by Neil Clarke
Like the fern man. “We’re all going to die,” the boyfriend said, “because of this little green dude.”
And LT thought, How can something so beautiful, so cool, be dangerous?
“Let’s give him a name,” Mom said. “LT, you do the honors.”
“I need to think about it,” he said.
Or maybe, LT thought that night as his mother and the boyfriend whisper-yelled at each other, I should change my own name. Chicago was making him into a different person. He’d become conscious of his Tennessee accent, and had taken steps to tame his vowels. He’d eaten Greek food. He’d almost gotten used to being around so many black people. And he’d started staying up to all hours in his room, an L-shaped nook off the kitchen with a curtain for a door, reading from his mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books as the rattling fan chased sweat from his ribs. The night they got the fern man he wondered if he should ask everyone to stop calling him LT and start calling him Lawrence or Taylor or something completely of his own creation, like . . . Lance. Lance was the kind of guy who’d be ready when the UFOs came down.
Doors slammed, his mother sobbed loudly for a while, and then the apartment went quiet. LT waited another twenty minutes, and then got up to pee. He didn’t turn on the bathroom light. He was a night creature now, as light-sensitive as a raccoon.
The door to his mother’s bedroom was ajar. She was alone in the bed.
He went into the living room. On the wall behind the couch hung four of the boyfriend’s pictures. They were all of naked women turning into buildings, or maybe vice versa, with red-brick thighs and doorways for crotches and scaffolds holding up their torsos. One of the nudes, pale and thin and sprouting television aerials from her frizzy hair, looked too much like his mother. LT wondered if other people thought they were beautiful, or if beauty mattered in art with a capital A. The figures didn’t seem to be very convincing as women or buildings. Neither nor.
The fern man stood in the dark on the coffee table. Its bulb head drooped sleepily, and its stem arms hung at its sides. The torso leaned slightly—toward the window, LT realized.
He picked up the ceramic pot and set it on the sill, in a pool of streetlight. Slowly, the trunk began to straighten. Over the next few minutes, the head gradually lifted like a deacon finishing a prayer, and the round leaves at the ends of its arms unfurled like loosening fists. The movement was almost too incremental to detect; its posture seemed to shift only when he looked away or lost concentration.
Slow Mo, he thought. That’s what we’ll call you.
Tomorrow his mother would throw all the paintings out the front window, send them sailing into the street. LT would never see the boyfriend again. The fern man stayed.
1978
The night they heard about the thistle cloud, LT was daydreaming of burning the house down. It was March and he was bored to the point of paralysis, an old man in a thirteen-year-old body. Country winters stretched each night into a prison sentence. The valley went cave dark before supper-time, stayed dark until the morning school bus honked for him at the end of the lane. He longed for the city. Torching the place, he figured, would make a bonfire that would light up the road all the way to Chicago.
The place was wrong for his father, too. Three years after Mom had left, the house was purposeless without her in it, like a desanctified church. His father’s handiwork—the tongue and groove hardwood floors, the hand-turned legs on the kitchen table, the graceful stair rail that curled at the end like the tail of a treble clef—seemed as frivolous as gingerbread. Why stay here? They never used the dining room, or the guest room with its fancy bathroom. No one would ever thread a needle in the sewing room. LT and his father ate their meals in the living room, in front of the fire, wordless as Neanderthals.
LT was grateful when the TV said that a new invasive species had erupted in Tennessee. Dad was in his armchair as usual, eyes on the snowy screen of the portable, which he’d set on a chair close to the fireplace, as if daring it to melt.
“Would you look at that,” Dad said.
LT did not look. He was sprawled on the couch, pretending to reread a book he hoped would annoy his father: Sexual Selection in the Animal World. There was an entire chapter on the bowerbirds of Papua New Guinea, whose males assembled and decorated elaborate bowers in hopes a female would prefer their art over the competitors’.
The third bachelor in the room was Mo. He was a sturdy three feet tall by then, and occupied the corner by the dark window. He was attracted to the fire. At night his limbs eased toward it, wanting the light if not the heat.
Mom couldn’t keep the fern. She’d moved in with a new, temperamental boyfriend, a restaurant owner who named a pasta dish after her the first week they dated, but flew into fits when he felt disrespected. Both Mo and LT had been causes of “friction” that summer, so LT begged to take the fern back to Tennessee in the fall. Mo had traveled in the back seat of his mom’s car like a passenger, bulbous head bent against the roof, a seat belt around his pot. LT hadn’t asked his father’s permission, and was surprised when he let it into his house without a fight. Dad was more upset by his son’s shaggy hair and the turquoise necklace around his neck. The day before school started, Dad drove him to the barber and ordered a buzzcut to match Dad’s own. LT kept the necklace under his shirt.
“It’s getting worse and worse,” his dad said. “Lord almighty.”
Now LT did look at the TV. Lord almighty was as close to swearing as his father got.
The sky over Chattanooga was crowded with spiky black shapes. A reporter asked a question, and a man held out a bloody arm.
“So much for dominion over the earth,” LT said. At the midweek prayer meeting—they went to services three times a week, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night—the pastor had launched into well-worn passages of God giving dominion of the earth to Adam. It came up whenever the invasives or women’s rights were in the news.
“Don’t be smart,” Dad said.
“Face it, we’re losing.” Every day the TV showed men in masks hacking down flowers as big as satellite dishes, or Argentinians fretting over alien moss that clung to the hooves of cattle like boots, or Kansas farmers dulling their chainsaws on traveling vines as tough as mahogany. In a lot of places the invasives were just a nuisance, but in some countries, especially the ones closest to the equator, the alien plants were causing real trouble. “They’re trying a million different strategies. All they need are a couple winners to drive us out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Out-survive us. They’ve got time on their side. We go at animal speed, but plants move at their own speed. Wheels within wheels.” An Elijah reference, just to poke him. “It’s evolution, Dad.”
Another provocation. His father believed in the Bible. There was no time for natural selection in the six days of creation, and no need for it. Dad’s God didn’t improvise. He was a measure-twice-cut-once creator.
“They’re better at surviving?” his father said. “These plants?”
LT shook his head as if disappointed in his father’s stupidity.
Dad slowly rose from his chair. LT realized he’d miscalculated. “Let’s see, then,” Dad said calmly. He gripped the sides of the ceramic pot, lifted it. It had to weigh almost two hundred pounds. Mo’s limbs curled inward.
LT yelled, “No! Stop it!”
His father turned the pot on its side. Dirt spilled onto the floorboards. He stepped toward the fire and pushed the top of the plant into the mouth of the fireplace.
LT threw himself into his father’s ribs. Stupid, useless. Dad was as squat and thick as an engine block. He turned, swinging Mo’s head out of the fireplace. It wasn’t on fire, but a haze of sizzling mist seemed to shroud the bulb.
LT burst into tears.
His father set the pot on the floor, anger gone now. “Aw, come on.”
LT ran upstairs, threw himself on the bed, awash with embarrassment and anger. He was thirt
een! He should be tougher than this. Crying over a damn plant. He wanted it all to end. How much longer did he have to wait for the aliens to come and scrape this planet clean?
The Chattanooga cloud was supposed to reach them that next afternoon. Vernon Beck, Dad’s oldest friend, drove over from Maryville to see it. Jumped out of his pickup and shook LT’s hand. “Goodness sakes, boy, you’re two feet taller! Hale, come say hello to LT and Mr. Meyers.”
A boy eased out of the passenger side of the pickup, long and lean, hair down to his shoulders. LT hadn’t seen Hale Beck since LT’s mother left. Their families used to go places together, and even though Hale was two years older than LT they got along like brothers. He remembered a long day riding water slides with Hale at a Pigeon Forge park. A hike in the Smokies during which Hale smashed a rock into a snake, the bravest thing LT had ever seen.
Hale shook hands with LT’s father, nodded at LT. Hale had gotten the growth spurt LT was still waiting on.
A strong wind was blowing but the cloud hadn’t shown up yet. The men went into the woodshop, and LT stood there awkwardly with Hale, unsure how to talk to him.
Hale took out a tin of Skoal from his back pocket, tucked a pinch of tobacco into his lip. He held out the tin, and LT shook his head. Hale leaned back on the hood of the truck. Spit black juice onto the gravel.
LT said, “We’ve got a fern man.”
“A what?”
“One of the invasives. Right in the house.” Dad said never to talk about the fern. But this was the Becks.
Hale said, “The one that moves?” He wanted to see that.
Dad had returned Mo to his usual spot. There was no visible damage from the flames. Hale said, “Looks like a regular plant.”
“Watch this,” LT said. He stood between Mo and the window and raised his arms. The fern man slowly shifted to the right, back into the light. LT moved in front of him again and Mo moved opposite. “It’s called heliotropism. Like sunflowers? But way faster.”
“Can I do it?” Hale asked.
“Sure. Just don’t tire him out.”
Hale took LT’s position. They danced in slow motion at first, and then Hale sped up. Mo jerked and flopped in rhythm. Hale laughed. “He’s just like one of those windsock guys at the dealership!”
LT was thrilled that Hale was impressed, but nervous about hurting Mo. “Hey, you want to see where the space seed landed?”
He managed to entice Hale to the cattle field. The wind had picked up, turned cold, but the sun was bright and hot. Hale’s hair blew across his face, and he kept pushing it back.
They walked around at the far end of the field. LT couldn’t find the furrow the seed had made when it hit four years ago. The tall dry grass rattled with every gust.
Hale said, “Look.”
In the distance, a dark, churning cloud. Light flashed at the edges of it like tiny lightning. Hale ran toward it, into the wind. They plunged through a line of trees, into the next field—and suddenly the cloud loomed over them. Thousands of glistening tumbleweeds, most the size of a fist, a few big as soccer balls. A sudden downdraft sent scores of them plummeting into the trees. Most stuck in the treetops, others bounced down into the undergrowth, and half a dozen ricocheted back into the air and spun toward them.
“Grab one!” Hale shouted. He pulled his T-shirt over his head in one quick move. His back was pale and muscled. LT felt a sudden heat and looked away, his heart pounding. Then Hale swung the shirt over his head, trying to snag a thistle ball. It floated just out of reach. He chased it, then jumped, jumped again. LT couldn’t take his eyes off the way his shoulders moved.
Then a lucky gust sent the ball down and the shirt caught against it. Hale hooted and LT cheered. The thing was hollow, a jumble of flat, silvery blades, thin as the wings of a balsa-wood glider, connected to each other by spongy joints which were decorated with thorns. Hale pulled his shirt free of them, and the cloth tore.
Then the sun dimmed, and they looked up. LT realized they’d only seen the front of the cloud, the first wave. Thousands and thousands more flew toward them, a spinning mass.
LT said, “Ho-lee shit.”
This struck Hale as hilarious, and then LT was laughing too, so hard he could barely stand. Then they ran, giggling and shouting.
1981
For months before his summer stay, when he was sixteen years old, LT begged his mother to take him to see the dragon tails of Kansas. Mom worked slow magic on her new husband, Arnaud, a thin, balding, control freak who made a lot of money as a chemical engineer. Eventually Arnaud came up with the idea that he should encourage LT’s interest in science and take them all to visit the most successful invasives in the Midwest. He rented an enormous RV and they drove southwest.
The first sign of the invasion came just past Topeka, when road crews waved them off the interstate. Arnaud eased the RV into the parking lot of a McDonald’s and said, “There you go.”
LT walked out of the RV, into sunlight and heat. At the edge of the lot rose an arch of deeply grooved bark. It emerged from the broken cement and came down about fifteen yards away in a field. Large purple leaf blades ran in single file atop the bark like the plates of a stegosaurus.
LT looked back at his mother. She beamed at him, then shooed him forward. He grabbed hold of the sturdy roots of the blades and pulled himself onto the base of the arch. A few careful steps more and he was upright, hands out for balance. The bark was a bit wider than his foot, but uneven. He knew from his books that the tail was not an ordinary trunk, but vines that had twisted around each other as they grew, only gradually adhering to share resources.
He reached the peak of the arch, eight feet off the ground. Twenty or thirty yards away, directly in front of him, another arch emerged, and another, like a sea monster coursing through an ocean of grass. No, one monster in a school of them. To either side, dozens and dozens of the dragon tails breached and dove. A group of them had burst up through the highway, and there was nothing manmade cement could do to keep them underground.
These were the aliens’ favorite trees, he thought. How could they not be? They were living architecture.
His mother called his name. She held the fancy, big-lensed camera Arnaud had bought her. She didn’t have to prompt LT to smile.
The last night of the vacation, Arnaud drove to a campground set among the dragon tails, a farmer’s feeble attempt to recoup something from the land after agricultural disaster. As they ate dinner at the RV’s tiny table, LT showed his mother pictures from one of his books about the invasives. He told her how the dark fans held chlorophyll-like molecules that absorbed a larger spectrum of light than the Earth versions. “If our plants tried to process that much energy they’d burn up, like a car engine trying to run on rocket fuel.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Arnaud said. He stood at the galley sink, washing the skillet he’d used to fry the hamburgers. “The photosystems they’re using seem to be variable, sometimes like retinol in archaea microbes, sometimes more like chlorophyll with novel sidechains added, so that they can control—”
“Take a look at this,” LT said, cutting him off. He showed her a cross section of the dragon tail, and how the vines were twisted around each other. “They call them golden spirals. See, there’s this thing called the Fibonacci sequence—”
“Dragon tails follow the golden spiral?” Arnaud said. He came over to the table. LT was pleased to know something the chemist didn’t.
Mom said, “What’s a Fibonacci?” and LT quickly answered. “It’s a series of numbers, starting with one, two, three, five . . . each one’s the sum of the previous two numbers, so—”
“That’s a close approximation of the golden ratio,” Arnaud said. He pulled the book closer, leaned over LT’s mother. “The growth factor of the curve follows that ratio. You can see the spiral in nature—in seashells, pine cones, everywhere.”
“So beautiful,” his mother said. She ran fingers over the glossy cross section. “L
ike the head of a sunflower.”
LT, suddenly furious, pushed himself out from behind the table. His mother said, “Where you going?”
Arnaud said, “Could you put away your plate?”
He let the door bang shut behind him.
Outside, the atmosphere was greenhouse humid. He marched away, not caring which direction his body took him. It was nine thirty and still not full dark, as if the sun couldn’t find the edge of these tabletop plains. The air was heavy with a floral perfume.
He came to the leaping back of a dragon trail, black against the purpling sky, and walked beside it. Gnats puffed out of the grass and he waved them away.
It had been a mistake to come on this trip. The RV was as stifling as a submarine. Arnaud sucked up all available oxygen, inserted himself into every conversation.
Eventually the dark came down, and he aimed for the fluorescent lights of the cinder-block building that doubled as park office and convenience store. Inside, a couple kids about his age, a boy and a girl, were glued to the Space Invaders cabinet. Were they brother and sister? Boyfriend and girlfriend? He thought about talking to them. He could tell them things. Like how the speed of the game was an accident; the aliens came down slow at first, then got faster and faster as their numbers were destroyed, not because it had been programmed that way, but because the processor could only speed up when the load lightened. Telling things was the only way he knew how to make small talk. Other forms of conversation were a mystery.
He bought a Coke and took it outside. Leaned against the wall under the snapping bug zapper.
A flashlight bobbed toward him out of the dark. He ignored it until a voice behind the light said, “Hello, my darlin’.”
His mother stepped up, clicked off the flashlight. “Did you see the stars? They’re amazing out here.”
“Still no meteors,” he said. Six years after the seed storm, everybody was waiting for a second punch. Or maybe the next wave was on its way now, in the void, creeping across the light-years. Perhaps the long delay was necessary because of orbital mechanics. What looked like design could be just an accident of the environment.
