There’s This Thing Out There

By Cricket Winters (PrayrieWolf )

Begun August 10, 2004, completed September 19, 2004

Edited October 29, 2004

Edited May 18-June 17, 2007

Edited April 28-May 4, 2008

15,120 words (web version)

Rated PG for mild ickiness

 

Author’s note: This story originated as part of a Halloween tradition to post Halloween-themed stories on the Lexx Scifi bulletin board. The theme is also a satire relating to issues on the board (and the internet in general) at that time.

 

There’s This Thing Out There

 

Daunted not at all by a dousing arboreal rain, dedicated women such as Lila studied trolls — all kinds of trolls. Bless their souls; they studied small ones, big ones, and lumpy, bumpy, green ones. They studied red-skinned and smooth trolls, poisonous and blue-gray — trolls striped with markings, spiny, lobed or coated with clay. They scrutinized troll follicles and measured troll fat; prized samples of troll ooze; bottled troll scat. They analyzed dank breath, noxious gases and odd body jellies. They configured diagnostic sticky “bubbles” to collect lint from troll bellies.

 Propped against the bulbous barrel of what had to be a world-record-holding keggplant, Lila chuckled at her own tomfoolery. Fatigue had taken its troll — toll on her sensibilities. Okay, she might as well forget a career as a poet or a comedian, and there were no other women in the rain or anywhere else studying trolls. However, sprinkles of levity helped to break up the monotony of repetitious data rounds. Lightness-of-the-heart tempered her unswerving pursuit of the next ghoulish sighting or the next pay dirt cave, her need to grab the one breakthrough encounter, the big score.

Listen….

Lila seemed to hug the keggplant backward, poised fiddle-string taut against its smooth wall, straining to hear what might lurk between the spattering of rain upon leaves and stagnation. She deduced though her trained senses that this jungle wasn’t moving enough. It wasn’t “breathing” as it should. There wasn’t much of the steady, primordial cadence of the ambulatory going about the business of living. Only drips of water moved. The air felt stale and weighty. There — she thought she’d just heard something grunt.

 Lila held her breath while two walkabout bushes emerged from the foliage on their springy “legs”. Through bars of slanted, subdued shadows, she began a more judicious trudging than moments earlier, thinking about what she might be doing right now besides looking for trolls. She thought about her less ambitious (more sane) friends enjoying a crisp and burnished season on Earth, nearing the harvest holiday, a vivid, playful time of year for Southerners, nothing like this endless summer of drabness. She should be endangering her teeth on caramel apples, catching footballs and swapping yarns, not wadding hip-deep through Misery.

What a quaint word to christen this crater world, “Misery”, but the name suited Lila’s pockmarked wilderness much better than “Quadrant 4, Cusp 9”. As if to prove it, mutant raindrops clamped her shirt to her body, saturated it enough to bubble up the fabric across her back. She didn’t want to know what her scandalized front must look like with her bra revealed through her shirt, or her poor braid, bedraggled and itchy at the scalp with pinhead beetles and bits of plant matter. Somehow, mental discipline helped her to slide past clinging plants and push stringy things out of her path. “Holy moley, girl,” she told herself, “don’t think of the creatures that make these webs so resistant.” If she didn’t look, she wouldn’t see — it was her “Ostrich theory”.

Turning aside something orange and spongy — she hoped just a fungus and not something with teeth or appendages — Lila felt more than the usual apprehension. Strapped to her muscular thigh, the cool grip of a good-old-fashioned projectile weapon reassured her inquiring fingertips. She checked it often as daylight waned. She didn’t trust those computer-guided phase-beam things other field workers used — not here. In her estimation, computers tended to think too much in comparison to firing pins and bullets, and in their thinking, often failed.

Lila directed her gaze up through the canopy to gauge the attitude of the sky, the lateness and her waning energy. The disturbing nature of today’s work had slowed her down and drained her reserves. Her sample containers, instruments, hologram cameras and survival gear weighed oh, about a ton, figuratively speaking. She frowned. Maybe she should shoot up. Yuck. Boosters were such nasty, blood-stinging things, certain to throw her body out-of-sync with her mind for hours — better to keep moving now, push further toward the goal. She felt a trollish feeling pulling her toward the far side of Keggplant Row.

Slinking past glittering-wet rooted life, Lila wiped grit from her cheek in a long, slow pass. The sharp iron taste of dirt hit her tongue from the back of her hand, and she was thinking — for what? For what purpose was all her fieldwork tribulation; what point to filth, boosters, leaning on keggplants and listening to grunts in the shadows? She wondered this, the cartilage in her knees making popping sounds as she squatted over a crushed Celt tree. Its once-beautiful knot work lay driven into the contours of a clawed footprint longer than her arm. The tree’s interlaced vines looked like broken white worms in the lowly pit loam, now. Sad by proxy, one of Lila’s tapering forefingers traced the edge of the muddy outline. Sensors bonded to her fingernail blinked with spooling red numbers tiny enough to fit on the head of a pin. The sensors slurped up readings with technological indifference while pooled rainwater slipped from Lila’s holster, down her bare leg and into her hiking boot. Normal people labeled her eccentric for this. Normal people fled from the Grendyl giants, but Lila plotted ways to capture or vivisect just one in the name of knowledge and personal satisfaction. They were evil.

Oafs. Cannibals. The Grendyl trolls lumbered through the forestation with more ponderous mass than bull elephants and with triple the voracious appetite. Even a child-sized troll posed a danger to humans, but few beings of any species survived an encounter with a Grendyl. However varied in size and form, all trolls tended towards violence, meanness, and stupidity. Vile, preposterous, ferocious beasts, trolls lacked morals, drew to bloodletting and smelled the least drop of life spilled two clicks away, heck, further than that. This particular scientist had learned as much the hard way. Lila rubbed the newest scar on her forearm, the souvenir of an encounter with a Whiner troll six months previous. 

 The readout on her fingernail read 121.9 centimeters. [1]

“So, Lila,” she wondered, “what might happen to this big fellow down the way?” She squatted over the blistered balls of her feet, scanning the minutiae of the footprint with the obsidian eyes inherited through her Dinka grandmother. The saturated loam of vegetable matter felt sticky beneath her palms when she put them down to stabilize herself and make decisions. Should she hike the series of imprints and perhaps observe the fate of this Grendyl, or should she cast a holographic mold of its footprint, declare the day a bust and retreat to the roving mini-lab? She’d already stomached more than the usual day’s grossness. Body after grotesque body — no, wait. Nothing she’d studied today had remotely resembled a body. She’d found naught but pulverized chunks of bodies to stir about with probes; nothing but reeking shards of bone and bits of raw gray flesh set a-quivering when poked. She’d found partially intact entrails, sometimes, slug-flesh brain matter (one handful per troll) and “smoker lungs”. Most memorable had been the twisted stump of a wrought tree, prized for its welding properties, somehow shorn in two, still hot, freshly decorated with the fibrillating heart of a Grendyl.

 Smaller and smaller droplets of water continued to erode the history of Lila’s big Grendyl while she watched them splash, carrying bits of forest litter into the depression. The moist tissues of her nose and mouth detected the presence of foot funk on the humidity where she crouched. She tried to wrap her mind around what beast, what force, could pull the meat and bones off such a foul giant as had left this mark. Was it another troll? Had a superior mutant risen out of happenstance? She could almost envision that, if it were not true that mutation generally resulted in inferiority, not superiority. Nevertheless, the images boggled the mind. Her brain ran rife with graphic mental footage of some genocidal monster razing its own kind, pounding rivals into the face of the planet. What might happen if some troll had spawned intelligence? Was that the true advantage? Something like a sting thrummed along Lila’s nerves to make her think, “An intelligent Grendyl troll — that wouldn’t be good.” 

 The rain grew fine. The poisonous odor of hot tar crossed Lila’s nostrils through the drizzle, and she turned her head toward it. The smell triggered a series of summer memories in her mind, taking her to a place where asphalt seemed to melt around a series of launch pads, giving off biting fumes of semi-breathable black. Here, the smell was of blood, not tar, sifting through the pit forest like an advertisement. She’d missed the phenomenon in action again, then. This footprint’s big Grendyl — may he rest in peace.  

 Lila preferred cartoon character impersonation to cursing, which never did any good anyway. Uttering “great suffering succotash” under her breath, she dutifully performed the data-gathering ritual for the footprint, using rain protocol of course. She screwed the cap back onto the last sample bottle as she heard Travis crashing through the undergrowth with all the subtlety of a charging troll.

 “Lila! Lila! Where are you? Lila!”

 “Hallo! Over here, Trav. Don’t make me waste a flare.”

 “Lila Firecloud whatever you’re doing, get yourself packed up right now, and I mean now! I saw it! I think I saw something. There’s this thing out there!”

 

Within twenty minutes of leading Lila between Misery’s equivalent to dewy fronds and eye-poking branches, Travis said, “There — over there. You see?” He released Lila’s hand when approaching the footprints in question, as if to sic his favorite coonhound onto a trail. With her nostrils flaring in and out, she approached the nearest track. She strained to see in the mist and darkness, feeling her way past shadows and plants weaving themselves on evening’s loom. Travis dogged her, asking, “What do you make of it? It looks human, but it can’t be, it just can’t. There’s nothing like a drop shipment scheduled for another month, when they come to pick up Don.”

Lila’s tiny sensors came out again, brighter in the contrast of increased gloom to hover scant millimeters above what appeared to be a very human footprint, complete with normal human toes, all five of them. There was nothing normal about the size or depth of the imprint. It had to be at least a size thirty-nine foot, probably larger, and nobody in their right mind walked barefoot through Misery.

“Good grief, Trav, for a human, this guy’s a monster. You’re not going to believe this. Look at the stride.”

“It’s a ‘guy’, not a troll? You’re sure?”

“I think it’s male. It’s definitely humanoid, and definitely huge.”

“How huge?”

Lila squinted in contemplation, her fingertips tapped lightly upon the soil, feeling for traces of answers. “Best guess —”

“C’mon, Lila, don’t mess with my head. Your guess is better than textbook fact.” Travis’ gray eyes scanned the foliage with quick movements.

“He’s at least three meters tall [2] . That’s nine-foot-eight back in ‘Bama; a big ole boy. What’s strange, though, is the depth of the imprint. See? This can’t be right. A three-meter-tall humanoid shouldn’t weigh half as much as our Rover, not even a troll. He must be fantastically obese or dense.”

“No kidding? Half as much as the Rover? But the Rover weighs —”

“Six thousand kilograms [3] on this planet,” Lila finished.

“Yeah, roughly that.”

“According to my readings, the owner of this print weighs 3,118 kilograms [4] , give or take half a kilo.”

“That’s just wrong.” Travis ran a gritty hand through his hair. “You’re sure?”

Lila rolled her eyes and blew a puff of air between her pursed lips. “A moment ago, I was a textbook. It’s not a classified troll, Trav. It’s heavy. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

Taking up his equipment bag, turning away, Travis muttered, “So the legend of Sasquatch reaches to here, and he’s got a weight problem. Unbelievable.”

“Just in time for Halloween,” Lila added brightly. She dusted off her hands and not feeling so cheerful as she’d let on, retrieved her things and followed her protégé deeper into the dank cusp of the pit.

The two researchers pushed themselves for a time, covering a distance of two-point-three kilometers [5] in silence before Lila caught up with Doctor Rand with questions and bits of deductions running through her mind. “Hey Travis, you’re ‘the-Truth-is-out-there’ type. Tell me, what do you know about Sasquatch, seriously?”

Travis glanced back to Lila while picking his way over some wriggling walker roots. “Not much,” he said. “I skipped class to watch a Bigfoot documentary a few years ago.”

“Somehow, I don’t think watching a Bigfoot documentary qualifies as mission education credit,” observed Lila.

“Ah, now she tells me,” said Travis. “I guess that explains why the board shot down my follow-up study, ‘Yeti Versus Nessie’.” His hand jerked back from an unidentified bush-like form of life. “Ouch!”

Travis bent down to check around the base of the bush for skeletons, husks or other signs he might die in the next few seconds, and finding none, sucked on his thorn-pricked digit lest the blood become a calling card. Lila watched him turn his dripping-wet hippie head toward her among amorphous gray vegetation. His bandanna didn’t look red anymore; more like a dried blood hue. She noticed how the spaces around him were beginning to fill with that peculiar graininess that tricks the eyes.

“Actually, I think our guy is more like the Abominable Snowman than old Sassie,” Travis continued. “I think I caught a glimpse of him back there before I called for you. Are there albino trolls?”

“He was white?” Lila asked. Her brows puckered thoughtfully. “It could happen, especially in the really big caves, like the one in Cusp 50, remember that? There might be caves so vast; trolls never leave them. If so, it’s possible their eyes have devolved and their skin become leeched of pigment, like cave spiders, salamanders or subterranean fish. I’d like to find a troll like that.”

“Well, what I saw wasn’t white exactly, but it was pale enough. It had a weird sheen to it, like platinum shark skin or something.” Travis turned to blaze trail once more.

“Really?” asked Lila. “Maybe it had a short, sleek coat of hair like Akhal-Tekes.”

“Akul-tek-ie whats?”

“Horses. They’re a rare desert breed more than three thousand years old. Some experts theorize that the unique metallic sheen to their coats is a camouflage adaptation to the shimmering nature of the desert.”

Travis chuckled. “You and your horses, Lila,” he said. “Do you think there’s a humanoid out there with metallic adaptations? In Misery?”

“It might even have metallic skin or scales,” Lila answered. She bit her lip for a moment. “Human kind has invented Mr. Sasquatch of the forests, Mr. Abominable of the snows and dozens of varieties in-between. Why shouldn’t we raise questions about a possible desert-bred recluse — some kind of long-legged ape or human-like troll?”

“I sure don’t see any deserts around here,” Travis remarked.  

“There are desert-cusps on the far side of the planet, around the Defacement,” Lila reminded him. “They’re beyond huge.”

“But nothing can survive the crossings, right? Maybe between the sea craters, an exceptional swimmer might cross to a neighboring cusp — not that our life sign scans revealed much troll life in either the desert or the island cusps.”

“Yeah, but LS won’t penetrate caves, remember? That’s why we can never get a handle on some of the cusp populations.”

Lila, usually a forward thinker, flung glances behind her as stepped over and ducked obstacles. Her skittish behavior didn’t feel rational or normal. It wasn’t like her. Something about the unidentified stalker must have struck a chord of something primal inside her that she hadn’t known was sleeping there.

“I wish I’d of paid more attention in Legends class,” Lila muttered.

“I saw a patch of something; just a flash of paleness moving fast. It could have been anything. I hope —”

Travis brought his long strides to a halt atop a small mound. He extended a hand through the darkness behind him. His companion strained to discern his reassuring, if grim, smile. “Girl, take my hand,” he said, his voice dropped to a murmur.

Lila edged between two trunks, scraping her pack against them to reach out her hand. She felt a jolt of warmth and relief as Travis’ rough fingers twined with her own. She’d missed that touch amazingly much in ten hours’ time. “Thanks, boy,” she murmured, returning his gentle squeeze. Then she received the hit of tar smell. She realized with a lurch, that Travis had his gun out.

“It’s bad. You don’t have to look.”

“No, s’okay, I want to,” Lila said, and claimed that final step to bring herself to the level of six-footer Travis. Now she smelled him too, ripe with rain, muck and sweat. Looking down the other side of their vegetating hump, they halfway saw something ugly in the copse of grainy sameness. There were broken trees, black scars in the earth and overturned boulders. Six kilotons worth of unrecognizable Grendyl troll lay in a widespread smear, glimmering and wet, as if scraped off the boot heel of a Titan.

“Something out here really has a problem with trolls,” Travis understated.

Lila had encountered thousands of broken bodies in her work, all viewed with clinical detachment, but she’d dealt with nothing this opossum-meets-transfer-truck messy. She turned her head away. Behind her, a waist-high Spiny troll stood licking smears from one of the boulders. Its ovoid mouth bared gnarly teeth. Travis’ gun cracked in Lila’s ears. The Spiny fell.

“There will be more,” Travis said grimly.

Travis tugged, but Lila failed to respond until he called her name with a sharp, “Doctor Firecloud! There will be more! It’s dark, now. We have to go.”

She suddenly turned to him with wide, astonished eyes. “Something’s back there! I saw — you won’t believe what I saw — eyes or something!”

“Lots of things have eyes. You should see yours right now,” said Travis. He jerked Lila off the mound and down the other side. Five strides later, out came his head lantern to cap the bandanna, and Lila followed suit, donning hers as they stumbled over exposed roots and flattened trees, on past the crime scene, not stopping to take readings or figure out which part of the Grendyl gleamed where.

“Faster, Doctor!”

Lila pushed herself into a run. The whistling scream of a Banshee troll raised the hairs on the back of her neck. The scream died half-finished under the weight of a grisly crunch. The ground vibrated under the blow. Close! She heard the cracking of wood-like growth behind her, there came another terrible roar, and then what must have been a large tree fell out of the sky to her right. It smelled of fresh tar. Still linked tightly to Travis’ hand, gripping her gun with the other, Lila’s breath whooshed in and out in well-conditioned gasps, steady and determined under the inhibitive weight of her gear. The Rover couldn’t be much further. It had better not be much further.

As Lila fled with Travis, she tried to believe she’d stood upon the rim of Cusp 9 just that morning when this crater world had seemed almost beautiful. She’d lived a moment of wonderment in viewing all the dateless meteoric violence — the hundreds of cusps entrenched one next to another toward all horizons like the moldy dimples on a planetary golf ball. She remembered the sun sweeping gorgeous shadows across bowls of isolated life and the wasteland grooves in-between. With the crater cone and base-land flysch lying barren and smooth below her, incapable of sustaining anything but microscopic forms of life, she’d marveled to think how the dynamics of sun, gravity and atmospheric anomalies had created both beauty and ugliness, spun them together into one vast, treacherous opportunity of a lifetime.  

The dense vegetation didn’t look so beautiful in the dark. In fact, it repulsed her, and it hurt. Unavoidable extensions of this or that tree shape flayed pieces of skin from Lila’s bare arms and legs. Certain kinds of plants hooked her feet or raked at her face. Her hand jerked free of Travis’ to protect herself, but everything came at her in flashes of half-seen motion, too fast for her brain to react in time to avoid painful consequences. Odd, but she didn’t recall reading about this in the “brochure”.

“Hey Trav, tell me again why we’re heading back to base so fast?”

He shot back, “Oh, I don’t know. How about we open the floor for discussion?” He propped like a rebellious horse, skidded and almost fell down. “Hey, I see it! I see the Rover!”

Lila found good use for the burst of energy that announcement lent to her. Then they were there, feeling metal with glad hands, climbing rungs, slamming hatches, dumping gear, jumping into seats. The machine cranked to life right away, sending the surroundings into low-frequency vibrations from the Rover’s diesel purr. Travis missed seeing two little lights — glowing eyes — in the driving viewer as he swung his periscope toward the base coordinates.

“Hello, here we go again. It won’t take first gear!” Travis growled. “Why does it always do this?” He snatched up his driving sledgehammer and convinced the gear lever to clang into place with a hefty blow. The vehicle began to move.

Kicking her equipment out of the way, Lila left her seat. She wiped her sweaty palms on her shorts. “It does that, because we lost our mechanic, remember? I’ll drive. Rover likes me better than he likes you.”

“Negative, Doctor. Suit up.”

“Suit yourself.”

Travis rolled his eyes and said, “Does this look like a good time for a pun war, hon?”

 “It’s a crisis, isn’t it?” countered Lila, sticking out her tongue. She changed into her popped balloon skin anyway — not an easy feat in low light and small spaces. The material felt icky and rubbery against her skin. She disliked the feeling of plastic-wrap suffocation and the Rover’s tight, unforgiving lines against her ribs, too much like the time she’d slipped between the faces of a volcanic crevasse and nearly boiled in her own juices.

For some time, the mini-lab clawed its way up the impact cone with two unnerved people in its steamy belly. It chewed the loam beneath rotating tracks and pierced the vegetation with intense beams of light. When it crested 9’s rim, the Rover teetered a breathless moment, and then it went down and down. “Shocking” and “disorienting” described what it felt like to drop from the rim of a lush bowl of life into lunar nothingness. The Rover crossed a marked line of transition from rain, soil, and the sense of things growing to the brutalized rock of the planet’s basal surface.

Lila took over the steering joystick while Travis stripped off his shirt. He fumbled around the rattling interior for his protective gear.

“One of these days, they’ll think to make these things climate-controlled and pressurized like the Eco-lab,” Travis grumbled, “How’re we doing?”

“Steady,” Lila replied, sounding as if she were speaking inside a barrel. “Lots of life signs behind us, but nothing like a Bigfoot or a mutant Grendyl.”

“If it’s a mutant, how would you know?”

“You felt the ground shake back there?”

“Yeah, a little,” Travis admitted.

“Had a lot of amplitude, don’t you think?”

“Now that you mention it….”

“Whatever it is, I think I’ll use the telephoto lens next time we go on safari, if you get my drift.”

The Rover and its cargo returned to level as it entered a planetary groove, a dead zone devoid of life, of structures, of anything at all. Bathed by the Rover’s forward lamps, the groove looked like a swept floor. It averaged thirty kilometers wide and scarred the planet for thousands of kilometers, coiling and twisting around cones. Travis’ dexterous hands moved all over the Rover’s console, checking for Screamers — nothing like Banshee trolls — but wind anomalies of unimaginable velocity. Scudding low along favored grooves, Screamers sucked breathable atmosphere from the base-land at random intervals. Even now, this groove looked sparkly with settling motes from a Screamer’s wake, come and gone as recently as fifteen minutes earlier. Outside the Rover, the airspace would have been soundless and still, a temporary vacuum filled with precipitating chips of gypsum and geological dust. Microwaves bounced off the surface at random, crackling in the form of static on the Rover’s detectors. The all-terrain vehicle chugged dauntlessly beneath Misery’s twilight, pressing beetle-like tracks into the glittering regolith, a layer of dust thin enough to wipe from the bedrock with a fingertip.  

“I think we made it,” said Lila. She sounded halfway relieved and halfway disbelieving as she watched an aching landscape scroll past her viewer. “Thank you, inhospitable planet, for your lopsided, disfigured face. Bless you for your wobbling axis, your gravitational flux and the winds that protect our base.”

Out of the forward darkness, home loomed. The Eco-lab looked like a mechanical ogre possessed of a humped back and braced cast-iron thighs, straining against its anchoring cables. It was both crude and civil, a metal monster on tracks and rollers. It seemed as if its ludicrous little windows, lights and strobes mocked the night, but Lila rejoiced to see them. Her comparatively tiny Rover jarred across the barren crust at its best speed, like a cub fleeing to its mother in fright. They soon passed the first of the Eco-lab’s eight anchor cables. Sunk several meters into bedrock, the cables ensured that the Eco-lab would outlast at the fiercest winds. A few moments later, Lila activated the Lab’s bay doors, which began to yawn with encouraging yellow light.

 “Home welcomes the intrepid travelers with open arms, just in time for dinner, Dr. Firecloud,” Travis said. His tone sounded nasally coming out of his helmet. He clapped the driver on her back. “Nice work, Lila.”

“Thanks, Dr. Rand. I hope this mean dinner is on you.”

 

Two hours later, they were clean. They felt safe.

Lila rubbed Scotty’s upturned belly while sitting beneath the oppressive brawn of Eco walls, ribs and bolts. From across their pedestal table in the dining hall, she watched Travis wolf down the final bites of his supper in near darkness. No high watt bulbs here — just a few chemical glow strips in strategic places — the conservation of resources in application. She reached up to wipe spaghetti sauce off her fellow researcher’s chin stubble, and it made him laugh. The intrusion of sound seemed awkward to both of them. Her hand snuck through the green shadows to touch Travis’ forearm where it lay beside his tray doing nothing but connecting his hand to the rest of his arm. The sensors in her nail weren’t blinking just now. She already knew every vein, every curve and every scar under her fingertip. She respected his strength and thirty-years-young virility, even if she beat him at arm wrestling half the time. She liked their equitable partnership. It felt right. She grinned at him, white teeth showing and everything.

“What?” he asked with mock suspicion.

“Well, what do you think?”

He dropped his amused gaze to the tabletop, pretending to cough. “I think we have a Sasquatch problem.”

Barefoot, Lila kicked his shin under the table, hard enough that one of her bandages came loose.

“Hey!”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Lila said.

“Whatever do you mean, ‘I should know it’, um…dear? We’re not back to that subject again, already?” Everything about Travis’ grin matched his scruffiness, slightly crooked nose and messy brown Jesus hair. Under that bandana, he looked as if he was smiling all the time, even when he wasn’t. Lila liked that. He wore a small gold cross through the cartilage of one of his ears. She liked that, too.

“Quit grinning like a troll and answer the question,” Lila said, “just a mandatory suggestion.”

Travis froze, sensing danger. He said, “Your eyes are sparkling. Make it stop.”

Lila took up Travis’ hand in both of hers. For once in her goal-oriented lifetime, she felt deep down beautiful, just glad to be alive. She leaned across the table to whisper, “Babies, Trav. ‘Baaay-beeez’. It’s a noun, plural, meaning very small children according to various dictionaries. You know, as in infants? Five years max after we win the Nobel Prize, no later. Babies. Got it? Good. I’m so glad we cleared this up.”

Lila laughed at the mock-stunned expression on Travis’ face and dropped his hand. Then shaking his head, he added his musical laugh. He could have been a professional singer.  

“You’re amazing, you know that?” he said, and then went back to chewing.

“Nope, not really,” she said, smiling, “Maybe you should enlighten me?”

Travis swallowed. “Maybe I will.”

“Holy cow, Scotty!” cried Lila as she recoiled out of the booth and away from Travis’ move toward her. Half a second later, Travis flung himself out of the blast zone as well, driven to the opposite side of the room by a malaise that hovered between he and Lila like a tangible entity, a genie on the rise. Lila glared back to the dozing terrier. In sleep, he flipped an ear at her. “Bad dog!” she scolded, “Bad, bad dog.”

“He’s not listening. He never listens.” Travis shook his head vigorously. “Now that’s the proper way to kill a mood. What in this world have you been feeding him?”

“Just the usual,” Lila said. “He’s a Westie, what do you expect?”

“Well, his timing...stinks.”

“Just wait till later, in the Cukkoon,” Lila snickered.

The man who never fit the image of a proper scientist pointed at the dog. “The Cukkoon?” he said. “That thing’s not sleeping with us tonight, oh no.”

Lila pouted. “But babe, he loves you, you’ll break his little canine heart.” Hands on her hips, she beamed toward Scotty. “Look at him, Trav. He can’t help it if he likes the finer things in life. He’s royalty, you know, a blue blood. The King of England feeds his littermates out of solid gold bowls and —”

Travis seized his prey from behind within two echoing strides’ worth of decking, but it wasn’t prey if it didn’t fight for life, was it? After the initial surprise, Lila realized how frightened he must have been for her in Cusp 9, by everything. Mister play-it-close-to-the-vest — his urgency betrayed him.

“Why are we here, Lila?” Travis mumbled against her neck. When she said nothing, he opened his arms and turned her around to see the concern in his eyes, and it was easy for her. She was as tall as he was. “I mean, really? You aren’t the glory type. You know what will happen. When Beowulf wraps up and the applause lifts you up to some stuffy stage, you won’t want it. You know you won’t want it. Fame and glory aren’t your style. You’ll reach for that proverbial brass ring, sure, but you won’t accept it.”

True, Lila couldn’t explain why she yearned to write herself into history books in some way even when she feared the limelight. Her whole life had been a paradox of modesty and ambition, genuine in humility, yet desirous of notice, even driven for it. Trav was right. What was wrong with her? Couldn’t she have both things: glory and anonymity?

“It must be hard to live like you do, Lila, torn in opposite directions every time you breathe.”

She sulked, saying, “Boy, you really know how to kill a mood — better than Scotty.”

“I just want you to be happy, Lillian, Prize or no Prize.”

 “What are you trying to say, Doctor Rand?” asked Lila. “I thought you wanted this as much as I do?”

He took a deep breath. “I guess I’m saying there’s this thing out there. We don’t know what it is, or what it wants. It’s already ruined so much of our work, honest, we should pull out. Be honest with yourself. This place is too dangerous with that creature on the loose. Forget all the ‘supportive husband’ hooey I talked about before coming here. I refuse to let anything bad happen to you.”

 “It’s not that I enjoy the idea of something happening to you, either,” Lila countered, “but we’ve come far enough, we’ll be criminals to pull out now.”

Taking Lila by the hand, Travis pulled her down into the booth of olive-green paint, utilitarian metal and polymer composites, saying, “Let’s not start a fight, okay? We don’t have to decide right this minute.”

Travis tried not to notice all the fresh scabs marring Dr. Firecloud’s smooth skin. Letting go of Lila’s hand, he looked down at his class ring with its snake staff twined into the gold. As an afterthought, he twisted the ring to face the gemstone upright.

“I was just thinking … it’s Halloween back home. We should celebrate, have a little fun and tell scary ghost stories or something.”

“Scary stories?” asked Lila. “We’re light-years away from home on an inhospitable planet, we have a dead guy in stasis, there’s a Sasquatch troll on the loose, and you need scary?”

“You first,” urged Travis. He grinned.

“Hm, well, I suppose. It’s not as if we’ll be having trick-or-treaters tonight. Are you sure you can handle it?”

“Sure.”

Lila’s smile in the subdued lighting had the edge of challenge to it. Maybe to her, the mood felt campy, and they were at the ice-cream parlor after a horror movie, drawn close to one another for security as much as for mutual attraction. All they lacked were the soda with two straws.

“I don’t know, but I’ve been told, the path to trolls is paved in gold.”

“Lila.”

“Okay, okay. Maybe this is true, who knows? Granma was dead serious about her trolls. She has her own troll theory, calls it proven fact, but she will go to her grave without telling anyone where it came from. She will say one thing only. She says to treat people kindly on the internet, because tolls were born in chat rooms and posting boards.”

Travis broke into a flashing grin of disbelief. He tried to hide it with his hand. “You have got to be kidding me,” he said. “The internet?”

Lila gave Travis the evil eye from behind strands of her walnut-brown hair. “Watch it, bub, nobody but nobody disses my Granma Firecloud.”

Travis tried to look contrite. “I would never dream of dissing your grandmother. She’s the one who married the Seminole man, right?”

“Yes. Granpa Firecloud was the son of a Seminole man and an Englishwoman. Granma is Dinka tribe, from Africa. She immigrated to the States in her twenties.”

“An interesting match,” Travis observed.

“Let’s just say mom’s side of the family is culturally rich, while dad’s side of the family is just plain rich. It’s a shame Granpa Firecloud is gone, now. He was cool. He was a great storyteller.”

Travis settled his face onto propped hands in a show of undivided attention. “Must run in the family.”

Lila smiled. She swung her hair behind one shoulder, getting down to business. “Okay, you’ve read the Bible at least ten times, right?”

“At least,” he replied.

“Do you remember the story where Jesus steps ashore from his boat and encounters a demon-possessed-man? The man wears no clothes and lives among tombs and solitary places like that. He’s the definition of ‘dysfunctional’. When Jesus commands the demon to come out of the man, the man falls at his feet and cries out something like, ‘What do you want from me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!’”

“Yeah, I remember that story,” said Travis. “It’s kind of freaky.”

“You got that right. The demon calls itself ‘Legion’ for there are many demons inside the man. They beg Jesus not to order them back into the Abyss, but instead, let them enter a nearby herd of swine. Jesus permits them. When the demons enter the swine, all two thousand of the beasts charge off a steep bank and drown in the lake.”

“I’ve always thought Jesus must have caused a temporary pork shortage when that happened.”

“Granma says trolls have a history kind of like those pigs,” Lila explained. Warming to the telling, she moved her hands in slight gestures. “Man’s mistreatment of man that evolved in chats and hid behind nicks somehow manifested itself as an actual spirit, or a legion of spirits, if you will. The unclean spirits of malice, intolerance, misunderstanding and plain old irascible meanness — they fed upon the pleasure centers of the human brain, in particular, those areas that are stimulated by the anticipation of revenge. This legion gorged itself upon hurt feelings and callousness. It controlled weak minds. It preyed upon even weaker morals. With such infinite fodder, a virtual cesspool of egomania, greed, and wickedness, the spirit legion spread and grew — not unlike one of Scotty’s nose burners, come to think of it — until the world reeked with it. The global community went dark and corrupt not long after the turn of the millennium. Remember that from school? Humanity as a whole devolved for a time.”

“Absolutely,” said Travis. “We had a brush with global anarchy back then. A fascinating study, really.”

Lila added, “Computer viruses proliferated to the point the internet became choked and worthless. Unconscionable people gouged one another with charges in every conceivable manner. They stole personal information and those old-fashioned credit numbers at every turn, invaded privacy without shame. They inundated the ‘net with immoral spam messages by the trillions. They took a basically good, beneficial tool, and spoiled it.”

“All well-documented,” Travis pointed out. “God bless America and the person who figured out how to salvage the internet.”

“You’re sure it was a person?” Lila asked. She cocked an eyebrow and raised a finger of “but-wait-there’s more”. With eyes fortune-teller wide, her voice went spooky to say, “Ah, but there’s an untold story, mon cherie. History won’t tell you what took place behind closed doors one cold, bleak All-Hallows Eve, when the forces of darkness supposedly exercise their power in purest form. Certain peoples of faith, thousands of people from around the globe, decided to rid the earth of the internet demons that had enveloped the earth and her circuitry. Following Jesus’ example, they called upon God to cast the unclean spirits out of the World Wide Web.”

 “Wow. Imagine the praying taking place before shoddy computers all around the planet. Oh, how those people must have clasped their hands and shaken with holy tremors. And that’s just to get the computers online.”

“Trav!”

“What? Good for them, I say, I do it all the time. ‘Oh please, boot up, you plastic piece of junk, I command you in the name of all that is saved on my storage chips.’”

“You do not. That’s a bald-faced lie,” Lila said, giving her husband a hard shove on the shoulder. “Do you want to hear the story or not?”

Travis fought to keep a serious, straight line to his mouth, moving a piece of stray hair out of Lila’s face. “Sorry, hon. Please do continue.”

“Their prayers were answered, smarty pants; those good people — they made a difference in Jesus’ name. And, writhing before the Lord God Almighty, the unclean spirits begged to avoid the Abyss. Since there are no pigs in earth’s orbit, The Lord banished the unclean spirits partway across the galaxy and into the gentle ape-like animals of this very planet, one of the first habitable planets discovered by man. Soon twisted and corrupted by the demons of Earth’s internet, the poor beasts developed into trolls, breeding and diversifying into the bloodthirsty creatures we know today.”

Travis couldn’t help it. He burst into laughter, and the storyteller laughed with him until he came down from the stratosphere again.

“A legion of unclean spirits from the internet, banished across space,” Travis said.

“Yep.”

“Ape-like alien animals, turned into trolls.”

“Yep.”

“That is the most preposterous, best Halloween story I’ve ever heard,” Travis declared, and laughed some more.

“Hey, it could happen,” protested Lila, but she grinned, too. “And it did happen about two hundred and twenty years ago.”

“So this is a big family secret or something? Your ancestors were among the ‘good people’?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“That sounds like something your father would say,” Travis teased. He softened the blow with a wink, but Lila looked down at her hands.

“Do you remember anything from mission training about the first expedition to this planet?” she asked, suddenly serious.

Travis sat back a bit. “It wasn’t much but a blip in my courses, but yeah, I know a little bit. Huge scandal. Half the team died under mysterious circumstances. Nobody really knows what happened.”

Lila nodded. “That’s what they taught me, too. What would you say if I told you that I suspect my great-great grandmother was part of that expedition — kept totally off the record?”

“I would say, ‘awesome’! Now, it’s my turn to fib my nether regions off.”

 

Dr. Travis Rand and Dr. Lillian Firecloud spent the next two hours swapping yarns and ghost stories. By that point, Travis couldn’t stop yawning long enough to cry “uncle” to Lila’s painfully bad troll jokes. She looked as exhausted as he felt, but she made no move to follow him when he slid out of the booth.

“I’m wired. Not ready for bed yet, hon,” she said, answering the unasked question.

“Are you planning to work on the Yapper anti-venom tonight?” Travis asked. He let a few strands of her hair slide through his fingers.

“Yeah, I feel like I owe it to Don. The arguer traps had some luck early this morning, near the east rim. There are two new samples of venom to work up. They shouldn’t take long. I want to up the priority on this, before you drag me home by the hair.”

Travis grinned at that, but just as quickly sobered. “Be careful, okay? Don lasted all of five days here. We hardly knew the man. Don’t take anything for granted.”

“That’s a bit of an odd goodnight, don’t you think?”

“Not for around here,” Travis stated. He scratched an itchy place on his temple before he scooped Scotty up. He swung the white terrier toward Lila with one hand. The animal hung there like a limp rag, proving its lack of concern for anything but sleep. “I could leave the ferocious guard dog with you, if you would like. As you can see, he’s stimulating company.”

“No thanks. I’m stimulated enough, I do believe.”

Travis sighed. “Don’t stay up too late, then. We have another long day ahead of us — all that analytic mumbo-jumbo.”

Arranging the terrier around his shoulders like a shepherd with a foundling lamb, Travis swung away from Lila and headed for the dinning room hatch. In soft clanging sounds, he and his shaggy companion drifted down the glow-strip pathways that would lead them to dreamland.

 Unlike Travis, Lila felt more unsettled as the hours had spun down. She couldn’t explain why. Maybe she was over-tired. She felt too jumpy to think about using the Cukkoon tonight. All in a row, big circles, Cukkoons reminded her of the clothes dryers at those old-fashioned Laundromats. Inside, they felt like oversize caskets. Sure, each ergonomic sleeping cylinder maintained a perfect atmosphere for utmost individualized comfort — crispy-cool, cozy-warm, or whatever one desired. Yes, the king-size mattresses were luxurious, and the sheets would welcome her with sleek comfort, but confinement and the holographic stars of home overhead? Not tonight. Her mind had a lot to whip together.

Lila wandered through more than a kilometer [6] of hallways and decking, covering all five levels of the Eco-lab from ground level to eighteen meters [7] in the thin air. Tap, tap, tap, her hand touched cool hull ribs in series as she checked the many labs, offices, recreation areas and the command center. She didn’t much care for the cramped engine room with its monolithic gears, chemical fuels and hydraulics. Everything smelled mechanical and oily — an interesting contrast to the medicinal, antiseptic smells of the upper decks.

Eco-life suited Lila well enough, although she preferred to hear more voices warming the emptiness. Dozens of scientists used to work in the Eco-Lab before it grew obsolete enough for troll work. This warren of hollow cubes, a slow-crawling building contained serviceable equipment and everything she and Travis needed to survive and work for months, even years at a time, but it didn’t contain much of what they needed to feel like real people. Trav scoffed, but the loneliness ate at him, too. See? He’d left the Cukkoon porthole un-shuttered for her so she could see him sleeping. How funny — the air filtration system was set on its highest setting.

Lila crept past dozens of circular hatches. The last Cukkoon on the bottom row contained the body. Weird, but she half expected to find the Cukkoon empty when she activated the iris and peeked through the porthole — the consequence of watching too many horror movies, no doubt.

Nope. Don was still there, still cyanotic and still dead. Feeling ridiculous, the young scientist nevertheless cycled the lights to spotlight the man’s naked feet. Size thirteen, she noted, and no signs of fur or loam debris. No fake strap-on feet in there, either. Glaring at the world with a slobbery shine, a criminal daub of Yapper venom stained the back of the man’s shoulder where he lay partially curled on one side, untouched for three weeks now, in stasis. He’d died instantly in his sleep, never knowing when the venom had soaked through his undershirt to his skin. Hey, they’d warned Mr. Macho about following safety procedures when working around Yappers.

“Sorry to have disturbed you, Don,” she whispered, locking down the iris to seal the stasis-chamber once more. “And thanks for fixing the linkage before you ‘checked out’.”

Lila turned around and leaned against the closed door for a few moments, feeling heavy and tired. She let her body relax while her mind remained fixated upon her mental checklist of slides and observations to transcribe. All of a sudden, little waves of sensory hyperactivity prickled the skin of her back. She pushed away and spun around, realizing she’d just made one of the top ten fatal mistakes victims make in slasher flicks. Never turn your back on a corpse, sealed-up or otherwise, especially on Halloween. A sharp movement of her hand on the control panel sent the iris spiraling open again, and there was Don again, lying curled as before. Lila’s fingers moved to touch her own throat, curious to know her current pulse rate. “Hypersensitive to stimuli,” she told herself. Had that strand of hair been lying across Don’s brow like that? She frowned, puzzled. She couldn’t remember.

“Get a grip, Lila,” she thought. Of course, that hair had been there, exactly as now. All the readouts confirmed the deadness of Don. Dead men don’t move in stasis. Nobody moves in stasis. Closing the iris once more, she departed from the sleeping quarters with quick, sure strides. She followed the road of glow-strips to the third deck where the grating felt cool to the blistered bottoms of her feet.

In her favorite lab, tucked rearward of more grandiose spaces, Dr. Firecloud reviewed her samples, data and images from the day’s excursion. She rubbed her almond-shaped eyes that knew well enough to be tired when her mind did not, slipped the next image into the holographic projector, and giggled.

Lila felt proud to have scored this image of the inimitable Yapper troll — off the charts toxic — notorious for refusing to give up the last word. Even a Grendyl would give it a wide berth. Lila’s earlier field studies had shown that Yappers would argue themselves to the point of fatal dehydration when confronted by automatic arguers set on “loop forever”. This female Yapper’s impossibly wide, toothless mouth flapped with pointless threat and profanity, frothing over with whipped spittle. Nearby plants browned and wilted instantly as bits of toxic foam showered onto them. Lila hit playback. For the second run-through, she activated the audio filter and translation module. As expected, the Yapper repeatedly contradicted itself. It had nothing rational to say, but it uttered creative new variations to the f-word, which she added to her notes.

The next series of slides contained the images of lesser trolls, showing first a treacherous Mind-games troll with its two-faced head capped by what looked like a built-in propeller beanie. The next slide showed a Mindless Me-Me-Me troll and a Whiner-Me-Me hybrid battling an Insulter troll. After that, Lila scrutinized the images of a Pseudo-Intelligence troll, the species of troll that tended to use godlike names and ALL-CAPS while making quips and picking what they considered battles of wit here and there. Lila also cycled through slides of Pervert and Slut trolls, Liar trolls, Time-Waster trolls and Hit-and-Run trolls, even Misguided Religious trolls. These lesser trolls belonged to the assembled-at-random set, comical things with mismatched body parts. Narcissism seemed by far the biggest common thread among them. Idly, Lila wondered what might have gone through their smidgens of brain matter during these captured moments in time. Were these trolls really so evil? Were they redeemable in some way? Maybe if she could cure the narcissism….

She clicked the next slide into place.

Lila’s doctorate was “only” an honorary title, true. She’d clawed her way to this moment on a shoestring and I.Q. Without Dad, his money or his famous surname, she’d constructed her own education system, married a “mere” Rand and crossed deep space that she might speculate about holographic trolls and redemption in the middle of the night. How naïve of her to expect her father’s approval when his twenty-eight year-old oddity had become the first and only person to earn her honorary degrees by auditing every class at three of the world’s most prestigious universities in three different fields of study. How naïve to hope for his pride in her blinking lights (very expensive, very exclusive) earned by way of twenty-four hour shifts in the labs, by never missing a meeting, and by volunteering for jobs nobody wanted — by being brilliant. Although Lila refused to adopt her father’s myopic ways, his official titles, degrees and signed certificates — most of all, his celebrity, like Dr. Aaron “The New Einstein” Reltih, she cared about knowledge and the acquiring of knowledge. Yet, somewhere in the mish-mash of her life lived a need so basic, it had driven her twelve parsecs from Redstone Arsenal to look at troll slides, to try to figure out why that very thing of looking at troll slides was so important to her. Maybe someday, along the way, she would unravel the mystery as to why Dad’s definition of failure was so different from her own. The Prize would fix that perspective problem, wouldn’t it? Everybody who was anybody understood the meaning of the Prize, especially Dr. Reltih. If only she had a Grendyl to add to the collection in jars.

Lila activated the next slide, and there stood a Grendyl troll. Hunched to the point of dragging its knuckles on the ground, heavy-shouldered, thick-limbed and small of head, the massive creature overpowered his environment just by standing there. Watching it, she gave thanks for the remote cameras. Half again as big as an African elephant, his disproportionately huge feet and hands cared nothing for what they smashed. This one grunted with suspicion toward the hidden camera, emitting noxious fumes from its froggy nostrils. He then disappeared from the grid, dragging his club behind him.

Lila’s dark eyes widened. She saw a platinum-hued blur behind holographic vegetation, just before the camera panned out. Leaning forward on her stool, the researcher felt a sudden pressure in her chest. Unseen behind holographic foliage, the Grendyl roared, growth shook and great cracking sounds on the speakers made her jerk her hands up to cover her ears. The holovid ended in silence, revealing nothing more. A part of Lila wanted to see the replay, but the greater part overruled the first. Standing on protesting legs, she shut down the projector, deciding to save both the replay and the Yapper venom samples for the ‘morrow.

Down in the mess hall, Lila stretched herself along a padded bench, using her hands and a lab coat for a pillow. Tumultuous, miserable thoughts wracked her, of Prizes slipping from her grasp, of lost work and keen, prying eyes. In reaction to the fluctuating outside temperatures, the sharp pinging sounds of her metal home seemed menacing rather than comforting as they usually did. Other than the humming of the air circulation system, it was so quiet, she fancied she heard footfalls on the deck above her, and she thought, “If that’s you, Trav, get yourself back to bed. Anybody else, please just leave a message and terrorize me in the morning.”

Exhaustion stripped Lila of her anxiety for a time. Sleep dragged her down from behind as surely as lions would. She dreamed of normal things — her father’s aloof excuse for a smile, herself charting the same complicated graphs again and again. She dreamed of Redstone Arsenal’s sterile hallways, and Alabama fireflies by the millions, yes, wondrous, starry millions of fireflies.

She entered a dark dream room, a rocket ship. She pulled herself up the side of a portal to look out. Grasses stretched away from the portal to the blinking tree line, revealing a moonlit pasture snowed with pinpricks of light — fireflies swimming slowly — all life moving slowly through a night as thick as water. The fireflies so captured her, she couldn’t remember when two lunar eyes had begun to burn in the quasi-darkness. Nearer, and nearer, the radioactive orbs floated toward her. They were Gemini moons, unblinking on course to meet her own eyes.

Lila’s heart felt strange when she jerked to wakefulness; felt it thudding hard enough to hear it in her head. The arm she’d slept on felt numb, and it had stuck to the bench by a film of her own sweat. She felt hot in the shallow trough behind her neck. Disoriented, all she could think about was the unreality of her state of mind and those darned freak-eyes. She stared at the nearest portal. “Bigfoot? Boogeyman? Bah!” she thought. “There isn’t anything out there, right? There can’t be. It’s all in your head, Lila. But what if there is something out there?”

She couldn’t look. No, she had to look. The suspense would give her a coronary whether she looked or not. Something in her shouted, “Don’t do it, Lila! Don’t do it!”

She got up from the bench and crept to the porthole, crouched low. Gingerly, with concentration, she unlatched the blast shield, slid it down. After waiting a long time, at least fifteen minutes of feeling foolish, she pressed her hands against the sidewall. She inched her upper body high enough to peek out the porthole. She knew it was sterile out there. It was inhabitable. No way would there —”

And there they were — nose-to-nose with her, boring into Lila’s psyche from the other side of the poly-metal window. There were volcanic yellow-green eyes and the illuminated planes of a huge, human face.

Lila came undone, utterly unglued. She shrieked with such hysterical intensity that everything choked up in her throat without the first sound. She slammed the spring-loaded shield shut, and then she fled rearward, tripped over a bench and pin wheeled onto the decking. The impact stung. She grabbed both sides of her head between skinned hands, because the Eco-lab had begun to scream.

It was awful, unthinkable, how the monstrous thing outside sank its hands into all thirty-two centimeters [8] of armor plating, crumpling arm holds out of the sidewall like it was made of paper. By the time Lila picked herself up, areas of bulkhead had gone red-hot, folding up in accordion pleats to either side of her body. The sounds grew deafening. Heat and shrinking spaces forced her to scramble past benches and tables on hands and knees. Through buckled ruptures in the hull, she could hear the anchor cables squealing, stretching and snapping with sharp “sprong!” sounds. The entire Eco-lab began to tilt.

Not possible. None of this was possible! But the “not possible” slid Lila across the decking before she caught herself against a table. Within the cacophony of vibration, twisting hull ribs and tumbling breakage, she felt the Eco-lab lift off the bedrock. It began to rotate into the quasi-vacuum. She saw the galley stove hurtling toward her from one direction and living-metal tentacles slashing toward her from another. She never knew which of them made contact….

Outside, a phosphor-eyed monster stood in silhouette with its six-story-tall “bug” pinned between the contact points of its arms. A cavernous voice rumbled, “Happy Halloween, Dr. Lillian Firecloud. Trick — or treat?”

 

“Lila.”

“Lila.”

Something warm and wet kept up a stroking to the researcher’s face, while another something shook her by the shoulder. “Go away, you,” she thought. “Why won’t you go away?”

“Lila, can you hear me? Lila? C’mon babe, wake up. What happened to you? Wake up, girl, we’ve been attacked.”

“Travis?” the woman muttered. She spoke without opening her eyes until she smelled the stench of Dave’s Doggy Crunch in her face. She peeped through her lashes just in time to catch a flash of pink swiping her nose. “Scotty, ugh, that’s enough. Stop that —”

“Thank God,” said Travis, kneeling next to Lila. He pushed her back down when she tried to rise. “Don’t try to move yet. How are you feeling? Does anything hurt?”

Does anything hurt? Lila concentrated upon the concept, the question, and her surroundings until the word, “No” wrung from her. She felt Scotty’s happy little paws trampling her stomach, but didn’t feel pain. Her brain registered her surroundings. How had she … a stretcher? Yes, she was on a stretcher somewhere on Deck 5, according to the stenciled sign behind Travis’ head. He must have been dragging her to the infirmary.

“It took me forever to find you,” Travis said gravely. “How in the blazes I slept through it all is beyond me. I think someone messed with the Cukkoon controls.”

Lila grabbed his shirt, wadding the fabric in her clenched fist. “Oh man, Trav, you have no idea. There was this thing out there with glowing eyes... huge... and strong...so strong. It wouldn’t stop! The walls, the anchors —”

“Shh — I saw,” said Travis.

Moving to sit cross-legged behind Lila, Travis pulled her upper body back against his chest, smoothing her hair. She felt the vibration of his voice through his chest when he said, “We have some serious problems, but we’re okay. Whatever it was, it made hamburger out of the starboard hull. Everything is a mess on all the decks from all the stuff not bolted down, total chaos — lots of broken glass in the labs — fun, eh? We won’t be airtight until I seal off the damaged area, but the water tanks held and the tracks seem okay. We can roll, if we need to. However, there’s this other little problem.”

Lila clung to Travis’ shirt a moment longer, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass, asking, “What? What now?”

“I’m not sure where we are,” answered Travis. “If the instruments are accurate, if they’re undamaged, it means we’ve moved at least five hundred kilometers [9] from our previous position. It couldn’t have been under our own power, could it? It would take a month for this hulk to move that far at top speed. We’re in an unexplored pit, Lila. I think this is Cusp 15.”

“That’s impossible.” Lila pushed herself upright, that she might see Travis’ face. He wasn’t kidding.

“Tell me anything that’s happened the last twenty-four hours, that makes sense,” he said.

“We need to follow disaster protocol, run through the checklists. That thing that hit us is no Grendyl, Trav, not even a mutant of one. It’s cunning. I — I swear, I think it’s after me.”

“Then why didn’t it kill you? By all the evidence, it could have shredded the Eco-lab into tiny souvenir pieces and that would have been it. Why didn’t it finish the job?”

“I don’t know! For fun later? I don’t get it, Trav.” Lila felt her head for some kind of injury that should have been there, but wasn’t. “You’re saying the cursed thing just snapped the anchors and carried this entire Eco-lab five hundred pitted kilometers in —” she glanced at Travis’ chronometer and did the math in her head. “In less than six hours?”

“Looks like it,” said Travis.

“Holy cow,” exclaimed Lila. “Why?”

Travis swallowed hard before he replied. “I can’t answer that, but I can tell you this much — the Screamer groove we thought was safe? It’s gone. Obliterated. Satellite downloads dated two hours ago show nothing but a giant dust cloud. That entire section of cusps took a big asteroid hit. Category seven.”

Lila’s mouth gaped open. Then she breathed out, “It knew.”

Travis slid his arm under one of Lila’s in support, easing her to her feet as Scotty bounced to the decking. “Come on Doctor, think you can walk okay? You have to see the dust cloud. It’s incredible.”

 

One week later, Lila needed to replenish her canteen. She couldn’t wait to remove the morning’s accumulation of pitloam from her skin. Though thirsty, she hesitated several meters from Cusp 15’s river, as would any wary beast. If she could have worn her gun around her neck pre-aimed or glued it to her hand, she would have. Too many mysteries remained unsolved; too many questions remained unanswered for her to continue her work without feeling as if she carried a target on her back. “Perhaps that’s the idea,” she thought to herself as she crept through the grass in duck-fashion. She ventured onto a jutting boulder. On muddy knees, she watched liquid violence navigate the rock-strewn course, and then she stretched her arm over the water.

Lila’s head snapped up on instinct. The same metallic sheen described by Travis and captured in the Grendyl vid passed through the growth at the opposite bank. She half-expected to hear subsequent roars and cracking sounds, but she heard nothing but the rapids. She waited, knowing in her gut it would happen, when a pale shape appeared out of the pit foliage and approached the riverbank. He was a platinum-tan giant no less, a man at least three meters tall. The arrival had such a surreal feeling in daylight that Lila oscillated from feelings of dread to curiosity, from alarm to excitement. Odd; she hadn’t expected that.

Standing up from her kneeling position, Lila shaded her eyes with one hand. Was this it? Was this the demon of the week before? Big feet or no, he seemed human enough. Certainly, he was no Sasquatch. He hadn’t evolved a fine coat of hair or reptilian scales, but he wore black pants. Lila decided to play ignorant, keep her cool. If he were to assault her, where would she go, anyway? Would she dive back into the forest for all of a few meters? If a Grendyl troll wouldn’t stand a cat’s whisker chance against this fellow, what chance did she have? For one thing, she could trash the obesity theory.

The stranger grew even larger in Lila’s perspective as he began to traverse the rapids and boulders on infallible bare feet. It was as if he couldn’t slip even if he wanted to. Funny, how the wet energy of the water lapped at his knees when it would have swamped her waist. The river-roar disguised any sound he might have made in his approach when he crouched upon the largest boulder midway, maybe thinking of the perfect greeting. With the sun at an unfortunate angle, Lila couldn’t see his eyes very well, not with all that wild, windblown hair obscuring them. They seemed firefly green when she was able to glimpse them. She took inventory: black hair, platinum skin, lunar eyes, powerfully proportioned — nowhere near troll. The boom of his voice rose above the river toward Lila in proof. “Greetings, earthling,” he said simply, “Take me to your leader?”

Lila blinked, thinking to herself, “In this historical moment of first contact, the best the ‘unknown’ has by way of greeting is a trite Hollywood line?”

“You speak Earth English,” Lila called back, giving a quick upward thrust of her chin. A shy “you-must-know-me-but-I-don’t-know-you” smile played upon her lips.

“Apparently so,” he replied.

The troglodyteologist pushed loose hair behind her ears. Good, she had a means of communication on her side. Cool, play it cool.

 “Boy, where’s your gun?” she called through the dancing, dashed droplets of water. “Don’t you know this is a pit infested with trolls? It’s crazy-freaky-killer out here. You need a weapon.”

 She had her gun, and Travis with his arsenal in the Rover would ride to the rescue at any moment. She’d activated the emergency beacon.

 The man looked at her, frank and steady.

 “I am a Weapon.”

 Okay. Keep him talking. Make time for Travis to find her. She fiddled with her canteen without looking at it, spinning the top off, twisting it down again, a metallic wispy sound.

 “I’m Lila,” she said as she squinted across the river.

“Call me Psy.”

“Where do you come from, Psy?” she asked. It seemed a logical question, nice and safe. She stooped to pick up a few rock chips and tossed them, “plink, plunk, plink” into a side pool as if she’d been on picnic all day with friends at Sipsey Park, carefree, just playing around.

 “I come from the same place you came from,” he replied. He was sort of smirking, she thought. She threw a smirk right back at him.

 “I don’t remember seeing you in the yearbook,” she said.

 He had the most beautiful laugh. It made Lila hear horses in her mind, the chuffing, soft way they used to greet her in the mornings, rich and deep.

 When the stranger’s laughter faded, he fixed Lila with his backlit eyes. “Maybe you did not look back far enough.”

 She snorted at that, or was it the flying water molecules that tickled her nose? “You look my little brother’s age — a few years younger, maybe.”

“You always judge by looks? What if I told you, there are two hundred and forty years between you and I?” he asked.

 “If you told me that, I would have to ask, ‘how would you know?’ I haven’t revealed my birthday.”

She had him, there. The stranger tilted his head to contemplate Lila in a disconcerting manner, so that his long, horse-like mane snaked runners of black over his mighty shoulders. There were beads of silver and blood red in the runners, sparkling in the thrown light of the water. He looked dangerous. Every line of his physique either stood taut or waited in supple readiness, but for what?

 Lila kneeled over the rapids, taking up two whirling, busy handfuls of river to splash away the grime. She wasn’t about to let herself meet Jesus with a dirty face. Dripping water from lashes and nose, she blinked up at the stranger again. “Making judgments and assessments is my job, my expertise, my life — and I’m good at it. You’re not a day over twenty. I’ll stake my reputation on it.”

 He almost disarmed her with his half-smile, until she heard him say, “People who stake their reputations or lives on their judgments, they always look shocked when they lose them. Ever notice that?”

“You say that as if by experience,” said Lila

“Perhaps,” said he. “But I suppose it is irrelevant.”

 Lila figured if here crouched the creature that had stalked her trolls, he had to know of her unease; had to smell it, taste it, maybe even hear the blood pumping in her veins on a different frequency than the river.

The being, or man asked, “Tell me, does your little brother have your interesting black eyes?”

Lila hesitated to answer. “Not really,” she said after a few moments. “They’re blue.”

The being said nothing, but his eyelids narrowed together, a bit of expression accusing her of a lie.

“He’s adopted,” Lila amended.

“I see,” said Psy. “The biological child failed to yield satisfactory results.”

Bold. Nobody had ever come right out and said it to her face before.

“That’s one theory,” she said, her tone gone flat.

The river imposed a constant, primeval roar between the being and Lila, rushing; it was always rushing and thundering with symphonic power, pointing out her human insignificance thousands of liters at a time. The stranger’s kaleidoscopic eyes regarded Lila through flecks of spray, their facets stoked with energy. She’d never seen a human face so beautiful that it didn’t seem real. She licked her lips, savoring the beads of moisture left by the spray. She couldn’t help asking a stupid question. She didn’t raise her voice this time.

 “Are you — are you an angel or something?”

 “What do you think?” he asked.

“I think—”

 The stranger palmed a lopsided chunk of native rock bigger than a Pseudo-intelligence troll’s head. For a sickening span of time, Lila feared he might up and smash her with it. Without any kind of warning, he crushed it. Self-preservation reflex clenched Lila’s eyes shut and forced her head aside to avoid the bits of stone that shot from between his fingers. The look she returned afterward must have been amusing, for he laughed again. There were sorrows echoing within that laughter as he opened his fist to allow the grit to spill from his hand.

 “I told you. I am a Weapon.”

 It made sense about the pulverized troll bones Lila had documented — skulls as thick as concrete slabs smashed flat into patterns like shards of pottery. She didn’t notice when her canteen dropped to her rock perch and bounced onto the riverbank.

 “Forgive me,” the stranger murmured. How the doctor heard his apology over the ages-old pounding of time and erosion, she would never know.

 “What did you say?” she asked. She should have asked, “Why did you say that?”, as she’d intended, but the answer might have been something she didn’t want to know, more of a premonition than an afterthought. She’d heard of conscionable soldiers saying, “I’m sorry” before plunging their weapons into the enemy.

 Psy lifted his hand toward Lila, and at first she thought the motion was symbolic, until his fingers shimmered, molten, stretching horrible claws out of the molecular stuff of his being. She gasped. Despite the distance between them, one mirror-bright claw had easily reached her throat. She remembered the tentacles from the night of the attack. Sliding up and over the contours of her jaw, the knurled top edge of the claw felt slick and modern. She knew that feel. It wasn’t unlike one of her own probes traversing the dermis of a subject. Cool alien metal glided along her cheek, taking up the blood that had seeped from a graze wound. She might have attracted a Grendyl and never known.

“Your blood is very dark, Dr. Firecloud. Have you — noticed?” asked Psy.

 “Brandywine has always been my color,” Lila replied in a hollow tone. She held herself like Granpa Firecloud would have, proud and steady. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the cruel claw withdraw across the rapids. Psy licked the curve of it, tasting the blood there.

She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe his audacity or the way he looked at her.

“Tastes good, does it?” spat Lila. Only now, did she begin to tremble. Years of nurses’ puzzled looks and offbeat comments rather jumbled up in her, and how dare this brute raise the same questioning type of eyebrow, as had they?

Deliberate in his reply, the stranger made a show of running his tongue along pearl-white teeth. Lila would swear his canines elongated into fearsome daggers as his tongue passed over them, but they appeared to return to normal when he spoke. “Tasty. It has an exotic ‘bouquet’, a very nice first impression. Type O is a favorite, but yours has — an aftertaste. What is that? Motor oil?”

There were goose bumps on her arms and alarms resounding between her ears. “There’s plenty more where that came from for you to find out,” snapped Lila. “How would you like me cooked?”

“Are you always this hilarious?” asked Psy.

She lifted one frontier-lacerated arm to perform a long pass through the air, indicating the wilderness all around. “Why don’t you ask the gallery? They catch my act almost every day.”

“I would rather grill you,” he teased.

“Very funny. You’re a punster. I love puns.”

“Hey, you started it.”

Lila crossed her arms in front of the institutional logo embroidered on her shirt. “Go ahead then, grill me,” she said. “Ask away. I suspect you’ve been waiting a long time.”

He seemed curious. “Tell me, Doctor, what did the boys say when you went All-American wide receiver your final year in high school football — age twelve in level twelve, no less? What did they say when you out-muscled them on their own terms?”

“I’m not sure that’s any of your business. Rather rude to ask at this stage of our acquaintance, don’t you think?”

“Just wondering,” he replied. “They must have been perplexed when you showed them up.” He laid his human-shaped arm across a wet boulder, lazy.

“They got over it,” she told him. Her apache-tear eyes glittered as much as her tone sounded hard. She hated that he knew so much about her when she knew next to nothing about him. “If you have points other than those claws and teeth, I wish you’d get to it.”

“Agreed,” Psy stated, adding a faint smile. “I could not help but observe some of your unusual qualities, Dr. Firecloud.” Huge fingers drummed the top of the boulder. “For one thing, you show up first at all my kills. For another, you pack like a mule. You have a keen sense of smell and hearing is that correct? You are observant as well. I admit, however, the intelligence factor throws me.”

“I could say the same about you,” said Lila.

“Touché,” he said, and then laughed. “I hear that often. Big guys like me are not supposed to be smart, are we?”

“Trolls are not supposed to be intelligent, no.”

“You know I am no troll.”

“There are many definitions of troll, Psy, and you happen to fit one or two of mine.”

“I cannot say that I blame you for thinking that,” he said. “The point is, there are many definitions of troll, yet not one of them includes intelligence; therein you will see my current conundrum.”

The hardness of Psy’s voice prompted the same pressure feeling in Lila’s chest she’d felt in the lab Halloween night.

“Conundrums are such a pain,” she said sarcastically.

“Sometimes. Sometimes they are interesting. You see, among other — purposes — I was made to sense things. I do not need your blinking lights to sense things.”

Psy said this, and eased himself upward from the river to his imposing three meters. Lila didn’t realize she was already leaving room on the bank for him, even as he swept the first step toward her, aggressive, covering an alarming measure of distance. “For instance, right now, your heart rate is up to one hundred and twenty beats per minute, correct?” he said. He made another splashing step. “Now it is one hundred and twenty-five.” He took yet another step. “and now it is one hundred and twenty-nine.” The forgotten canteen crunched flat beneath his foot. “One hundred and forty —”

“Stop it. Stop saying that!”

Ignoring Lila’s orders, the giant took another step. The sun disappeared behind his shoulders. He tilted his head, studious. “Your heart rate is up to one-fifty-five, blood pressure falling, body temperature ninety-four flat — somewhat low — for a human, anyway.”

“I said stop.”

Feeling sick, Lila crouched lower to the ground and backed toward the foliage in time with Psy’s advance. This was the craziest kind of waltz. Nothing should be able to move so three-kilotons-fluid as that.

The platinum giant lowered himself nearer to her eye-level, folding onto his haunches, propped on one hand. “Please do not faint, Doctor,” he said, near enough now, that she felt his cool, scentless exhale on her face.

Lila saw a spherical darkness closing up her vision and heard the telltale hum of a shutdown in her ears. Background sounds wanted to fade. She held onto her awareness by concentrating on the technical aspects of sliding down the barrel of a keggplant. Lila hugged her knees. When the worst of the buzzing had passed, she lifted her face to the sunrays that refracted around the stranger’s torso. For some time, neither person moved nor said anything. In the distance behind Psy, she sensed rather than heard the Rover crashing through the vegetation.

“You ruined my work. You ruined my life,” Lila said. It was a harsh, accusatory whisper. “You made certain there would be nothing worthwhile to study.”

He shrugged a shoulder beneath his ropes of black mane. “Sorry. Usually, I just kill bad things on Halloween,” he said.

“But you aren’t finished,” Lila said, matter-of-fact. She was proud of how calm she sounded, almost detached. How ironic, when her heart rate had accelerated to one hundred ninety beats per minute. He knelt all the way down on his knees, easing to the sparse grass.

“Been thinking about finishing it, yes — weighing if I should.”

“May I ask — why?”

“I hate trolls.”

Lila’s nails clenched into the backs of her crossed arms. She saw her seawall of denial and explained-away little oddities dashed to pieces in that one tidal-wave moment. Crumbling where no one could see, Lila became flooded with shame and things she refused to contemplate. Not anywhere but her subconscious and her nightmares, had she acknowledged those things.

The monster changed his form. He shrank downward, shining mercury-liquid in places. He reformed his body until he knelt before Lila as someone she knew, a six-foot-five someone familiar filling out a dark gray mechanic’s uniform. His long, black hair pulled itself back into a snazzy ponytail and his eyes mimicked a hazel-green color. Angling his head to look at himself, he asked, “Is this normal enough for you to feel less frightened, Doctor?”

She swallowed hard. Her smile looked wretched. “Hi, ‘Don.’ I didn’t think I’d get to tell you, but the steering linkage never worked better.”

He chuckled as he watched beetle-like creatures moving in the loam near Lila’s feet. “Thanks, I try,” he said. “Just please do not ask me to work on the Rover again. Alas, I tend to break those. I can rearrange my mass and density. I cannot lessen them.”

“You rigged the stasis diagnostics,” Lila observed. Lifting her head from her knees, she showed the pit her wry smile. “And you modified the Cukkoon to handle your weight; made sure you ‘died’ in there. I knew I should have performed an autopsy.”

Psy reminded Lila too much of her father’s sternness behind the eyes, when he chided her, saying, “What you should have done, was check the latest telemetry of all red-tagged asteroids. You missed the bulletin, as well. That is sloppy procedure, Dr. Firecloud. You and Dr. Rand are fortunate I did not miss it.”

“Sloppy procedure?” asked Lila, riling up and as growing as defensive as always when reminded of her father. “Well, things like autopsies and checking telemetry get a bit lost in the shuffle when you’re struggling to survive.”

“‘Struggling to survive?’ Is that what you call a single-minded purpose to win the Nobel Prize?” asked Psy. His gaze drilled into her. “Or perhaps ‘survive’ to you is something more important than the Prize or even the rote, daily preservation of your life? Perhaps it is more like learning about who you are?”

“Whoever, or whatever you are, you do get off on being cryptic,” said Lila.

“Do not play the ignorance game with me, please. Perhaps you do not fully realize why you study what you study, but I do. Knowledge gives you the leverage to change things, and you want to change something about yourself, correct? Maybe you would like to find proof of what you suspect happened with the first expedition.”

Lila looked up at him, straight. She broke out with, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect har-mo-ny. I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it com-pa-ny.”

Still kneeling before Lila, “Don” laughed, keeping his hands propped on the tops of his thighs. He shook his head in admiration. “Mind games. That is interesting.”

Lila shrugged, concentrating on the details of these final moments. She savored everything from the sunlight on her face to the breeze in her fine arm hair. She memorized the watery gurgle-sounds of the rapids and scrutinized the mimicked tan that showed past “Don’s” shirtsleeves. Lila noticed the stylized wolf head and crest medallion on cords around his neck, the two rings he wore, and the critical places he wore them.

“You’re married,” she breathed.

“A widower,” he clarified.

“Ah, I’m sorry,” said Lila. She paused, and then added, “She must have been a big girl.”

 Psy chuckled. “Not at all,” he said, gentle. “She was somewhat smaller than you are. I stood less than seven feet tall during our time together, only eight hundred pounds the year we married. We had a good marriage. She lived a long span of time, a full life. I miss her.”

Lila noted the man-thing’s use of archaic English units of measure like Granma always did back in rural Alabama. Maybe it was true, that he was more than two hundred years old. He would have been around for the Banishment, and the first expedition to this planet.

“She was human?” Lila asked.

“Mostly,” he said.

“I see,” said Lila. Her curiosity spiked — amazing, how that happened. “So she grew old and you just — grew?”

Psy lowered his long, dark lashes. He was quiet. Then, he stood up. Lila watched with fascination as he stretched both upward and outward, expanding himself to his former terrific size and form. “Increasing in mass and density over time is what I do. It is what black holes do. It never ends. I am a Weapon.”

“And Weapons kill trolls,” said Lila.

“Among other bad things,” he acknowledged, looking down at Lila. She craned her head back as far as it would go to see the fragmented aspects of his eyes like crystal shards, churning, changing, and judging.

The growth line across the river had begun to quiver. Lila knew she shouldn’t have called Travis. One of them needed to survive this place, this thing.

Lila made herself clamber to her feet, preparing to play decoy. In stillness other than trembling against the keggplant, she asked frankly, “So, Psy, have you decided?”

Psy shifted his weight, perhaps to disguise the readiness in his limbs, or perhaps because of it. “I have been watching you, Lillian. You know it would not do for the human element to have intelligent trolls propagating and running around unchecked. You have always understood that, correct? You know as well as I that the demon-possessed swine must drown. Tell me, should I stay my hand from that which the Lord himself has condemned?”

Ah, he’d referenced her God! She’d never understood why people like Dad couldn’t believe, when even demons and monsters believed.

Lila murmured toward the white sky, her eyes now shining wet, her hands moving upward as if pleading her case to a higher authority, “I don’t believe the Lord has condemned all of me.”

“I admit you have surprised me,” said Psy. “There was one other like you who surprised me. I would say you are like her, but you are more refined. You are gentle, less troll, more human.”

“I’m glad you approve,” whispered the troglodyteologist. Lila tasted the first tears of grief running down the convex curves of her cheekbones, mourning the loss of a type of contrived innocence, the one that prevented her from seeing the irrefutable evidence of chromosomes and DNA.

The stranger waited while Lila opened up for him, and for herself.

“That all-important ‘Human element’ you mentioned … everybody else takes it for granted, don’t they?” she said. “It’s an intangible something that sets Homo sapiens apart from anything in nature; sets Man apart as marked for God. Call me a fool, but I’ve never stopped believing in my own measure of humanity to dwell upon, or to see, that which people would fear in me — that something might be wrong with me. I’ve never thought of myself as the daughter of an intellectual genius and a woman with an unthinkable secret.” Lila’s balled fist thumped her chest above her heart. “I’ve only carried forward with ‘Lila’, with me, Lillian Firecloud, as if there lives in me no more darkness than in anyone else.”

Stooping low, Psy reached forth the smallest finger on his right hand to hook the necklace around the doctor’s neck. He watched the silver cross glitter in the sun. “And, is there ‘more darkness’ in you, Lila?” he asked, pensive. The pinky he laid against the base of her neck weighed more than a bar of lead, yet he held it with such care, she felt only the portent and the chill.

Lila replied in a low tone, “Am I demon-possessed? Am I more evil than normal people because of a little troll blood in my veins? Is that what you want to know? I can only admit I’m as dark as they come, Psy, the same as you and everyone else. Back home, people want to believe they are better than others — less sinful, more pure — according to the station to which they are born, or according to how they live their lives, the good things they do, but that’s a fallacy, isn’t it? There’s no distinction between ‘evil dark’ and ‘just a bit dark around the edges’ in God’s eyes. There are no acceptable gray areas when it comes to sin and no such thing as a so-called good person who is ‘light enough’. Everyone is full of darkness next to the holiness of Almighty God.”

The twinkle never reached Psy’s eyes to soothe her. “It does seem rather hopeless, doesn’t it?”

“It would be, but for grace. Thank God for grace!” Lila’s brief smile showed confidence, not fear, toward the bit of sky showing beyond Psy’s form. “I rejoice to know the one big difference between trolls and humans — something you’ve either forgotten or failed to apply to me. Humans have the capacity to repent of their darkness and accept God’s freely given redemption … trolls don’t. Maybe I am not one hundred percent human, but I have always believed I am human enough to accept redemption; human enough for faith. If that’s not human enough for you, then so be it. It just isn’t.”

The creature (and he was a creature in the truest sense, for he had not been born) remained joyfully silent for a time. The river behind him remained forever tumultuous, cascading, tumbling like his kaleidoscopic irises. Beyond the river, the oncoming Rover sounded like three or four bulldozers in the growth. The Weapon’s giant fingers moved to tip Lila’s chin upward. No alien claws or daggers erupted from him, but she thought of deep space in a new and strangely comforting way, uncertain if the thought had originated from her own mind or not. She wished her father would smile at her like that.

“Go home, Dr. Firecloud,” Psy rumbled, sounding like Lila imagined Gabriel or Michael would have, warm yet distant. “Go home to your family, your friends and your harvest moon. You do not need to study trolls to learn how to change what you are. You do not need a Nobel Prize to prove your humanness or prove to your father that you are human enough to deserve his love. Go home to every Halloween that shrieks into being. Have your babies. Tell your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren your stories about trolls and monsters.”

The cosmic phenomena in Psy rippled his metallic tonnage, and like a mirror, reflected the sky, the pit foliage, and Lila’s staunch body. She gained a sliver of insight into his true nature before he shifted back to his platinum color phase and turned away.  The Weapon strode to the riverbank. There, he paused to regard the troglodyteologist from over his shoulder. Something edgy and hungry had arisen in his changeling eyes, triggered perhaps, by the nearness of his next victim.

“Promise to tell your progeny something for me, Lila,” he said. “When you tell your children your stories, also tell them why they should mind their ways. Show them where to find redemption and the love of God. Let them know they should never, ever indulge their inner trolls.” He laughed and added, “Especially on the internet. There’s this thing out there. It only kills unredeemed, bad things.”

 

All done.

 

Footnotes

See also chart “TTTOT_lineage.xls” for Lila’s ancestral line.