Liss already had her hand on the switch. Before Jack could open his mouth, she turned off the light.
The only illumination remaining in the room fell from the little houses on the farming walls.
“It’s about time,” said Grampa Treel. He turned to his family, snatched a pot from the hands of a granddaughter. “The rest of you get inside. I want to have a few words with our new giants.”
“I’m really sorry,” Jack said. “We didn’t mean any harm.”
Grampa Treel flicked the air with a hand, dismissing Jack’s apology. He settled down in a rocking chair whose runners creaked faintly on the warped boards of the porch. Jack saw a microscopic spark of light and might have dismissed it as a random twinkling of his optic nerve if it hadn’t slowly flared and caught fire in a tangle of tobacco, way down in the bowl of a minuscule corncob pipe. The slightest whiff of cherry cavendish drifted through the room.
“Smoke?” asked Grampa Treel.
“No thanks,” Jack said. “I got out of the habit in the city. None of my neighborlings would put up with it.”
“Thank heavens for that,” said Liss.
“Won’t bother me,” said Grampa Treel. “Not much bothers me, now that you come to it—except screwy light. And giants who play harmonica. Last feller had your place, he was a city type like you. Thought that just by moving in he could call himself a country boy. Bought himself a straw hat, a pair of boots, and worst of all he took up the harmonica. Now I don’t mind when my neighborlings play it on their porches in the summer; it’s no more trouble than a fly humming in your ear. But when it’s a giant right outside your door, wheeping up and down the scale, blowing spit all over everything… well, that’s something I can’t abide.”
“I never did want to play harmonica,” Jack said.
“Then there’s hope for you. What brings you to the country?”
“Liss is an artist. She needs peace and quiet to get her work done. We both wanted a change of scene, a new set of walls. I thought I could help out on the farms if anybody needs me.” He flexed his hand, dwarfing the Treels’ front porch. “‘No job too big or too small.’ That’s my motto.”
“Hm,” said Grampa Treel. “Might be I could find some use for a giant. That is, unless Narmon Cate’s got work for you climbing in to ream his pipestems or something like that.”
“Uh, no,” Jack said. “Narmon hasn’t said anything to me about that.”
Treel’s chair stopped rocking. “So tell me, are you an early riser?”
“Sure. I used to work eight to five every day, so I had to get up early. My eyes just pop open around six-thirty.”
“Six-thirty?” The old man found this quite hilarious. “Boy, I wish I could sleep that late.”
Jack bit his tongue. “What time do you get up?”
“We’re up about an hour before light, like I said. And the lights come on at five-thirty this time of year.”
“Five…” Jack stared up at the dark ceiling. “…thirty?”
“Guess you won’t be sleeping in the main room, hm?”
“No,” said Liss.
“Well, no matter. I had some work needed doing first thing, and there’s a field needs turning, but don’t you worry about it. You just sleep in till those eyes of yours ‘pop’ open. Six-thirty, you said?”
“Uh, no, earlier is fine. I can be up around five-thirty, I guess. I need the work.”
“Good man.” Grampa Treel stood up, increasing his height by a fraction of an inch. “Work is something there’s always plenty of around here. I’ll be getting to bed now. Good night, youngsters.”
Liss pulled Jack onto the porch again. He saw that she was laughing with a hand over her mouth.
“What’s so funny?” he said.
“You. You’re in for it now.”
“I like getting up early. Really. It’s sort of like… well, it helps you tune into nature. Even if the light cycle is artificial, it’s still based on the rhythm of the world outside. The world that had a sun and a moon, day and night, indoors and outdoors. The world that was, you know, finite.”
“Those old notions again.” She laughed. “I’m sorry, Jack. I just don’t know if you’re cut out for farming.”
Perturbed, he dropped down in the porch swing and folded his arms.
“Anyway,” he said, “all this was your idea.”
Despite himself, Jack was up before the lights came on. He had slept badly, like a boy awaiting the coming of old Saint Escher, who strode through the infinite levels of scale, visiting all in a single night, rewarding children both giant and small with miraculous gifts. It puzzled Jack that he should be so excited about a day of manual labor—truly, the first in his life. He slipped out of bed without disturbing Liss, then crept into the dark of the main room.
The farming walls looked like fairy trees ablaze with the tiny lights of neighborlings. He leaned close to the Treel residence, hoping to catch the faint clatter of spoons in cereal bowls, the peaceful mooing of vineclimbing milk cows. Instead, he was greeted with a bellow.
“Well, young feller, didn’t expect to see you till midday.”
He jerked back, a hand to his ear, as Grampa Treel came clomping onto the porch. The old man carried a bullhorn so that Jack wouldn’t miss a syllable.
“Don’t just stand there, sonny, let’s get to work.”
Jack closed the door to the bedroom, envying Liss her extended slumber in the warm dark bed. There was a crust of sleep in his eyes, but he was so tired he hadn’t managed to yawn yet. Meanwhile, the ceiling was slowly growing brighter.
Old Grampa Treel was as lively as he’d been the night before. “Good to get an early start,” he was saying as he tromped around on the porch. “Course, we already milked the cows. You wouldn’t have been much use there. They’re delicate things.”
They certainly were. To Jack they resembled fat spotted aphids clinging to shiny green vines that grew in a tangle above and beside the house. A few plaintive mews rose from the herd. He knew that any attempt on his part to milk them would have ended in disaster. “You mind if I have something to eat?” Jack said.
“Eat? Well, I imagine you do need your fuel. A big feller like you. One of your breakfasts could feed all us Treels for a year and a day.”
At that moment, Jack felt a mighty rumbling. Light poured in through the windows from Narmon Cate’s room. The lobe of Cate’s monstrous ear blocked the glow momentarily, then he heard a roar that faintly resembled the end of the world.
The giants were awake.
Narmon commenced to clear his nostrils, gathering floods of mucus in the vast inmost caverns and sunless seas of his skull. His massive door creaked open; then came the sound of a distant cataclysm as he hawked and spat a mighty wad into the room of the giants on whose wall his house was built. To those giants two levels up from Jack, Cate’s phlegm would have been no more objectionable than a fly speck or a flea turd. (There were neither flies nor fleas in the levels, but these old concepts made useful metaphors and refused to die.) Had Narmon turned to spit on his neighborlings’ earthen wall, however, Jack and Liss could have drowned in the stuff.
Jack had lost his appetite for breakfast. He shrugged, tucked in his shirt, and turned back to Grampa Treel. “Where do I start?”
“You got a fork?”
“A fork?”
“Sure. You were gonna eat, weren’t you? I imagined you’d have a fork.”
“Yes, I have a fork. But what do I need it for?”