Wings (15 page)

He was immediately sorry he'd said that. Gurder looked more unhappy than he'd ever seen him.

"That's true," the Abbot said. "I wouldn't have believed it. I'm not sure I believe it now, and I'm in it."

"Maybe, when we've found somewhere to live, we can send the Ship back and collect any other nomes we can find," Masklin hazarded. "I'm sure Angalo would enjoy that." Gurder's shoulders began to shake. For a moment Masklin thought the nome was laughing, and then he saw the tears rolling down the Abbot's face.

"Um," he said, not knowing what else to say.

Gurder turned away. "I'm sorry," he muttered. "It's just that there's so much... changing. Why can't things stay the same for five minutes? Every time I get the hang of an idea it suddenly turns into something different and I turn into a fool! All I want is something real to believe in! Where's the harm in that?"

"I think you just have to have a flexible mind," said Masklin, knowing even as he said the words that this probably wasn't going to be a lot of help.

"Flexible? Flexible? My mind's got so flexible I could pull it out of my ears and tie it under my chin!" snapped Gurder. "And it hasn't done me a whole lot of good, let me tell you! I'd have done better just believing everything I was taught when I was young! At least I'd be wrong only once! This way I'm wrong all the time!" He stamped away down one of the corridors.

Masklin watched him go.

Not for the first time, he wished he believed in something as much as Gurder did so he could complain to it about his life. He even wished he were back, yes, back in the hole. It hadn't been too bad, apart from people being cold and wet and getting eaten all the time. But at least he'd been with Grimma. They would have been cold and wet and hungry together. He wouldn't have been so lonely...

There was a movement by him. It turned out to be Pion, holding a tray of what had to be... fruit, Masklin decided. He put aside being lonely for a moment, and realised that hunger had been waiting for an opportunity to make itself felt. He'd never seen fruit that shape and colour He took a slice from the proffered tray. It tasted like a nutty lemon.

"It's kept well, considering," he said, weakly. "Where did you get it?"

It turned out to come from a machine in a nearby corridor. It looked fairly simple. There were hundreds of pictures of different sorts of food. If you touched a picture, there was a brief humming noise and then the real food dropped onto a tray in a slot. Masklin tried pictures at random, and got several different sorts of fruit, a squeaky green vegetable thing, and a piece of meat that tasted rather like smoked salmon.

"I wonder how it does it?" he said aloud.

A voice from the wall beside him said: "Would you understand if I told you about molecular breakdown and reassembly from a wide range of raw materials?"

"No," said Masklin, truthfully.

"Then it's all done by Science."

"Oh. Well, that's all right, then. That is you, Thing, isn't it?" "Yes." Chewing on the fish-meat, Masklin wandered back to the control room and offered some of the food to Angalo. The big screen was showing nothing but clouds.

"Won't see any quarry in all this," he said.

Angalo pulled one of the levers back a bit. There was that brief feeling of extra weight again.

They stared at the screen.

"Wow," said Angalo.

"That looks familiar," said Masklin. He patted his clothes until he found the folded, crumpled map they'd brought all the way from the Store.

He spread it out, and glanced from it to the screen.

The screen showed a disc, made up mainly of different shades of blue and wispy bits of cloud.

"Any idea what it is?" said Angalo.

"No, but I know what some of the bits are called," said Masklin. "That one that's thick at the top and thin at the bottom is called South America. Look, it's just like it is on the map. Only it should have the words 'South America' written on it."

"Still can't see the quarry, though," said Angalo.

Masklin looked at the image in front of them. South America. Grimma had talked about South America, hadn't she? That's where the frogs lived in flowers. She'd said that once you knew about things like frogs living in flowers, you weren't the same person.

He was beginning to see what she meant.

"Never mind about the quarry for now," he said. "The quarry can wait."

"We should get there as soon as possible, for everybody 's sake," said the Thing.

Masklin thought about this for a while. It was true, he had to admit. All kinds of things might be happening back home. He had to get the Ship back quickly, for everybody's sake.

And then he thought: I've spent a long time doing things for everybody's sake.

Just for once, I'm going to do something for me.

I don't think we can find other nomes with this Ship, but at least I know where to look for frogs.

"Thing," he said, "take us to South America - and don't argue."

FROGS: Some people think that knowing about frogs is important. They are small and green, or yellow, and have four legs. They croak. Young frogs are tadpoles. In my opinion, this is all there is to know about frogs.

From A Scientific Encyclopaedia for the Enquiring Young Nome by Angalo de Haberdasheri.

Find a blue planet... Focus.

This is a planet. Most of it is covered with water, but it's still called Earth.

Find a country... Focus... Blues and greens and browns under the sun, and long wisps of rain cloud being torn by the mountains... Focus... on a mountain, green and dripping, and there's a... focus... tree, hung with moss and covered with flowers, and... focus... on a flower with a little pool in it, is an epiphytic bromeliad.

Its leaves, although they might be petals, hardly quiver at all as three very small and very golden frogs pull themselves up and gaze in astonishment at the fresh, clear water. Two of them look at their leader, waiting for it to say something suitable for this historic occasion.

It's going to say... mipmip...

And then they slide down the leaf and into the water.

Although the frogs can spot the difference between day and night, they're a bit hazy on the whole idea of time. They know that some things happen after other things. Really intelligent frogs might wonder if there is something that prevents everything happening all at once, but that's about as close as they can get to it.

So how long it was before a strange night came in the middle of the day is hard to tell, from a frog point of view.

A wide black shadow drifted over the treetops, and came to a halt. After a while there were voices. The frogs could hear them, although they didn't know what they meant or even what they were. They didn't sound like the kind of voices frogs were used to.

What they heard went like this: "How many mountains are there, anyway? I mean, it's ridiculous! Who needs this many mountains? I call it inefficient. One would have done. I'll go mad if I see another mountain. How many more have we got to search?"

"I like them."

"And some of the trees are the wrong height."

"I like them, too, Gurder."

"And I don't trust Angalo doing the driving." "I think he's getting better, Gurder."

"Well, I just hope no more airplanes come flying around, that's all." Gurder and Masklin swung in a crude basket made out of bits of metal and wire. It hung from a square hatchway under the Ship.

There were still huge rooms in the Ship that they hadn't explored yet. Odd machines were everywhere. The Thing had said the Ship had been used for exploring.

Masklin hadn't quite trusted any of it. There probably were machines that could have lowered and pulled up the basket easily, but he'd preferred to loop the wire around a pillar inside the Ship, and with Pion helping inside, to pull themselves up and down by sheer nomish effort.

The basket bumped gently on the tree branch.

The trouble was that humans wouldn't leave them alone. No sooner had they found a likely looking mountain than airplanes or helicopters would buzz around, like insects around an eagle. It was distracting.

Masklin looked along the branch. Gurder was right. This would have to be the last mountain.

But there certainly were flowers here.

He crawled along the branch until he reached the nearest flower. It was three times as high as he was. He found a foothold and pulled himself up.

There was a pool in there. Six little yellow eyes peered up at him.

Masklin stared back.

So it was true, after all.

He wondered if there was anything he should say to them, if there was anything they could possibly understand.

It was quite a long branch, and quite thick. But there were tools and things in the Ship. They could let down extra wires to hold the branch and winch it up when it was cut free. It would take some time, but that didn't matter. It was important.

The Thing had said there were ways of growing plants under lights the same colour as the sun, in pots full of a sort of weak soup that helped plants grow. It should be the easiest thing to keep a branch alive. The easiest thing in the world.

If they did everything carefully and gently, the frogs would never know.

If the world was a bathtub, the progress of the Ship through it would be like the soap, shooting backward and forward and never being where anyone expected it to be. You could spot where it had just been by airplanes and helicopters taking off in a hurry.

Or maybe it was like the ball in a roulette wheel, bouncing around and looking for the right number.

Or maybe it was just lost.

They searched all night. If there was a night. It was hard to tell. The Thing tried to explain that the Ship went faster than the sun, although the sun actually stood still. Some parts of the world had night while other parts had day.

This, Gurder said, was bad organisation "In the Store," he said, "it was always dark when it should be. Even if it was just somewhere built by humans." It was the first time they'd heard him admit the Store was built by humans.

There didn't seem to be anywhere that looked familiar.

Masklin scratched his chin.

"The Store was in a place called Blackbury," he said. "I know that much. So the quarry couldn't have been far away." Angalo waved his hand irritably at the screens.

"Yes, but it's not like the map," he said. "They don't stick names on places! It's ridiculous! How's anyone supposed to know where anywhere is?"

"All right," said Masklin. "But you're not to fly down low again to try to read the signposts. Every time you do that, humans rush out into the streets and we get lots of shouting on the radio."

"That's right," said the Thing. "People are bound to get excited when they see a ten-million-ton starship trying to fly down the street."

"I was very careful last time," said Angalo stoutly. "I even stopped when the traffic lights went red. I don't see why there was such a fuss. All the trucks and cars started crashing into one another too. And you call me a bad driver."

Gurder turned to Pion, who was learning the language fast. The geese nomes did. They were used to meeting nomes who spoke other languages.

"Your geese never got lost," he said. "How did they manage it?"

"They just did not get lost," said Pion. "They knew always where they going."

"It can be like that with animals," said Masklin. "They've got instincts. It's like knowing things without knowing you know them."

"I don't know," said Gurder. "Why doesn't the Thing know? It could find Floridia, so somewhere important like Blackbury ought to be no trouble."

"I can find no radio messages about Blackbury. There are plenty about Florida," said the Thing.

"At least land somewhere," said Gurder.

Angalo pressed a couple of buttons.

"There's just sea under us right now," he said. "And - what's that?"

Below the Ship and a long way off, something tiny and white skimmed over the clouds.

"Could be goose," said Pion.

"I... don't... think... so," said Angalo carefully. He twiddled a knob. "I'm really learning about this stuff," he said.

The picture of the screen flickered a bit, and then expanded.

There was a white dart sliding across the sky.

"Is it the Concorde?" said Gurder.

"Yes," said Angalo.

"It's going a bit slow, isn't it?" "Only compared to us," said Angalo.

"Follow it," said Masklin.

"We don't know where it's going," said Angalo, in a reasonable tone of voice.

"I do," said Masklin. "You looked out the window when we were on the Concorde. We were going toward the sun."

"Yes. It was setting," said Angalo. "Well?"

"It's morning now. It's going toward the sun again," Masklin pointed out.

"Well? What about it?"

"It means it's going home." Angalo bit his lip while he worked this out.

"I don't see why the sun has to rise and set in different places," said Gurder, who refused even to try to understand basic astronomy.

"Going home," said Angalo, ignoring him. "Right. I see it. So we go with it, yes?"

"Yes." Angalo ran his hands over the Ship's controls. "Right," he said. "Here we go. I expect the Concorde drivers will probably be quite pleased to have some company up here." The Ship drew level with the plane.

"It's moving around a lot," said Angalo. "And it's starting to go faster too."

"I think they may be worried about the Ship," said Masklin.

"Can't see why," said Angalo. "Can't see why at all. We're not doing anything except following them."

"I wish we had some proper windows," said Gurder, wistfully. "We could wave."

"Have humans ever seen a Ship like this before?" Angalo asked the Thing.

"No. But they've made up stories about ships coming from other worlds."

"Yes, they'd do that," said Masklin, half to himself. "That's just the sort of thing they'd do."

"Sometimes they say the ships will contain friendly people -"

"That's us," said Angalo.

"And sometimes they say they will contain monsters with wavy tentacles and big teeth."