Wings (9 page)

"Snuggle?" shouted Gurder. "I've never snuggled in my life!"

"You rode on the Concorde," Angalo pointed out. "And that was built and driven by humans."

Gurder glared like someone who wasn't going to give in easily.

"Well, who built the geese?" he demanded.

Angalo grinned at Masklin, who said: "What? Dunno. Other geese, I expect."

"Geese? Geese? And what do they know about designing for air safety?"

"Listen," said Masklin, "They can take us all the way across this place. The Floridians fly thousands of miles on them. Thousands of miles, without even any smoked salmon or pink wobbly stuff. It's worth trying it for eighteen miles, isn't it?" Gurder hesitated. Topknot muttered something.

Gurder cleared his throat.

"Very well," he said haughtily. "I'm sure if this misguided individual is in the habit of flying on these things, I should have no difficulty whatsoever." He stared up at the argy shapes bobbing out in the lagoon. "Do the Floridians talk to the creatures?"

The Thing tried this on Shrub. She shook her head. No, she said, geese were quite stupid. Friendly but stupid. Why talk to something that couldn't talk back?

"Have you told her what we're doing?" said Masklin.

"No. She hasn't asked."

"How do we get on?" Shrub stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled.

Half a dozen geese waddled up the bank. Close up, they didn't look any smaller. "I remember reading something about geese once," said Gurder, in a sort of dreamy terror. "It said they could break a human's arm with a blow of their nose." "Wing," said Angalo, looking up at the feathery argy bodies looming over him. "It was their wing."

"And it was swans that do that," said Masklin, weakly. "Geese are the ones you mustn't say boo to."

Gurder watched a long neck weave back and forth above him.

"Wouldn't dream of it," he said.

A long time after, when Masklin came to write the story of his life, he described the flight of the geese as the fastest, highest, and most terrifying of all.

People said, Hold on, that's not right. You said the plane went so fast that it left its sound behind, and so high up there was blue all around it.

And he said, That's the point. It went so fast you didn't know how fast it was going, it went so high you couldn't see how high it was. It was just something that happened. And the Concorde looked as though it was meant to fly. When it was on the ground it looked kind of lost.

The geese, on the other hand, looked as aerodynamic as a pillow. They didn't roll into the sky and sneer at the clouds like the plane did. No, they ran across the top of the water and hammered desperately at the air with their wings and then, just when it was obvious they weren't going to achieve anything, they suddenly did; the water dropped away, and there was just the slow creak of wings pulling the goose up into the sky.

Masklin would be the first to admit that he didn't understand about jets and engines and machines, so maybe that was why he didn't worry about travelling in them. But he thought he knew a thing or two about muscles, and the knowledge that it was only a couple of big muscles that were keeping him alive was not comforting.

Each traveller shared a goose with one of the Floridians. They didn't do any steering, as far as Masklin could see. That was all done by Shrub, who sat far out on the neck of the leading goose. He never found out how she steered. Maybe by orders in some language the geese and the geese nomes shared. Maybe by little movements. Maybe (according to Angalo) by some sort of Science. It was a mystery. But then - he told himself - Shrub probably wouldn't know how to drive a truck. She'd probably be very impressed, he told himself. That made him feel a bit better.

The ones behind Shrub's bird followed their leader in a perfect V shape.

Masklin buried himself in the feathers. It was comfortable, if a bit cold. Floridians, he learned later, had no difficulty sleeping on a flying goose. The mere thought made Masklin's hands sweat.

He peered out just long enough to see distant trees sweeping by much too fast, and stuck his head down again.

"How long have we got, Thing?" he said.

"I estimate arrival in the vicinity of the launch pad one hour from launch."

"I suppose there's absolutely no possibility that launches have anything to do with lunches?" said Masklin wistfully.

"No."

"Pity. Well - have you any suggestions about how we get on the machine?"

"That is almost impossible."

"I thought you'd say that."

"But you could put me on," the Thing added.

"Yes, but how? Tie you to the outside?"

"No. Get me close enough and I will do the rest."

"What rest?"

"Call the Ship."

"Yes, where is the Ship? I'm amazed satellites and things haven't bumped into it."

"It is waiting."

"You're a great help, sometimes."

"Thank you."

"That was meant to be sarcastic."

"I know." There was a rustling beside Masklin and his Floridian co-rider pushed aside a feather. It was the boy he had seen with Shrub. He'd said nothing, but just stared at Masklin and the Thing. Now he grinned, and said a few words.

"He wants to know if you feel sick."

"I feel fine," Masklin lied. "What's his name?"

"His name is Pion. He is Shrub's oldest son."

Pion gave Masklin another encouraging grin.

"He wants to know what it is like in a jet," said the Thing. "He says it sounds exciting. They see them sometimes, but they keep away from them." The goose canted sideways. Masklin tried to hang on with his toes as well as his fingers.

"It must be much more exciting than geese, he says," said the Thing.

"Oh, I don't know," said Masklin weakly.

Landing was much worse than flying. It would have been better on water, Masklin was told later, but Shrub had brought them down on land. The geese didn't like that much. It meant that they had almost to stand on the air, flapping furiously, and then drop the last few inches.

Pion helped Masklin down onto the ground, which seemed to him to be moving from side to side. The other travellers tottered toward him through the throng of birds.

"The ground!" panted Angalo. "It was so close! No one seemed to mind!" He sagged to his knees.

"And they made honking noises!" he said. "And kept swinging from side to side! And they're all knobbly under the feathers!" Masklin flexed his arms to let the tension out.

The land around them didn't seem a lot different from the place they'd left, except that the vegetation was lower and Masklin couldn't see any water.

"Shrub says that this is as close as the geese can go," the Thing said. "It is too dangerous to go any farther."

Shrub nodded, and pointed to the horizon.

There was a white shape on it.

"That?" said Masklin.

"That's it?" said Angalo.

"Yes." "Doesn't look very big," said Gurder quietly.

"It's still quite a long way off," said Masklin.

"I can see helicopters," said Angalo. "No wonder Shrub didn't want to take the geese any closer."

"And we must be going," said Masklin. "We've got an hour, and I reckon that's barely enough. Er. We'd better say good-bye to Shrub. Can you explain, Thing? Tell her that - that we'll try to find her again. Afterward. If everything's all right. I suppose."

"If there is any afterward," Gurder added. He looked like a badly washed dishcloth.

Shrub nodded when the Thing had finished translating, and then pushed Pion forward.

The Thing told Masklin what she wanted.

"What? We can't take him with us!" said Masklin.

"Young nomes in Shrub's people are encouraged to travel," said the Thing. "Pion is only fourteen months old and already he has been to Alaska." "Try to explain that we're not going to a Laska," said Masklin. "Try to make her understand that all sorts of things could happen to him!" The Thing translated.

"She says that is good. A growing boy should always seek out new experiences."

"What? Are you translating me properly?" said Masklin suspiciously.

"Yes."

"Well, have you told her it's dangerous?"

"Yes. She says that danger is what being alive is all about." "But he could be killed!" Masklin shrieked.

"Then he will go up into the sky and become a star."

"Is that what they believe?"

"Yes. They believe that the operating system of a nome starts off as a goose. If it is a good goose, it becomes a nome. When a good nome dies, NASA takes it up into the sky and it becomes a star."

"What's an operating system?" said Masklin. This was religion. He always felt out of his depth with religion.

"The thing inside you that tells you what you are," said the Thing.

"It means a soul," said Gurder wearily.

"Never heard such a lot of nonsense," said Angalo cheerfully. "At least, not since we were in the Store and believed we came back as garden ornaments, eh?" He nudged Gurder in the ribs.

Instead of getting angry about this, Gurder just looked even more despondent.

"Let the lad come if he likes," Angalo went on. "He shows the right spirit. He reminds me of me when I was like him."

"His mother says that if he gets homesick be can always find a goose to bring him back," said the Thing.

Masklin opened his mouth to speak.

But there were times when you couldn't say anything because there was nothing to say. If you had to explain anything to someone else, then there had to be something you were both sure of, some place to start, and Masklin wasn't sure that there was any place like that around Shrub. He wondered how big the world was to her. Probably bigger than he could imagine. But it stopped at the sky.

"Oh, all right," he said. "But we have to go right away. No time for long tearful -" Pion nodded to his mother and came and stood by Masklin, who couldn't think of anything to say. Even later on, when he understood the geese nomes better, he never quite got used to the way they cheerfully parted from one another. Distances didn't seem to mean much to them.

"Come on, then," he managed.

Gurder glowered at Topknot, who had insisted on coming this far. "I really wish I could talk to that nome," he said.

"Shrub told me he's quite a decent nome, really," said Masklin. "He's just a bit set in his ways."

"Just like you," said Angalo.

"Me? I'm not -" Gurder began.

"Of course you're not," said Masklin, soothingly. "Now, let's go." They jogged through scrub two or three times as high as they were.

"We'll never have time," Gurder panted.

"Save your breath for running," said Angalo.

"Do they have smoked salmon on shuttles?" said Gurder.

"Dunno," said Masklin, pushing his way through a particularly tough clump of grass.

"No, they don't," said Angalo authoritatively. "I remember reading about it in a book. They eat out of tubes."

The nomes ran in silence while they thought about this.

"What, toothpaste?" said Gurder, after a while.

"No, not toothpaste. Of course not toothpaste. I'm sure not toothpaste."

"Well, what else do you know that comes in tubes?"

Angalo thought about this.

"Glue?" he said, uncertainly.

"Doesn't sound like a good meal to me. Toothpaste and glue?" "The people who drive the space jets must like it. They were all smiling in the picture I saw," said Angalo.

"That wasn't smiling, that was probably just them trying to get their teeth apart," said Gurder.

"No, you've got it all wrong," Angalo decided, thinking fast. "They have to have their food in tubes because of gravity."

"What about gravity?"

"There isn't any."

"Any what?"

"Gravity. So everything floats around."

"What, in water?" said Gurder.

"No, in air. Because there's nothing to hold it on the plate, you see."

"Oh." Gurder nodded. "Is that where the glue comes in?"

Masklin knew that they could go on like this for hours. What these sounds mean, he thought, is: I am alive and so are you. And we're all very worried that we might not be alive for much longer, so we'll just keep talking, because that's better than thinking.

It all looked better when it was days or weeks away, but now when it was "How long. Thing?"

"Forty minutes."

"We've got to have another rest! Gurder isn't running, he's just falling upright." They collapsed in the shade of a bush. The shuttle didn't look much closer, but they could see plenty of other activity. There were more helicopters.

According to Pion, who climbed up the bush, there were humans, much farther off.

"I need to sleep," said Angalo.

"Didn't you sleep on the goose?" said Masklin.

"Did you?" Angalo stretched out in the shade.

"How are we going to get on the shuttle thing?" he said.

Masklin shrugged. "Well, the Thing says we don't have to get on it, we just have to put the Thing on it."

Angalo pushed himself up on his elbows. "You mean we don't get to ride on it? I was looking forward to that!"

"I don't think it's like the Truck, Angalo. I don't think they leave a window open for anyone to sneak in," said Masklin. "I think it'd take more than a lot of nomes and some string to fly it, anyway."

"You know, that was the best time of my life, when I drove the Truck," said Angalo dreamily. "When I think of all those months I lived in the Store, not even knowing about the Outside..."

Masklin waited politely. His head felt heavy. "Well?" he said.

"Well, what?" "What happens when you think of all those months in the Store not knowing about the Outside?"

"It just seems like a waste."

Pion curled up and started to snore. Angalo yawned.

They hadn't slept for hours. Nomes slept mainly at night, but needed catnaps to get through the long day. Even Masklin was nodding.

"Thing?" he remembered to say, "wake me up in ten minutes, will you?"

SATELLITES: They are in space and stay there by going so fast that they never stay in one place long enough to fall down. Televisions are bounced off them.