“It was a carpet cleaner, wasn’t it?” he said slowly. “I always thought it was something magical, and it was just a carpet cleaner. There’s lots of them in Household Appliances. With Extra Suction For Deep-Down Carpet Freshness.”
“Good. That’s nice. Now, how do we get out of here?”
Some searching behind the filing cabinets found a crack in the floorboards just big enough to squeeze through with difficulty. Getting back took half a day, partly because Gurder would occasionally sit down and burst into tears, but mainly because they had to climb down inside the wall itself. It was hollow and had wires and odd bits of wood in it, tied into place by the Klothians, but it was still a tedious job. They came out under Kiddies Klothes. Gurder had pulled himself together by then and haughtily ordered food and an escort.
And so at last they came back to the Stationery Department.
Just in time.
Granny Morkie looked up as they were ushered into the Abbot’s bedroom. She was sitting by the bed with her hands on her knees.
“Don’t make any loud noises,” she ordered. “He’s very ill. He says he’s dyin’. I suppose he should know.”
“Dying of what?” said Masklin.
“Dyin’ of bein’ alive for such a long time,” said Granny.
The Abbot lay, wrinkled and even smaller than Masklin remembered him, among his pillows. He was clutching the Thing in two thin, clawlike hands.
He looked at Masklin and, with a great effort, beckoned him to come closer.
“You’ll have to lean over,” Granny ordered. “He can’t talk above a croak, poor old soul.”
The Abbot gently grabbed Masklin’s ear and pulled it down to his mouth.
“A sterling woman,” he whispered. “Many fine qualities, I am sure. But please send her away before she gives me any more medicine.”
Masklin nodded. Granny’s remedies, made from simple, honest, and generally nearly poisonous herbs and roots, were amazing things. After one dose of stomachache jollop, you made sure you never complained of stomachache ever again. In its way, it was a sort of cure.
“I can’t send,” he said, “but I can ask.”
She went out, shouting instructions to mix up another batch.
Gurder knelt down by the bed.
“You’re not going to die, are you, sir?” he said.
“Of course I am. Everyone is. That’s what being alive is all about,” whispered the Abbot. “Did you see Arnold Bros (est. 1905)?”
“Well. Er.” Gurder hesitated. “We found some Writing, sir. It’s true, it says the Store will be demolished. That means the end of everything, sir—whatever shall we do?”
“You will have to leave,” said the Abbot.
Gurder looked horrified.
“But you’ve always said that everything outside the Store could only be a dream!”
“And you never believed me, boy. And maybe I was wrong. That young man with the spear, is he still here? I can’t see very well.”
Masklin stepped forward.
“Oh, there you are,” said the old nome. “This box of yours.”
“Yes?” said Masklin.
“Told me things. Showed me pictures. Store’s a lot bigger than I thought. There’s this room they keep the stars in, not just the glittery ones they hang from the ceiling at Christmas Fayre, but hundreds of the damn things. It’s called the universe. We used to live in it, it nearly all belonged to us, it was our home. We didn’t live under anyone’s floor. I think Arnold Bros (est. 1905) is telling us to go back there.”
He reached out, and his cold white fingers gripped Masklin’s arm with surprising strength.
“I don’t say you’re blessed with brains,” he said. “In fact, I reckon you’re the stupid but dutiful kind who gets to be leader when there’s no glory in it. You’re the kind who sees things through. Take them Home. Take them all Home.”
He slumped back onto the pillows and shut his eyes.
“But—leave the Store, sir?” said Gurder. “There’s thousands of us, old people and babies and everyone. Where can we go? There’s foxes out there, Masklin says, and wind and hunger and water that drops out of the sky in bits! Sir? Sir?”
Grimma leaned over and felt the old nome’s wrist.
“Can he hear me?” said Gurder.
“Maybe,” said Grimma. “Perhaps. But he won’t be able to answer you, because he’s dead.”
“But he can’t die! He’s always been here!” said Gurder, aghast. “You’ve got it wrong. Sir? Sir!”
Masklin took the Thing out of the Abbot’s unresisting hands as other Stationeri, hearing Gurder’s voice, hurried in.
“Thing?” he said quietly, walking away from the crowd around the bed.
“I hear you.”
“Is he dead?”
“I detect no life functions.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘yes.’”
“Oh.” Masklin considered this. “I thought you had to be eaten or squashed first. I didn’t think you just sort of stopped.”
The Thing didn’t volunteer any information.
“Any idea what I should do now?” said Masklin. “Gurder was right. They are not going to leave all this warmth and food. I mean, some of the youngsters might, for a lark. But if we’re going to survive outside, we’ll need lots of people. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. And what am I supposed to say to them: Sorry, you’ve all got to leave it all behind?”
The Thing spoke.
“No,” it said.
Masklin had never seen a funeral before. Come to that, he’d never seen a nome die from being alive too long. Oh, people had been eaten, or had never come back, but no one had simply come to an end.
“Where do you bury your dead?” Gurder had asked.
“Inside badgers and foxes, often,” he’d replied, and hadn’t been able to resist adding, “You know. The handsome and agile hunters?”
This was how the nomes said farewell to their dead:
The body of the old Abbot was ceremoniously dressed in a green coat and a pointy red hat. His long white beard was carefully combed out, and then he lay, peacefully, on his bed as Gurder read the service.
“Now that it has pleased you, Arnold Bros (est. 1905), to take our brother to your great Gardening Department beyond Consumer Accounts, where there is Ideal Lawn Edging and an Amazing Floral Display and the pool of eternal life in Easy-To-Lay Polythene With Real-Crazy-Paving Edging, we will give him the gifts a nome must take on his journey.”
The Count de Ironmongri stepped forward. “I give him,” he said, laying an object beside the nome, “the Spade Of Honest Toil.”
“And I,” said the Duke de Haberdasheri, “lay beside him the Fishing Rod Of Hope.”
Other leading nomes brought other things: the Wheelbarrow Of Leadership, the Shopping Basket Of Life. Dying in the Store was quite complicated, Masklin gathered.
Grimma blew her nose as Gurder completed the service and the body was ceremoniously carried away.
To the subbasement, they later learned, and the incinerator. Down in the realms of Prices Slashed, the Security, where he sat at nighttimes, legend said, and drank his horrible tea.
“That’s a bit dreadful, I reckon,” said Granny Morkie as they stood around aimlessly afterward. “In my young day, if a person died, we buried ’em. In the ground.”
“Ground?” said Gurder.
“Sort of floor,” explained Granny.
“Then what happened?” said Gurder.
Granny looked blank. “What?” she said.
“Where did they go after that?” said the Stationeri patiently.
“Go? I don’t reckon they went anywhere. Dead people don’t get about much.”
“In the Store,” said Gurder slowly, as if he were explaining things to a rather backward child, “when a nome dies, if he has been a good nome, Arnold Bros (est. 1905) sends them back to see us before they go to a Better Place.”
“How can—�
� Granny began.
“The inner bit of them, I mean,” said Gurder. “The bit inside you that’s really you.”
They looked at him politely, waiting for him to make any sort of sense.
Gurder sighed. “All right,” he said, “I’ll get someone to show you.”
They were taken to the Gardening Department. It was a strange place, Masklin thought. It was like the world outside but with all the difficult bits taken away. The only light was the faint glow of indoor suns, which stayed on all night. There was no wind, no rain, and there never would be. There was grass, but it was just painted green sacking with bits sticking out of it. There were mountainous cliffs of nothing but seeds in packets, each one with a picture that Masklin suspected was quite unreal. They showed flowers, but flowers unlike any he’d ever seen before.
“Is the Outside like this?” said the young priest who was guiding them. “They say, they say, er, they say you’ve been there. They say you’ve seen it.” He sounded hopeful.
“There was more green and brown,” said Masklin flatly.
“And flowers?” said the priest.
“Some flowers,” Masklin agreed. “But not like these.”
“I seed flowers like these once,” said Torrit and then, unusually for him, fell silent.
They were led around the bulk of a giant lawn mower and there—
—were nomes. Tall, chubby-faced gnomes. Pink-cheeked painted gnomes. Some of them held fishing rods or spades. Some of them were pushing painted wheelbarrows. And every single one of them was grinning.
The tribe stood in silence for some time.
Then Grimma said, very softly, “How horrible.”
“Oh, no!” said the priest, horrified. “It’s marvelous! Arnold Bros (est. 1905) sends you back smart and new, and then you leave the Store and go to a wonderful place!”
“There’s no women,” said Granny. “That’s a mercy, anyway.”
“Ah, well,” said the priest, looking a bit embarrassed. “That’s always been a bit of a debatable question. We’re not sure why, but we think—”
“And they don’t look like anyone,” said Granny. “They all look the same.”
“Well, you see—”
“Catch me coming back like that,” said Granny. “If you come back like that, I don’t want to go.”
The priest was almost in tears.
“No, but—”
“I saw one like these once.” It was old Torrit again. He looked very gray in the face and was trembling.
“You shut up, you,” said Granny. “You never saw nothing.”
“I did too,” said Torrit. “When I was a little lad. Grandpa Dimpo took some of us across the fields, through the wood, and there was all these big stone houses where humans lived, and they had little fields in front full of flowers like what they got here, and grass all short, and ponds with orange fish, and we saw one of these. It was sitting on a stone toadstool by one of these ponds.”
“It never was,” said Granny automatically.
“It was an’ all,” said Torrit levelly. “And I mind Grandpa sayin’, ‘That ain’t no life, out there in all weathers, birds doing their wossname on your hat and dogs widdlin’ all over you.’ He tole us it was a giant nome who got turned to stone on account of sitting there for so long and never catching no fish. And he said, ‘Wot a way to go. That ain’t for me, lads—I want to go sudden like,’ and then a cat jumped out on him. Talk about a laugh.”
“What happened?” said Masklin.
“Oh, we gave it a good seeing-to with our spears and picked him up, and we all run like bu—run very fast,” said Torrit, watching Granny’s stern expression.
“No, no!” wailed the priest. “It’s not like that at all!” and then he started to sob.
Granny hesitated for a moment and then patted him gently on the back.
“There, there,” she said. “Don’t you worry about it. Daft old fool says any old thing that comes into his head.”
“I don’t—” Torrit began. Granny’s warning look stopped him.
They went back slowly, trying to put the terrible stone images out of their minds. Torrit trailed along behind, grumbling like a worn-out thunderstorm.
“I did see it, I’m telling you,” he whispered. “Damn great grinning thing, it were, sitting on a spotty stone mushroom. I did see it. Never went back there, though. Better safe than sorry, I always said. But I did see it.”
It seemed taken for granted by everyone that Gurder was going to be the new Abbot. The old Abbot had left strict instructions. There didn’t seem to be any argument.
The only one against the idea, in fact, was Gurder.
“Why me?” he said. “I never wanted to lead anyone! Anyway . . . you know . . .” He lowered his voice. “I have Doubts, sometimes. The old Abbot knew it, I’m sure. I can’t imagine why he’d think I’d be any good.”
Masklin said nothing. It occurred to him that the Abbot might have had a very definite aim in mind. Perhaps it was time for a little doubt. Perhaps it was time to look at Arnold Bros (est. 1905) in a different way.
They were off to one side in the big underfloor area the Stationeri used for important meetings; it was the one place in the Store, apart from the Food Hall, where fighting was strictly forbidden. The heads of the families, rulers of departments and subdepartments, were milling around out there. They might not be allowed to bear weapons, but they were cutting one another dead at every opportunity.
Getting them to even think of working together would be impossible without the Stationeri. It was odd, really. The Stationeri had no real power at all, but all the families needed them and none of them feared them, and so they survived and, in a strange sort of way, led. A Haberdasheri wouldn’t listen even to common sense from an Ironmongri, on general principles, but he would if the speaker was a Stationeri because everyone knew the Stationeri didn’t take sides.
Masklin turned to Gurder.
“We need to talk to someone in the Ironmongri. They control the electric, don’t they? And the truck nest.”
“That’s the Count de Ironmongri over there,” said Gurder, pointing. “Thin fellow with the mustache. Not very religious. Doesn’t know much about electric, though.”
“I thought you told me—”
“Oh, the Ironmongri do. The underlings and servants and whatnot. But not people like the Count. Good heavens.” Gurder smiled. “You don’t think the Duke de Haberdasheri ever touches a pair of scissors, do you, or Baroness del Icatessen goes and cuts up food her actual self?”
He looked sideways at Masklin. “You’ve got a plan, haven’t you?” he said.
“Yes. Sort of.”
“What are you going to tell them, then?”
Masklin picked absently at the tip of his spear.
“The truth. I’m going to tell them they can leave the Store and take it all with them. I think it should be possible.”
Gurder rubbed his chin. “Hmm,” he said. “I suppose it’s possible. If everyone carries as much food and stuff as they can. But it’ll soon run out, and anyway, you can’t carry electric. It lives in wires, you know.”
“How many Stationeri can read Human?” said Masklin, ignoring him.
“All of us can read a bit, of course,” said Gurder. “But only four of us are any real good at it, if you must know.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be enough,” said Masklin.
“Well, there’s a trick to it, and not everyone can get the hang of it. What are you planning?”
“A way to get everyone, everyone, out. Carrying everything we’ll ever need, ever,” said Masklin.
“They’ll be squashed under the weight!”
“Not really. Most of what they’ll be carrying doesn’t weigh anything at all.”
Gurder looked worried.
“This isn’t some mad scheme of Dorcas’s, is it?” he said.
“No.”
Masklin felt that he might explode. His head wasn’t big enough to hold
all the things the Thing had told him.
And he was the only one. Oh, the Abbot had known, and died with his eyes full of stars, but even he didn’t understand. The galaxy! The old man thought it was just a great big room outside the Store, just the biggest department ever. Perhaps Gurder wouldn’t comprehend either. He’d lived all his life under a roof. He had no idea of the sort of distances involved.
Masklin felt a slight surge of pride at this. The Store nomes couldn’t understand what the Thing was saying, because they had no experiences to draw on. To them, from one end of the Store to the other was the biggest possible distance in the world.
They wouldn’t be able to come to grips with the fact that the stars, fr’instance, were much farther away. Even if you ran all the way, it’d probably take weeks to reach them.
He’d have to lead up to it gently.
The stars! And a long, long time ago, nomes had traveled between them on things that made trucks look tiny—and had been built by nomes. And one of the great ships, exploring around a little star on the edge of nowhere, had sent out a smaller ship to land on the world of the humans.
But something had gone wrong. Masklin hadn’t understood that bit, except that the thing that moved the ships was very, very powerful. Hundreds of nomes had survived, though. One of them, searching through the wreckage, had found the Thing. It wasn’t any good without electricity to eat, but the nomes had kept it nevertheless, because it had been the machine that steered the Ship.
And the generations passed by, and the nomes forgot everything except that the Thing was very important.
That was enough for one head to carry, Masklin thought. But it wasn’t the most important bit, it wasn’t the bit that made his blood fizz and his fingers tingle.
This was the important bit. The big Ship, the one that could fly between stars, was still up there somewhere. It was tended by machines like the Thing, patiently waiting for the nomes to come back. Time meant nothing to them. There were machines to sweep the long corridors, and machines that made food and watched the stars and patiently counted the hours and minutes in the long, dark emptiness of the Ship.
And they’d wait forever. They didn’t know what Time was, except something to be counted and filed away. They’d wait until the sun went cold and the moon died, carefully repairing the Ship and keeping it ready for the nomes to come back.
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