Strategies Against Nature

by Cody Goodfellow

  Whatever he had that the vats couldn’t replicate, that Nature had succeeded in keeping a secret from his masters, he gave it to her.

  And then he gave it to her again.

  He awoke with his scalp prickling and eyes on fire. He was alone in the bubble. The interior was an opaque mirror. Surrounded everywhere by melting kaleidoscopic reflections of himself, he reached for the wall of the unfaceted jewel and forced his hand through it.

  The sensation was like being electrocuted. All the blood in his arm seemed to turn to snow, and he was quite sure his hand would shatter when he pulled it back. But it only tingled and twitched, so he clamped his jaw shut over his tongue, closed his eyes, and dove out of the bubble.

  Shreds of it clung to him, a sticky, jellyfish-stinging mess that gummed his eyes shut and webbed his fingers. He heard Lilith cry out. High, sawtoothed grass scythed at his legs, but he struggled towards the forlorn, echoing sound, raking the slime out of his eyes.

  Seeing it did not help.

  Lilith lay prone on the grass, in the shadow of a gigantic, translucent spider. This perception, made in haste, despite the creature’s having way too many legs to pass for an arachnid, a protoplastic carapace like molten blown glass, and a baroque array of eyes, antennae and downlink dishes on stalks and turrets instead of a head. But Harvey didn’t stop to classify it, or to consider his own chances of survival.

  The sight of a brace of surgical forelimbs poised over Lilith’s naked body sent Harvey into a red rage. With no other weapons at hand, he snatched up a fistful of the bladed grass and swiftly braided it into a garrote. The spider twitched its bloated abdomen and sprayed Harvey with more of the infernally smart bubble-matter. Blinded, drowning but undaunted, Harvey fought upstream with his head down, leapt over Lilith and vaulted onto the monstrosity’s bucking thorax.

  All its myriad limbs reached up to dissect him, but he hugged the thorax and looped the grass garrote around the sensory array jutting out of the crack in the spider’s exoskeleton. The jagged quartz teeth of the grass sawed through stalks so effortlessly, Harvey nearly cut both his thumbs off when he hacked the monster’s “head” off at the root.

  Instantly, the shell beneath him went soft, collapsed and dissolved into a viscous pool of smart matter, totally enclosing Harvey before he could stifle his scream and hold his breath.

  The agonizing sting of the melted spider paralyzed him, but he could see all too well as two more spiders climbed down from the enormous central mangrove tree, glided across the surface of the inland sea and scuttled up to Lilith. He could only writhe in impotent torment as they bore her off, back to the tree and into a hollow in the labyrinthine tangle of roots at the base of the trunk.

  He fought until he ran out of breath, and inhaled gouts of liquid spider. Horribly, he could still absorb oxygen through the thick fluid, but he couldn’t fight the inexorable pull as the monster reintegrated itself into a spidery form and carried him back to the airlock.

  When he raced through the fungi jungle to the outer hatch, he wanted only to find a weapon, but he crashed into the sealed airlock and pounded it until bloody smears obscured the empty blackness outside. The redshifting starburst of his ship’s departing thrusters twinkled in the void.

  Hot tears erupted from his eyes and floated away. He had come here puffed up with the importance of the message he bore. It was a shock to discover that he had not been the messenger, but only the disposable bottle.

  In time, he found that most of the mold and fungi were edible, and that one conduit leaked water vapor that he could trap and condense in a boot. Living in micro-gravity, he began to succumb to malnutrition and radiation sickness, but there was little else to look forward to.

  Perhaps he lost his mind, or the slowtime programming from the flight took over, but he had only the growth of his hair and beard to measure time inside the airlock. The asteroid tumbled past like a carousel, a pleasing, meaningless blur. He munched the sweet, downy mold that grew in his armpits and groin, and he watched.

  Inside, the pageant of wildlife became a fiery wheel that circled the great central tree, as it erupted with verdant arrays of strange new leaves and, finally, fruit.

  The pods ripened in the starlight like balloons, swelled and grew into transparent wombs, each bearing a twinned pair of embryos that grew from tadpoles to nimble bipeds, grappling in their tumescent incubators while Harvey took a catnap.

  All too soon, the first fruit was harvested. The spiders delicately sliced open each womb and extracted a bumper crop of wailing, wriggling human babies.

  His babies.

  If Lilith ever came back out of the tree, she moved too fast for him to see her, but once the harvest had begun, a pavilion of carnivorous water lilies erupted out of the sea to exude a nursery, and the spiders showered their bounty upon her. Lying upon the bed of a massive white lotus, she was plump and sluggish, but she smiled as she took up each infant in its turn to let it suckle at her breast.

  Harvey understood, at last, why the Invisible Hand always said that sentience was a privilege, not a right. Harvey could never rapture himself, but self-awareness was a cruel luxury he would gladly trade for some tools, a mate and a more varied diet.

  He could take no more. He repaired his spacesuit, scraping the seals clean and grafting patches from his own skin to pressurize it, and hacked away the fungi reefs until he found an antique equipment locker. After raiding the forgotten trove of cosmonaut tools, he threw the switch to open the outer airlock.

  Sucked out on a blast of frozen air and spore-clouds, Harvey barely caught the handrails on the outer shell. His suit was leaking from dozens of tiny holes. Condensation beaded and froze on his visor. The agonizing squeal of depressurization filled his ears, but soon enough, they popped, and silence reigned.

  The airlock module was cannibalized Russian orbiter junk, but it was still fiendishly useful to the cosmonaut in deep trouble. Tethering himself to a bulkhead by a lifeline of braided fungi, Harvey swam around to the skin of the bubble.

  A woven diamond lattice formed the skeleton of what was essentially a gigantic animal cell membrane. His helmet magnified the view to show him metropolises of mitochondria and stranger organelles, massing under his shadow to repel an attack. But it had no defense against what he did next.

  Ripping the packaging off the thermite welder, he fired it up and jammed the white-hot wand into the membrane.

  A blister formed in the outer surface as the membrane struggled to dissipate the heat. Overloaded, it parted like lips blowing a kiss. Harvey hacked it wide open with the welder and dove into the momentary fissure an instant before it sealed over him.

  Harvey swam through corrosive cytoplasm, accumulating giant lysosomes like lampreys pumping digestive enzymes into his skin. He could barely make out the lotus pavilion where the woman he loved tended his children, but the inner membrane seemed just out of reach of his thrusting knife. Actively hostile fluid percolated into his suit and drowned him, mercifully, before he was completely dissolved.

  But not wasted. Nature’s Mother squeezed every atom of energy from earth’s surviving hostage biomass, but Harvey could still teach it a few lessons about survival.

  Rogue fragments of his DNA spun protein shells and waged trial by combat to evolve a host of new viral varieties that passed easily through the inner membrane via the keyholes for the arcology’s own regulatory viruses, into the water and the air of Eden, and into the wetware of Paradise.

  Harvey opened his eyes.

  The grass towered over him, casting green, sawtooth shadows on his tiny, furry form. All around, predators stalked, but the water’s call was irresistible.

  Harvey opened his eyes, and ate himself.

  The whole of the garden splayed out beneath him as he rode the wind and roosted on a branch drooping with human fruit, but his eye darted about restlessly, looking for prey like a fire in danger, always, of burning itself out.

  Harvey opened his eyes.

  The plains spre
ad below him, food forever, in all directions. Scurrying rodents clamored to feed on his droppings, and birds of prey circled over the nearest grove of trees, dogging his trail in hopes of scavenging from his next kill.

  Harvey opened his eyes.

  He twisted around a drooping vine, and looked into Lilith’s eyes. Her child army lay frozen with terror around her. He had no apple to give her, and he knew nothing of scripture.

  “Do you want to know a secret?” he asked her. His forked tongue made a hash of the words, but his fangs worked like they should.

  Lilith closed her eyes and opened her arms, and accepted him.

  FLEA CIRCUS

  “Before you enter, we must discuss, once more, the rules.” The whisperer blocked the last doorway in the dim, dingy corridor, as if Lena Spielbaum might prove so insane with eagerness as to charge in, as if the Shroud of Turin awaited in the basement hotel room.

  Again with the rules, and not a discussion, but a lecture. Her dismissive smirk was lost on the hulking—manager? wrangler? pimp? She settled for blowing the dregs of her smoke at him, then doused it in the drained martini she’d brought from the bar.

  The rankest amateur acts confused secrecy with showmanship, and the paranoid ones always let her down the hardest. If they thought you could steal their gimmick, they had crap. Lena had not staked out her lofty, if narrow, perch in the talent game by wasting time with rubes and grifts. Schooled by her Daddy, Solomon Spielbaum, king of the Borscht Belt circuit, Lena was no mere agent, but a true old-school talent scout.

  But these days, anyone who could carry a tune or juggle got an agent in the womb, and charm, brains, pipes and performance chops could be digitally grafted onto any hot young pair of silicon tits, so Lena had been rolled back to stalking these regional talent conventions for animal acts and performing freaks—they preferred the term “natural talents”—but she still proudly scouted for the biggest freakshows of all.

  “Listen, Svengali,” she shot back, “Maybe Morrie didn’t tell you who I am, but I don’t scout for state fair sideshows. I place acts on network television, movies and commercials. I’m not here to take pictures, make recordings or any of that. Just let me see it, with my own two eyes. I won’t be ten seconds, if it’s something I’ve seen before, and believe me—”

  “It will take longer than that.” The gatekeeper raised his voice to a sandblasted croak. “No recording devices,” he repeated, just like a recording, “and you will tell no one what you’ve seen. No mirrors. Do not attempt to touch anything on the stage, and above all, do not speak to, or otherwise disturb the talent. To upset his concentration during the performance would be dangerous.”

  Not for the first time, Lena questioned the wisdom of coming here. All these conditions suggested a gaff, or a creaky magic act that would never translate on-camera.

  “Okay,” the manager said, but he didn’t move right away. He seemed to be ticking things off in his mind, or summoning some emergency reserve of guts, before he opened the door.

  They stood in the dark long enough that Spielbaum hugged her purse and waited to get coshed.

  Did these people even consume entertainment? Did they have any notion at all of how to present a show? Lena’s grandfather was in vaudeville. He did the blowoff shows at Coney Island—comedy, singing, stage magic, the works—and if he never cost Joe Brown, Al Jolson or Houdini a night’s sleep, he surely knew how to suck in the rubes. Once a slave to a good pitch out of pure love for the game, Lena preferred now to just eyeball the act in full fluorescent light.

  And here, she’d done something she never did anymore. She went in blind. Over drinks with Morrie Lowe tonight, she’d let herself get sucked into his pitch for this act, which he didn’t even represent. Okay, he didn’t pitch it, so much as warn her away like a cancer survivor warns a young smoker, but if he really meant it, he should’ve known better. His stark, unblinking stare, the waxy pallor under his carrot-orange bottle tan, the breathless hitch in his runaway train speech, sold her on a peek, though the hysterical old bastard wouldn’t tip a hint as to what the hell it was, beyond calling it a “kind of an animal act.” She ought to book Morrie. His preternatural bullshit juggling skills were, if not superhuman, at least an oddity worthy of a regular bit on the Kimmel show.

  Were they about to throw a feeble flashlight beam on a fiberglass Fiji Mermaid, or would they pass her a bowl of spaghetti to fondle in the dark? And these are his guts. . .

  When the pitch-blackness finally broke, she covered her eyes to shade them from the weird purple glow. It wasn’t bright, almost wasn’t light at all, so much as a pure color, a luminescent stain that saturated the murky room.

  Her eyes dried up until they felt like garlic cloves, sinuses parched and cracked and stung like someone had reamed her nostrils with a potato peeler. The lurid purple didn’t dispel the dark, only antagonized it, sending it jittering around in all the corners and folds of the room and its anonymous contents. She could not initially see the light source, nor could she find her shadow.

  The room wasn’t hot, so why was she sweating so much? And why did the walls and floor seem to warp and melt, as if through roiling serpentine heat haze? She wasn’t cold, so why did her skin prickle in gooseflesh?

  Maybe it’s a menopause machine, she kidded herself, but it boomeranged on her. Maybe the light was some kind of jury-rigged x-ray projector, powered by naked plutonium. What the hell kind of act was this?

  Maybe it wasn’t an act. She wracked her brains to match the manager’s face to anyone she’d auditioned before, but drew blanks. Lord knows, she’d put down enough flop acts, and filled a few file drawers with hate mail, death threats and Ex-Lax brownies. Nobodies got angry when you told them the truth.

  But something about the light stilled her tongue. It porcupined her buzzing brain with shivery needles of that same paralyzing euphoria she identified with her brief and unhappy dalliance with cocaine. Never at a loss for words, she might have idled there with her mouth an open flytrap for several minutes before her eyes adjusted to the uneasy gloom, and the room gave her permission to move.

  Her burning eyes came to rest, under fierce protest, on the man sitting on the queen-sized bed behind a folding card table. A sheet draped over something on the table, which was the source of the purple light. Cue music: Is That All There Is? (instrumental bridge)

  He was younger than most folks who chased this kind of fame, but he looked ill, even accounting for the unflattering light. She pegged him as a rube, a shill from the audience, with his self-inflicted haircut, a canned ham for a head, a parolee’s cheap blue suit, dull black aviator shades and a sickly, vacant smile that looked like his lips hated his teeth. A smile for biting the heads off chickens.

  The geek ignored Lena. Staring straight ahead at a darker square on the desert-motif wallpaper where a picture of a lone cowboy must have hung until tonight, he reached under the sheet. His creeping hand set the purple light’s strobing wildly off-kilter, the pulses vacillating from maddeningly fast to heartbeat slow.

  Still, she stood rooted, slack-jawed, while the seconds crawled. Was she really in some kind of trance, or did the pulsating light gum up the works of her internal clock? Or would she look out the window and see the semis on the interstate crawl by like eighteen-wheeled tortoises, held hostage to this abortion of an overgrown science fair act?

  At last, the grinning geek snatched away the sheet with a flourish. Exposed, the raw purple glow got no brighter, but deeper, heavier, pouring out of a globular lamp in a wire cage on a short post anchored to the center of the table. It hung low like a dire sun over an elaborate miniature circus.

  The ferris wheel and the carousel began to whirr and turn, but Spielbaum was distracted by the sight of her hand in front of her face. Her bones and veins and muscles and overworked nerves shone through in soft silhouettes, like when you put your hand over a flashlight in the dark. The violet light oozed through it, and she could feel it. The longer she looked, the deeper the light penetra
ted, her hand expanding into a landscape, a horizon filled with the glowing households of a million billion nuclear families, all tuned in to the Lena Spielbaum show. Her cells, silent shareholders in the bold venture, now in its forty-ninth sleeper season.

  Lena did acid once in college, and paid a steep price for breaking the cardinal rule her guru boyfriend told her: never look in mirrors. She’d picked holes in her face that still called for a thick foundation of makeup. If this was a flashback, triggered by the light, she should get back to her room and lie down and listen to some soothing music. She should leave—

  Snap out of it!

  The manager shuffled into the room holding something big and flat under a black cloth.

  “So,” Spielbaum said, “you guys new to show business? What line of work were you in, last week?”

  For as long as he could remember, for business or pleasure, Joe Sudweeks was an exterminator. From lazy childhood afternoons with an anthill, a magnifying glass and a can of lighter fluid, and the chloroform and formaldehyde kicks of biology dissections, to the roving nights with Rat Patrol Pest Control, killing nasty lower forms of life had always put food in his head and joy in his heart. A man of simple tastes, he knew the joys of being born to a job and doing it, but he never gave up on his dreams. Maybe that was why he blew it.

  At first, Joe’s ambition had seemed satisfied with the little extras he brought home from work. Some houses had a lot of nice things, and maybe he might have lifted a few items nobody in their right mind would have missed. The accusations of theft galled him so much, he took a swing at his boss. Pointless to cry about it, now.