Truckers (3 page)

Masklin started to think again. The rushing of the traffic filled his ears. He let go and threw himself into the long grass as the creature galloped out onto the asphalt.

He landed heavily and rolled over, all the breath knocked out of him.

But he remembered what happened next. It stayed in his memory for a long time, long after he'd seen so many strange things that there really should have been no room for it.

The fox, as still as a statue in a headlight's beam, snarled its defiance as it tried to outstare ten tons of metal hurtling toward it at seventy miles an hour.

There was a bump, a swish, and darkness.

Masklin lay facedown in the cool moss for a long time. Then, dreading what he was about to see, trying not to imagine it, he pulled himself to his feet and plodded back toward whatever was left of his home.

Grimma was waiting at the burrow's mouth, holding a twig like a club. She spun round and nearly brained Masklin as he staggered out of the darkness and leaned against the bank. He stuck out a weary hand and pushed the stick aside.

“We didn't know where you'd gone,” she said, her voice on the edge of hysteria. “We just heard the noise and there it was you should have been here and it got Mr. Mert and Mrs. Coom and it was digging at the—”

She stopped and seemed to sag.

“Yes, thank you,” said Masklin coldly, “I'm all right, thank you very much.”

“What—what happened?”

He ignored her and trooped into the darkness of the burrow and lay down. He could hear the old ones whispering as he sank into a deep, chilly sleep.

I should have been here, he thought.

They depend on me.

We're going. All of us.

It had seemed a good idea, then.

It looked a bit different, now.

Now the nomes clustered at one end of the great dark space inside the truck. They were silent. There wasn't any
room
to be noisy. The roar of the engine filled the air from edge to edge. Sometimes it would falter and start again. Occasionally the whole truck lurched.

Grimma crawled across the trembling floor.

“How long is it going to take to get there?” she said.

“Where?” said Masklin.

“Wherever we're going.”

“I don't know.”

“They're hungry, you see.”

They always were. Masklin looked hopelessly at the huddle of old ones. One or two of them were watching him expectantly.

“There isn't anything I can do,” he said. “I'm hungry too, but there's nothing here. It's empty.”

“Granny Morkie gets very upset when she's missed a meal,” said Grimma.

Masklin gave her a long, blank stare. Then he crawled his way to the group and sat down between Torrit and the old woman.

He'd never really talked to them, he realized. When he was small, they were giants who were no concern of his, and then he'd been a hunter among hunters, and this year he'd either been out looking for food or deep in an exhausted sleep. But he knew why Torrit was the leader of the tribe. It stood to reason—he was the oldest nome. The oldest was always leader; that way there couldn't be any arguments. Not the oldest
woman
, of course, because everyone knew this was unthinkable; even Granny Morkie was quite firm about that. Which was a bit odd, because she treated him like an idiot and Torrit never made a decision without looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Masklin sighed. He stared at his knees.

“Look, I don't know how long—” he began.

“Don't you worry about me, boy,” said Granny Morkie, who seemed to have quite recovered. “This is all rather excitin', ain't it?”

“But it might take ages,” said Masklin. “I didn't know it was going to take this long. It was just a mad idea . . .”

She poked him with a bony finger. “Young man,” she said, “I was alive in the Great Winter of 1999. Terrible, that was. You can't tell
me
anything about going hungry. Grimma's a good girl, but she worries.”

“But I don't even know where we're going!” Masklin burst out. “I'm sorry!”

Torrit, who was sitting with the Thing on his skinny knees, peered shortsightedly at him.

“We have the Thing,” he said. “It will show us the Way, it will.”

Masklin nodded gloomily. Funny how Torrit always knew what the Thing wanted. It was just a black square thing, but it had some very definite ideas about the importance of regular meals and how you should always listen to what the old folk said. It seemed to have an answer for everything.

“And where does this Way take us?” said Masklin.

“You knows that well enough. To the Heavens.”

“Oh. Yes,” said Masklin. He glared at the Thing. He was pretty certain that it didn't tell old Torrit anything at all; he knew he had pretty good hearing, and he never heard it say anything. It never did anything, it never moved. The only thing it ever did was look black and square. It was
good
at that.

“Only by followin' the Thing closely in all particulars can we be sure of going to the Heavens,” said Torrit uncertainly, as if he'd been told this a long time ago and hadn't understood it even then.

“Yes, well,” said Masklin. He stood up on the swaying floor and made his way to the tarpaulin. Then he paused to screw up his courage and poked his head under the gap.

There was nothing but blurs and lights, and strange smells.

It was all going wrong. It had seemed so sensible that night, a week ago. Anything was better than here. That had seemed so obvious then. But it was odd. The old ones moaned like anything when things weren't exactly to their liking, but now, when everything was looking bad, they were almost cheerful.

People were a lot more complicated than they looked. Perhaps the Thing could tell you that, too, if you knew how to ask.

The truck turned a corner and rumbled down into blackness and then, without warning, stopped. He found himself looking into a huge lighted space, full of trucks, full of
humans
. . . .

He pulled his head back quickly and scuttled across the floor to Torrit.

“Er,” he said.

“Yes, lad?”

“Heaven. Do humans go there?”

The old nome shook his head. “
The
Heavens,” he said. “More than one of 'em, see? Only nomes go there.”

“You're absolutely certain?”

“Oh, yes.” Torrit beamed. “O' course, they may have heavens of their own,” he said. “I don't know about that. But they ain't ours, you may depend upon it.”

“Oh.”

Torrit stared at the Thing again.

“We've stopped,” he said. “Where are we?”

Masklin stared wearily into the darkness.

“I think I had better go and find out,” he said.

There was whistling outside, and the distant rumble of human voices. The lights went out. There was a rattling noise, followed by a click, and then silence.

After a while there was a faint scrabbling around the back of one of the silent trucks. A length of line, no thicker than thread, dropped down until it touched the oily floor of the garage.

A minute went by. Then, lowering itself with great care hand over hand, a small, stumpy figure shinned down the line and dropped onto the floor. It stood rock still for a few seconds after landing, with only its eyes moving.

It was not entirely human. There were definitely the right number of arms and legs, and the additional bits like eyes and so on were in the usual places, but the figure that was now creeping across the darkened floor in its mouse skins looked like a brick wall on legs. Nomes are so stocky that a Japanese sumo wrestler would look half starved by comparison, and the way this one moved suggested that it was considerably tougher than old boots.

Masklin was, in fact, terrified out of his life. There was nothing here that he recognized, except for the smell of
all
, which he had come to associate with humans and especially with trucks (Torrit had told him loftily that
all
was a burning water that trucks drank, at which point Masklin knew the old nome had gone mad. It stood to reason. Water didn't burn).

None of it made any sense. Vast cans loomed above him. There were huge pieces of metal that had a made look about them. This was definitely a part of a human heaven. Humans liked metal.

He did skirt warily around a cigarette end and made a mental note to take it back for Torrit.

There were other trucks in this place, all of them silent. It was, Masklin decided, a truck nest. Which meant that the only food in it was probably
all
.

He untensed a bit and prodded about under a bench that towered against one wall like a house. There were drifts of wastepaper there, and, led by a smell which here was even stronger than
all
, he found a whole apple core. It was going brown, but it was a pretty good find.

He slung it across one shoulder and turned around.

There was a rat watching him thoughtfully. It was considerably bigger and sleeker than the things that fought the nomes for the scraps from the litter bin. It dropped on all fours and trotted toward him.

Masklin felt that he was on firmer ground here. All these huge dark shapes and cans and ghastly smells were quite beyond him, but he knew what a rat was, all right, and what to do about one.

He dropped the core, brought his spear back slowly and carefully, aimed at a point just between the creature's eyes . . .

Two things happened at once.

Masklin noticed that the rat had a little red collar.

And a voice said: “Don't! He took a long time to train. Bargains Galore! Where did
you
come from?”

The stranger was a nome. At least Masklin had to assume so. He was certainly nome height and moved like a nome.

But his clothes . . .

The basic color for a practical nome's clothes is mud. That was common sense. Grimma knew fifty ways of making dyes from wild plants, and they all yielded a color that was, when you came right down to it, basically muddy. Sometimes yellow mud, sometimes brown mud, sometimes even greenish mud, but still, well, mud. Because any nome who ventured out wearing jolly reds and blues would have a life expectancy of perhaps half an hour before something digestive happened to him.

Whereas this nome looked like a rainbow. He wore brightly colored clothes of a material so fine, it looked like a fries wrapper, a belt studded with bits of glass, proper leather boots, and a hat with a feather in it. As he talked, he slapped his leg idly with a leather strap which, it turned out, was the leash for the rat.

“Well?” he snapped. “Answer me!”

“I came off the truck,” said Masklin shortly, eyeing the rat. It stopped scratching its ears, gave him a look, and went and hid behind its master.

“What were you doing on there? Answer me!”

Masklin pulled himself up. “We were traveling,” he said.

The nome glared at him. “What's traveling?” he snapped.

“Moving along,” said Masklin. “You know? Coming from one place and going to another place.”

This seemed to have a strange effect on the stranger. If it didn't actually make him polite, at least it took the edge off his tone.

“Are you trying to tell me you came from
Outside
?” he said.

“That's right.”

“But that's impossible!”

“Is it?” Masklin looked worried.

“There's nothing Outside!”

“Is there? Sorry,” said Masklin. “But we seem to have come in from it, anyway. Is this a problem?”

“You mean
really
Outside?” said the nome, sidling closer.

“I suppose I do. We never really thought about it. What's this pl—”

“What's it like?”

“What?”

“Outside! What's it like?”

Masklin looked blank. “Well,” he said. “It's sort of big—”

“Yes?”

“And, er, there's a lot of it—”

“Yes? Yes?”

“With, you know, things in it—”

“Is it true the ceiling is so high you can't see it?” asked the nome, apparently beside himself with excitement.

“Don't know. What's a ceiling?” said Masklin.

“That is,” said the nome, pointing up to a gloomy roof of girders and shadows.

“Oh, I haven't seen anything like that,” said Masklin. “Outside it's blue or gray, with white things floating around in it.”

“And, and, the walls are such a long way off, and there's a sort of green carpet thing that grows on the ground?” asked the nome, hopping from one foot to the other.

“Don't know,” said Masklin, even more mystified. “What's a carpet?”