Wings

Wings

Terry Pratchett

The Bromeliads Book 3

IN THE BEGINNING...

... was Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), the great department store.

It was the home of several thousand nomes - as they called themselves - who'd long ago given up life in the countryside and settled down under the floorboards of Mankind.

Not that they had anything to do with humans. Humans were big and slow and stupid.

Nomes live fast. To them, ten years is like a century. Since they'd been living in the Store for more than eighty years, they'd long ago forgotten that there were things like Sun and Rain and Wind. All there was, was the Store - created by the legendary Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) as a proper place for nomes to live.

And then, into the Store from an Outside the nomes didn't believe existed, came Masklin and his little tribe. They knew what Rain and Wind were, all right. That's why they'd tried to get away from them.

With them they brought the Thing. For years they had thought of the Thing as a sort of talisman or lucky charm. Only in the Store, near electricity, did it wake up and tell a few selected nomes things they hardly understood.

They learned that they had originally come from the stars, in some sort of Ship, and that somewhere up in the sky that Ship had been waiting for thousands of years to take them home.

And they learned that the Store was going to be demolished in three weeks.

How Masklin tricked, bullied, and persuaded the nomes into leaving the Store by stealing one of its huge trucks is recounted in Truckers.

They made it to an old quarry, and for a little while things went well enough.

But when you're four inches high in a world full of giant people, things never go very well for very long.

They found that humans were going to reopen the quarry.

At the same time, they also found a scrap of newspaper that had a picture of Richard Arnold, grandson of one of the brothers who founded Arnold Bros. The company that had owned the Store was now a big international concern, and Grandson Richard, 39 - said the newspaper - was going to Florida to watch the launch of its first communications satellite.

The Thing admitted to Masklin that, if it could get into space, it could call the Ship. He decided to take a few nomes and go to the airport and find some way of getting to Florida to get the Thing into the sky - which, of course, was ridiculous, as well as impossible. But he didn't know this, so he tried to do it anyway.

So, thinking that Florida was five miles away and possibly a kind of orange juice anyway,
1
and that there were perhaps several hundred human beings in the world, and not knowing where exactly to go or what to do when they got there, but determined to get there and do it anyway, Masklin and his companions set out.

[1] The only time the nomes had seen the word "Florida" before was on an old carton of orange juice. When nomes get hold of an idea, they don't let go without a struggle.

The nomes that stayed behind fought the humans in Diggers. They defended their quarry as long as they could and fled on the Cat, the great yellow digging machine.

But this is Masklin's story...

AIRPORT: A place where people hurry up and wait.

From A Scientific Encyclopaedia for the Enquiring 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. 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 were 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 French fry.

Angalo looked up.

"Seen him?" he said, sarcastically.

Masklin shrugged. "There are 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 stepped 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 only spoke 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 can 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 now, we'll leave right now and forget you ever existed."

A second light came on, very faintly.

Masklin stood up, and nodded to the other.

"All right," he said. "Let's go." The Thing made a little electronic noise, which 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 39. He has just gone into the 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 too," 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 look 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."

"We came here to find him, didn't we?" said Gurder.

"Yes! But what do we actually do?"

"Well, of course, we... we... that is, we'll..."

"We don't even know what a departure lounge is."

"The Thing said it's a room where humans wait to get on an airplane," said Masklin.

Gurder prodded Angalo with an accusing finger.

"You're frightened, aren't you?" he said. "You're frightened that if we see Grandson Richard, 39, it'll mean there really is an Arnold Bros. and you'll have been wrong! You're just like your father. He could never stand being wrong, either!"

"I'm frightened about you," said Angalo. "Because you'll see that Grandson Richard, 39, is just a human. Arnold Bros. was just a human too. Or two humans. They just built the Store for humans. They didn't even know about nomes! And you can leave my father out of this too."

The Thing opened a small hatch on its top. It did that sometimes. When the hatches were shut you couldn't see where they were, but whenever the Thing was really interested in something it opened up and extended a small silver dish on a pole, or a complicated arrangement of pipes.

This time it was a piece of wire mesh on a metal rod. It started to turn, slowly.

Masklin picked it up.

While the other two argued he said, quietly, "Do you know where this lounge thing is?"

"Yes," said the Thing.

"Let's go, then." Angalo looked around.

"Hey, what are you doing?" he said.

Masklin ignored him. He said to the Thing, "And do you know how much time we have before he starts going to Florida?" "About half an hour." Nomes live ten times faster than humans. They're harder to see than a high-speed mouse.

That's one reason why most humans hardly ever see them.

The other is that humans are very good at not seeing things they know aren't there. And since sensible humans know that there are no such things as four-inch-high people, a nome who doesn't want to be seen probably won't be seen.

So no one noticed three tiny blurs darting across the floor of the airport building. They dodged the rumbling wheels of luggage carts. They shot between the legs of slow-moving humans. They skidded around chairs. They became nearly invisible as they crossed a huge, echoing corridor.

And they disappeared behind a potted plant.

It has been said that everything everywhere affects everything else. This may be true.

Or perhaps the world is just full of patterns.

For example, in a tree nine thousand miles away from Masklin, high on a cloudy mountainside, was a plant that looked like one large flower. It grew wedged in a fork of trees, its roots dangling in the air to trap what nourishment they could from the mists. Technically, it was an epiphytic bromeliad, although not knowing this made very little difference to the plant.