Howard Waldrop: Scientifiction

Lala’s head went into the slab. Her helmet twisted. She couldn’t see.

Then the slab moved, spun, slid forward.

The light went down.

Lala turned her helmet back. Everybody gave one more shove.

She saw that the light from the Sparky had halved, then the sparks arched out shorter. The dark shape above them and the one level with the ground to the right moved then, still slow, but a violent shuddering, wrenching it slowly back and forth.

There was a sound beginning, low and slow and far away, and it was building in volume.

They ran. All of them, up and out and away. The workers dropped their black crumbly burdens, backed toward the Settlement.

The dark thing in the air moved slowly from one side to the other as the sound grew and grew, up from the bottom where they could hear it, louder and louder, their tympani aching already, and it went louder, higher—

The dark thing dropped to the ground, spewing steam, and bounced once. The one over to the right flipped into the air, spun, turned, lay still and smoking.

The Sparky went down to a spewing glow, no worse than one of the Fuel-pocket fires the miners dealt with all the time.

The sky came back, dark. Their eyes adjusted to the light from the dark red sun on the other side of the Settlement. The dim stars hung in the east, beyond the glowing remnants of the Sparky.

The Fuel-miners and workers ran out, avoiding the smoking dark things, which gave off a bad smell, as when the lichen is cooked too long, and shoveled more black stuff on the slabs.

“Hee-hee-hee!” came the thin voice of Grandfather Bugg from the highest part of the Settlement. “Couldn’t have done it better myself! Wouldn’t have missed it for the world!”

“Well done, my people,” said the Leader, readjusting her Fuel-miner’s suit. “That’s what hard work gets you.”

Doers Tola and Sima had their antennules together. Lala heard them making preparations to fight Sparkies in advance so they wouldn’t have to go through all this if it happened again.

Then she realized how tired and hurt she was, and how much she ached. She walked toward the Settlement.

As she was passing through the gate, Grandfather Bugg bent forward from his chair and said, “Say, little Missy. Lookin’ good today. Tckh-tckh-tckh! ”

She stood on the same high building later, looking at the east, at the dark sky and stars. Her shadow stretched before her as it should.

It seemed as if all those things had happened in a resting-phase.

She looked at the site of the Sparky, now a huge pile of black crumbly boulders. Barely a flicker of light came out, no more than from the walls of any room.

Her side still hurt from the battering she had taken, and her left eye had lost most of its focus.

The places where the dark things had lain for a time were empty, except for the charred remnants of the coverings. Doer Tola had some of them in her workshop to examine.

Lala reached under her jacket and scratched her right side knob.

From somewhere far back out in the Cold World came the howling of the roachpack.