Howard Waldrop: Scientifiction

There were three of them. One had appeared slowly from the left, she reasoned, out of a grey space she saw now was the edge of a building all straight and level, not jumbled up like the Settlement. She had not seen the first two at their biggest because they were bent forward pushing something.

The something was round on the ends and longer in the middle. There was a circle of the color yellow on the long part. In the circle were three patches of black like the blades of one of the fans in Doer Tola’s workshop. She knew Fuel-miners sometimes found the black and yellow pieces while they were digging. It usually meant they were nearing Fuel.

They pushed it very slowly and it moved very slowly forward.

Then she saw that one of the three things was looking at her very slowly. It and the two others were covered with something very loosely; her below-red was not working much but there were shapes inside (the sun and everything were giving off below-red). Something like her own Fuel-miner’s suit. It had a bulky head and two large shiny round places like eyes, only set too far forward and close together for good vision.

It slowly reached out and slowly touched one of the two bent-over ones slowly moving the round thing.

The one it touched turned and watched her slowly.

The other kept rolling the thing, then pushed it to one side and rolled it a little faster, and then slowly turned back to the two others.

Indistinct loud noises came to Lala through the sleeves of her suit.

More indistinct noises.

Then the third one turned to look at her slowly.

Slowly the middle one started toward her.

She jerked upright, took two steps backward.

The one coming at her stopped slowly, waited, started slowly again. The other two slowly looked around the first and then looked toward each other and then looked back. It took them a long time.

The big thing advanced on her. Soon she would have to do something.

She looked back at the shimmer from the Sparky. It hung high in the air, higher than she could get to. There was nothing to climb on to get there. The shimmer was feeble, flickering, barely visible with so much light from the sun, the sky, the green ground.

The thing got very close very slowly and very largely. She had never seen anything that big move before, no matter how slowly. The other two had started toward her, one to one side, one to the other.

She ran to the left.

The one closest looked left and right slowly as it came on.

Then she ran to the right.

The one on the right jerked back slowly away from her when she stopped.

The one in the middle looked slowly around and saw her, his back to the glowing Sparky.

The one on the far side left the ground. Could they, like the black-and-yellow living thing, hold themselves up in the air? But no. It leaned up then down while it was in the air and parts of it touched the green ground again.

Loud indistinct sounds came from it and the other two.

An arm-like thing came out for her from the right. There were five extensions on the end of it. They were curving inward. They would miss her.

Then Lala ran. She ran toward the one on the ground. She jumped up near the top end, pushing off it. She grabbed the one in the middle somewhere far up. Where she grabbed gave, she swung slowly back and forth. Arm-things came down toward her slowly.

She saw, as she pushed off from it into the air, into the eye-place on the thing, and through it she had a glimpse of an eye. It was round, like the eye-place outside it. There seemed to be cilia around it. It grew slowly wide.

Then she was gone, on the leap, out toward the Sparky, into the white, into the hot pain, the sharp streaks of piercing heavy light.

And onto the ground.

Onto the shimmering white and dull blue ground. Beside one of the crumbly black pieces. The heavy air was gone. She could breathe again.

“Lala!” someone yelled, and a rope flopped near her; she grabbed it, losing her helmet, and they pulled her up the slope.

Anxious faces, the smell of concern. Behind her the Sparky, sending raging heavy blue hght into the air.

She lost the conscious use of her body for some little while. It all went away.

It all came back. Someone had put another helmet on her.

She turned from where she lay.

Everyone was there. They were not working. They were all standing stock-still, even the guards on the outside. They were all looking into the heart of the Sparky.

A dark place was forming in its midst, high up. It was just a smudge, a shape, but unmoving while the rest of the Sparky was sputtering, shimmering jets of fire and light.

The populace—workers, guards, Fuel-miners, the Doers, the Leader—were fascinated.

Lala turned her head back. Another dark place formed beside the first, more indistinct.

“Work!” yelled Lala. “Quick! Work! Work!”

The crowd jerked at her words. Then the Leader and the Doers started yelling “Work! Work!” The smell of activity filled the thin air, even over the reek of the Sparky.

The Fuel-miners regripped the grey metal slab, staggering under the load. Workers in patchwork suits threw chunks of the black stuff into the roaring base of the unnatural furnace. The line stretched back to the tumbled mass of fragments, workers heaving one to the next, passing the chunks along the line, throwing them at the raging light before them.

They slid the grey metal slab out, closer, closer, pulling it over the jumble of the black fragments growing around them.

Lala pushed on the back edge, doing what she could. The light in front of her was too bright to look at.

She looked up above, into the fan of the Sparky. There were three, four—no, something else began to appear—five dark spaces in the middle of it.

“Now!” screamed Doer Tola.

The Fuel-miners heaved, pushed, ran forward.

“More black stuff!” yelled the Leader.

The long slab of grey metal slid out onto the base of the Sparky. A jumble of black boulders bounced atop it.

The Sparky wavered, shook, long streaks of light came out of it through the ground before them.

The dark thing in the air in its middle was now five things going into one thing, getting wider. They could see it moving now.

“The other slab!” yelled Doer Sima.

“More black. More slab!” screamed the Leader.

The Sparky flared bright again.

The workers were a blur, speeding up; the pile of black boulders went down quickly as they threw it atop the first metal slab on the Sparky.

The Fuel-miners struggled with the second slab. It was heavier and thicker.

“Everybody! Guards! Everybody!” yelled the Leader.

They dropped their spears and ran in to help.

Doer Tola said to the worker-line at the black pile: “No matter what happens, keep piling it on ’til it’s all gone. Then get more!” Then she ran down to the dull metal slab.

“I said ‘Everybody’!” screamed the Leader, looking around. There were those throwing the black stuff, and those pushing the slab, and her. She ran down to the back edge of the slab and pushed.

“Push, push!” yelled voices. The black crumbly boulders had covered so much of the ramp their footing slipped.

Above them the Sparky stood up, slinging off light. In its center the five dark things, the thing they joined, the thing behind it hung over them. There had never been anything so large. And it grew. Another dark place formed near the base of the Sparky, off to their right.

The slab went up, over the highest black boulder, down, stuck. They lifted, pushed, heaved.

Lala saw the Sparky’s reflection, the dark shape in the metal before her. She pulled. The Leader, two workers away with a look of grim determination, shifted her grip. Heave. Push.