The Bromeliad 2 - Diggers

Chapter 1

I. And in that time were StrangeHappenings: the Air moved harshly, theWarmth of the Sky grew Less, on somemornings the tops of puddles grew Hardand 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 thinkthis is cold? You wait till it gets really cold!" She was enjoying this, Masklin noticed; Granny Morkie always enjoyed doom. "It'll be really coldthen, when it gets cold. You get real frosts, and water comes down out ofthe sky in frozen bits!" She leaned back triumphantly. "What d'you thinkof that, then? Eh?"

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

"Yes," said Dorcas. "There used to be cards with pictures on them, backin 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," Masklinbegan.

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 whereto go to get more if we need it. Unless anyone's got anything else toraise, why don't we close the meeting?"

Everything was going well. Or, at least, not very badly. That sort ofthing always worried Masklin.

Oh, there was still plenty of squabbling and feuds between the variousfamilies, but that was nomish nature for you. That's why they'd set upthe council, which seemed to be working.

Nomes liked arguing. At least the Council of Drivers meant they couldargue 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, therewere no departments in a quarry. But by instinct, almost, nomes likedhierarchies. The world had always been neatly divided between those whotold people what to do, and those who did it. So, in a strange way, a newset of leaders was emerging.

The Drivers.

It depended on where you had been during the Long Drive. If you were oneof 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'tofficial or anything. It was just that the bulk of nomekind felt thatanyone who could get the Truck all the way here was the sort of personwho 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 likedhunting, and apparently it wasn't right for a Driver to do it. And theymined potatoes and there'd been a big harvest of corn from a nearbyfield, even after the machines had been around. Masklin would havepreferred the nomes to grow their own food, but they didn't seem to havethe knack of making seeds grow in the rock-hard ground of the quarry. Butthey were getting fed, that was the main thing.

Around him he could feel thousands of nomes living their lives. Raisingfamilies. Settling down.

He wandered back to his own burrow, down under one of the derelictquarry sheds. After a while he reached a decision and pulled the Thingout of its own hole in the wall.

None of its lights was on. They wouldn't do that until the Thing wasclose 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 away 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 himfirst or ran him over or anything."

Masklin's little tribe had lived in a highway embankment beside rollingcountryside which was full of things that were hungry for fresh nome. Theidea that you could die simply of not being alive anymore was a new oneto them.

"So we buried him up on the edge of the potato field, too deep for theplow. The Store nomes haven't got the hang of burial yet, I think. Theythink he's going to sprout, or something. I think they're mixing it upwith what you do with seeds. Of course, they don't know about growingthings. 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 theground, they think it's not natural. And they think the rain is asprinkler system. I think they think the whole world is just a biggerStore. Urn."

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 saideventually. "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 away of listening that was quite off-putting.

"Everyone's worried about the winter. Um. But we've got masses ofpotatoes stored up, and it's quite warm down here. The Store nomes havesome funny ideas, though. They said that when it was Christmas Fayre timein the Store there was this thing that came called Santer Claws. I justhope 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 Isay. Um."

The black cube managed to look sympathetic.

"Everyone says I worry too much. I don't think it's possible to worry toomuch. Um."

He thought some more.

"Um. I think that's about all the news for now." He lifted the Thing upand put it back in its hole.

He'd wondered whether to tell it about his argument with Grimma, butthat was, well, personal.

It was all that reading books, that was what it was. He shouldn't havelet her learn to read, filling her head with stuff she didn't need toknow. Gurder was right, women's brains did overheat. Grimma's seemed tobe boiling hot the whole time, these days.

He'd gone and said, Look, now everything was settled down more, it wastime they got married like the Store nomes did, with the Abbot mutteringwords and everything.

And she'd said she wasn't sure.

So he'd said, It doesn't work like that, you 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 Iwas told when I was a gel.

Then he'd complained to Gurder, who said, Yes, it was very wrong, girlsshould 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 onher, perhaps it would be better to leave it a bit and these were, afterall, changing times... .

Changing times. Well, that was true enough. Masklin had done most of thechanging. He'd had to make people think in different ways to leave theStore. Changing was necessary. Change was right. He was all in favor ofchange.

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 usemetal these days.

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

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

Below the quarry a dirt road wound down through scrubby hedges and joinedthe main highway. Beyond that there was the railroad, another name fortwo long lines of metal on big wooden blocks. Things like very longtrucks went along it sometimes, all joined together.

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

The nomes knew what gates were for. You saw them on fields, to stopthings from getting out. It stood to reason, therefore, that the gateswere to stop the trains from escaping from their rails and rushing aroundthe place.

Then there were more fields, some gravel pits, good for fishing, for thenomes who wanted fish, and then there was the airport.

Masklin had spent hours in the summer watching the planes. They drovealong the ground, he noticed, and then went up sharply, like a bird, andgot smaller and smaller and disappeared.

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

They should be going where the planes went. That was what the Thing hadtold him, when it was still speaking to him. The nomes had come from thesky. Up above the sky, in fact, which was a bit hard to understand, because surely the only thing there was above the sky was more sky. Andthey should go back. It was their ... something beginning with D.

Density. Their density. Worlds of their own, they once had. And somehowthey'd got stuck here. But-this was the worrying part-the 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 whenthey came down here in a smaller ship, and the small ship had crashed, and they hadn't been able to get back.

And he was the only one that 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 werepractical people and there was so much to organize these days.

It was just that everyone was settling down. We're going to turn thisinto our little world, just like in the Store. They thought the roof wasthe 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 sightthat Masklin realized he had been watching it for a while without reallyseeing it at all.

"There was no one on watch! Why wasn't there anyone on watch? I saidthere should always be someone on watch!"

Half a dozen nomes scurried through the dying bracken toward the quarrygate.

"It was Sacco's turn," muttered Angalo.

"No it wasn't!" hissed Sacco. "You remember, yesterday you asked me toswap because-"

"I don't care whose turn it was!" shouted Masklin. "There was no one there! And there should have been! Right?"

"Sorry, Masklin."

"Yeah. Sorry, Masklin."

They scrambled up a bank and flattened themselves behind a tuft ofdried grass.

It was a small truck, as far as trucks went. A human had already climbedout of it and was doing something to the gates leading into the quarry.

"It's a Land-Rover," said Angalo smugly. He'd spent a long time in theStore reading everything he could about vehicles, before the Long Drive.

He liked them. "It's not really a truck, it's more to carry humans over-"

"That human is sticking something on the gate," said Masklin.

"On our gate," said Sacco disapprovingly.

"Bit odd," said Angalo. The man sleepwalked, in the slow, ponderous waythat humans did, back to the vehicle. Eventually it backed around androared off.

"All the way up here just to stick a bit of paper on the gate," saidAngalo, as the nomes stood up. "That's humans for you."

Masklin frowned. Humans were big and stupid, that was true enough, but there was something unstoppable about them and they seemed to be controlled by bits of paper. Back in the Store a piece of paper had said theStore was going to be demolished and, sure enough, it had beendemolished. You couldn't trust humans with bits of paper.

He pointed to the rusty wire netting, an easy climb for an agile nome.

"Sacco," he said, "you'd better fetch it down."

Miles away, another piece of paper fluttered on the hedge. Spots of rainpattered across its sun-bleached words, soaking the paper until it washeavy and soggy and ...

... it tore.

It flopped onto the grass, free. A breeze made it rustle.