He'd taken it away again, and tucked it into a gap in one of the walls. He had an obscure feeling that it wasn't time to use the Thing yet. The longer they left it, he thought, the longer they'd have to work out for themselves what it was they were doing. He'd like to wake it up later and say, "Look, this is what we've done, all by ourselves."
Gurder had already worked out that they were probably somewhere in China.
And so the winter became spring, and spring became summer.
But it wasn't finished, Masklin felt.
He sat on the rocks above the quarry, on guard. They always kept a guard on duty, just in case. One of Dorcas's inventions, a switch which was connected to a wire which would light a bulb down under one of the sheds, was hidden under a stone by his side. He'd been promised radio, one of these days. One of these days might be quite soon, because Dorcas had pupils now. They seemed to spend a lot of time in one of the tumbledown sheds, surrounded by bits of wire and looking very serious.
Guard duty was quite popular, at least on sunny days.
This was home, now. The nomes were settling in, filling in the corners, planning, spreading out, starting to belong.
Especially Bobo. He'd disappeared on the first day, and turned up again, scruffy and proud, as the leader of the quarry rats and father of a lot of little ratlings. Perhaps it was because of this that the rats and the nomes seemed to be getting along okay, politely avoiding each other whenever possible and not eating one another.
They belong here more than we do, thought Masklin. This isn't really our place. This belongs to humans. They've just forgotten about it for a while, but one day they'll remember it. They'll come back here and we'll have to move on. We'll always have to move on. We'll always try to create our own little worlds inside the big world. We used to have it all, and now we think we're lucky to have a little bit.
He looked down at the quarry below him. He could just make out Grimma sitting in the sun with some of the young nomes, teaching them to read.
That was a good thing, anyway. He'd never be that good at it, but the kids seemed to pick it up easily enough.
But there were still problems. The departmental families, for example. They had no departments to rule, and spent a lot of time squabbling.
There seemed to be arguments going on the whole time, and everyone expected him to sort them out. It seemed the only time nomes acted together was when they had something to occupy their minds Beyond the moon, the Thing had said. You used to live in the stars.
Masklin lay back and listened to the bees.
One day we'll go back. We'll find a way to get to the big ship in the sky, and we'll go back. But not yet. It'll take some doing, and the hard part again will be getting people to understand. Every time we climb up a step we settle down and think we've got to the top of the stairs, and start bickering about things.
Still, even knowing that the stairs are there is a pretty good start.
From here, he could see for miles across the countryside. For instance, he could see the airport.
It had been quite frightening, the day they'd seen the first jet go over, but a few of the nomes had recalled pictures from books they'd read and it turned out to be nothing more than a sort of truck built to drive in the sky.
Masklin hadn't told anyone why he thought that knowing more about the airport would be a good idea. Some of the others suspected, he knew, but there was so much to do that they weren't thinking about it now.
He'd led up to it carefully. He'd just said that it was important to find out as much about this new world as possible, just in case. He'd put it in such a way that no one had said, "In case of what?" and, anyway, there were people to spare and the weather was good.
He'd led a team of nomes across the fields to it; it had been a week's journey, but there were thirty of them and there had been no problems. They'd even had to cross a motorway, but they'd found a tunnel built for badgers, and a badger coming along it the other way turned around and hurried off when they approached. Bad news like armed nomes spreads quickly.
And then they'd found the wire fence, and climbed up it a little way, and spent hours watching the planes landing and taking off.
Masklin had felt, just as he had done once or twice before, that here was something very important. The jets looked big and terrible, but once he'd thought that about trucks. You just had to know about them. Once you had the name, you had something you could handle, like a sort of lever. One day, they could be useful. One day, the nomes might need them.
To take another step.
Funnily enough, he felt quite optimistic about it. He'd had one glorious moment of feeling that, although they argued and bickered and got things wrong and tripped over themselves, nomes would come through in the end. Because Dorcas had been watching the planes, too, clinging to the wire with a calculating look in his eyes. And Masklin had said:
"Just supposing – for the sake of argument, you understand we need to steal one of those, do you think it could be done?"
And Dorcas had rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"Shouldn't be too hard to drive," he said, and grinned. "They've only got three wheels."
[Book 2]
Diggers
IN THE BEGINNING...
... Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) created the Store.
At least, that was the belief of thousands of nomes who for many generations (Nome generations, that is. Nomes live ten times faster than humans. To them, ten years is a long lifetime.) had lived under the floorboards of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), an old and respected department store in the middle of the city.
The Store had become their world. A world with a roof and walls.
Wind and Rain were ancient legends. So were Day and Night. Now there were sprinkler systems and air conditioners, and the nomes' small, crowded lives ticked to the clock of Opening Time and Closing Time. The seasons of their year were January Sales, Spring into Spring Fashions, Summer Bargains, and Christmas Fayre. Led by the Abbot and priesthood of the Stationeri, they worshipped – in a polite, easygoing sort of way, so as not to upset him – Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), who they believed had created everything, i.e., the Store and all the contents therein.
Some families of nomes had grown rich and powerful and took the names – more or less – of the Store departments they lived under... the Del Icatessen, the Ironmongri, the Haberdasheri.
And into the Store, on the back of a truck, came the last nomes to live Outside. They knew what wind and rain were, all right. That's why they tried to leave them behind.
Among them was Masklin, rat hunter, and Granny Morkie, and Grimma, although they were women and didn't really count. And, of course, the Thing.
No one quite understood the Thing. Masklin's people had handed it down for centuries; it was very important, that was all they knew. When it came near the electricity in the Store it was able to talk. It said it was a thinking machine from a ship which, thousands of years before, had brought the nomes from a far Store, or possibly star. It also said it could hear electricity talk, and one of the things the electricity was saying was that the Store would be demolished in three weeks.
It was Masklin who suggested that the nomes leave the Store on a truck. He found, oddly enough, that actually working out how you could drive a giant truck was the easiest part. The hardest part was getting people to believe that they could do it.
He wasn't the leader. He'd have liked to be a leader. A leader could stick his chin out and do brave things. What Masklin had to do was argue and persuade and, sometimes, lie very slightly. He found it was often easier to get people to do things if you let them think it was their idea.
Ideas! That was the tricky bit, all right. And there were lots of ideas that they needed. They needed to learn to work together. They needed to learn to read. They needed to think that female nomes were, well, nearly as intelligent as males (although everyone knew that really this was ridiculous and that if females were encouraged to think too much their brains would
overheat).
Anyway, it all worked. The truck did leave just before the Store mysteriously burned down, and hardly damaging anything very much, it was driven out into the country.
The nomes found an abandoned quarry tucked into a hillside, and moved into the ruined buildings.
And then they knew everything was going to be All Right. There was going to be, they'd heard, a Bright New Dawn.
Whatever that was.
Most nomes had never seen a dawn, bright or otherwise, and if they had they would have known that the trouble with bright new dawns is that they're usually followed by cloudy days. With scattered showers.
Six months passed...
This is the story of the Winter.
This is the story of the Great Battle.
This is the story of the awakening of the Cat, the Dragon in the Hill, with eyes like great eyes and a voice like a great voice and teeth like great teeth.
But the story didn't end there.
It didn't start there, either.
The sky blew a gale. The sky blew a fury. The wind became a wall sweeping across the country, a giant stamping on the land. Small trees bent, big trees broke. The last leaves of autumn whirred through the air like lost bullets.
The garbage dump by the gravel pits was deserted. The seagulls that patrolled it had found shelter somewhere, but it was still full of movement. The wind tore into the heaps as though it had something particular against old detergent boxes and leftover shoes. Tin cans rolled into the ruts and clanked miserably, while lighter bits of rubbish flew up and joined the riot in the sky.
Still the wind burrowed. Papers rustled for a while, then got caught and blasted away.
Finally one piece that had been flapping for hours tears free and flies up into the booming air. It looks like a large white bird with oblong wings.
Watch it tumble...
It gets caught on a fence, but very briefly. Half of it tears off, and now that much lighter, it pinwheels across the furrows of the field beyond...
It is just gathering speed when a hedge looms up and snaps it out of the air like a fly.
1
I. And in that time were Strange Happenings: the Air moved harshly, the Warmth of the Sky grew Less, on some mornings the tops of puddles grew Hard and Cold.
II. And the nomes said unto one another, What is this Thing?
From the Book of Nome, Quarries I, v. I–II
"Winter," said Masklin firmly. "It's called winter."
Abbott Gurder frowned at him.
"You never said it would be like this," he said.
"It's so cold."
"Call this cold?" said Granny Morkie. "Cold? This ain't cold. You think this is cold? You wait till it gets really cold!" She was enjoying this, Masklin noticed; Granny Morkie always enjoyed doom.
"It'll be really cold then, when it gets cold. You get real frosts, and water comes down out of the sky in frozen bits!" She leaned back triumphantly. "What d'you think of that, then? Eh?"
"You don't have to use baby talk to us," sighed Gurder. "We can read, you know. We know what snow is."
"Yes," said Dorcas. "There used to be cards with pictures on them, back in the Store. Every time Christmas Fayre came around. We know about snow. It's glittery."
"You get robins," agreed Gurder.
"There's, er, actually there's a bit more to it than that," Masklin began.
Dorcas waved him into silence. "I don't think we need to worry," he said. "We're well dug in, the food stores are looking good, and we know where to go to get more if we need it. Unless anyone's got anything else to raise, why don't we close the meeting?"
Everything was going well. Or, at least, not very badly. That sort of thing always worried Masklin.
Oh, there was still plenty of squabbling and feuds between the various families, but that was nomish nature for you. That's why they'd set up the council, which seemed to be working.
Nomes liked arguing. At least the Council of Drivers meant they could argue without hitting one another hardly ever.
Funny thing, though. Back in the Store the great departmental families had run things. But now all the families were mixed up and, anyway, there were no departments in a quarry. But by instinct, almost, nomes liked hierarchies. The world had always been neatly divided between those who told people what to do, and those who did it. So, in a strange way, a new set of leaders was emerging.
The Drivers.
It depended on where you had been during the Long Drive. If you were one of the ones who had been in the truck cab, then you were a Driver. Everyone else was just a Passenger. No one talked about it much. It wasn't official or anything. It was just that the bulk of nomekind felt that anyone who could get the Truck all the way here was the sort of person who knew what they were doing.
Being a Driver wasn't necessarily much fun.
Last year, before they'd found the Store, Masklin had to hunt all day. Now he only hunted when he felt like it; the younger Store nomes liked hunting, and apparently it wasn't right for a Driver to do it.
And they mined potatoes and there'd been a big harvest of corn from a nearby field, even after the machines had been around. Masklin would have preferred the nomes to grow their own food, but they didn't seem to have the knack of making seeds grow in the rock-hard ground of the quarry. But they were getting fed, that was the main thing.
Around him he could feel thousands of nomes living their lives. Raising families. Settling down.
He wandered back to his own burrow, down under one of the derelict quarry sheds. After a while he reached a decision and pulled the Thing out of its own hole in the wall.
None of its lights was on. They wouldn't do that until the Thing was close to electrical wires; then it would light up and be able to talk. There were some wires in the quarry, and Dorcas had got them working. Masklin hadn't taken the Thing to them, though. The solid black box had a way of talking that always made him feel unsettled.
He was pretty certain it could hear, though.
"Old Torrit died last week," he said after a while.
"We were a bit sad, but after all, he was very old and he just died. I mean, nothing ate him first or ran him over or anything."
Masklin's little tribe had lived in a highway embankment beside rolling countryside which was full of things that were hungry for fresh nome.
The idea that you could die simply of not being alive anymore was a new one to them.
"So we buried him up on the edge of the potato field, too deep for the plow. The Store nomes haven't got the hang of burial yet, I think. They think he's going to sprout, or something. I think they're mixing it up with what you do with seeds.
Of course, they don't know about growing things.
Because of living in the Store, you see. It's all new to them. They're always complaining about eating food that comes out of the ground, they think it's not natural. And they think the rain is a sprinkler system. I think they think the whole world is just a bigger Store. Um."
He stared at the unresponsive cube for a while, scraping his mind for other things to say.
"Anyway, that means Granny Morkie is the oldest nome," he said eventually. "And that means she's entitled to a place on the council, even though she's a woman. Abbot Gurder objected to that, but we said, all right, you tell her, and he wouldn't, so she is. Um."
He looked at his fingernails. The Thing had a way of listening that was quite off-putting.
"Everyone's worried about the winter. Um. But we've got masses of potatoes stored up, and it's quite warm down here. The Store nomes have some funny ideas, though. They said that when it was Christmas Fayre time in the Store there was this thing that came called Santer Claws. I just hope it hasn't followed us, that's all. Um."
He scratched an ear.
"All in all, everything's going right. Um."
He leaned closer.
"You know what that means? If you think everything's going right, something's going wrong that you haven't heard about yet
. That's what I say. Um."
The black cube managed to look sympathetic.
"Everyone says I worry too much. I don't think it's possible to worry too much. Um."
He thought some more.
"Um. I think that's about all the news for now."
He lifted the Thing up and put it back in its hole.
He'd wondered whether to tell it about his argument with Grimma, but that was, well, personal.
It was all that reading books, that was what it was. He shouldn't have let her learn to read, filling her head with stuff she didn't need to know.
Gurder was right, women's brains did overheat.
Grimma's seemed to be boiling hot the whole time, these days.
He'd gone and said, Look, now everything was settled down more, it was time they got married like the Store nomes did, with the Abbot muttering words and everything.
And she'd said she wasn't sure.
So he'd said, it doesn't work like that, you get old, you get married, that's how it's done.
And she'd said. Not anymore.
He'd complained to Granny Morkie. You'd have expected some support there, he thought. She was a great one for tradition, was Granny. He'd said, Granny, Grimma isn't doing what I tell her.
And she'd said, Good luck to her, wish I'd thought of not doin' what I was told when I was a gel.
Then he'd complained to Gurder, who said, Yes, it was very wrong, girls should do what they were instructed. And Masklin had said, Right then, you tell her. And Gurder had said, Well, er, she's got a real temper on her, perhaps it would be better to leave it a bit and these were, after all, changing times...
Changing times. Well, that was true enough.
Masklin had done most of the changing. He'd had to make people think in different ways to leave the Store. Changing was necessary. Change was right.
He was all in favor of change.
What he was dead against was things not staying the same.
His spear was leaning in the corner. What a pathetic thing it was... now. Just a bit of flint held onto the shaft with a twist of binder twine. They'd brought saws and things from the Store. They could use metal these days.
The Bromeliad Trilogy Page 16
