Bruce Sterling - Luciferase

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2024-11-24 0 0 68.93KB 12 页 5.9玖币
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Luciferase
by Bruce Sterling
His flesh lit up with erotic need.
The urge within him was beyond comprehension. It was cosmic: its own pure justification.
Light shocked out of him in a tumbling chemical rush.
Someone smashed into him with a violent scrabble of claws. He lost his grip on the grass stem and fell
spinning into the dirt. He lay there stunned, legs folded tightly across his belly.
His assailant plummeted after him from the twilight sky. It was Peck, a spider. Peck hit the rotting leaf
litter and rebounded on powerful legs. He spun his spiny carcass, his domed eyes searching for prey like
a set of black periscopes.
”Peck, it’s me. It’s Vinnie.” Wisely, Vinnie stifled his tremendous urge to flash. Peck would attack
anything that lit his eight black eyes.
”I need to eat you right now,” Peck said reasonably.
”Peck, you can’t eat me, okay? Fireflies are poisonous.”
Peck had molted since the last time their paths had crossed. His bristling, aggressive body had almost
doubled in volume. Peck might be as dumb as a clod of earth, but you could never fault a jumping spider
for audacity.
The nights were growing longer, and Vinnie wasn’t getting any younger. He bent his flat head and striped
thorax, tumbled sideways with an effort, then clambered to his long, hooked feet. He’d reached full size
for a firefly, and the grueling effort of his nightly displays had cost him a lot of weight. He felt
light-headed, giddy, and possessed by a frustrated lust.
Peck’s fierce attack had just damaged his left midleg. The complex joint between Vinnie’s coxa and
femur had gone all leaky.
Peck looked a bit embarrassed. By his nature, Peck was susceptible to good sense; it was just that his
all-consuming urge to leap, bite, and devour was more than he could handle. “Vinnie, was that you I
jumped just now?”
”Yes, of course it was, and you’ve busted my leg. Get this straight, Peck: I’m a lightning bug. If you ever
eat me, you’re going to vomit and die.”
”But I thought you were just a nice, tasty beetle.”
”We’ve had this discussion before, Peck. Iam a beetle. All lightning bugs are beetles. Beetles of the
family Lampyridae.”
Peck drummed the littered earth with his murderous spiny forelegs. “You’re awfully soft-bodied for a
beetle.”
”I don’t need any armor, because I’ve got toxins,” Vinnie snapped. “I’m also built light ‘cause I fly! You
want to eat something soft? Kill a snail!”
”I don’t like snails,” Peck muttered. “Snails got no legs and they eat with their tongues. Plus they got big
hard shells!”
Vinnie sighed gustily through his spiracles. Why were spiders so mulish and picky? Snails were delicious.
Vinnie himself had eaten snails, back when he was a grub.
When he had been a kid, all he had wanted to do was burrow, eat, and grow. No adult airborne
displays. No burdensome public reputation as an artist. Yet he’d been so happy and excited, innocently
writhing in the loamy dark. Kids were like that.
Vinnie leaned against a tall dandelion stem and unhinged his striped wing-covers. His left midleg was
screwed up, but he was itching to get aloft and shine. “Peck, I forgive you. You’re a dumb, meat-eating
spider, but at least you don’t use webs. Those are just plain irresponsible, webs.”
”I could chew your broken leg off,” Peck mused. “Your legs aren’t poisonous.”
Vinnie wriggled his damaged joint cautiously. “How’d things work out with that lady friend I
recommended?”
”Oh! She was so pretty!”
”How come you’re still alive, then?”
”I tried my best to get close to her,” Peck said gloomily. “I really hoofed it up for that chick. I did my big
courtship peace-dance … But she gave me the brush-off. Wrong species.”
”She didn’t eat you,” said Vinnie. He was genuinely curious.
The spider tore at the earth in embarrassment. Peck was reluctant to engage in such personal
confidences, but, being a lone predator, he rarely had the chance to talk things out with a sympathetic
listener. “I was so ticked off by that. Really, I felt like attacking her and eating her myself. But … well …
that’s just the way chicks are … All dames are trouble, basically …” Peck’s distress was growing.
“When, Vinnie? When will I find a decent girl willing to eat me?”
Vinnie preened both his antennae. “It’s a terrible thing, loneliness.”
”It’s all I can think about. I need to find the woman who’s meant for me. I want to become one with her.
I want to lay my body down … afterward, you know … Feeling so nice and tired then, done with all this
struggle of life … Complete, like, fulfilledness … Fulfillitude …”
”’Serenity.’ That’s the word you’re looking for, Peck.”
”And I want her to eat me. I do. Maybe she’ll eat me real nice and slow, while I’m all full of venom,
paralyzed, and still alive!”
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分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：12 页 大小：68.93KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-11-24

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