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.