Truckers (25 page)

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 long journey, but there were thirty of them and there had been no problems. They'd even had to cross a highway, 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.”

The nomes' adventures continue
in the next installment of

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 Chap. 1, v. I–II

“W
INTER,” SAID
M
ASKLIN
firmly. “It's called winter.”

Abbot 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 was what kept her going. “It'll be really cold then, when it gets cold. You get
real
frosts and, and water comes down out of the sky in frozen bits!” She leaned back triumphantly. “What d'you think to that, then? Eh?”

“You don't have to use baby talk to us.” Gurder sighed. “We
can
read, you know. We know what snow is.”

“Yes,” said Dorcas. “There used to be cards with pictures on, 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 satisfactory, 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.

Oh, there was still plenty of squabbling and rows 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—or 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. All the rest were just Passengers. 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 hunted only when he felt like it; the younger Store nomes liked hunting, and apparently it wasn't
right
for a Driver to do it. They mined potatoes, and there'd been a big harvest of corn from a nearby field, even after the machines had been round. Masklin would have preferred them to grow their own food, but the nomes 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 were on. They wouldn't go on until it was close to electricity wires, when it would light up and be able to talk. There were some 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 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 once lived in a highway embankment beside rolling countryside that 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. They've got some funny ideas, though. In the Store they said that when it was Christmas Fayre time, 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.