The Space Butterflies
Burdon felt the familiar lurch as the lander dropped out of orbit. He looked up from his instrument console. Lieutenant Fairbrother was striking a pose, shoulders back, hands clasped. Burdon peered past her to the viewscreen — His jaw dropped. The planet was beautiful. A dozen Earths could have been laced around its black equator. Huge towers pierced the atmosphere, and giant cities sparkled in the light — What light? The planet sailed through space alone, far from any star. But the layer of space around it seemed to churn as if stirred by a ladle. Gradually Burdon made out details, and he realized that vast ships were sailing around the planet, like butterflies with wings a thousand kilometers wide. The reflective wings gathered up the starlight and splashed it over the cities ... "Let's have a status report, Mr. Burdon," said Fairbrother. Burdon glared at her back. "I don't think the absolute speedo's working." The absolute speed indicator gave the lander's velocity relative to the cosmic background radiation—the dull glow all around the sky left over from the Big Bang. Burdon thumped the indica-  tor's scuffed surface to no avail. "According to this the planet's got zero absolute speed. But we know it's moving at several hundred kilometers a second ..."
Fairbrother's turret of a head swiveled around toward him. "Don't bring me problems, Mr. Burdon. I want solutions." Burdon thumped the speedo again. "Fairbrother, for heaven's sake —" Fairbrother's eyes were wide apart and seemed to target him individually. "Mr. Burdon!" she thundered. Their wills locked. The moment stretched. Burdon tried to remember that the whole point of him signing up on the Falcon's interstellar voyage of exploration had been to leave his personal weaknesses behind him on Earth. To do more than the nine-to-five routine at the bank—to escape the mess his life had become ... Had he gained nothing? Was he going to let himself be dominated by pompous old Fairbrother? You bet I am, he thought. Burdon dropped his eyes and began the speedo's test routine. He had traveled light-years and gotten nowhere, he thought gloomily. His faults encased him like a space-suit. Motion was an illusion — Burdon snapped out of his introspection. He checked the speedo again. "Fairbrother, I think the speedo's working after all. It's just that the planet really is stationary." She frowned. "But we know it's got a velocity of several hundred kilometers a second —" "In the galactic frame, yes—but the galaxy's moving against the cosmic background. You didn't know that? So are all the nearby galaxies; they're streaming through space like a flock of starry geese."
Her face crumpled with the effort of accepting a new idea. She searched for words. "Why?" she managed. "Nobody knows. But the point is this planet's motion is an illusion; the galaxy is moving past it." Fairbrother's eyes flickered skyward. "So helpful," she said dryly. She sat in her control chair. "We'll make for the head of one of those towers." They crept into the flock of butterflies. Wings flapped over the lander, edged with starlight. They were huge; scaled against Earth's moon they would have looked like moths beating against a light bulb. The tower was a hollow spire reaching out of the atmosphere. "Look at that." Burdon pointed. "They use the towers to launch the winged things." A cylinder like a chrysalis squirted up and out of the tower; its shell cracked and tumbled away and magnificent wings began to unfurl. Other butterflies clustered around like parents, bathing the newcomer with focused starlight. Damp-looking wings clutched at the light. "They're using radiation pressure to help it reach orbital velocity," Burdon breathed. "Fantastic —" Fairbrother took them nosing through the crowd; the mature butterflies scattered nimbly but the "baby" couldn't get out of the way. They made straight for it. Fairbrother extended the grappling arm. Burdon stared, horrified. "What are you doing?" She didn't answer. With clinical skill she snipped away the glistening wings. Then she grabbed the helpless central section and began to draw it into the lander. Fragments of the wings drifted away, crumpling. Mature butterflies sailed around them, agitated. "Fairbrother, that's brutal." "Do you want to do an analysis of this thing, Mr. Burdon?" Burdon, unhappily, went to his console. Fairbrother brought the butterfly remnant into a lab bay. The monitor showed a clear globe four meters wide. Inside, a mothlike creature thrashed. It was human-shaped but smoothed out and stretched, a sculpture in hot plastic. It had wings of its own; they were silvery and threw highlights in tantalizing hints of pattern. It had no mouth. Long fingers worked control threads that led to the forlorn stumps of butterfly wings. Fairbrother snorted contemptuously. "How primitive." Burdon watched the wings. "I don't know," he said. "There seems to be a purpose to those reflections. Suppose that's how it communicates?" There was a lot of fast-moving detail. "It must be equivalent to thousands of words a minute. That's a lot of information, Fairbrother —" She shrugged. "So what? It couldn't even defend itself." "Military will isn't the only measure of intelligence! How could these creatures have developed spaceflight without a high civilization?" She smiled. "On Earth there's a spider that builds diving bells out of its webbing. Blind evolution, that's all." Burdon tried to find the words to shut her up, and failed. A laser scalpel lanced across the bay and slit open the moth creature's life sac. The delicate wings thrashed in a visual scream as precious gases rushed out. "Fairbrother, you're such a swine." "Hm. Interesting mix of trace elements. Almost breathable." Then she turned her back on the dying alien and moved back to her control chair. Burdon worked frantically, pumping the lab bay full of a gas mixture. But the alien had crumpled like waste paper and barely twitched. Burdon felt like climbing in there with it. The lander plunged toward the atmosphere. Fairbrother hummed as she worked.
|
