"I can't pull stunts like that!" Peck protested. "Because my flesh isn't poisonous! Some bird would pick me off in a hot second." Peck ran one foreleg through his venomed fangs. "All this sex talk sure makes me hungry."
"Don't you dare bite me," Vinnie said.
"But I'm ravenous! If I don't eat, I'm gonna die!"
"How about a tasty mosquito?" said Vinnie. "A female mosquito with a belly full of fresh blood! That's mammal blood! Right off the top of the food chain."
Peck perked up. "Now that's what I'm talking about!"
Vinnie loathed mosquitoes. Their brainless whining spoiled the limpid beauty of his evening flights. When mosquitoes were full of blood, they were a serious collision hazard. "Over there at streamside where the water smells bad, those parasites are out of their heads on pheromones. There's a cloud of ‘em there tonight, a big orgy. I'll take you there right away. You follow my taillight and you'll make out like a bandit."
It was an enticing prospect and a genuinely friendly offer, but romantic rejection had made Peck jaded. "You know that I can't fly."
"You can hop! You can jump! I'll fly low for you," Vinnie promised. "I'll glow bright, just for your weak spider eyes."
"Look, my eyes are just fine," Peck lied. "I'm great at tracking motion! It's just, well, I can't focus too good. So once you're up there flashing, well, those big blurry lights could be anybody."
"Peck, give me a break. You'll know it's me, because my skills are second to none. Now pay some attention and learn about the state of the art in aerobatic luminescence."
The tough climb up the tall stalk got Vinnie warmed up. He poised himself under the canopy of the dandelion bloom, flapped open his casings, extruded filmy black wings, and took flight.
Light shocked out of his slatted belly and the world exploded with meaning. He was a glowing arc across the nullity of darkness. His very being was focused: to connect.
He and his fellow artists were chips of sunlight smuggled from day into gloom. Illumination streamed from his being. When a woman responded from her private world in the vital undergrowth, he did not so much see her message as become it: that female response pressed directly on his soul.
He felt too bright to eat, these days. He knew that it was important to chew, to swallow, but he couldn't seem to focus any interest in anything but mating. It was as much as he could do to suck a little nectar in the after-hours, during the blue glow of dawn. Even tasty loaves of pollen seemed boring now, beneath him somehow. There was a clarity, a purity in this radiant giving of his essence.
It could not last, he knew that. Yet each new gout of light, as it burst from his flesh, each bout of soul-bruising carnality, pushed him closer to wisdom.
Once airborne, he forgot Peck at once. It made no sense to waste his art on some dirt-bound spider. The evening air was a pageant of glittering rivals. The ground below was bejeweled with willing women.
The night was splendor itself. The air had just the right level of dampness to avoid desiccation, and a light, assisting breeze that was perfect for stunting. His powerful wing muscles blew heat through his long body. He lit up like a falling star.
He was reaching a personal best, this evening: he felt calm, mellow, yet tingling with anticipation. He looped, he swirled: masterful accents against the velvet darkness. No frenzy anymore, never too much zeaclass="underline" his glittering arcs were a languid commentary on the universe, an invitation to enhance one's state of being.
The other flyboys in the evening air with him tonight … Yes, these were his rivals, the genetic competition, but Vinnie couldn't help but admire their skill. Some ugly bitterness had died within him tonight. Even the worst among them …. the guys pulling cheap stunts, the vulgar ones who just trawled the briar patch, same old same old … At least they had heart. They had desire, need. Life meant something, even to them.
Then he saw her.
She had a woman's glow. Women didn't glow in the way men did. They didn't glow for the sake of fame: they glowed in response to others. He'd come to know them as practical, single-minded. There was a perfunctory quality to the signals they sent up from their posts on leaves, stems, blossoms. As if they had watched his antics long enough, and now they were saying: Very well. If that's what it takes to make you happy, here I am.
But this dazzling, feminine glow … It was very bright, and there was some piquant quality about it … A teasing lag, a kind of ironic awareness … He circled and sent a response. A query.
Her answer came, a bit too quickly. Bold, assertive. As if he were being a little foolish not to already know who she was, what she was, what their game was. An implicit challenge there. No coyness needed, no quarter taken or given.
He sent a long reply, a rising note, sustained.
Her answer was the very soul of allure. It was rich, self-conscious, and burningly voluptuous. It astounded him. He could no more have resisted that siren flash than a moth could resist a flame. His airborne body reoriented itself almost against his will.
She was on the broad leaf of a nettle. Vinnie wasn't crazy about nettle plants; the gummy, stinging barbs weren't likely to hurt a creature of his size, but they were inconvenient. The leaf was sticky, and his left midleg was wonky, so it wasn't the elegant, poised landing a man come courting would have hoped for.
Then she pounced on him. She came running from the base of the nettle leaf, and for all her great bulk—she seemed three times his size—she was lethally fast.
She knocked him backward with her headlong assault, and in a confused, writhing mass, they fought. They battled in a jumbled mess of multilegged wrestling, and somehow, the two of them ended up jammed down and half-trapped among the nettle barbs. She couldn't get the lethal grip she wanted, the crushing bite that would have finished him off; she had his bad leg in her huge jaws, but her wing-case had gone askew in the struggle and the tender veil of her wing was crumpled and stuck into place. They were stalemated.
"Okay," he gasped. "Now you're going to tell me what this is about! Who are you? What are you?"
"I'm a Photuris," she muttered around the shaft of his leg. "So I'm eating you."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Well, you're a Photinus. Or you taste like one. And I'm a Photuris, so I prey on you."
"Would you stop chewing, please? Can't we discuss this matter like adults?"
"'Adults?'" She pulled her fanged mandibles from the badly dented chitin of his leg. Her mouth looked somewhat like his own, but much larger and highly suited to ripping men apart. "Do I look like a pupa to you, shorty?"
Vinnie heaved himself vigorously, struggling to find his feet in the gummy footing of the nettle leaf. She wasn't really three times his size—more like double it—and now that her sudden ambush had failed, she had a fight on her hands with him. Vinnie knew that she could kill him, and it was clear she intended to eat him. But he'd been in some fights of his own in younger days, and he knew how to handle himself. She could lose an antenna, maybe a leg.