t want to go. It’s cold, there’s absolutely nothing to do, and I’d be stranded for at least three months while my faithless fiancee, Stephanie, danced her way through half the men in Miami.

But when my editor assigned me to do the article, it was either book passage or hit the road looking for a new job. Old news: jobs are hard to come by, unless you relish the idea of a challenging career selling shoes for a living.

I had the pool secretary call Delta for reservations.

Traveler of Worlds is a magazine with six editors. Every month each editor gets one slot. In that space they can publish anything they damn well please. It can be an essay on the color red. It can be a case study of a paranoid schizophrenic. It can be an analysis of the architectural styles found in Port Burroughs, Mars. Our readers like the grab bag approach. They like having their horizons broadened. The eclectic nature of the subject material is worth snob points at the next social outing. They all seek to outdo one another with titillating trivia gleaned from this month’s article on the sexual habits of the inigloo, a fist-sized primate that lives in Greensward. They pay a steep price for a large-format glossy magazine that still goes to the trouble and expense to publish on paper. Looks good on the coffee table, you see.

Randall Barker, one of the editors, had decided that he wanted an article on adaman, an exotic hardwood of great beauty and even greater price. A fair percentage of our magazines end up on coffee tables made of adaman. Each and every one of those tables cost as much as I make in six months.

Did I mention that Randall Barker has eyes for my fiancee?

Thirty-eight light-years in six days.

Not bad, I guess, especially considering that the ship was a Lockheed Starbounder—modern twenty years ago, moderate ten years ago, hopelessly outmoded today. But you can hardly expect Delta to put the latest ships on the backwater runs. And Messagie, my destination, was nothing if not a backwater.

Still, six days is six days, and I was already half out of my mind with a sick combination of boredom due to my enforced confinement and worry about Stephanie. I’d tried to call her—left messages, even—somehow I just never seemed to catch her at home. That was hardly surprising. By now Stephanie probably had her number in half the black books in town. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, I could guarantee Stephanie was not bored.

I schooled myself as best I could for patience. It was only three months, I kept telling myself. I could make it for three months, couldn’t I?

A nasty little voice in the back of my mind kept telling me that I could, but whether my relationship with Stephanie would survive… that was another matter entirely.

Messagie was remarkable only for two things. The first was adaman, of course. The second was the tree from which the wood came.

Totally unremarkable in the overall scheme of things was the fact that it’s always winter on Messagie. Snow puffed into my face as I stepped stiffly down the ramp from the freight shuttle. My legs felt as though they had been splinted. I was unaccustomed to wearing so much bulky clothing and I felt like an overinflated balloon.

The man who met me was perhaps fifty, rough and weather-beaten looking. Enough character etched into the lines of his face for three men. He looked at me—not exactly disapprovingly—more as though he was taking my measure. He wasn’t telegraphing his conclusions and I wasn’t about to ask.

I stuck out my gloved hand. His was bare and callused and had a grip that could teach my grandfather’s vise a thing or two. “My name’s Michael Sokol,” I told him.

“Luther Kellerman. I’m what you might call the mayor,” he responded, and released my hand. He turned and started walking away from me.

My gaze, which had been on him, traveled back to the nearest tree, about a kilometer away, then up. And up. Then up some more. Then the tree faded out, obscured by the falling snow and the low cloud cover. And all I had seen so far was trunk; the limbs wouldn’t start until somewhere around two thousand meters. Since the cloud cover on Messagie is pretty nearly constant, it’s rare to see all the way to the top of an adaman, but I had been assured that the sight was awe inspiring. Before I left home, I had sat for quite some time staring at a diagram in the encyclopedia comparing a redwood to an adaman tree—the redwood looked like a toothpick standing next to a fat pencil. As much as thirty-five hundred meters in height and with some specimens approaching three hundred in diameter, an adaman tree is anything but your average bonsai.

The human mind, at least one raised on Earth, is not prepared for the sheer immensity of a single adaman tree, let alone an entire forest of them. I went through a few seconds of a vertiginous shrinking feeling; as Alice must have felt after following the instructions on the Drink Me bottle.

The feeling passed and I forced my eyes down. Kellerman was looking back at me, face expressionless. “You coming?”

I hefted my bag and hurried to catch up.

“You wanted to know about the trees,” he prompted.

I nodded. “Biggest living things known to man. You can’t help but be fascinated with something like that.”

“And the wood.”

“Yeah. And the wood.”

“Well, that’s what we do here. We mine the wood. Only thing we’ve got that’s worth a damn, unless you know someone who wants to buy snow.”

His face hadn’t changed, so I didn’t know if he was serious or evidencing a particularly dry sort of humor, but I grinned anyway. “Is that what you call it? Mining?”

He glanced at me. “What would you call it?”

I shrugged. Really, it was as good a word as any. The trees were far, far too large to cut down. The impact of one hitting the ground would probably trigger seismic activity. Instead, they cut into the living tree. No worse from the tree’s point of view than a beetle boring into a pine. By the time you had tunnels and chambers within the tree, it probably did begin to seem a little like a mine.

Kellerman gestured back at the shuttle. “If we had all the money they made off of our wood back on Earth, we could have decent schools for our kids, maybe even a hospital.”

Interesting point to slip into the article. “So all the money—”

“Middlemen,” he spat. “We don’t get much, here. Oh, I’ll grant that freight is a tremendous part of it—the crap’s heavy—but there are about eighty different layers of hands between the tree and your sawblade on Earth. Half that number would still be too many.” He looked at me sideways. “How much you pay for your last piece?”

“How’d you know I was a woodworker?” It was the nominal reason I’d been picked by Randall to write the article on adaman. Hell of a hobby to land me in such a place as this.

“I can tell,” he said. “How much did you pay?”

I thought back. “It was just a little piece.” I described a square in the air with my hands. “It was almost three hundred.”

His mouth tightened into a sardonic grin, the first expression I’d seen on his face. “Hell, I’ll give you little dinky pieces like that. We burn ’em.”

“Burn them? Just like that?”

Again the grin. “Man’s gotta keep warm somehow, doesn’t he?”

It made sense, but… it beggared my imagination to tally the worth of what a fire would burn during the course of a single evening. Even knowing intellectually that adaman would be cheap on Messagie hadn’t prepared me for the simple fact that they literally had enough of it to burn. Yes, they got a lot of their heat by burning the methane given off by recycling their wastes, but to supplement that by burning adaman—clearly, I had some readjusting to do.

Somewhere deep down inside, I have a conviction that making myself come to terms with the very differentness of other peoples and other places will keep me from growing old. Calisthenics for the mind. I trudged through the snow next to Kellerman, doing my brain exercises. One, two… one, two… working off the mental flab.

The village was small. A double row of buildings flanked the single-lane street, reminding me incongruously of the simple, linear towns in old Westerns. The buildings stood close to one another, as though huddled together for warmth. Some were so close that only one person would have been able to walk between them at a time. All had planks bridging the space between adjacent roofs, making the entire village, in a sense, two extended buildings, one along each side of the street. The buildings were all of wood—adaman, of course—on stone foundations.

I shook my head. The price of one of these plain wooden buildings would equal that of a mansion if it were to be transported to Earth.

Kellerman had seen me shake my head. “What? You don’t like our town?” There was an edge to his voice.

All I could do was chuckle in return. “I was just thinking that, at least in Earth dollars, you live in palaces.”

“I suppose so.” He gestured towards a building to our left, one nearly at the end of the street. “You’ll be staying with me, at least for the first week or two. Then we’ll see if someone else wants to take you over for a while. We’re not really set up for visitors. In fact, you’re the first person to ever stay over between shuttles.”

Frowning, I said, “Seems like tourism would be an obvious draw.”

He snorted. “Think it through. They come, they see the trees. In six hours they’re ready to go home. But the shuttle only comes in once every three months. What are they going to do for the rest of the time?”

I nodded. “Right.”

He stepped up onto a broad wooden porch that ran halfway across the back of his house. Stomping his boots to get the clotted snow out of the treads, he held the door open as I slipped past into a room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room. All the cooking implements were of metal, battered and burnished from long use. The computer terminal was obsolete to the point of being an antique.

To my right there were three doors, all standing open. The ones on either side were tiny bedrooms. The one in the middle was a bathroom. That was it. The whole house might have measured four meters by eight.

I walked over to a window on the opposite wall that looked out on the street. Triple panes to keep heat loss to a minimum, I noticed.

He said, “One thing I’d like you to do to sort of earn your keep while you’re staying with me is to make sure the shutters are closed every night.”

I nodded. “Be glad to. I imagine it helps keep the heat in.”

Kellerman rubbed his hands together. “I think of it as keeping the cold out. You live here as long as I have and the cold starts to seem like a living thing.”

The next morning I followed Kellerman to his tree—one of about a dozen being actively worked. The actual entrance into the tree was an arch perhaps three meters across and four high. From any distance at all it was invisible, lost in the rough, ropy furrows of the bark. Two heavy wooden doors were spread open and footprints in the previous night’s snow indicated that we weren’t the first to pass this way. I later learned that there were between six to ten men and women working in each tree.

Just inside the door was a small cubicle, like a coat-check room in a fancy club. Kellerman stopped at the counter, leaning on it with his elbow. “Ruby, this is the man from Earth who’s come to write about us taking the wood out of the tree. His name is Michael Sokol.”

Ruby reminded me irresistibly of a German hausfrau. Although not dressed for the part, the round, cheerful face was enough to convince me. She smiled broadly at me, then turned to Kellerman. “I’ll take good care of him, Luther. Don’t you worry.”

She looked at me. “I keep the equipment back here, sell fresh blades and such. Every morning, everybody who works this tree has to check in with me—then they check out again that night. That way I know that no one is left inside when I lock up.”

“Why not just leave it open?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Animals might come in during the night. The next morning, Luther, here, might get a surprise when he turned the corner. It’s just easier to close the doors. That way we know that nothing of any size can get in.”

Kellerman said, “Make damned sure you check in with Ruby every single time you come in here. If she’s not here at this counter, you wait for her to finish lunch or whatever she’s doing. I don’t care if you have to wait an hour. Same thing on the way out.”

“Why are you so careful about people being in the tree? Seems like it’d be a pretty safe place to spend the night.”

Ruby answered, “Well, there’s several things. Say a man’s off working by himself and gets hurt, we might not know for a few days. This way, we start looking as soon as he doesn’t check out. Happens about once or twice a year. Last time was about October, I think, so it’s about time for someone else to get hurt. Just make sure that it isn’t you.”

I nodded solemnly.

“Then again,” she continued, “sometimes it’s the tree that gets them.”

My mouth twitched. “What’s it do—eat them?”

She shook her head, completely serious. “Nobody told you?”

“Told me what?”

She glanced at Kellerman, frowning. “You brought a man in here without—”

He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Ruby, I thought he knew. He says he’s worked adaman before, so I thought—”

“Humph! Small consolation that would have been.” She turned back to me. “Adaman sap is mildly hallucinogenic. Some other effects, as well, it seems.” She gestured at the open doors. “We keep these open all day, no matter how bad the weather gets, so we can keep fresh air circulating though the tree.”

Kellerman looked grim. “Accidents happen more because someone gets to seeing things and loses control of their saw than for any other reason. You don’t want to stay in a dead-end tunnel any longer than you have to.”

Ruby said, “Two or three hours aren’t enough to do much to you, but I wouldn’t stay in stagnant air for much longer than that. Take a break. Go to a window. Get yourself some fresh air. The stuff clears from your body fairly quickly. Just don’t overdo it.”

Now I was unsure of myself. My certainty that they were having a joke at my expense was wilting under Ruby’s earnest gaze. I glanced at Kellerman. On his face, too, was the look of a man who meant what he said. But still…

“If adaman has some kind of vapors, why didn’t I have a problem when I worked with it at home?”

Kellerman said, “If you have to be in the tree, here, surrounded by the stuff for several hours before it begins to affect you, a small piece like the one you messed with…” he shrugged. “There’s just not enough to bother you.”

“Why not wear a mask or something?”

“By the time you keep out the fumes, the mask gets so heavy you can’t stand to wear it for long. It’s just easier to get fresh air once in a while.”

“But what about the importers? Surely they have a warehouse full of the stuff.”

“How much they might have on hand at any one time, I couldn’t say, but you can be sure that they’re well ventilated.”

“But your house—”

He held up a ramrod straight finger. “Ah! Once the wood is dry, it’s no longer a problem. Either air or kiln-dried, it doesn’t matter. The wood used to build my house—and all the others in the village—has been stored outside for at least five or six years after being cut. Quite dry, I assure you. If you go back behind Town Hall, you’ll see a shed where boards are stacked, drying, so that there will always be cured wood on hand if someone needs to make repairs or if a new building is needed.”

Inwardly, I was pleased. That adaman had such a quirk was just more grist for my mill. The trivia hunters would have a field day.

Kellerman led me though man-made halls, caverns, and rooms, all cut from the tree itself. The sumptuous appearance of the wood was enough to convince me that here, truly, was a residence fit for a king. The ebony floor in Henry VIII’s banqueting hall at Leeds Castle was nothing compared to this. So what if it was a tree house turned inside out?

The cut surface of the wood nearer the entrance hall was deep gray, the color of the side of an old barn. Dirt and grime had covered the original glory of the wood. The color was still there; I used my pocketknife to cut off a sliver in order to expose the clean wood underneath. The newer rooms, however, were vibrant. Deep reddish-brown shot through with vibrant autumn orange swirls and black accents. I also became aware of a feint odor, almost below the threshold of smell, comprised of equal parts cinnamon and coffee, with a resinous piney undertone. A wonderful smell. I sniffed deeply, enjoying every molecule that passed through my nose… until a sharp glance from Kellerman reminded me that I was also dealing with something more than an aroma.

I exhaled noisily, noting that adaman was like Stephanie—beautiful, but not necessarily good for you in the long run.

As field research goes, things progressed normally enough. I spent the next two weeks talking to the men and women who worked the trees. Ruby and her counterparts in the other trees grew accustomed to seeing me come in several times a day. Asking questions was a way of life for me, and people either were helpful or taciturn, according to their temperament. I tried my best not to annoy those who did not respond well to my inquiries.

One fellow, Lane Daltry, seemed to take an instant dislike to me. I stopped by the room he was carving out, using something like a large circular saw that could make blind cuts into a solid wall.

I stood by the door and watched, making certain that I was well out of his way. Aromatic sawdust flew out of the vent at the back of the saw.

The blade was getting dull and gummy; dark resin was building up on the sides. The longer he cut, the more the smell of the overheating motor began to override that of the adaman sawdust. Eventually thick gouts of gray-blue smoke were coming out along with the sawdust as the glaze on the blade began to burn. Daltry didn’t let up. He kept pushing it.

The motor gave up the unequal battle about a hand’s breadth from the end of the cut. It simply lacked the torque. He switched it off, stopped to wipe his forehead, then reached down and switched the motor on again as though it could simply resume where it left off. In the meantime, the glaze had cooled enough to harden, locking the blade into the cut as surely as if it had been glued there. The motor sucked amperage through the line, but couldn’t break free. A circuit breaker tripped somewhere back at the other end of the thick power cable that snaked out past my feet and down the hallway, taking the light in the room with it.

Daltry spun on his heels, seeing me for the first time, silhouetted against the still-lit hallway. “What’d you do?” he demanded angrily.

I shrugged. “Nothing. I was just standing here watching.”

He tried the switch on the saw again. “It quit working.”

“I think maybe the circuit breaker blew.”

That didn’t suit him. He went and fumbled for the switch on the lamp in the semi-gloom, fanning his hand in front of his face as though he could part the clouds of smoke. He grumbled something under his breath when the light wouldn’t come on, either. Then he straight-armed me back against the side of the door and pushed past without another word.

The impact knocked the wind out of me and my head cracked sharply against the wood. I hadn’t anticipated physical assault, and I’d had my hands in my pockets. Unable to keep my balance, I fell sideways onto the hall floor, landing heavily on my side. By the time I was able to disentangle myself and sit up, Daltry was gone.

Clutching one hand to my ribs where my elbow had dug in when I fell, I staggered to my feet. I felt dizzy, and, mindful of Ruby’s daily reminders about the fumes from the wood, I made my way up the hall towards a window… and away from Daltry.

After finding a window, simply a large, tunnel-like rectangular opening in the side of the tree, I sat on the inside lip and breathed deeply. After a few minutes I began to smell the smoke from Daltry’s saw and it belatedly occurred to me that I wasn’t really getting all that much fresh air if what was flowing past me was coming from within the tree. I painfully hefted myself up farther into the window and slid along towards the outer edge. Once there, I discovered a neatly carved depression in the bark. Slipping into it, I discovered that it made a comfortably contoured seat. Not a coincidence, I was sure.

I looked down. Big mistake. My stomach turned queasy, instantly. It was a long way down to the ground. Once, as a tourist in New York, I had gone up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Although it’s been quite some time since that was the tallest building in the world, looking down from there had unnerved me enough that I had had the jitters for an hour afterwards. This, however, was easily twice that high, with no barrier of any sort between me and the ground far, far below.

I closed my eyes, took a deep, slow breath, and opened them again, looking up this time. The clouds were not far above me and it looked as though it might snow again soon. The day before, I had seen Luther accurately predict the start of a snowfall, just by observing the height of the cloud cover relative to known points on a tree. When the lowering clouds reached a certain limb, he turned to me and casually remarked that I ought to raise my hood. I thought he was teasing, but damned if the first flakes didn’t drift down less than five minutes after he said that. Naturally, I made a mental note to throw that into my article.

I turned my attention to the window itself. It had been cut so that the outer end of it emerged into a furrow in the bark, which saved another meter or two of cutting since the bark stood out that much farther on either side. Where I sat it was a mere half-meter thick. Proportionate to the diameter of the trunk, the bark was as thin as the skin on an apple. But how much do you need? The tree had few known indigenous enemies, and we humans had only been around for an eye-blink in the history of the species.

According to the people I had talked to, no one had yet figured out a reliable way to tell how old the trees were, as there was no discernible ring structure. The current range of esti-, mates went from ten thousand to half a million years. Measurements of the rate of cell growth had given the halfmillion-year-old figure. Yet there was another camp who cited evidence that the growth went through longterm cycles. Not exactly analogous to annual rings in trees on Earth since these seemed to happen at random intervals, but similar in effect. I had heard some say, only half jokingly, that given the age of the trees, they probably recorded entire ice ages.

The wood was the densest, hardest known to man. Ebony and lignum vitae were as balsa next to adaman. I’d pretty well taken the edge off of a carbide-tipped blade with the little piece I’d worked back on Earth. The saw blades they used here were tipped with industrial diamonds and were replaced frequently—by everyone but Daltry, it seemed. Lasers, long used for novelty carvings on Earth, had been tried, but the heavy blue-gray smoke given off by the wood when heated defeated the beam after just a few centimeters. Add to that the fact that the wood burned lustily if overheated and they had soon gone back to saws.

More nearly translucent than woods back home, a good piece of adaman, when finished with a hand-rubbed coat of lacquer, looked as though you could sink your hand in it up to the wrist. I had heard that the last thing John Kenney, the head of 3M, did before he left the company was to have a six-meter-long table built of adaman for the boardroom so that the board of directors could rest their elbows on elegance incarnate. When the bill came in, John Kenney went out. Shareholders won’t stand for that sort of extravagance when the company is losing money.

Funny thing, though. Even though Kenney left, the table stayed.

I can’t say as I’d have sold it, either.

I dreaded seeing my phone bill. Six intersystem calls back to Earth for the dubious pleasure of listening to Stephanie’s recorded voice saying, “I’m sorry, but I’m busy just now. If you’ll leave your name…”

Yes, I could have triggered her sim-persona, the program on her computer which imitated the real woman, but I’ve always hated those things. If I’m going to take abuse in the name of love, I’U take it face to face, thank you, not delivered by an electronic golem.

The seventh time actually paid off, in a sense. I got Stephanie. She was pushing her hair back out of her eyes. She looked stunning. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Michael. I’ve been trying to get you.”

“Uh, right.”

That’s all? Not even so much as a greeting? “Listen, is everything OK? I’ve been worried about you.”

“Yeah, well, I was on my way out… I’d already locked the door and had to get out my keys and everything and run to catch the phone. You know.”

Which didn’t answer my question. Suddenly the conversation seemed very awkward, very one-sided. “You’re not in much. I’ve tried calling—”

She cut me off, her tone verging on defensive, “Yeah, well, I’ve been out some. Busy, you know.”

“Out a lot, it seems,” I said testily. Dammit, I’d sworn that I’d keep my temper if I did manage to talk to her, but I was on the verge of losing it.

“Like I said. I’ve been busy.” She switched topics. “So, how’s the story coming?” Her heart wasn’t in it.

“Great. The trees are really incredible when you actually get to see them up close.” Hell, now I was sounding wooden. It’s hard to maintain any momentum when you’re the only one who wants to talk.

“Neat. Well, listen, it’s good talking to you and all that, but I don’t want to run up your phone bill and I need to get going, anyway.”

“Well, OK. I love you.”

“Bye,” she said, and hung up.

Since when had Stephanie ever worried about running up my phone bill? And why was she dressed to kill, headed out the door at 11:30 p.m.? I’d been sure to call late so I’d have a better chance of catching her.

Whether I liked it or not, I pretty much knew the answers.

True to his word, Luther Kellerman kept me for about two weeks, then I found myself moving down the street to stay with Norm Sat, a man I kept having to remind myself wasn’t crazy. He was sap-happy—the local term for someone who’d breathed a little too much adaman in his time. His eyes sometimes went loose in his head, seeming to see further than they should, through walls, floors… and me.

Whereas Kellerman’s cabin had been clean and well-kept, Sat’s place was a dump. Literally. Things dumped in the corner, things dumped in the chairs, things dumped in the middle of the floor. Knickknacks of every description. He was a world-class pack rat. Nothing was ever thrown away. Bits of cloth, scraps of metal, even little pieces of adaman he would bring home at the end of the day just because he liked the patterns he saw in the grain and figuring of the wood.

He had an entire collection of pieces he had found with semi-recognizable faces in them, the same way that there are people on Earth who claim to see the face of Jesus in an oddly shaped potato. Sat would smoothe a piece of wood, lacquer it, and set it on a windowsill, on the mantel, or maybe just throw it in a box with twenty or thirty others. Anywhere there was space. There was enough raw adaman wood lying about that his cabin smelled as though I was still in the tree.

Grudgingly, I had to admit that some of them really did look like faces. About a dozen or so, out of probably three or four hundred, were uncannily realistic, so much so that he had given them names.

Sometimes he talked to them. Now, that made me nervous.

After the third day, when he had introduced me to the wooden face he called Don for perhaps the fifth time, I said, “Norm, do you really believe that these are faces?”

A quick frown passed across his face, as though I had asked a question that was too difficult for him. “Um, well… after you’ve known them a while, they kinda grow on you.”

“So how long have you been collecting them?”

He blinked, and his gaze became distant. “Oh, about two hundred… Greta!… have I shown you Greta?” He bounced out of his seat as though he’d sat on a tack. Scurrying over to a grease-stained cardboard box that had split open along one edge, he began pawing through it, muttering under his breath. It took him a minute, but he found the one he wanted. Back to the table he came, wiping the dust off of Greta’s face with his shirtsleeve. Reverently, he placed the piece of wood in my hands. “That’s Greta. I’ve had her a long time. One of the first, way back when. She came to live with me from one of the boards that went into building Dick and Sheila Moit’s place. Actually, I think Silas came before Greta, but I haven’t seen him around recently. He’ll turn up directly, though. You can count on it. Always turns up, that one does.”

Greta was, indeed, a work of art. A finely patterned sweep of black arched back, giving the impression of thick, wavy hair. The rest of the face seemed shadowed beneath the hair. She was looking up from underneath, a coy, intimate look, like a woman would give her lover.

I looked up at Sat, then back down at the magical piece of wood in my hands. “She’s beautiful,” was all I could think of to say.

He sat back, smiling proudly, as though he could take credit for having creating her. Come to think of it, there was a certain amount of truth in that. “Yup. Yup. One of the best. One of my favorites. Shuttle pilot saw her one time. Wanted to buy her of’n me. Lotta money.” He shook his head in a slow, wide arc, like a child. “No way. Never. Not for sale.”

I nodded slowly, turning the piece slowly back and forth in my hands, helplessly falling in love. “I can see why.”

That night, as I was falling asleep, something bothered me. Something about the piece of wood he called Greta. But it had been a long day, and I was tired. Whatever it was, the problem would be there in the morning. I could worry about it then.

I was dreaming. There was a campfire. I could hear the crackle of the flames. The aromatic smoke drifted past my nose. I was… I was…

My eyes snapped open. The crackling was real. The smoke was real. Light was flickering through chinks in the rickety shutters on my bedroom window. How the smoke was getting in, I didn’t know, but clearly there was a draft somewhere.

I sprang from the bed, rushing for the window. Peering out through the cracks, I could see a scene from hell. The building next to Sat’s house was Town Hall, all of two meters away. The wood stockpile behind it was a blazing inferno. The rear half of Town Hall itself was in flames, which is what had woken me. Black silhouettes of men and women ran back and forth, pitching snow into the roaring flames. They might as well have saved their energy.

“Norm! Norm!” I shouted. “Get up!” Running out into the short hallway, I kicked his door.

He barreled out of his bedroom, wild-eyed and disheveled. “What? What?”

“The wood’s on fire! Town Hall is burning!”

His nervous eyes darted to the window in my bedroom. Then he spun on his heels, headed for the main room, the one closest to the flames.

I left him to his curses, and ran back into my room. I hadn’t unpacked much more than my toothbrush, so it took no time at all to gather my belongings. If the fire could leap the distance from the wood shed to Town Hall, it wouldn’t take anything at all for Sat’s place to catch.

Out Sat’s front door into the street. I dropped my bag, then put my computer on top. As I straightened, turning, a gust of wind whipped the dry, powdery snow across the ground. The flames crackled greedily, sucking in fresh oxygen as they reached along the joints between the boards. Already, flames were licking at the rear corner of Sat’s house.

I snatched at the first long thing I saw, a shovel, and began to jam at the boards covering the narrow alley, trying to knock them loose before Sat’s house caught. They were nailed at both ends—had to be in order to stay in place against the wind—but it was working against me. I stopped to beat against the outside wall of the house.

“Get out here and help me! Your house is catching fire.”

I thought I heard a reply, but couldn’t make out the words. Just then, a man came and grabbed at my sleeve. I’d been introduced to him, but couldn’t remember his name. “Come help,” he yelled, pointing at the wood shed.

I shook him off. “Forget the shed—it’s gone. You’re wasting your time. We’ve got to keep the other buildings from catching fire.” I went back to smashing at the boards over my head, finally knocking the first one loose. It crashed to the ground, sparks swirling down behind it. Then the wind gusted again, blowing the sparks onto me and I started dancing, trying to knock them off. When I was sure that I wasn’t on fire, I went at the second board. It came easily. The third wouldn’t let go and the flames burning Town Hall were driving me back.

Now the rear corner of Sat’s house was burning briskly. I backed out into the town’s central street and reentered Sat’s house through the front door. He had the lights on and was grubbing in a box for something.

“Norm, your house is burning. You’ve got to get out.”

“Can’t find Silas!”

“Norm, come on, it’s too late! You’ve got to get out now, while there’s time. These houses are going up like tinderboxes.”

“Gotta find Silas, dammit! Can’t leave him here, he’ll burn.”

“You idiot, you’ll burn if you stay. Now, come on!”

He pointed at a cardboard box by my feet, full of his adaman faces. I could see Greta on top. “Take that out. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Folly is humankind’s middle name. I shook my head, grabbed the box, and ran for the door. As my foot hit the second step, a giant hand slapped me in the back, driving me face forward into the snow. An enormous concussion squeezed my body from all directions at once.

Norm Sat’s house had exploded.

Rolling over, coughing raggedly, I staggered to my feet. There was no thought of rushing in to save him. The entire rear half of the house was demolished. The front door had blown off its hinges and I could see straight through the roiling flames into the forest behind.

Seizing the box, I dragged it back away from the flames, next to my bag and computer. I collapsed next to that small pile of belongings and held my head. My ears were ringing so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything when someone ran up and started yelling at me.

“I can’t hear,” I bellowed, or thought I did. I couldn’t even hear myself. When I brought my hands down from my head, my right was bloody, whether from a cut or a bleeding eardrum, I had no idea.

The silhouette jerked at me. This time, I got the message. They wanted me on my feet. Groggily, I pushed myself into a standing position. Hands started tugging me away. I fought back long enough to lean down and pick up my bag, my computer, and Sat’s box, then allowed them to lead me away.

No sooner had we turned than Town Hall blew, in much the same manner as Sat’s house. Finally, it dawned on me—the methane tanks were exploding.

When the house on the other side of Town Hall went off with a blast even I could hear clearly, I started running. I turned to make sure my companion was still with me.

The face within the hood was that of a young woman, her face lit by the raging flames. Tears streaked smudged cheeks below staring, horrified eyes. We made it to the end of the street, just past the last of the houses. Others were there with pathetic piles of whatever they had been able to grab quickly. My guide let go of me and turned back towards the flames. Before she had taken three steps, the house this side of Sat’s went, hurling a seething ball of tormented flame towards the sky.

Something deep within me rebelled at letting a woman go back into a self-destructing village in search of survivors while I stood rooted in the snow like a fence post. I dropped my belongings and started after her.

I caught up and tried to communicate by gestures that I was going to help her. She either didn’t understand what I was trying to get across or was shell-shocked and just didn’t care. I staggered up to the first door and, without bothering to knock, jerked it open and entered. They were already coming out. I reached out my arms, offering to carry something… anything. I ended up with a child, perhaps two years old. I turned to go, but something made me duck into a door on the left, guessing correctly that it was a bedroom, and, holding the child cradled in my left arm, I swept the blankets and covers from the bed with my right. No matter what else happened, the kid would need to be kept warm.

After depositing the child and its mother at the end of the street, the father and I went back. I caught a look at his face by firelight. Charlie Elmore. He worked a different tree from either Kellerman or Sat, so I knew little about him. Now I knew him to be a married man, a father, and barring a miracle, one soon to be homeless.

While he made another run with clothes and more blankets, I went to the next house. No one there. Hopefully they were already out. The next house was already smoldering as I mounted the steps. Just as I reached for the door, Ruby came bustling out as though all the hounds of hell were on her heels. She ran straight into my chest, then backed up, clearly surprised to find someone in her way.

“Anything I can carry?” I shouted. I could almost hear myself. Perhaps I wasn’t permanently deafened, after all.

She shook her head, then changed her mind. Taking me by the hand, she led me back into the house. I couldn’t quite hear her words, but her gestures told me what I needed to know. There was a shelf above the sink with china on it. With no time to be delicate, I hurriedly stacked the plates in descending order of size, then balanced as many teacups as I could on top. She grabbed one more and stuck it in a capacious pocket in her wrap, and away we went, down to the end of the street. We managed another trip and got the rest, plus her silver. Then her house was gone.

It became a routine. I worked just ahead of the flames, helping people gather as many belongings as we could save. The end of the street began to resemble a rummage sale. At some point, I realized that I was working the other side of the street. Somehow the fire had jumped over to the other row of houses. I hadn’t really noticed. I had just taken for granted that they were all in danger of burning.

The heat from the fires had melted the snow in the street, turning it into a quagmire. I was wet and muddy, hot one moment while near the flames, freezing the next while at the end of the street depositing an armload of salvaged clothing.

I stopped when there were no more houses to be emptied—no more people to be pulled to safety. By degrees my hearing was returning, although I still had a ferocious ringing in my ears. The crying of the children was heartrending because there was nothing I could do to ease their anguish. I stood like a robot with its power cut off, another balled up wad of blankets in my arms, facing a small crowd of devastated people. I was waiting for someone to take the covers from me, but no one seemed interested. They were all looking past me.

I turned. There, smoking in the dim gray light of dawn, was what remained of the village. There was damned little of it. The adaman had burned with a will, and all that was left of most of the houses was the rough stone foundations. Smoke curled insolently from the ruins, as though to cruelly emphasize the totality of the loss. Not a single building stood.

I stood transfixed, like the rest of them, until the first flakes of snow began to fall. Then it hit me that they would need shelter and food. The weather on Messagie would not wait until it was convenient.

I simply dropped the blankets on the ground and turned, scanning the faces for Kellerman.

“Luther!” I called. “We’ve got to get these people in out of the snow. Can we use your tree?”

“But the fumes—” he began.

I shook my head. “We don’t have a choice, Luther. There are children out here. We’ve got to get them out of the wind.”

There was nothing he could say to that. He nodded, accepting that it was the lesser of two evils, and picked up some things at his feet. I picked the blankets back up and trudged off towards the tree. Halfway there, I became aware that someone was walking beside me. I glanced, seeing that it was the woman who had come for me after Sat’s house had exploded. I didn’t know her name.

“Thanks,” she said.

I took a deep breath, then let it out, as much a sigh as anything else. “It was just something that needed doing.”

“You didn’t have to. You don’t live here. You didn’t have anything to lose.”

“Actually, I did.”

She glanced up at me.

“My self-respect.”

Ruby threw open the doors to the tree, started the ventilation fans, then went back for another load. It took a little over an hour to get everything from the end of the street into the tree.

There was one more thing I needed to do before I could allow myself rest. Once again, I sought out Kellerman.

“Food,” I said. “We’re going to need—”

He held up his hand, nodding, having anticipated me. “Already working on it. We’re not in any immediate danger there. We have a building that sat away from town where we cured meat. I’ve sent someone to get some.”

“Away from town?”

“Can’t have predators sniffing about when they smell meat, can we?”

I nodded. “OK. If you need me, let me know I’m going to rest for a few minutes.”

He nodded, reaching out to grip my shoulder. “You earned it.”

I went, found my bag, and collapsed against it, using it for a pillow.

Careful fingers were probing the side of my face and it hurt like hell. I pried open my eyes—I hadn’t realized that I had fallen asleep—to find that Ruby was dabbing at the side of my head with a blood-stained rag.

My best attempt at a grin felt lopsided. “You’ve got a lot of people to check into your tree today, ma’am,” I told her.

She smiled sadly. “There’s a few who won’t be here.”

It took a moment for me to catch her meaning. “How many?”

She wrung the rag out into a small bowl of water—part of her china set, I realized. “Eight, we think. It’s hard to do a head count under the circumstances, but Luther is working on it.”

I winced as she resumed dabbing at the side of my face.

“You’ve got a nasty cut here,” she said, by way of explanation.

“I was afraid it was my ear. When Sat’s house went up it pretty much did in my hearing for a while, but it seems to be coming back.”

She nodded. “Kirdre was worried about you.”

“Who?”

“You were talking to her earlier, on the way to the tree.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know her name.”

Ruby added, “Your hand is hurt, too. You might want to take it easy for a bit.”

I frowned, lifting my hands for inspection. My left hand was wrapped in a clean, white rag, probably torn from a sheet. I had known about my head, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember hurting my hand. I looked back up at her. “Now what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’ve got to start thinking about building shelter, something that won’t burn this time. Stone, probably. I know it sounds callous, but we’ve also got to get you people back into production. Rebuilding is going to cost money, and—”

“And we don’t have any,” she finished for me.

I nodded. “Nails, wire, blankets…”

“I see where you’re going.” She stopped dabbing at the side of my head. “All I can think about is getting through today. Tomorrow will have to take care of itself.”

“Ruby, we can’t wait too long.”

“We?”

“What?”

“You said we can’t wait too long. You aren’t under any obligation to help. Next time the shuttle comes in, you’re going home.”

For some reason, that brought to mind Stephanie’s impatience to get out the door. I sighed. “In my absence, I imagine that my house has burned, as well.”

She didn’t understand what I meant, of course, so I gave her a rough sketch of the situation back home. She didn’t say anything when I was done—just looked at me. What she was thinking, I couldn’t tell. She laid her hand on mine, my good one, for a moment, then moved on to her next patient.

Early the next morning I walked down to the village. It’s not as though I could accomplish anything, but I felt drawn to the ruins.

Another set of footprints preceded me through the fresh snow. Smallish footprints. For some reason, I expected to see Ruby when I got to the village, but it was Kirdre whose form materialized out of the drifting snow.

“Be careful,” she said, “it’s slick.”

Indeed, the snow that had melted in the street during the fire had refrozen into a solid sheet of muddy ice streaked with ebony soot. In most places the surface was rough enough to provide decent traction, but in some the water had pooled before freezing and the resulting surface was as smooth and treacherous as a patch of oil.

We walked slowly among the remains of the houses, side by side. She stopped. “This was mine,” she said simply.

“I’m sorry.” What else do you say to someone who has lost everything but the clothes on her back?

She stepped carefully over the low stone foundation wall. I followed. The intense heat had caused some of the rocks to spall off cupped pieces that reminded me of discarded, broken eggshells. “My room was here.” She walked a little farther. “The kitchen was here.” A few steps more and she whispered something too softly for me to hear. She turned, I opened my arms, and she fell against my chest, sobbing.

Guilt came to me, unbidden. I shouldn’t be holding this woman. Stephanie was waiting for me to return to Miami, and my arms were only for her.

But were Stephanie’s arms only for me?

I sighed and held Kirdre closer.

Eventually, we made our way to where Town Hall had stood. Along the side wall steel filing cabinets lay jumbled after falling through the floor when it collapsed. The paint was blackened and blistered, and in places the raw metal showed through, already revealing a light brown patina of rust. The exterior walls had fallen outwards and the roof had followed the opposite side wall on the way down so the heat had not been as intense or prolonged here. That and the lack of sufficient air inside the cabinets had largely spared the contents.

I heaved one upright and opened the top drawer. The paper files were yellowed and brittle, lightly toasted along the edges, but still legible. I pulled open the second drawer and saw that it contained what appeared to be birth certificates and medical records. I called Kirdre over. Gesturing at them, I said, “These might help Luther determine…” My voice trailed off as my eye caught something. Curtis Andersson, a fellow I had interviewed late the previous week, born… when?

Must have been his father.

Then I realized there was no date of death. Frowning, I flipped to the one behind it. I didn’t recognize the name. The dates indicated that she had died at age seven. The one behind that was another name I didn’t recognize, but if the dates were to be believed… let’s see, eight minus three, carry one to subtract four from one… no way. I adopted a different tactic, flipping through until I found Luther Kellerman.

I stood stock still, staring at that page for three seconds less than forever. Luther Kellerman was 171 years old.

I looked at Kirdre, confused. She was standing very close to me. “What’s your last name?” I asked.

“Pye,” she said in a small voice.

My gloved fingers were clumsy at migrating through the files, but I found it. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath before turning to face her. “Kirdre—”

Her eyes refused to meet mine. “It was too soon to talk about it.”

“Too soon to talk about what?”

“I…” she turned her head away sharply, as though she didn’t want me to see her face. “It wasn’t supposed to come up this way. We need you here. I had it in mind to… oh, hell.”

I gently took her chin and pulled her face around towards mine. “Talk to me. What’s going on around here?”

“It’s the trees.”

“It’s the trees?” I repeated, blinking.

“Something about the trees. We think it’s the fumes from the wood, but we don’t know. We don’t have a research laboratory. We can’t afford one. We can’t ask for a research team from Earth without telling them why. We can’t have people storming in here in search of the fountain of youth because…” she paused, searching my face, “one way or another, it kills most of them.”

“It—”

She gestured at the open drawer at my elbow “Susaen Andreeth was my best friend’s daughter. We think it’s genetic—a recessive trait—she didn’t have it. If you don’t have it, it drives you the other way. You get old fast. Days are weeks. Months are years. Years are entire decades. She died of old age at seven, wanting to play hopscotch one last time. She couldn’t. Her body was sagging… old.” Kirdre looked away from me again, but the words came in a rush. “Lane Daltry caught her when she was about three—looked like she was in her twenties—fortunately there weren’t any children. She never really understood what was happening, only that it felt good.”

Too much, too much. I couldn’t assimilate the things she was telling me. And to make matters worse, I suddenly remembered what I had been thinking just before I went to sleep in Sat’s house. Something about Greta. He had started to say that he had found her almost two hundred, and in my mind I filled in the blank… years ago.

She continued, “Of those who survive the physical aspects, some can’t handle the mental strain. There’s not a lot to do on Messagie, and some people get, well, bored. We have a statistically high percentage of suicides.”

A high price to pay. It was easy to see why they wanted to keep it quiet. “So once you find out that you’re going to live, then—”

“Why do you think we have silly little make-work jobs like Ruby’s? So she can breathe the tree. Why don’t the cutters wear masks to keep out the fumes? They need it, too. If you leave, then you live and die just like anyone else.”

“Too much and you end up like Sat. Too little and you live a normal life span.”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

“So how long do you live?”

A wry smile. “Well, whatever’s in that stuff, it clearly works pretty well for the trees. We’ve not yet really had anyone die of old age. They just get stranger and stranger, like Norm. Sooner or later, he would have had an accident with his saw, I guess.”

I shook my head slowly. No one part of it was all that strange, and in retrospect, they hadn’t even been hiding it all that carefully. The hints were everywhere. “So you’re asking me to stay, is that it? Add some diversity to the gene pool. I’ve survived several weeks without aging, so I must have this gene.”

“I know that the way I’ve told you these things makes it sound terrible. But we’re here, and you saw the files, and I couldn’t think of a way to just toss it off.”

Gently, I brushed the snowflakes from her hair. “Helluva way to spend the morning.”

“Ruby said that your, um, personal life isn’t all that wonderful right now.”

Involuntarily, my mouth tightened. Well, it wasn’t as though I had asked Ruby to keep it a secret. “No, it isn’t,” I admitted.

She smiled shyly and held out her hand. “Let’s start over. Hi, my name’s Kirdre.”

I reached out and took her hand. “I’m Michael, and this is all going way too fast, but it seems that I’ve got a decision to make. Maybe you could help.”

Hand in hand, we stepped over the remains of the foundation of the building that had been Town Hall and walked into the forest. And talked. I talked to her as I have rarely talked to anyone, man or woman, in my entire life. I talked to her the way I’d been trying to talk to Stephanie for the last two years. But whereas Stephanie had given sullen silences in return, Kirdre weighed the things I said, turned them over, and showed me different perspectives. Insight, she had, and wisdom. Perhaps it was her age. On the other hand, maybe she was just that kind of woman.

One thing she was not, was jaded. Everything was interesting to her. She would stop, lightly touch the bark of one of the trees we passed, tell me some small bit of wood lore, then resume exactly where she had left off.

During that walk with Kirdre, I discovered something… mostly about myself.

Stephanie’s beauty was a cultural product, bought in bottles, applied staring into mirrors. With it, she was an astonishingly desirable creature. Without it, she was plain, a blank canvas. Her personality was another null. She had certain artifices, but, like her makeup, they were only superficial appliques. I realized that perhaps the reason she didn’t talk to me was that she couldn’t. There wasn’t anything to say, because there was no person underneath the bright smiles and sparkling eyes.

Kirdre, by comparison, was substantial and whole. While not overtly beautiful, although she did have lovely eyes, there was a person inside, and that lit her up from within. No makeup, no mirrors. All natural. Genuine.

Hours passed. We walked. We talked. It was a seduction of sorts, pure and simple. Kirdre wanted to show me the good side of Messagie. I’d seen some of the bad parts. She showed me the snow-dappled forest, with its cathedral-like velvety quiet that made a perfect background for thinking. In contrast with the background noise level in the city I had left, the silence was nearly deafening. She showed me the beauty of the trees. I had taken for granted the wood itself. Kirdre introduced me to the trees themselves, the snowflakes that drifted into crevices in the bark, the wholesome smell of the air that sighed between the gargantuan trunks.

Always, I had felt an amused contempt for musicians and other assorted lost souls who went into the Himalayas to find a guru and meditate. What could they find there that they could not find at home? Belatedly, I began to see that there might possibly be something to their pilgrimages.

Perhaps it was time to begin my own.

Luther and I sat across from each other at the table. Kirdre sat beside me. Ruby sat beside him. I had a plan. He was skeptical.

“Luther, you’ve got to bring more people in. With as few people as you have now, you’ll never manage much more than a subsistence economy. You, yourself told me that you need better schooling for your children, a hospital—”

“But what will we do when so many of them die?” he demanded. “We can’t just go killing off ninety-nine out of a hundred immigrants. That’s bound to become unpopular, fast.”

“Let’s say that enough people came in to make up a decent-sized town. A lot of the suicides are due to the monotony, the boredom. If they had enough people to associate with, then they would feel less isolated. As for the tree killing them, surely someone can identify the trait that they would need to have in order to survive. If you filter out the ones who are at risk, then you’re not killing them off, right? Hell, with a little genetic work, they can probably fix the problem.”

“Still…” he grumbled.

“There’s no reason Messagie should not become more self-sufficient. You’re importing all your tools. That’s expensive. Find some ore. Start an iron mine. Make steel from the iron. Make saw blades from the steel. Cut adaman with the saw blades and make furniture from the adaman. Which reminds me… you’ve got to start sending out finished goods in addition to the raw lumber. You’re throwing away profit. Hell, that would provide employment for some of the immigrants right there.”

Luther’s eyes were narrowed, his mouth drawn. “And just how do you expect to get all this started?”

“I know the shed burned, but is there any cured wood left?”

“Some. ’Bout enough to build a house, I reckon. We tried something a few years back. Someone, Norm, in fact, wanted to try curing wood inside the tree. He had some damn fool idea that the color would be better if it cured out inside the tree. Last time I looked, it was about like all the rest, so I don’t think his idea was worth diddly. Also, we tried kiln drying the wood once upon a time. Now that definitely is not as good as air drying, but it’s a hell of a lot faster. Anyway, there’s some wood, and I can get you more.”

I nodded. “Good. Start with coffee tables and end tables, built so they’ll nest inside one another in order not to take up any more room than necessary. Then fill in any remaining spaces with candlestick holders, coasters, jewelry boxes, anything that will fit. That stuff brings a king’s ransom on Earth. If we can structure things such that any significant portion of the profit comes here, then you’ll be living a hell of a lot better than you are now.”

Ruby nodded. “Get in some concrete and build houses that won’t burn.”

“If someone would go out and look, I’ll bet we could find some limestone and make our own mortar. It’s not that hard to make. All you need is heat. Surely, we can do it here and save that money for something else.”

Luther wasn’t convinced yet, but Ruby was nodding. “I think he’s got something.”

“Hmmmph!” Luther grunted at her. “Lotsa fancy talk, but I’m not sure I want somebody from Earth telling me how to do things. Where the hell is he going to be when it’s time to get our hands dirty?”

“Right here,” I told him, tapping the tabletop with my fingertip.

And I meant it.

So what did Stephanie think of my decision?

I went back to Earth temporarily to set up a business to receive the adaman lumber and finished goods. That cut out nearly all of the middlemen Luther had been complaining about, so a great deal more money came in afterwards.

The finished goods were an instant hit. I placed an ad where it would do the most good—in Traveler of Worlds. Perfect targeting of our prospective customer base. We charged about ten percent less than the old distributors and made a killing since we had much, much less overhead.

Randall Barker had a decidedly strange look on his face when I handed in the story, my resignation, and the ad copy, all at the same time.

Stephanie, I swear, was hurt by my abrupt declaration that our relationship was over. Not that she would miss me. As I had suspected, she and Randall had started a mutual self-destruct society before I was past Lunar orbit. Her despair, I think, was due to the fact that I took the initiative, depriving her of the opportunity to jerk the rug out from under me. I think it was a first for her to have a man leave her. She was accustomed to leaving them instead.

I suppose it goes without saying that Kirdre and I set up housekeeping. What the odds were, I couldn’t say, but we had a bright-eyed baby boy who lived. Normal nine months pregnancy. I guess the placenta filters out whatever comes from the tree so as not to slow down the fetus’s growth. We plan to keep him away from daily contact with the tree until he’s in his teens, at least—God knows we don’t want the terrible twos to last for ten years. After that, he’s free to make up his own mind about when to start slowing down his aging process.

All in all, I think coming to Messagie was a good thing. It hasn’t been without its trials, but my life is so much better than it was on Earth. I have peace and quiet. I can build things; I’m in charge of the woodworking shop. And, of course, I’ve got my family.

You know, I’ve gotten so that I don’t even mind the cold. Not with Kirdre to keep me warm.