Chainflicker

There was a rush on broemite after Ruggle stumbled across a seam in the hills above Heddy's Spit. In the first few years the rush was viscous, hampered by a dearth of tools, infrastructure, and the timber necessary to prevent the tunnels and shafts of the broemite mines from caving. Trees were everywhere - soft lungfruit trees, inadequate for bearing weight, and traafir trees. The traafir wood is suitable for the mines - long-grained, elastic, durable - but the dense bark hampered early efforts to clearcut by hand. Imagine yourself up in the hills, ankle-deep in mud, unable to scratch itch on your own nose behind your crystal, sharpening the dull hatchet that you sharpened only an hour ago while you were hacking at the very same tree that you still need to hack for hours more. Then you hear the rumbling belch of a freighter. You and the other prospectors in the surrounding hills spontaneously cheer, because you already know what the shipment contains: a thousand gleaming cases of Pip's Smooth-Cut Chainflickers that will liberate the industry and commerce of an entire planet. You yourself, in your rush down the hill, already feeling the ergonomic rubber grip of the flicker in your hand, might stumble down a slope, crack your head against the very trees you wanted to crack, and perish in a gush of blood and cerebrospinal fluid. Dying, your hands might even twitch a phantom saw through phantom tree trunks. You did it, and you didn't. But you are, in the end, irrelevant to the progress of the galaxy. There are hundreds of others who will carry on your work - and hundreds did, clearcutting the hills like so many human termites. Timber propped up the mines, spanned bridges across the valleys, streams, and crevices in the hills, and advanced the built environment of the Spit beyond the ramshackle tents and hovels of the first wave of drifters. Two-story buildings - a colossal victory over gravity. What's a mudslide compared to that?