“Right or left?” said Grimma. “What do you think?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Dorcas, as the digger twanged through the fence.
“We’ll try going left, then,” she said. “Slow down, Sacco! Left a bit. More. More. Steady at that. Oh, no!”
There was another car in the distance. It had a flashing light on the top.
Dorcas risked a look behind them.
There was another flashing light there.
“No,” he said.
“What?” said Grimma.
“Just a little while ago you asked if humans ever gave up,” he said. “They don’t.”
“Stop,” said Grimma.
The teams trotted obediently across Big John’s floor. The digger rolled gently to a halt again, engine idling.
“This is it,” said Dorcas.
“Are we at the barn yet?” a nome called up.
“No,” said Grimma. “Not yet. Nearly.”
Dorcas made a face.
“We might as well accept it now,” he said. “You’ll end up waving a stick with a star on it. I just hope they don’t force me to mend their shoes.”
Grimma looked thoughtful. “If we drove as hard as we could at that car coming toward us—” she began.
“No,” said Dorcas, firmly. “It really wouldn’t solve anything.”
“It’d make me feel a lot better,” said Grimma.
She looked around at the fields.
“Why’s it gone all dark?” she said. “We can’t have been running all day. It was early morning when we started out.”
“Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourselves?” said Dorcas gloomily. “And I don’t like milk much. I don’t mind doing their housework if I don’t have to drink milk, but—”
“Just look, will you?”
Darkness was spreading across the fields.
“It might be an ellipse,” said Dorcas. “I read about them: It all goes dark when the sun covers the moon. And possibly vice versa,” he added doubtfully.
The car ahead of them squealed to a halt, crashed backward across the road into a stone wall, and came to an abrupt stop.
In the field by the road the sheep were running away. It wasn’t the ordinary panic of sheep ordinarily disturbed. They had their heads down and were pounding across the ground with one aim in mind. They were sheep who had decided that this was no time to waste energy panicking when it could be used for galloping away as fast as possible.
A loud and unpleasant humming noise filled the air.
“My word,” Dorcas said weakly. “They’re pretty damn terrifying, these ellipses.” Down below, the nomes were panicking. They weren’t sheep, every nome could think for itself, and when you started to think hard about sudden darkness and mysterious humming noises, panicking seemed like a logical idea.
Little lines of crawling blue fire crackled over Big John’s battered paintwork. Dorcas felt his hair standing on end.
Grimma stared upward.
The sky was totally black.
“It’s . . . all . . . right,” she said, slowly. “Do you know, I think it’s all right!”
Dorcas looked at his hands. Sparks crackled off his fingertips.
“It is, is it?” was all he could think of to say.
“That isn’t night, it’s a shadow. There’s something huge floating above us.”
“And that’s better than night, is it?” said Dorcas.
“I think so. Come on, let’s get off.”
She shinned down the rope to Big John’s deck. She was smiling madly. That was almost as terrifying as everything else put together. They weren’t used to Grimma smiling.
“Give me a hand,” she said. “We’ve got to get down. So he can be sure it’s us.”
They looked at her in astonishment as she wrestled with the gangplank.
“Come on,” she repeated. “Help me, can’t you?”
They helped. Sometimes, when you’re totally confused, you’ll listen to anyone who seems to have any sort of aim in mind. They grabbed the plank and shoved it out of the back of the cab until it tilted and swung down toward the floor.
At least there wasn’t so much sky now. The blue was a thin line around the edge of the solid darkness overhead.
Not entirely solid. When Dorcas’s eyes grew used to it, he could make out squares and rectangles and circles.
Nomes scurried down the plank and milled around on the road below, uncertain whether to run or stay.
Above them one of the dark squares in the shadow moved aside. There was a clank, and then a rectangle of darkness whirred down very gently, like an elevator without wires, and landed softly on the road. It was quite big.
There was something on it. Something in a pot. Something red and yellow and green.
The nomes craned forward to see what it was.
15
I. Thus ended the journey of Big John, and the nomes fled, looking not behind.
From The Book of Nome,
Strange Frogs Chap. VII, v. I.
DORCAS CLAMBERED DOWN awkwardly onto Big John’s oily deck. It was empty now, except for the bits of string and wood that the nomes had used.
They’ve dropped things just any old how, he thought, listening to the distant chattering of the nomes. It’s not right, leaving litter. Poor old Big John deserves more than this.
There was some sort of excitement going on outside, but he didn’t pay it much attention.
He bumbled around for a bit, trying to coil up the string and push the wood into tidy heaps. He pulled down the wires that had let Big John taste the electricity. He got down on his hands and knees and tried to rub out the muddy footprints.
Big John made noises, even with the engine stopped. Little pops and sizzles, and the occasional ping.
Dorcas sat down and leaned against the yellow metal. He didn’t know what was going on. It was so far outside anything he’d ever seen before that his mind wasn’t letting him worry about it.
Perhaps it’s just another machine, he thought wearily. A machine for making night come down suddenly.
He reached out and patted Big John.
“Well done,” he said.
Sacco and Nooty found him sitting with his head against the cab wall, staring vacantly at his feet.
“Everyone’s been looking for you!” Sacco said. “It’s like an airplane without wings! It’s just floating there in the air! So you must come and tell us what makes it go . . . I say, are you all right?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you all right?” said Nooty. “You look rather odd.”
Dorcas nodded slowly. “Just a bit worn out,” he said.
“Yes, but, you see, we need you,” said Sacco insistently.
Dorcas groaned and allowed himself to be helped to his feet. He took a last look around the cab.
“It really went, didn’t it?” he said. “It really went very well. All things considered. For his age.”
He tried to give Sacco a cheerful look.
“What are you talking about?” said Sacco.
“All that time in that shed. Since the world was made, perhaps. And I just greased him and fueled him up and away he went,” said Dorcas.
“The machine? Oh, yes. Well done,” said Sacco.
“But—” Nooty pointed upward.
Dorcas shrugged.
“Oh, I’m not bothered about that,” he said. “It’s probably Masklin’s doing. Perfectly simple explanation. Grimma is right. It’s probably that flying thing he went off to get.”
“But something’s come out of it!” said Nooty.
“Not Masklin, you mean?”
“It’s some kind of plant!”
Dorcas sighed. Always one thing after another. He patted Big John again.
“Well, I care,” he said.
He straightened up and turned to the others. “All right,” he said, “show me.”
It was in a metal pot in the middle of the floating platform. The nomes craned and tried
to climb on one another’s shoulders to look at it, and none of them knew what it was except for Grimma, who was staring at it with a strange quiet smile on her face.
It was a branch from a tree. On the branch was a flower the size of a bucket.
If you climbed high enough, you could see that inside it, held with its glistening petals, was a pool of water. And from the depths of the pool, little yellow frogs stared up at the nomes.
“Have you any idea what it is?” said Sacco.
Dorcas smiled. “Masklin’s found out that it’s a good idea to send a girl flowers,” he said. “And I think everything’s all right.” He glanced at Grimma.
“Yes, but what is it?”
“I seem to remember it’s called a bromeliad,” said Dorcas. “It grows on the top of very tall trees in wet forests a long way away, and little frogs spend their whole lives in it. Your whole life in one flower. Imagine that. Grimma once said she thought it was the most astonishing thing in the world.”
Sacco bit his lip thoughtfully.
“Well, there’s electricity,” he said. “Electricity is quite astonishing.”
“Or hydraulics,” said Nooty, taking his hand. “You told me hydraulics was fascinating.”
“Masklin must have got it for her,” said Dorcas. “Very literal-minded lad, that lad. Very active imagination.”
He stared from the flower to Big John looking small and old under the humming shadow of the Ship.
And felt, suddenly, quite cheerful. He was still tired enough to go to sleep standing up, but he felt his mind fizzing with ideas. Of course there were a lot of questions, but right now the answers didn’t matter; it was enough just to enjoy the questions, and know that the world was full of astonishing things, and that he wasn’t a frog.
Or at least he was the kind of frog who was interested in how flowers grew and whether you could get to other flowers if you jumped hard enough.
And, just when you’d got out of the flower, and were feeling really proud of yourself, you’d look at the new, big, wide endless world around you.
And eventually you’d notice that it had petals around the horizon.
Dorcas grinned.
“I’d very much like to know,” he said, “what Masklin has been doing these past few weeks. . . .”
EXCERPT FROM THE BROMELIAD TRILOGY: WINGS
AIRPORT: A place where people hurry up and wait.
From A Scientific Encyclopedia
for the Inquiring Young Nome
by Angalo de Haberdasheri
LET THE EYE of your imagination be a camera. . . .
This is the universe, a glittering ball of galaxies like the ornament on some unimaginable Christmas tree. Find a galaxy. . . .
Focus
This is a galaxy, swirled like the cream in a cup of coffee, every pinpoint of light a star.
Find a star. . . .
Focus
This is a solar system, where planets barrel through the darkness around the central fires of the sun. Some planets hug close, hot enough to melt lead. Some drift far out, where the comets are born. Find a blue planet. . . .
Focus
This is a planet. Most of it is covered in water. It’s called Earth.
Find a country. . . .
Focus
. . . blues and greens and browns under the sun, and here’s a pale oblong which is . . .
Focus
. . . an airport, a concrete hive for silver bees, and there’s a . . .
Focus
. . . building full of people and noise and . . .
Focus
. . . a hall of lights and bustle and . . .
Focus
. . . a bin full of rubbish and . . .
Focus
. . . a pair of tiny eyes . . .
Focus
Focus
Focus
Click!
Masklin slid cautiously down an old burger carton.
He’d been watching humans. Hundreds and hundreds of humans. It was beginning to dawn on him that getting on a jet plane wasn’t like stealing a truck.
Angalo and Gurder had nestled deep into the rubbish and were gloomily eating the remains of a cold, greasy french fry.
This has come as a shock to all of us, Masklin thought.
I mean, take Gurder. Back in the Store he was the Abbot. He believed that Arnold Bros made the Store for nomes. And he still thinks there’s some sort of Arnold Bros somewhere, watching over us, because we are important. And now we’re out here, and all we’ve found is that nomes aren’t important at all. . . .
And there’s Angalo. He doesn’t believe in Arnold Bros, but he likes to think Arnold Bros exists just so that he can go on not believing in him.
And there’s me.
I never thought it would be this hard.
I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.
There’s more humans in this place than I’ve ever seen before. How can we find Grandson Richard, 39, in a place like this?
I hope they’re going to save me some of that potato. . . .
Angalo looked up.
“Seen him?” he said, sarcastically.
Masklin shrugged. “There’s lots of humans with beards,” he said. “They all look the same to me.”
“I told you,” said Angalo. “Blind faith never works.” He glared at Gurder.
“He could have gone already,” said Masklin. “He could have walked right past me.”
“So let’s get back,” said Angalo. “People will be missing us. We’ve made the effort, we’ve seen the airport, we’ve nearly got trodden on dozens of times. Now let’s get back to the real world.”
“What do you think, Gurder?” said Masklin.
The Abbot gave him a long, despairing look.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know. I’d hoped . . .”
His voice trailed off. He looked so downcast that even Angalo patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “You didn’t really think some sort of Grandson Richard, 39, was going to swoop down out of the sky and carry us off to Florida, did you? Look, we’ve given it a try. It hasn’t worked. Let’s go home.”
“Of course I didn’t think that,” said Gurder irritably. “I just thought that . . . maybe in some way . . . there’d be a way.”
“The world belongs to humans. They built everything. They run everything. We might as well accept it,” said Angalo.
Masklin looked at the Thing. He knew it was listening. Even though it was just a small black cube, it somehow always looked more alert when it was listening.
The trouble was, it spoke only when it felt like it. It’d always give you just enough help, and no more. It seemed to be testing him the whole time.
Somehow, asking the Thing for help was like admitting that you’d run out of ideas. But . . .
“Thing,” he said, “I know you can hear me, because there must be loads of electricity in this building. We’re at the airport. We can’t find Grandson Richard, 39. We don’t know how to start looking. Please help us.”
The Thing stayed silent.
“If you don’t help us,” said Masklin quietly, “we’ll go back to the quarry and face the humans, but that won’t matter to you because we’ll leave you here. We really will. And no nomes will ever find you again. There will never be another chance. We’ll die out, there will be no more nomes anywhere, and it will be because of you. And in years and years to come you’ll be all alone and useless and you’ll think, Perhaps I should have helped Masklin when he asked me, and then you’ll think, If I had my time all over again, I would have helped him. Well, Thing, imagine all that has happened and you’ve magically got your wish. Help us.”
“It’s a machine!” snapped Angalo. “You can’t blackmail a machine—!”
One small red light lit up on the Thing’s black surface.
“I know you can tell what other machines are thinking,” said Masklin. “But ca
n you tell what nomes are thinking? Read my mind, Thing, if you don’t think I’m serious. You want nomes to act intelligently. Well, I am acting intelligently. I’m intelligent enough to know when I need help. I need help now. And you can help. I know you can. If you don’t help us, we’ll leave right now and forget you ever existed.”
A second light came on, very faintly.
Masklin stood up and nodded to the others.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The Thing made the little electronic noise that was the machine’s equivalent of a nome clearing his throat.
“How can I be of assistance?” it said.
Angalo grinned at Gurder.
Masklin sat down again.
“Find Grandson Richard Arnold, 39,” he said.
“This will take a long time,” said the Thing.
“Oh.”
A few lights moved on the Thing’s surface. Then it said, “I have located a Richard Arnold, aged thirty-nine. He has just gone into the first-class departure lounge for flight 205 to Miami, Florida.”
“That didn’t take a very long time,” said Masklin.
“It was three hundred microseconds,” said the Thing. “That’s long.”
“I don’t think I understood all of it, either,” Masklin added.
“Which parts didn’t you understand?”
“Nearly all of them,” said Masklin. “All the bits after ‘gone into.’”
“Someone with the right name is here and waiting in a special room to get on a big silver bird that flies in the sky to go to a place called Florida,” said the Thing.
“What big silver bird?” said Angalo.
“It means jet plane. It’s being sarcastic,” said Masklin.
“Yeah? How does it know all this stuff?” said Angalo suspiciously.
“This building is full of computers,” said the Thing.
“What, like you?”
The Thing managed to looked offended. “They are very, very primitive,” it said. “But I can understand them. If I think slowly enough. Their job is to know where humans are going.”
“That’s more than most humans do,” said Angalo.
“Can you find out how we can get to him?” said Gurder, his face alight.
“Hold on, hold on,” said Angalo, quickly. “Let’s not rush into things here.”
Diggers Page 13
