Fire and Ice
by Grey Rollins
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.