The Bromeliad 3 - Wings

by Terry Pratchett

  "On a machine that no nome has been on for fifteen thousand years?" said Masklin.

  Gurder shrugged. "Well, maybe there's something at the back of a cupboard somewhere," he said. "I want a word with you, Masklin."

  "Yes?"

  Gurder moved closely and glanced over his shoulder at Angalo, who was lying back in the control seat with a look of dreamy contentment on his face.

  He lowered his voice.

  "We shouldn't be doing this," he said. "I know it's a dreadful thing to say, after all we've been through. But this isn't just our Ship. It belongs to all nomes, everywhere."

  He looked relieved when Masklin nodded.

  "A year ago you didn't even believe there were any other nomes anywhere,"

  Masklin said.

  Gurder looked sheepish. "Yes. Well. That was then. This is now. I don't know what I believe in anymore, except that there must be thousands of nomes out there we don't know about. There might even be other nomes living in Stores! We're just the lucky ones who had the Thing. So if we take the Ship away, there won't be any hope for them."

  "I know, I know," said Masklin wretchedly. "But what can we do? We need the Ship right now. Anyway, how could we find these other nomes?"

  "We've got the Ship!" said Gurder.

  Masklin waved a hand at the screen, where the landscape was spreading outand becoming misty.

  "It'd take forever to find nomes down there. You couldn't do it even with the Ship. You'd have to be on the ground. Nomes keep hidden! You nomes inthe Store didn't know about my people, and we lived a few miles away.

  We'd never have found Pion's people except by accident. Besides"-hecouldn't resist prodding Gurder gently-"there's a bigger problem too. Youknow what we nomes are like. Those other nomes probably wouldn't evenbelieve in the Ship."

  He was immediately sorry he'd said that. Gurder looked more unhappy thanhe'd ever seen him.

  "That's true," the Abbot said. "I wouldn't have believed it. I'm not sureI believe it now, and I'm in it."

  "Maybe, when we've found somewhere to live, we can send the Ship back andcollect any other nomes we can find," Masklin hazarded. "I'm sure Angalowould enjoy that."

  Gurder's shoulders began to shake. For a moment Masklin thought thenome was laughing, and then he saw the tears rolling down the Abbot'sface.

  "Um," he said, not knowing what else to say.

  Gurder turned away. "I'm sorry," he muttered. "It's just that there's somuch ... changing. Why can't things stay the same for five minutes?

  Every time I get the hang of an idea it suddenly turns into somethingdifferent and I turn into a fool! All I want is something real to believein! Where's the harm in that?"

  "I think you just have to have a flexible mind," said Masklin, knowingeven as he said the words that this probably wasn't going to be a lot ofhelp.

  "Flexible? Flexible? My mind's got so flexible I could pull it out of myears and tie it under my chin!" snapped Gurder. "And it hasn't done me awhole lot of good, let me tell you! I'd have done better just believingeverything I was taught when I was young! At least I'd be wrong onlyonce! This way I'm wrong all the time!"

  He stamped away down one of the corridors.

  Masklin watched him go.

  Not for the first time, he wished he believed in something as much asGurder did so he could complain to it about his life. He even wished hewere back, yes, back in the hole. It hadn't been too bad, apart frompeople being cold and wet and getting eaten all the time. But at leasthe'd been with Grimma. They would have been cold and wet and hungrytogether. He wouldn't have been so lonely... .

  There was a movement by him. It turned out to be Pion, holding a tray ofwhat had to be ... fruit, Masklin decided. He put aside being lonely fora moment, and realized that hunger had been waiting for an opportunity tomake itself felt. He'd never seen fruit that shape and color.

  He took a slice from the proffered tray. It tasted like a nutty lemon.

  "It's kept well, considering," he said, weakly. "Where did you get it?"

  It turned out to come from a machine in a nearby corridor. It looked fairly simple. There were hundreds of pictures of different sorts offood. If you touched a picture, there was a brief humming noise and thenthe real food dropped onto a tray in a slot. Masklin tried pictures atrandom, and got several different sorts of fruit, a squeaky greenvegetable thing, and a piece of meat that tasted rather like smokedsalmon.

  "I wonder how it does it?" he said aloud.

  A voice from the wall beside him said: "Would you understand if I told you about molecular breakdown and reassembly from a wide range of raw materials?"

  "No," said Masklin, truthfully.

  "Then it's all done by Science."

  "Oh. Well, that's all right, then. That is you, Thing, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  Chewing on the fish-meat, Masklin wandered back to the control room and offered some of the food to Angalo. The big screen was showing nothing but clouds.

  "Won't see any quarry in all this," he said.

  Angalo pulled one of the levers back a bit. There was that brief feeling of extra weight again.

  They stared at the screen.

  "Wow," said Angalo.

  "That looks familiar," said Masklin. He patted his clothes until he found the folded, crumpled map they'd brought all the way from the Store.

  He spread it out, and glanced from it to the screen.

  The screen showed a disc, made up mainly of different shades of blue and wispy bits of cloud.

  "Any idea what it is?" said Angalo.

  "No, but I know what some of the bits are called," said Masklin. "That one that's thick at the top and thin at the bottom is called South America.

  Look, it's just like it is on the map. Only it should have the words

  'South America' written on it."

  "Still can't see the quarry, though," said Angalo.

  Masklin looked at the image in front of them. South America. Grimma had talked about South America, hadn't she? That's where the frogs lived in flowers. She'd said that once you knew about things like frogs living in flowers, you weren't the same person.

  He was beginning to see what she meant.

  "Never mind about the quarry for now," he said. "The quarry can wait."

  "We should get there as soon as possible, for everybody 's sake," saidthe Thing.

  Masklin thought about this for a while. It was true, he had to admit. Allkinds of things might be happening back home. He had to get the Ship backquickly, for everybody's sake.

  And then he thought: I've spent a long time doing things foreverybody's sake.

  Just for once, I'm going to do something for me.

  I don't think we can find other nomes with this Ship, but at least I knowwhere to look for frogs.

  "Thing," he said, "take us to South America-and don't argue."

  Chapter 12

  Frogs: Some people think that knowing about frogsis important. They are small and green, or yellow, and have four legs. They croak. Young frogs aretadpoles. In my opinion, this is all there is toknow about frogs. - From A Scientific Encyclopediaor the Enquiring Young Nome by Angalo deHaberdasheri.

  Find a blue planet ... Focus.

  This is a planet. Most of it is covered with water, but it's stillcalled Earth.

  Find a country... . Focus... . Blues and greens and browns under thesun, and long wisps of rain cloud being torn by the mountains... .

  Focus ... on a mountain, green and dripping, and there's a ... focus ... tree, hung with moss and covered with flowers, and ... focus ... on aflower with a little pool in it, is an epiphytic bromeliad.

  Its leaves, although they might be petals, hardly quiver at all as threevery small and very golden frogs pull themselves up and gaze inastonishment at the fresh, clear water. Two of them look at their leader, waiting for it to say something suitable for this historic occasion.

  It's going to say ... mipmip... .

  And then they slide down the leaf and into the w
ater.

  Although the frogs can spot the difference between day and night, they're a bit hazy on the whole idea of time. They know that some thingshappen after other things. Really intelligent frogs might wonder if thereis something that prevents everything happening all at once, but that'sabout as close as they can get to it.

  So how long it was before a strange night came in the middle of the dayis hard to tell, from a frog point of view.

  A wide black shadow drifted over the treetops, and came to a halt. Aftera while there were voices. The frogs could hear them, although theydidn't know what they meant or even what they were. They didn't soundlike the kind of voices frogs were used to.

  What they heard went like this:

  "How many mountains are there, anyway? I mean, it's ridiculous! Who needsthis many mountains? I call it inefficient. One would have done.

  I'll go mad if I see another mountain. How many more have we got to search?"

  "I like them."

  "And some of the trees are the wrong height."

  "I like them, too, Gurder."

  "And I don't trust Angalo doing the driving."

  "I think he's getting better, Gurder."

  "Well, I just hope no more airplanes come flying around, that's all."

  Gurder and Masklin swung in a crude basket made out of bits of metal and wire. It hung from a square hatchway under the Ship.

  There were still huge rooms in the Ship that they hadn't explored yet.

  Odd machines were everywhere. The Thing had said the Ship had been usedfor exploring.

  Masklin hadn't quite trusted any of it. There probably were machines that could have lowered and pulled up the basket easily, but he'd preferred toloop the wire around a pillar inside the Ship, and with Pion helpinginside, to pull themselves up and down by sheer nomish effort.

  The basket bumped gently on the tree branch.

  The trouble was that humans wouldn't leave them alone. No sooner had they found a likely looking mountain than airplanes or helicopters would buzz around, like insects around an eagle. It was distracting.

  Masklin looked along the branch. Gurder was right. This would have to be the last mountain.

  But there certainly were flowers here.

  He crawled along the branch until he reached the nearest flower. It was three times as high as he was. He found a foothold and pulled himself up.

  There was a pool in there. Six little yellow eyes peered up at him.

  Masklin stared back.

  So it was true, after all.

  He wondered if there was anything he should say to them, if there was anything they could possibly understand.

  It was quite a long branch, and quite thick. But there were tools andthings in the Ship. They could let down extra wires to hold the branchand winch it up when it was cut free. It would take some time, but thatdidn't matter. It was important.

  The Thing had said there were ways of growing plants under lights thesame color as the sun, in pots full of a sort of weak soup that helpedplants grow. It should be the easiest thing to keep a branch alive. Theeasiest thing in the world.

  If they did everything carefully and gently, the frogs would never know.

  If the world was a bathtub, the progress of the Ship through it would belike the soap, shooting backward and forward and never being where anyoneexpected it to be. You could spot where it had just been by airplanes andhelicopters taking off in a hurry.

  Or maybe it was like the ball in a roulette wheel, bouncing around andlooking for the right number.

  Or maybe it was just lost.

  They searched all night. If there was a night. It was hard to tell. TheThing tried to explain that the Ship went faster than the sun, althoughthe sun actually stood still. Some parts of the world had night whileother parts had day. This, Gurder said, was bad organization.

  "In the Store," he said, "it was always dark when it should be. Even ifit was just somewhere built by humans." It was the first time they'dheard him admit the Store was built by humans.

  There didn't seem to be anywhere that looked familiar.

  Masklin scratched his chin.

  "The Store was in a place called Blackbury," he said. "I know that much.

  So the quarry couldn't have been far away."

  Angalo waved his hand irritably at the screens.

  "Yes, but it's not like the map," he said. "They don't stick names onplaces! It's ridiculous! How's anyone supposed to know where anywhereis?"

  "All right," said Masklin. "But you're not to fly down low again to tryto read the signposts. Every time you do that, humans rush out into thestreets and we get lots of shouting on the radio."

  "That's right," said the Thing. "People are bound to get excited whenthey see a ten-million-ton starship trying to fly down the street."

  "I was very careful last time," said Angalo stoutly. "I even stopped whenthe traffic lights went red. I don't see why there was such a fuss. Allthe trucks and cars started crashing into one another too. And you callme a bad driver."

  Gurder turned to Pion, who was learning the language fast. The geesenomes did. They were used to meeting nomes who spoke other languages.

  "Your geese never got lost," he said. "How did they manage it?"

  "They just did not get lost," said Pion. "They knew always where they going."

  "It can be like that with animals," said Masklin. "They've got instincts.

  It's like knowing things without knowing you know them."

  "I don't know," said Gurder. "Why doesn't the Thing know? It could find Floridia, so somewhere important like Blackbury ought to be no trouble."

  "I can find no radio messages about Blackbury. There are plenty about Florida," said the Thing.

  "At least land somewhere," said Gurder. Angalo pressed a couple of buttons.

  "There's just sea under us right now," he said. "And-what's that?"

  Below the Ship and a long way off, something tiny and white skimmed over the clouds.

  "Could be goose," said Pion.

  "I ... don't ... think ... so," said Angalo carefully. He twiddled a knob. "I'm really learning about this stuff," he said.

  The picture of the screen flickered a bit, and then expanded.

  There was a white dart sliding across the sky.

  "Is it the Concorde?" said Gurder.

  "Yes," said Angalo.

  "It's going a bit slow, isn't it?"

  "Only compared to us," said Angalo.

  "Follow it," said Masklin.

  "We don't know where it's going," said Angalo, in a reasonable tone of voice.

  "I do," said Masklin. "You looked out the window when we were on the Concorde. We were going toward the sun."

  "Yes. It was setting," said Angalo. "Well?"

  "It's morning now. It's going toward the sun again," Masklin pointed out.

  "Well? What about it?"

  "It means it's going home."

  Angalo bit his lip while he worked this out.

  "I don't see why the sun has to rise and set in different places," said Gurder, who refused even to try to understand basic astronomy.

  "Going home," said Angalo, ignoring him. "Right. I see it. So we go with it, yes?"

  "Yes."

  Angalo ran his hands over the Ship's controls. "Right," he said. "Here we go. I expect the Concorde drivers will probably be quite pleased to have some company up here."

  The Ship drew level with the plane.

  "It's moving around a lot," said Angalo. "And it's starting to go faster too."

  "I think they may be worried about the Ship," said Masklin.

  "Can't see why," said Angalo. "Can't see why at all. We're not doing anything except following them."

  "I wish we had some proper windows," said Gurder, wistfully. "We could wave."

  "Have humans ever seen a Ship like this before?" Angalo asked the Thing.

  "No. But they 've made up stories about ships coming from other worlds."

  "Yes, they'd do that," said Masklin, half
to himself. "That's just the sort of thing they'd do."

  "Sometimes they say the ships will contain friendly people-"

  "That's us," said Angalo.

  "And sometimes they say they will contain monsters with wavy tentacles and big teeth."

  The nomes looked at one another.

  Gurder cast an apprehensive eye over his shoulder.

  Then they all stared at the passages that radiated off the control room.

  "Like alligators?" said Masklin.

  "Worse."

  "Er," Gurder said, "We did look in all the rooms, didn't we?"

  "It's something they made up, Gurder. It's not real," said Masklin.

  "Whoever would want to make up something like that?"

  "Humans would," said Masklin.

  "Huh," said Angalo, nonchalantly trying to swivel around in the chair in case any tentacled things with teeth were trying to creep up on him. "I can't see why."

  "I think I can. I've been thinking about humans a lot."

  "Can't the Thing send a message to the Concorde drivers?" said Gurder.

  "Something like 'Don't worry, we haven't got any teeth and tentacles, guaranteed'?"

  "They probably wouldn't believe us," said Angalo. "If I had teeth andtentacles all over the place that's just the sort of message I'd send.

  Cunning."

  The Concorde screamed across the top of the sky, breaking thetransatlantic record. The Ship drifted along behind it.

  "I reckon," said Angalo, looking down, "that humans are just aboutintelligent enough to be crazy."

  "I think," said Masklin, "that maybe they're intelligent enough to belonely."

  The plane touched down with its tires screaming. Fire engines racedacross the airport, and there were other vehicles behind them.

  The great black ship shot over them, turned across the sky like aFrisbee, and slowed.

  "There's the reservoir!" said Gurder. "Right under us! And that's therailway line! And that's the quarry! It's still there!"

  "Of course it's still there, idiot," muttered Angalo as he headed theShip toward the hills, which were patchy with melting snow.

  "Some of it," said Masklin.

  A pall of black smoke hung over the quarry. As they got closer, they sawit was rising from a burning truck. There were more trucks around it, andalso several humans, who started to run when they saw the shadow of theShip.