Truckers (26 page)

Authors: Terry Pratchett

BOOK: Truckers

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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 rightâwomen'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 thatâyou get told, 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 girl.

Then he'd complained to Gurder, who'd 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 set 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.

He stared at the spear for some time. Then he picked it up and went out for a long, serious think about things and his position in them. Or, as other people would have put it, a good sulk.

The old quarry was about halfway up the hillside. There was a steep turf slope above it, which in turn became a riot of bramble and hawthorn thicket. There were fields beyond.

Below the quarry, a lane wound down through scrubby hedges and joined the main road. Beyond that there was the railway, another name for two long lines of metal on big wooden blocks. Things like very long trucks went along it sometimes, all joined together.

The nomes had not got the railway fully worked out yet. But it was obviously dangerous, because they could see a lane that crossed it, and whenever the railway moving thing was coming, two gates came down over the road.

The nomes knew what gates were for. You saw them on fields, to stop things getting out. It stood to reason, therefore, that the gates were to stop the railway from escaping from its rails and rushing around on the roads.

Then there were more fields, some gravel pitsâgood for fishing, for the nomes who wanted fishâand then there was the airport.

Masklin had spent hours in the summer watching the planes. They drove along the ground, he noticed, and then went up sharply, like birds, and got smaller and smaller and disappeared.

That was the
big
worry. Masklin sat on his favorite stone, in the rain that was starting to fall, and started to worry about it. So many things were worrying him these days, he had to stack them up, but below all of them was this big one.

They should be going where the planes went. That was what the Thing had told him, when it was still speaking to him. The nomes had come from the sky. Up above the sky, in fact, which was a bit hard to understand, because surely the only thing above the sky was more sky. And they should go back. It was their . . . something beginning with D. Density. Their density. Worlds of their own, they once had. And somehow they'd got stuck here. Butâthis was the worrying partâthe Ship thing, the airplane that flew through the really high sky, between the stars, was still up there somewhere. The first nomes had left it behind when they came down here in a smaller ship, and it had crashed, and they hadn't been able to get back.

And he was the only one who knew.

The old Abbot, the one before Gurder, he had known. Grimma and Dorcas and Gurder all knew some of it, but they had busy minds and they were practical people, and there was so much to organize these days.

It was just that everyone was settling down. We're going to turn this into our little world, just like in the Store, Masklin realized. They thought the roof was the sky, and we think the sky is the roof.

We'll just stay and . . .

There was a truck coming up the quarry road. It was such an unusual sight that Masklin realized he had been watching it for a while without really seeing it at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TERRY PRATCHETT's novels have sold more than thirty-two million copies and have inspired a devoted worldwide following. In addition to his best-selling adult books about Discworld, Mr. Pratchett has also written several books for young readers, including
THE WEE FREE MEN
and the Johnny Maxwell trilogy:
ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND, JOHNNY AND THE DEAD
, and
JOHNNY AND THE BOMB.
Mr. Pratchett was awarded Britain's highest honor for a children's novel, the Carnegie Medal, for
THE AMAZING MAURICE AND HIS EDUCATED RODENTS.

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OTHER WORKS

The Wee Free Men

A Hat Full of Sky

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The Carpet People

The Dark Side of the Sun

Strata

THE JOHNNY MAXWELL TRILOGY

Only You Can Save Mankind

Johnny and the Dead

Johnny and the Bomb

The Unadulterated Cat
(illustrated by Gray Jolliffe)

Good Omens
(with Neil Gaiman)

THE DISCWORLD SERIES

The Color of Magic

The Light Fantastic

Equal Rites

Mort

Sourcery

Wyrd Sisters

Pyramids

Guards! Guards!

Eric

Moving Pictures

Reaper Man

Witches Abroad

Small Gods

Lords and Ladies

Men at Arms

Soul Music

Feet of Clay

Interesting Times

Maskerade

Hogfather

Jingo

The Last Continent

Carpe Jugulum

The Fifth Elephant

The Truth

The Thief of Time

Night Watch

Monstrous Regiment

The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable

(illustrated by Paul Kidby)

CREDITS

Cover design by Bradford Foltz

COPYRIGHT

Harper TrophyÂ® is a registered trademark of
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

The Bromeliad Trilogy
Copyright Â© 1998 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett including

Truckers
Copyright Â© 1989 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

EPub Edition Â© JANUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062193827

First published in 1989 by Doubleday
a division of the Random House Group Ltd
First Harper Trophy edition, 2004
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