Diggers (2 page)

Being a Driver wasn't necessarily much fun.

Last year, before they'd found the Store, Masklin had to hunt all day. Now he hunted only when he felt like it; the younger Store nomes liked hunting, and apparently it wasn't
right
for a Driver to do it. They mined potatoes, and there'd been a big harvest of corn from a nearby field, even after the machines had been round. Masklin would have preferred them to grow their own food, but the nomes didn't seem to have the knack of making seeds grow in the rock-hard ground of the quarry. But they were getting fed, that was the main thing.

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

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

None of its lights were on. They wouldn't go on until it was close to electricity wires, when it would light up and be able to talk. There were some in the quarry, and Dorcas had got them working. Masklin hadn't taken the Thing to them, though. The solid black box had a way of talking that always made him 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 him first or ran him over or anything.”

Masklin's little tribe had once lived in a highway embankment beside rolling countryside that was full of things that were hungry for fresh nome. The idea that you could die simply of not being alive anymore was a new one to them.

“So we buried him up on the edge of the potato field, too deep for the plow. The Store nomes haven't got the hang of burial yet, I think. They think he's going to sprout, or something. I think they're mixing it up with what you do with seeds. Of course, they don't know about growing things. 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 the ground; they think it's not natural. And they think the rain is a sprinkler system. I think
they
think the whole world is just a bigger store. Um.”

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 said eventually. “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 a way of listening that was quite off-putting.

“Everyone's worried about the winter. Um. But we've got masses of potatoes stored up, and it's quite warm down here. They've got some funny ideas, though. In the Store they said that when it was Christmas Fayre time, there was this thing that came called Santer Claws. I just hope 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 I say. Um.”

The black cube managed to look sympathetic.

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

He thought some more.

“Um. I think that's about all the news for now.” He lifted the Thing up and put it back in its hole.

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 right—women'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 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 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 pits—good for fishing, for the nomes who wanted fish—and 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. 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 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.

“There was no one on watch! Why wasn't there anyone on watch? I said there should always be someone on watch!”

Half a dozen nomes scurried through the dying bracken toward the quarry gate.

“It was Sacco's turn,” muttered Angalo.

“No, it wasn't!” hissed Sacco. “You remember, yesterday you asked me to swap 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 of dried grass.

It was a small truck, as far as trucks went. A human had already climbed out 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 the Store 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 way that humans did, back to the vehicle. Eventually it backed around and roared off.

“All the way up here just to stick a bit of paper on the gate,” said Angalo, 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 the Store was going to be demolished and, sure enough, it
had
been demolished. 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 rain pattered across its sun-bleached words, soaking the paper until it was heavy and soggy and . . .

. . . tore.

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

III. But there came a Sign, and people said, What is it that this means?

IV. And it was not good.

From
The Book of Nome,
Signs Chap. 1, v. III–IV

G
URDER SHUFFLED ON
hands and knees across the paper that had been taken down from the gate.

“Of course I can read it,” he said. “I know what every word means.”

“Well, then?” said Masklin.

Gurder looked embarrassed. “It's what every sentence means that's giving me trouble,” he said. “It says here . . . where was it . . . yes, it says here the quarry is going to be reopened. What does that mean? It's open already—any fool knows that. You can see for miles.”

The other nomes crowded around. You certainly could see for miles. That was the terrible part. On three sides the quarry had decent high cliff walls, but on the fourth side . . . well, you got into the habit of not looking in that direction. There was too much of nothing, which made you feel even smaller and more vulnerable than you were already.

Even if the meaning of the paper wasn't clear, it certainly looked unpleasant.

“The quarry's a hole in the ground,” said Dorcas. “You can't open a hole unless it's been filled in. Stands to reason.”

“A quarry's a place you get stone from,” said Grimma. “Humans do it. They dig a hole and they use the stone for making, well, roads and things.”

“I expect you read that, did you?” said Gurder sourly. He suspected Grimma of lack of respect for authority. It was also incredibly annoying that, against all the obvious deficiencies of her sex, she was better at reading than he was.