And because he wouldn’t talk about himself much, they spent spare moments and evenings talking about her, and her isolation, and the how and why of it.
221
WITH FBIENDS LIKE THESE .. •
She found the forest nearly thirty years ago and had been here constantly, excepting one trip, ever since. In that tune she’d confirmed much that was suspected, all that was known, and made many new discoveries about the singing trees.
They began to make music when barely half-meter high snoots, and retained that ability till the last vein of sap dried in the aged trunk. They could grow to a height of eight meters and a base diameter of ten.
Chimers had been uprooted and transplanted since their music-making abilities had been first discovered. At one time it seemed there was hardly a city, a town, a village, or wealthy individual that didn’t own one or two of of the great trees.
Seemingly, they thrived in their new environments, thrived and sang. But they would not reproduce— from seeds, from cuttings, nothing. Not even in the most controlled greenhouse ecology, in which other plants from Chee survived and multiplied. Only the chimer died out.
But few of those wealthy music lovers had ever heard a whole forest sing, Caitland reflected.
The song of the forest, he noticed, varied constantly. The weather would affect it, the cry of animals, the time of day. It never stopped, even at night.
She explained to him how the trees sang, how the semiflexible hollow trunk and the rippling protrusions inside controlled the flow of air through the reverberating bole to produce an infinite range of sound. How the trunk sound was complemented by the tinkling bells—chimes—on the branches. Chimes which were hard, shiny nuts filled with loose seeds.