Tom and I settle into a routine. If I still had to sleep, this guy would be impossible. He goes to sleep at dark, wakes up before dawn, and never stops working. In a week, he’s dug a canal from the river, and rigged up his own shower somehow. But he’s built a pump mostly from wood, and a water heater. And pipes and a showerhead. No electricity, so it's all mechanical: water or steam driven. The man is a beast.
We found a few normal sized cows on our hunts. Not only did Tom grab them and tie them up, but he also built a corral in a day, and now he’s got five cows and a bull. Tom wrestling the bull and not hurting it was something else. And he's acquired chickens. I had to help a bit on this one, with my speed and sound-tricks, but we picked up a dozen ground fowl of some sort, and now we get a few eggs a day, rather than having to hunt up eggs.
He’s built up an orchard of fruit trees somehow. One week there was a field; the next there was an orchard. The cornfield took a day. Right after the cornfield, I didn’t see him much for a week. But a week later, we had cornbread with our pulled pork, which Tom says isn’t real barbecue. He apparently built a mill-type grinder to grind the corn into meal. And he turns the mill himself with a big pole. I think they used to have horses do that, but Tom has Tom.
When he’s not growin’ something with plant magic, he’s building something. When he’s not building something, he’s fixing something. When he’s not fixing, he’s cooking, or whittling, or checking something. Every daylight hour, that man is in motion. I was always the guy who kept drummin', but I can't keep up.
And we go hunting every day. Over the course of a couple months, I’ve built a reverse microphone out of sound. It’s like my saserface, but reversed. I can hear quiet stuff from 100 yards away, by parabolic sound concentration. When we’re stopped for a minute in the middle of a jungle, I listen around us, and find critters. Then Tom catches or kills or decides to ignore them.
I’m up a hundred-odd o-thaums from our month of hunting together. And despite not needing it, I’m enjoying the heck out of the food that keeps getting more varied. Different kinds of meats, mostly grilled or barbecued, plus grilled or boiled vegetables. Cooking is simple. Ingredients are great. I’m beginning to believe his boasts about how good Texas barbecue is. I don’t think I’ve ever had meat where the fat on the meat isn’t really even a solid any more, but more like the consistency of butter enriching the flavors. It’s amazing stuff. Sometimes he smokes it well, and the meat is good. Sometimes he smokes it perfectly, and it's the nectar of the gods.
While Tom does his hundred and ninety three things around the farm, I drum. Sometimes I drum in a cornfield. Sometimes I drum near potato plants. Sometimes I drum by the fruit trees, and sometimes by the pines or hardwoods. My Thaumic whorl has grown since I started hanging out on the farm. I’ve got a solid forty yards of increased mana density, and I’ve perfected my fourth nested wave rhythm. I can now do an eight-ex speed rhythm with four interesting oscillations using just one hand, my tail and a foot.
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And that means that I can play around on rhythm with my other hand and my other foot so I don’t get bored. Like I can play the helicopter part from Billy Joel’s Goodnight Saigon intro with my left side, and then keep it running softly through the whole song. Then I can play the drum line with my right side. I may have done that a couple hundred times. Playing a helicopter on the drums is hella fun. I even work on doing other sound effects.
Yes, I had help. Turns out some of the sounds need other instruments. A tight enough drum with enough heavy balls in it can sound like rushing water, if you rotate the drum. I had heard about ocean drums back in the old world, and we were able to make some. Tom made it, that is. Putting it on a stand, and letting my tail rotate it was really cool. Adding that into the layers of waves is going to be really cool, but getting the right speed for the sound, and still layering it in with variation as a waves layer is way hard.
Anyhow, lots of polyrhythm practice. And Tom’s as crazy as Alec was about experiments. On the other hand, while Alec was a vegetable, Tom just loves ‘em. Turns out radish contains a similar amount of thaums naturally as a nut, and they grow fast. Maybe five or ten i-thaums. With Tom’s plant-o-magic, he’s able to grow plants which collect thaums from the atmosphere and sun better. But it takes time. A radish grows in a month or so. One of the fastest naturally growing vegetables. But Tom can make them faster or more thaum-ful.
He can increase the ability of a plant to absorb thaums, so that a radish holds a fifty or a hundred i-thaums growin’ in a normal environment. Or he can grow it fast, and have a radish in a day, which holds only about one i-thaum.
Where it gets interesting is that I can change the environment now. I can increase the thaum density in the air around me by about thirty times now. And when I do that, the one-day radish can get up to ten i-thaums, while a full month of radish grown in high thaum density musical climates seems to hold up to an r-thaum or so.
“Ffssshhh”, I sigh. I’m tired of calling them i-thaums, r-thaums and such. I’m calling them by their colors now.
Even cooler than all his growing thaumic food, Tom figured out how to leave the thaums in the food. So when we eat, we get thaums from the eating, rather than from the coins. I saw a documentary once where food cravings are thought to come from calorie density times taste strength. In the new world, it’s thaum-density, it seems. Food with thaums tastes really good.
Anyhow, with Tom’s plant-o-mancy helping, and Snake the radish-drummer thaum-ilizing the fields, we end up with maybe fifty thousand radishes in a 40 yard radius circle. Tomorrow we, and by we I mean Tom, are going to harvest them. If everything went well, we’ll have between twenty and fifty o-thaums for our work. Plus radishes for the salad. Spicy and Thaumy together is a good taste. Even real men like salads with thaums.