Terry Pratchett - Bromeliad 2 Diggers

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2024-11-29 0 0 206KB 96 页 5.9玖币
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Diggers,
by Terry Pratchett.
Book Two of The Bromeliad
In the beginning...
...Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) created the Store.
At least, that was the belief of thousands of nomes who for many
generations* had lived under the floorboards of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905),
an old and respected department store in the middle of the city.
*[Nome generations, that is. Nomes live ten times faster than humans. To
them, ten years is a long lifetime.]
The Store had become their world. A world with a roof and walls.
Wind and Rain were ancient legends. So were Day and Night. Now there were
sprinkler systems and air conditioners, and the nomes' small, crowded
lives ticked to the clock of Opening Time and Closing Time. The seasons
of their year were January Sales, Spring into Spring Fashions, Summer
Bargains, and Christmas Fayre. Led by the Abbot and priesthood of the
Stationer!, they worshipped in a polite, easygoing sort of way, so as
not to upset him. Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), who they believed had created
everything, i.e., the Store and all the contents therein.
Some families of nomes had grown rich and powerful and took the
names-more or less-of the Store departments they lived under . . . the
Del Icatessen, the Ironmongri, the Haberdasheri.
And into the Store, on the back of a truck, came the last nomes to live
Outside. They knew what wind and rain were, all right. That's why they
tried to leave them behind.
Among them was Masklin, rat hunter, and Granny Morkie, and Grimma,
although they were women and didn't really count. And, of course, the
Thing.
No one quite understood the Thing. Masklin's people had handed it down
for centuries; it was very important, that was all they knew. When it
came near the electricity in the Store it was able to talk. It said it
was a thinking machine from a ship which, thousands of years before, had
brought the nomes from a far Store, or possibly star. It also said it
could hear electricity talk, and one of the things the electricity was
saying was that the Store would be demolished in three weeks.
It was Masklin who suggested that the nomes leave the Store on a truck.
He found, oddly enough, that actually working out how you could drive a
giant truck was the easiest part. The hardest part was getting people to
believe that they could do it.
He wasn't the leader. He'd have liked to be a leader. A leader could
stick his chin out and do brave things. What Masklin had to do was argue
and persuade and, sometimes, lie very slightly. He found it was often
easier to get people to do things if you let them think it was their
idea.
Ideas! That was the tricky bit, all right. And there were lots of ideas
that they needed. They needed to learn to work together. They needed to
learn to read. They needed to think that female nomes were, well, nearly
as intelligent as males (although everyone knew that really this was
ridiculous and that if females were encouraged to think too much their
brains would overheat).
Anyway, it all worked. The truck did leave just before the Store
mysteriously burned down, and hardly damaging anything very much, it was
driven out into the country.
The nomes found an abandoned quarry tucked into a hillside, and moved
into the ruined buildings.
And then they knew everything was going to be All Right. There was going
to be, they'd heard, a Bright New Dawn.
Whatever that was.
Most nomes had never seen a dawn, bright or otherwise, and if they had
they would have known that the trouble with bright new dawns is that
they're usually followed by cloudy days. With scattered showers.
Six months passed . . .
This is the story of the Winter.
This is the story of the Great Battle.
This is the story of the awakening of the Cat, the Dragon in the Hill,
with eyes like great eyes and a voice like a great voice and teeth like
great teeth.
But the story didn't end there.
It didn't start there, either.
The sky blew a gale. The sky blew a fury. The wind became a wall sweeping
across the country, a giant stamping on the land. Small trees bent, big
trees broke. The last leaves of autumn whirred through the air like lost
bullets.
The garbage dump by the gravel pits was deserted. The seagulls that
patrolled it had found shelter somewhere, but it was still full of move-
ment. The wind tore into the heaps as though it had something particular
against old detergent boxes and leftover shoes. Tin cans rolled into the
ruts and clanked miserably, while lighter bits of rubbish flew up and
joined the riot in the sky.
Still the wind burrowed. Papers rustled for a while, then got caught and
blasted away.
Finally one piece that had been flapping for hours tears free and flies
up into the booming air. It looks like a large white bird with oblong
wings.
Watch it tumble. . . .
It gets caught on a fence, but very briefly. Half of it tears off, and
now that much lighter, it pinwheels across the furrows of the field
beyond. . . .
It is just gathering speed when a hedge looms up and snaps it out of the
air like a fly.
Chapter 1
I. And in that time were Strange
Happenings: the Air moved harshly, the
Warmth of the Sky grew Less, on some
mornings the tops of puddles grew Hard
and Cold.
II. And the nomes said unto one another,
What is this Thing?
- From the Book of Nome, Quarries I, v. I-II
"Winter," said Masklin firmly. "It's called winter."
Abbott Gurder frowned at him.
"You never said it would be like this," he said. "It's so cold."
"Call this cold?" said Granny Morkie. "Cold? This ain't cold. You think
this is cold? You wait till it gets really cold!" She was enjoying this,
Masklin noticed; Granny Morkie always enjoyed doom. "It'll be really cold
then, when it gets cold. You get real frosts, and water comes down out of
the sky in frozen bits!" She leaned back triumphantly. "What d'you think
of that, then? Eh?"
"You don't have to use baby talk to us," sighed Gurder. "We can read, you
know. We know what snow is."
"Yes," said Dorcas. "There used to be cards with pictures on them, back
in the Store. Every time Christmas Fayre came around. We know about snow.
It's glittery."
"You get robins," agreed Gurder.
"There's, er, actually there's a bit more to it than that," Masklin
began.
Dorcas waved him into silence. "I don't think we need to worry," he said.
"We're well dug in, the food stores are looking good, and we know where
to go to get more if we need it. Unless anyone's got anything else to
raise, why don't we close the meeting?"
Everything was going well. Or, at least, not very badly. That sort of
thing always worried Masklin.
Oh, there was still plenty of squabbling and feuds between the various
families, but that was nomish nature for you. That's why they'd set up
the council, which seemed to be working.
Nomes liked arguing. At least the Council of Drivers meant they could
argue without hitting one another hardly ever.
Funny thing, though. Back in the Store the great departmental families
had run things. But now all the families were mixed up and, anyway, there
were no departments in a quarry. But by instinct, almost, nomes liked
hierarchies. The world had always been neatly divided between those who
told people what to do, and those who did it. So, in a strange way, a new
set of leaders was emerging.
The Drivers.
It depended on where you had been during the Long Drive. If you were one
of the ones who had been in the truck cab, then you were a Driver. Ev-
eryone else was just a Passenger. No one talked about it much. It wasn't
official or anything. It was just that the bulk of nomekind felt that
anyone who could get the Truck all the way here was the sort of person
who knew what they were doing.
Being a Driver wasn't necessarily much fun.
Last year, before they'd found the Store, Masklin had to hunt all day.
Now he only hunted when he felt like it; the younger Store nomes liked
hunting, and apparently it wasn't right for a Driver to do it. And they
mined potatoes and there'd been a big harvest of corn from a nearby
field, even after the machines had been around. Masklin would have
preferred the nomes to grow their own food, but they 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 was on. They wouldn't do that until the Thing was
close to electrical wires; then it would light up and be able to talk.
There were some wires 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 feel 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 lived in a highway embankment beside rolling
countryside which 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. Urn."
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. The Store nomes have
some funny ideas, though. They said that when it was Christmas Fayre time
in the Store 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 gel.
Then he'd complained to Gurder, who 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 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 dirt road wound down through scrubby hedges and joined
the main highway. Beyond that there was the railroad, 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 railroad fully worked out yet. But it was
obviously dangerous, because they could see a road that crossed it and,
whenever the railroad 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 from getting out. It stood to reason, therefore, that the gates
were to stop the trains from escaping from their rails and rushing around
the place.
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 a bird, 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 there was 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 the small ship had crashed,
and they hadn't been able to get back.
And he was the only one that 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. 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 con-
trolled 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 . . .
... it tore.
It flopped onto the grass, free. A breeze made it rustle.
Chapter 2
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 I, v. III-IV
Gurder shuffled on hands and knees across the paper 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 decently 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.
"I did, actually," said Grimma, tossing her head.
"But, you see," said Masklin patiently, "there aren't any more stones
here, Grimma. That's why there's a hole."
"Good point," said Gurder, sternly.
"Then he'll make the hole bigger!'" snapped Grimma. "Look at those cliffs
up there"-they obediently looked-"they're made of stone! Look here"-ev-
ery head swivelled down to where her foot was tapping impatiently at
the paper-"it says it's for a highway extension! He's going to make the
quarry bigger! Our quarry! That's what it says he's going to do!"
There was a long silence.
Then Dorcas said, "Who is?"
"Order! He's put his name on it," said Grimma.
"She's right, you know," said Masklin. "Look. It says: To be reopened, by
Order."
The nomes shuffled their feet. Order. It didn't sound a promising name.
Anyone called Order would probably be capable of anything.
Gurder stood up and brushed the dust off his robe.
"It's only a piece of paper, when all's said and done," he said sullenly.
"But the human came up here," said Masklin. "They've never come up here
before."
"Dunno about that," said Dorcas. "I mean, all the quarry buildings. The
old workshops. The doorways and so on. I mean, they're for humans. Always
worried me, that has. Where humans have been before, they tend to go
again. They're rascals for that."
There was another crowded silence, the kind that gets made by lots of
people thinking unhappy thoughts.
"Do you mean," said a nome slowly, "that we've come all this way, we've
worked so hard to make a place to live in, and now it's going to be taken
away?"
"I don't think we should get too disturbed right at this-" Gurder began.
"We've got families here," said another nome. Masklin realized that it
was Angalo. He'd been married in the spring to a young lady from the Del
Icatessen family, and they'd already got a fine pair of youngsters, two
months old and talking already.
"And we were going to have another go at planting seeds," said another
nome. "We've spent ages clearing that ground behind the big sheds. You
know that."
Gurder raised his hand imploringly.
"We don't know anything," he said. "We mustn't start getting upset until
we've found out what's going on."
"And then can we get upset?" said another nome sourly. Masklin recognised
Nisodemus, one of the Stationeri and Gurder's own assistant. He'd never
liked the young nome, and the young nome had never liked anyone, as far
as Masklin could see. "I've never, um, been happy with the feel of this
place, um, I knew there was going to be trouble-"
"Now, now, Nisodemus," said Gurder. "There's no cause to go talking like
that. We'll have another meeting of the council," he added. "That's what
we'll do."
The crumpled newspaper lay beside the road. Occasionally a breeze would
blow it randomly along the verge, while a few inches away, the traffic
thundered past.
A stronger gust hit at the same time as a particularly large truck
roared by, dragging a tail of whirling air. The paper shot up over the
road, spread out like a sail, and rose on the wind.
* * *
The Quarry Council was in session, in the space under the floor of the
old quarry office.
Other nomes had crowded in and the rest of the tribe milled around
outside.
"Look," said Angalo, "there's a big old barn up on the hill, the other
side of the potato field. It wouldn't hurt to take some stores up there.
Make it ready, you know. Just in case. Then if anything does happen,
we've got somewhere to go."
"The quarry buildings don't have spaces under the floors, except in the
canteen and the office," said Dorcas gloomily. "It's not like the Store.
There aren't many places to hide. We need the sheds. If humans come here,
we'll have to leave."
"So the barn will be a good idea, won't it?" repeated Angalo.
"There's a human on a tractor who goes up there sometimes," said Masklin.
"We could keep out of its way. Anyway," said Angalo, looking around at
the rows of faces, "maybe the humans will go away again. P'raps they'll
just take their stone and go. And we can come back. We could send someone
to spy on them every day."
"It seems to me you've been thinking about this barn for some time," said
Dorcas.
"Me and Masklin talked about it one day when we were hunting up there,"
said Angalo. "Didn't we, Masklin?"
"Hmm?" said Masklin, who was staring into space.
"You remember, we went up there and I said, 'That'd be a useful place if
ever we needed it,' and you said 'Yes.' "
"Hmm," said Masklin.
"Yes, but there's this Winter thing coming," said one of the nomes. "You
know. Cold. Glitter on everythin'."
"Robins," another nome put in.
"Yeah," said the first nome uncertainly. "Them too. Not a good time to go
摘要：

Diggers,byTerryPratchett.BookTwoofTheBromeliadInthebeginning......ArnoldBros.(est.1905)createdtheStore.Atleast,thatwasthebeliefofthousandsofnomeswhoformanygenerations*hadlivedunderthefloorboardsofArnoldBros.(est.1905),anoldandrespecteddepartmentstoreinthemiddleofthecity.*[Nomegenerations,thatis.Nome...

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