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.