The Bromeliad Trilogy

by Terry Pratchett

  And it stayed there, while the sun set. The humans below tried shining colored lights at it, and playing tunes at it, and eventually just speaking to it in every language known to humans. It didn't seem to take any notice.

  Masklin woke up.

  He was on a very uncomfortable bed. It was all soft. He hated lying on anything softer than the ground. The Store nomes liked sleeping on fancy bits of carpet, but Masklin's bed had been a bit of wood. He'd used a piece of rag for a cover and thought that was luxury.

  He sat up and looked around the room. It was fairly empty. There was just the bed, a table, and a chair.

  A table and a chair.

  In the Store, the nomes had made their furniture out of matchboxes and cotton reels; the nomes living Outside didn't even know what furniture was.

  This looked rather like human furniture, but it was nome-sized.

  Masklin got up and padded across the metal floor to the door. Nome-sized, again. A doorway made by nomes for nomes to walk through.

  It led into a corridor, lined with doors. There was an old feel about it. It wasn't dirty or dusty. It just felt like somewhere that had been absolutely clean for a very, very long time.

  Something purred toward him. It was a small black box, rather like the Thing, mounted on little treads. A little revolving brush on the front was sweeping dust into a slot. At least, if there had been any dust it would have been sweeping it. Masklin wondered how many times it had industriously cleaned this corridor, while it waited for nomes to come back.

  It bumped into his foot, beeped at him, and then bustled off in the opposite direction. Masklin followed it.

  After a while he passed another one. It was moving along the ceiling with a faint clicking noise, cleaning it.

  He turned the corner, and almost walked into Gurder.

  "You're up!"

  "Yes," said Masklin. "Er. We're on the Ship, right?"

  "It's amazing... !" Gurder began. He looked wild-eyed, and his hair was sticking up at all angles.

  "I'm sure it is," said Masklin reassuringly.

  "But there's all these... and there's great big... and there are these huge... and you'd never believe how wide... and there's so much..." Gurder's voice trailed off. He looked like a nome who would have to learn new words before he could describe things.

  "It's too big!" he blurted out. He grabbed Masklin's arm. "Come on," he said, and half ran along the corridor.

  "How did you get on?" said Masklin, trying to keep up.

  "It was amazing! Angalo touched this panel thing and it just moved aside and then we were inside and there was an elevator thing and then we were in this great big room with a seat and Angalo sat down and all these lights came on and he started pressing buttons and moving things!"

  "Didn't you try to stop him?"

  Gurder rolled his eyes. "You know Angalo and machines," he said. "But the Thing is trying to get him to be sensible. Otherwise we'd be crashing into stars by now," he added gloomily.

  He led the way through another arch into – well, it had to be a room. It was inside the Ship. It was just as well he knew that, Masklin thought, because otherwise he'd think it was Outside. It stretched away, as big as one of the departments in the Store.

  Vast screens and complicated-looking panels covered the walls. Most of them were dark. Shadowy gloom stretched away in every direction, except for a little puddle of light in the very center of the room.

  It illuminated Angalo in a big padded chair. He had the Thing in front of him, on a sloping metal board studded with switches. He had obviously been arguing with it. When Masklin walked up, he glared at him and said, "It won't do what I tell it!"

  The Thing looked as small and black and square as it could.

  "He wants to drive the Ship," it said.

  "You're a machine! You have to do what you're told!" snapped Angalo.

  "I'm an intelligent machine, and I don't want to end up very flat at the bottom of a deep hole," said the Thing. "You can't pilot the Ship yet."

  "How do you know? You won't let me try! I drove the Truck, didn't I? It wasn't my fault all those trees and streetlights and things got in the way," he added, after catching Masklin's eye.

  "I expect the Ship is more difficult," said Masklin diplomatically.

  "But I'm learning about it all the time," said Angalo. "It's easy. All the buttons have got little pictures on them. Look..." He pressed a button.

  One of the big screens lit up, showing the crowds outside the Ship.

  "They've been waiting there for ages," said Gurder.

  "What do they want?" said Angalo.

  "Search me," said Gurder. "Who knows what humans want?"

  Masklin stared at the throng below the ship. "They've been trying all sorts of stuff," said Angalo. "Flashing lights and music and stuff like that. And radio, too, the Thing says."

  "Haven't you tried talking back to them?" said Masklin.

  "No. Haven't got anything to say." said Angalo. He rapped on the Thing with his knuckles. "Right, Mr. Clever? If I'm not going to do the driving, who is?"

  "Me."

  "How?"

  "There is a slot by the seat."

  "I see it. It's the same size as you."

  "Put me in it."

  Angalo shrugged, and picked up the Thing. It slid smoothly into the floor until only the top of it was showing.

  "Look, er," said Angalo, "can't I do something? Operate the windshield wipers or something? I'd feel like a twerp sitting here doing nothing."

  The Thing didn't seem to hear him. Its light flickered on and off for a moment, as if it were making itself comfortable in a mechanical kind of way. Then it said, in a much deeper voice than it had ever used before:

  "RIGHT."

  Lights came on all over the Ship. They spread out from the Thing like a tide; panels lit up like little skies full of stars, big lights in the ceiling flickered on, there was a distant banging and fizzing as electricity was woken up, and the air began to smell of thunderstorms.

  "It's like the Store at Christmas Fayre," said Gurder.

  "Science!" breathed Angalo.

  "ALL SYSTEMS IN WORKING ORDER," boomed the Thing. "NAME OUR DESTINATION."

  "What?" said Masklin. "And don't shout."

  "Where are we going?" said the Thing. "You have to name our destination."

  "It's got a name already. It's called the quarry, isn't it?" said Masklin.

  "Where is it?" said the Thing.

  "It's..." Masklin waved an arm vaguely. "Well, it's over that way somewhere."

  "Which way?"

  "How should I know? How many ways are there?"

  "Thing, are you telling us you don't know the way back to the quarry?" said Gurder.

  "That is correct."

  "We're lost?"

  "No. I know exactly what planet we're on," said the Thing.

  "We can't be lost," said Gurder. "We're here. We know where we are. We just don't know where we aren't."

  "Can't you find the quarry if you go up high enough?" said Angalo. "You ought to be able to see it, if you go up high enough."

  "Very well."

  "Can I do it?" said Angalo. "Please?"

  "Press down with your left foot and pull back on the green lever, then," said the Thing.

  There wasn't so much a noise as a change in the type of silence. Masklin thought he felt heavy for a moment, but then the sensation passed.

  The picture in the screen got smaller.

  "Now, this is what I call proper flying," said Angalo, happily. "With real Science. No noise and none of that stupid flapping."

  "Yes, where's Pion?" said Masklin.

  "He wandered off," said Gurder. "I think he was going to get something to eat."

  "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?"

  Gurde
r 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 out and 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 in the 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" – he couldn't resist prodding Gurder gently – "there's a bigger problem too. You know what we nomes are like. Those other nomes probably wouldn't even believe in the Ship."

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

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

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

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

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

  Gurder turned away. "I'm sorry," he muttered. "It's just that there's so much... changing. Why can't things stay the same for five minutes? Every time I get the hang of an idea it suddenly turns into something different and I turn into a fool! All I want is something real to believe in! Where's the harm in that?"

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

  "Flexible? Flexible? My mind's got so flexible I could pull it out of my ears and tie it under my chin!" snapped Gurder. "And it hasn't done me a whole lot of good, let me tell you! I'd have done better just believing everything I was taught when I was young! At least I'd be wrong only once! 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 as Gurder did so he could complain to it about his life. He even wished he were back, yes, back in the hole. It hadn't been too bad, apart from people being cold and wet and getting eaten all the time. But at least he'd been with Grimma. They would have been cold and wet and hungry together. He wouldn't have been so lonely...

  There was a movement by him. It turned out to be Pion, holding a tray of what had to be... fruit, Masklin decided. He put aside being lonely for a moment, and realized that hunger had been waiting for an opportunity to make 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 of food. If you touched a picture, there was a brief humming noise and then the real food dropped onto a tray in a slot. Masklin tried pictures at random, and got several different sorts of fruit, a squeaky green vegetable thing, and a piece of meat that tasted rather like smoked salmon.

  "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," said the Thing.

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

  And then he thought: I've spent a long time doing things for everybody'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 know where to look for frogs.

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

  12

  FROGS: Some people think that knowing about frogs is important. They are small and green, or yellow, and have four legs. They croak. Young frogs are tadpoles. In my opinion, this is all there is to know about frogs.

  From A Scientific Encyclopedia for the Enquiring Young Nome

  by Angalo de Haberdasheri.

  Find a blue planet... Focus.

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

  Find a country... Focus... Blues and greens and browns under the sun, 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 a flower with a little pool in it, is an epiphytic bromeliad.

  Its leaves, although they might be petals, hardly quiver at all as three very small and very golden frogs pull themselves up and gaze in astonishment 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 water.

  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 things happen after other things. Really intelligent frogs might wonder if there is something that prevents everything happening all at once, but that's about as close as they can get to i
t.

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

  A wide black shadow drifted over the treetops, and came to a halt. After a while there were voices. The frogs could hear them, although they didn't know what they meant or even what they were. They didn't sound like 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 needs this 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 used for 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 to loop the wire around a pillar inside the Ship, and with Pion helping inside, 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.