Mind Webs - The Day Of The Butterflies

Mind with.

Welcome to half hour of mind with.

Short stories from the worlds of speculative fiction.

This is Michael Hanson.

For this half hour, the story comes from the door science fiction reader,

an anthology edited by Donald Wollheim.

This is Mary and Zimmer Bradley's The Day of the Butterflies.

Diana was a city girl, that always been a city girl, and liked it that way.

She came through the revolving doors at half past five, pulling kid gloves over her hands.

The soft kid insulated her hands from the rough-touch wall and door,

as her still heels tapping and bright rhythm insulated her feet from the hard and filthy concrete pavement.

Her eyes burned with a smog, but to her senses it was fresh air, a normal, sun-shiny day in the city.

She bought a paper from a street vendor without looking at him or it,

and turned for the brisk three-block walk to the subway, which was her daily constitution.

And then, what happened exactly?

She never knew.

There was a tiny queer lurch, as if the sidewalk had shifted very slightly either this way or that,

and the sun was golden and honey-warmed,

and the green light filtered through a soft leaf canopy,

lying like soap on her bare shoulders.

Soft scented wind rustled grass and crest her bare feet,

and suddenly she was dancing, a joyous, ecstatic whirl of dance,

and a cloud of crimson and yellow butterflies circling like sparks around the tossing strands of her hair.

She flung out her hands to trap them, pressed cold, turquid grass blades underfoot,

a chilly scent of hyacinths who refreshed her nose,

and as the butterflies float away from her fingertip she was,

slipping down the first step of the subway,

so violently that she turned her foot over hard and had a grab at the railing.

A fat garlic-smiling woman shoved by and muttering,

and I knew like where you're going!

And then a shutter eyes opened them again with a sort of shutter,

the sweaty light of the subway struck her with almost a physical pain.

It's very strange, she thought would confuse the attachment.

It's very strange that I never realized before quite how ugly a sublime staircase is,

how grimy and dark, and then the jolt delayed hit her.

My goodness, she thought there must be something wrong with my mind,

because I was there, I was there for just a minute dancing,

I didn't just smell it or feel it or see it,

I smelled it and felt it and saw it,

and tasted it and walked on it and touched it.

It was hallucination, of course.

I thought pinked her cheek with tingles.

Did I really dance here on Lexington Avenue?

Automatically she thrust her token into the subway turnstile.

A golden butterfly fluttered from her hand.

Diana let the man behind shove her through the turnstile.

She looked up dazed as the brilliant flicker of gold

danced up through the noisy dismal stench and was gone.

A tiny child squealed.

Oh look at the butterfly!

But none of the grim faces pouring through the maw of the subway station

faltered or looked up.

Diana wedged herself into the train and grabbed dazed at a strap.

A rattle and jolt, under her feet, was acutely painful,

though she'd never noticed it before.

Her toes wriggled, craving the cold grass.

She breathed, trying to recapture hyacinth

and choked on garlic sweaty bodies,

fetted with chemical deodorant's hairspray,

cheap perfume and soot.

But what happened?

She thought wildly that she wasn't the kind of person

things like that ever happened to.

No, I dreamed it.

Butterfly and all, or there's something wrong with my eyes.

And so, as a child of the 20th century,

who never had believed anything she could not see,

and in these days of TV and camera,

a dynamation and special effects only about half of what she did see,

Diana managed to close her mind against this incredible opening of the door.

Until the next time,

the next time she was in the Hurley-Burly of Penn station,

mid-morning of a busy Saturday,

she pushed, shouted, stared anxiously at some destination,

not only to themselves.

The public address system made cryptic noises distorted into improbable sounds.

Diana hurried along.

Her glove-hands resting firmly on pizza, Sir Jarme.

Her heels racing to keep pace with his stride.

It was not that they were in any particular hurry,

but all the surrounding screamed at them to hurry, hurry, hurry.

And obediently, they hurry, hurry.

It was as rapid as a thought,

the fading of the thick noisy air,

and the descend of silence,

except for the gently rustling wind

and the long, dry grass at her feet.

She was running,

dancing in a whirl of the jeweled butterflies,

tossing her arms and wild abandoned,

the play of chilly winds against her bare legs and feet.

She was not.

The air was thick and harsher in her lungs,

and she literally gasped at the impact of noise

in the moment before she fell pizza on his tracks

and watched her with a fron.

Something a matter died,

and she felt like saying,

yes, everything,

this horrible place of just realized just how horrible it is,

but she didn't.

That would be to give reality,

to give preference even to that,

that green or hallucination or whatever it was.

She moved her feet inside the tight shoes, sign a little.

No, no, nothing.

It's just a little hot and stuffy here,

and I felt a little absent-minded.

Absent-minded is right.

Her body was here,

or Pete would have noticed.

But her mind went off on a leaf of absence.

Heaven knows where her mind was.

She asked,

why did you ask Pete?

Well, what did I do?

Well, you sort of stopped in your tracks,

and I couldn't see what you were looking at,

said Pete, the practical.

And you sort of lurched a little like you had turned your ankle.

You all right?

Of course.

She said responding to the tenderness in his voice.

Oh, she loved him.

He wasn't just another day.

He was the right one.

The one she wanted to spend her life with,

and yet was anything here ever really right, after all?

No, thinking like that gave all this reality,

that hallucination.

Uh, you got something on your foot,

your chewing gum or dog mess or something?

No.

Saddiana scraped your foot backward,

and it was true.

Who would see or believe a crushed blade of grass

here in the noise of Penn Station?

Well, come on on this hurry and get the train.

Is there really any hurry?

She asked, and suddenly,

her bugging.

Except maybe,

to hurry up and get out of this ugly, filthy station?

Did you ever stop and think how ugly most of the city is?

No, wouldn't live anywhere else.

Neither would you.

Are you getting homesick

with a cornflat-hillswile or something like that?

Pete, you're not, you know, I was born in Queens.

It isn't even nostalgia for some faraway and lovely childhood.

But what is it then?

How can I be homesick for something I never saw?

I've never even dreamed.

Maybe I've just had a little too much of a good thing.

Surely the city is a good thing.

Everything, oh man,

if it wanted us here, culture, progress,

companionship, even beauty, and Pete.

Pete, do we have to finish this shopping right now?

No, I'm not.

Certainly not.

You're the one from a hurry to pick out towels and spillets and things.

Put them away for the day when we find an apartment

and get the license,

but should we do instead then?

And all too accurately,

she foresaw the astonishment in his face when she said,

let's go for a walk in the park under the trees

and look at some flowers.

But she knew he would say yes, and he did.

It wasn't much, but it helped a little.

And now she never knew when she blinked her eyes,

whether she would open them to the noise and roar of the city,

or to the green and dancing world of the butterfly claved.

In some part of herself,

she knew it was hallucination,

aberration of eyes in mind,

but why did she now and then find herself

clasping a butterfly, a flower, a blade of brass?

But she did not deceive herself about why

she put off again and again her promise to visit to a doctor

or an optician or a psychiatrist.

Next time, she told herself,

next time for sure.

But she knew why it was always next time,

and never this.

If it's hallucination,

the doctor would make it go away.

And she didn't want it to go away.

She flited herself at no one knew,

and yet one day she emerged from,

I mean, a dance to the sound of distant pen pipes,

where she shoveled hair,

hot and sweaty on her bare neck,

and then with a shock and jerk,

feeling the pins taught in the French nut at her neck,

her hands just touching the keys of her office electric

and the girl at the next desk staring.

What's with you, Diane?

I've spoken to you three times.

She raised her hands from the keyboard,

unwilling to let it go this time,

aware that she had lost the threat of the documents she was copying.

What absolute utter rubbish, she thought,

cradling in her hand,

the cool softness of a tiny blue blossom,

her fingers cherishing the tiny petals.

She concealed it inside her palm

from the other girl's eyes,

and knew that her voice sounded strange,

as she said.

Oh, I'm sorry, Jessie.

Kind of daydream, I guess.

It must have been a real doozy, Jessie said.

You know, it's all sort of soft and radiant.

Who was the guy?

Michael Sarzen or somebody or just Pete?

If he turns you on that much,

you're one lucky woman.

Diane laughed softly.

If it was anybody, it would be Pete.

No, I just, I was daydreaming about a wood,

a kind of grow full of flowers and butterflies.

She had expected a flippant comment from the other woman,

but it did not come.

Instead, Jessie's round face took on a remembering look.

Funny.

That sounds like what I did the other day.

I went to see my Aunt Marge in Staten Island,

and I took the furry boat,

and I thought, all of a sudden,

that I was running on a beach picking up shelves,

it seems so real.

I could hear the goals and smell the salt,

and I even thought there was sand under my feet,

bare feet, that is.

Only, the only beach I ever been through is Corny Island,

you know, so it wasn't that.

This was a beach like in the movies, you know?

Funny thing happened later.

Yes.

Diane felt a choking lump in her throat

under her upper arms, purgled goose flesh.

You won't believe me,

but when I got home, I took off my shoes.

I always take my shoes off,

I sing when I get home and, yes,

you won't believe it,

but there was sand in my shoes.

Sand.

Sand might sand like it was all over my rug.

Your rights, Diana said,

I won't believe it.

If she did,

what else would she have to believe?

She might have written an office frustration

for she was very much a child of the Freudian age,

and repressions and frustrations were

as much a part of her vocabulary as computers and typewriters.

But there was nothing either of repression or frustration

in the surroundings next time.

For she and Pete were curled up together

in the big sofa in her apartment.

The lights were low and the music soft,

but Pete was quite abstracted.

She thought for a moment,

he dropped off to sleep and moved every so gently

to the extracater arm,

but he murmured not opening his eyes.

Oh, yeah.

That word smokes smells great.

And the implication electrified her

so that she jerked upright as if an electric current

had jolted them apart.

Pete, you too?

He set up with a look she knew

had been so often on her own face,

but to his murmured disclaimer she charged.

Where were you this time?

Pete, it's happened to me too, only with me.

It's a wood with butterflies and dress.

Pete, what's happening to people?

I thought it was only me,

but a girl in my office,

and now you...

Up here, here, hold on.

His hand seized her.

Comed her.

But it's happened to me,

or maybe it doesn't time.

Suddenly, I'm somewhere else.

I know it's a dream,

but it seems so damn real.

You look thoughtful.

What is real anyhow?

Maybe this is only one reality,

or maybe our reality is something wrong with it.

Look at us.

All packed together,

like in a hive,

fine for bees, sure,

but people,

is this the way a million years

of nature evolved man to live?

And you, a city boy,

you always said the city was the end result

of man's progress,

social evolution.

I said too many damn full things.

Yeah, end result, all right.

That end.

Oh, yes, I hate it so now,

but maybe I've always hated it

and didn't know.

Maybe there's nothing...

nothing abnormal about this.

A dream or a hallucination or whatever it is.

Maybe it's just our subconscious minds,

warning us that we've had enough city,

and we've got to get out if we want to stay sane.

Maybe, she said unconvinced,

and shifted weight as he changed position,

bending to retrieve what fell from his lap.

It was a tiny brown-cented pine cone,

no longer than her thumbnail.

She held it out to him,

her throat tight with excitement.

Pete, what's real?

Pete turned the small cone

tenderly between his fingers.

He said it last.

Suppose experiences are only a form of agreements.

Even the scientists are saying now

that space and matter in above all time

are not what the material physicists have always thought.

As you ever hear,

that all the solid matter

in the planet the size of our Earth

could be compressed into a sphere,

the size of a tennis ball,

that all the rest of it

is the space between the atoms

and the electrons and their nuclei.

Maybe we only see the material universe this way

because this is the way we learn to see it.

And all humanity is overcrowded

and our senses so bombarded with stimuli

that the texture of the agreements is breaking down.

And those little spaces

between the electrons

are changing to conform to a new set of agreements.

So that we find that ice isn't necessarily cold,

and fire doesn't necessarily burn,

and the chemical elements of smog

might be butterflies in the oxygen.

But what would make that set of agreements break down, Pete?

God knows sensory deprivation

can drive a man's sense of receptors

to pick up very funny things then.

Five hours in the deprivation tank

the thought I was the most a man could take

without going raving mad.

And maybe sensory overload

could do the same thing.

Maybe but she did not hear the rest.

For the world is old and a green's world

and she ran dancing through the green glade.

Only this time, Pete was there too.

From that day she began to look for signs.

Her boss paused at her desk

to ask for legal documents.

She was typing, but before Diana could pull it out

of her typewriter, he cocked his head to one side

and she heard briefly.

The twittering of a distant bird

and he shivered a little, snapped.

I'll talk to you later about it.

And she saw him,

basically, heading downstairs for a drink.

In a sudden rainstorm,

she managed to be the first in the crush

for a taxi in a soft curling green oak leaf

play on the seat.

Is it happening everywhere then?

And does everybody it happens to think

he or she is the only one?

She found herself scanning newspapers

for strange happenings,

felt curiously confirmatory thrill.

The night a news corresponded straight

from wherever the front was.

This year came on the air sounding days

so the story tried to refer to

flippantly as the gremlins getting out of hand again.

It seemed that eight army tanks

had vanished without trace

before the eyes of an entire regiment.

Sabotage was adjusted,

but then it would bother to plant

half a dozen beds of tulips

in their place.

A practical joke could be enormous proportions.

But Diana was beyond surprise.

Her own hands were filled with flowers

she had gathered somewhere.

It made the cover of time

next week,

when after a lengthy manhunt

a criminal serving a sentence

where armed robbery was found only a mile

from the prison.

Question, he said,

I just got into a mood

where I forgot the prison was air

and I walked out.

While the guards and the walls were repeatedly

and why the taxiers confirmed

that no one had gone in or out,

even the usual laundry truck.

And the man might have vifled

the supermarket only.

There weren't any in the locality

for his arms were filled with exotic

tropical fruits.

All pizza into this,

when the story was shown to him,

was in the fabric of

this reality is getting thinner

and thinner.

I bet a day will come

when every morning more of the cells

in that prison will be empty

and they'll never find

most of the ones who walk out

after all,

there are realities

a lot more imbarable and most.

He frowned, staring in the space.

She thought he had gone away again,

but he only mused.

And it's getting pretty thin.

I wonder how long it'll last

and where it'll rip all the way across.

She clung to him in terror.

Oh, Pete, I don't want to lose you.

Suppose it does.

Suppose it does tear all the way across

and we lose each other

or one of us can't get back.

Hey, hey, hey, come on.

I got a feeling that whatever it is

between you and me,

it's part of a reality

that's maybe

realer than this.

We might have to find each other again,

but if what we have is real,

it'll last through whatever form

reality takes.

I know it sounds kind of corny

in this day and age,

but I love you, Diana.

And if love isn't real,

I don't know what is.

She was hardly surprised

when though his arms were still

around her,

she felt the cool grass beneath

them,

saw the green light

through the trees

and she whispered

against the singing winds.

Let's never go back.

But they did.

But the fabric thinned

for Diana daily,

shopping in the east village

for beads to back up

and advertising display.

She was struck by the look

of blank-faced ecstasy,

the impression of being

elsewhere on the soft,

preoccupied faces

of bearded boys

and long-haired barefoot girls.

They can't all be on drugs,

she thought.

This is something else.

And I think I know what.

A delicate wispy girl,

the long-faded dress

her hair,

waist length,

looked up at Diana.

And Diana was conscious

of her own,

elaborately twisted hair,

her heels forced high

and fashionable platforms

her legs,

itchingly imprisoned

in nylon,

thought wistfully

of green-forced lights

and gleaming butterflies,

bare feet,

racing through the clouds.

No, no,

I'm here in the city

and I have to live with it.

They seem to be

living elsewhere.

A hippie girl smiled gently

up at Diana,

and gave her a flower.

Diana would have sworn,

she had not been

carrying flowers,

and she whispered,

you know, don't you?

Do you think,

while you can,

if it's really your thing,

it won't be long.

And in her eyes,

Diana saw a strange,

skies reflected,

her at the distant roll

of breakers

and the faraway

crab balls from,

somewhere,

Jesse speech,

she murmured,

I know where you are.

The sound of breakers died,

and the girl said

sently,

oh no,

no,

but you know where we

ought to be.

It won't be long,

though.

They're trying to

pave it all

over, you know.

Make it into one

big parking lot,

but it won't work.

Even if they covered

over the whole planet

with concrete,

one paid,

which just happened.

In a great God pan,

stepped down

off that statue

and central park,

the real one.

And stamp his hoof,

bound through the concrete,

and then,

then violence

would spring up

through the dead land.

The girl's voice

trailed into silence,

she smiled,

and wandered away.

Her bare feet,

treading the

filthy pavement,

as if she already

wandered on the

prophesized violets.

Diana wanted to run

after her,

into that place,

where she,

so obviously,

spends so much of her

time now.

But she forced her

feet on her own

errand.

She,

and the girl were

in different layers

of time,

almost in different

layers of space,

and only by some curious magic,

had they come

within speaking distance,

like passing ships

drifting through fog,

just within hail.

Or two falling leaves,

just touching as they fell

from separate trees.

She saw the street

through a blurred

tears,

and for the first time,

tried deliberately

to breach the veil,

to reach for that

other world,

which broke through

into this so unpredictably,

and never,

when you wanted it.

Even as a city girl,

Diana had never liked

Wall Street.

At high noon,

it's chaos,

noise,

and robot-like humans,

all alike,

and all perpetually,

rushing,

nowhere.

A human amp-hill,

populated by mimic creatures,

and suits and ties,

with patterns of rigid,

that they seem to have grown,

on the semi-human forms.

The Russian pandemonium,

sold at her census

of violently,

that she stopped dead,

letting the insect,

like mimics,

surely they could not

be human,

divide their flow

around her,

as if she were a rock

in their stream.

Ugliness,

noise everywhere,

horror,

and she thought,

wildly,

this place is wrong,

a huge cosmic mistake,

a planetary practical joke,

if everyone who knew,

everyone who seemed

the real world,

would somehow just say,

no to all this,

would just reach out

altogether, say,

this is too much,

we don't, we won't,

we can't stand,

then,

maybe those ugly skyscrapers,

these skyscrapers

would just dissolve,

violets spring up,

or listen,

she implored,

her whole body in mind,

and census all one

strained hunger,

or listen,

if they'd only stop

and see all this the way,

it really is,

see what's happening

to people who think

it's real,

and think they have to live in it,

time and space,

are only this way,

because we have

made them this way,

and we've made them all wrong,

let's start all over again,

and do it right,

this time.

She never knew how long she stood there,

because for her

the accidents of time

and space had stopped.

She only knew that

everything she was

and ever had been,

had poured itself

into the one

anguished,

passionate plea.

Listen,

and then,

she became aware

that hers was only one voice

in a vast,

swelling,

in a world song.

As perception slowly

came back to her

overloaded senses,

she saw first one

than another,

and another,

of the rigidly

suited form stop,

fling away

umbrella and briefcase,

and then split

like an insect

shedding his

chin in the shell

burst into humanity again.

The veil

of illusion shredded

from top to bottom,

skyscrapers

thinned

to transparency

melted and vanished,

and a great towering,

real trees

could be seen

through their wavering

outlines.

Through the dead

and spreading concrete,

a shy blade of grass

poked up its head,

wavered slightly,

then erupted

in a joyous

ride of green,

swiftly,

blotting out the concrete.

Great

green lawns

expanded from

a horizon to a horizon

as the sky quickly

cleared to a delicious

blue.

Silence,

descendant,

threaded

trace of rebirth

song.

One lonely

bewildered taxi

horn-linkered

questioning

and fronted before

it died away forever.

In the canyons

of Manhattan,

the real Manhattan

breaking through,

man and women

ran naked on the grass,

flowers in their hands

and carlins

in their hair,

as the jeweled

butterflies

flashed upward

flaming,

and gleaming

in the sun.

Diana,

sobbing with joy,

ran into the

throng,

knowing that

Pete was there

somewhere,

and Jessie,

and the hippie girl,

and children

and prisoners,

and everyone

for whom

allusion

had vanished.

She ran on,

shedding butterflies

at every step,

and wondered,

once and

never again,

if the other world,

the one that wasn't real,

was still there

for anybody,

but she didn't really care.

It wasn't there for her

anymore,

and Pete was waiting

for her here.

She knew she would find

it,

and of course she did.

That was the day

of the butterflies,

a story by

Marion Zimmer Bradley.

It appears in

the door,

a science fiction

reader,

edited by Donald Bullheim,

and published

by DAW Books.

This is Michael Hanson,

technical operation

for this program

by Bob Chan.

Mindwebs is a production

of WHA,

Radio and Madison,

a service

of University

of Wisconsin,

Extension.