Free Wings by Terry Pratchett Page B

in the summer. There were probably even other nomes back home! We just never found them!" He pulled the Abbot to his feet.
    "And we haven't got a lot of time left," he added.
    "I'm not going up on one of those things!" The geese gave Gurder a puzzled look, as if he were an unexpected frog in their water-weed
    "I'm not very happy about it either," said Masklin, "but Shrub's people do it all the time. You just snuggle down in the feathers and hang on."
    "Snuggle?" shouted Gurder. "I've never snuggled in my life!"
    "You rode on the Concorde," Angalo pointed out. "And that was built and driven by humans."
    Gurder glared like someone who wasn't going to give in easily.
    "Well, who built the geese?" he demanded.
    Angalo grinned at Masklin, who said: "What? Dunno. Other geese, I expect."
    "Geese? Geese? And what do they know about designing for air safety?"
    "Listen," said Masklin, "They can take us all the way across this place. The Floridians fly thousands of miles on them. Thousands of miles, without even any smoked salmon or pink wobbly stuff. It's worth trying it for eighteen miles, isn't it?" Gurder hesitated. Topknot muttered something.
    Gurder cleared his throat.
    "Very well," he said haughtily. "I'm sure if this misguided individual is in the habit of flying on these things, I should have no difficulty whatsoever." He stared up at the argy shapes bobbing out in the lagoon. "Do the Floridians talk to the creatures?"
    The Thing tried this on Shrub. She shook her head. No, she said, geese were quite stupid. Friendly but stupid. Why talk to something that couldn't talk back?
    "Have you told her what we're doing?" said Masklin.
    "No. She hasn't asked."
    "How do we get on?" Shrub stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled.
    Half a dozen geese waddled up the bank. Close up, they didn't look any smaller. "I remember reading something about geese once," said Gurder, in a sort of dreamy terror. "It said they could break a human's arm with a blow of their nose." "Wing," said Angalo, looking up at the feathery argy bodies looming over him. "It was their wing."
    "And it was swans that do that," said Masklin, weakly. "Geese are the ones you mustn't say boo to."
    Gurder watched a long neck weave back and forth above him.
    "Wouldn't dream of it," he said.
    A long time after, when Masklin came to write the story of his life, he described the flight of the geese as the fastest, highest, and most terrifying of all.
    People said, Hold on, that's not right. You said the plane went so fast that it left its sound behind, and so high up there was blue all around it.
    And he said, That's the point. It went so fast you didn't know how fast it was going, it went so high you couldn't see how high it was. It was just something that happened. And the Concorde looked as though it was meant to fly. When it was on the ground it looked kind of lost.
    The geese, on the other hand, looked as aerodynamic as a pillow. They didn't roll into the sky and sneer at the clouds like the plane did. No, they ran across the top of the water and hammered desperately at the air with their wings and then, just when it was obvious they weren't going to achieve anything, they suddenly did; the water dropped away, and there was just the slow creak of wings pulling the goose up into the sky.
    Masklin would be the first to admit that he didn't understand about jets and engines and machines, so maybe that was why he didn't worry about travelling in them. But he thought he knew a thing or two about muscles, and the knowledge that it was only a couple of big muscles that were keeping him alive was not comforting.
    Each traveller shared a goose with one of the Floridians. They didn't do any steering, as far as Masklin could see. That was all done by Shrub, who sat far out on the neck of the leading goose. He never found out how she steered. Maybe by orders in some language the geese and the geese nomes shared. Maybe by little movements. Maybe (according to Angalo) by some sort of