October 1, 2025 • 29 mins
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts, dreams, and philosophical what-ifs. Each episode is a cerebral journey into the mind’s deepest questions.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
My Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome to a half hour of mind Web short stories,
Worlds of spec a little fiction. This is Michael Hansen
(01:12):
for this half hour. The story comes from The daw
Science Fiction Reader. An anthology edited by Donald Wolheim. This
is Marian Zimmer Bradley's The Day of the Butterflies. Oh.
Diana was a city girl, had always been in a
(01:32):
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 of 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
(01:55):
sunshiny day in the city. She bought a paper from
a street vender without looking at her more it and
turned with the brisk three block walk to the subway,
which was her daily constitutional. And then what happened exactly
she never knew.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
There was a.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Tiny queer lurch, as if the sidewalk had shifted very slightly,
either this way or that, And the sun was golden, honey, warm,
and the green light filtered through a soft leaf kenopy, lying.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Like silk on her bare shoulders.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Soft scented wind rustled grass and cressed her bare feet,
and suddenly she was dancing a joyous, ecstatic whirl of
dance in 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, turgid
grass blades underfoot. A chilly scent of hyacinths refreshed her nose,
(02:51):
and as the butterflies flowed away from her fingertips, 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 smelling woman
shoved by, muttering any look where you're going, and Diana
shut her eyes, opened them again with a sort of shudder.
(03:11):
The sooty light of the subway struck her with almost
a physical pain. It's very strange, she thought, with confused detachment.
It's very strange that I never realized before quite how
ugly a subway staircase is, how grimy and dark. And
then the jolt delayed hit her. My goodness, she thought,
(03:33):
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 a hallucination, of course, I thought, pinked her cheek
with tingles. Did I really dance here on Lexington Avenue? Automatically,
(03:58):
she thrust her token into the subway turnstile. A golden
butterfly fluttered from her hand. Diana let the man behind
shove 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
(04:21):
at the butterfly, But none of the grim faces pouring
through the maw of the subway station faltered.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Or looked up.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Diana wedged herself into the train and grabbed, dazed at
a strap. The rattle and jolt under her feet was
acutely painful, though she.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Had never noticed it before.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Her toes wriggled, craving the cold grass. She breathed trying
to recapture hyacinth, and choked on garlic, sweaty bodies feted
with chemical deodorance, hair spray, she perfume and soot. But
what happened? She thought wildly that she wasn't the kind
of person things like that ever happened to. No ringed
(05:00):
it butterfly and all, or there's something wrong with my eyes.
And so. As a child of the twentieth century who
never had believed anything she could not see, and in
these days of TV and camera dynamation and special effects
only about half of what she did see, Diana managed
to close her mind against this incredible opening of the
(05:21):
door until the next time. The next time, she was
in the hurly burly of Penn Station mid morning of
a busy Saturday. Bodies 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 gloved
(05:43):
hands resting firmly on Pete's sir jarme her heels, racing
to keep pace with his stride. It was not that
they were in any particular hurry, but all the surroundings.
Screamed at them to hurry, hurry, hurry, and obediently they hurry, hurried.
It was as rapid as a thought, the fading of
the thick, noisy air, the descent of silence except for
(06:03):
the gently rustling wind and the long dry grass at
her feet. She was running, dancing in the whirl of
the jeweled butterflies, tossing her arms and wild abandoned the
play of chilly winds against her bare legs and feet.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
She was not.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
The air was thick and harsh in her lungs, and
she literally gasped at the impact of noise. In the
moment before she felt Pete stub in his tracks and
watched with a frown something the matter die. She felt
like saying, yes, everything, this horrible place. I've just realized
just how horrible it is. But she didn't. That would
be to give reality, to give preference even to that
(06:43):
that dream or hallucination or whatever it was. She moved
her feet inside the tight shoes, sighing a little, no, no, nothing.
I felt, it's just a little hot and stuff eat 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 leave of absence. Heaven
(07:05):
knows where her mind was.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
She asked, why.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Did you ask?
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Pete? Well, what did I do? Well?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
You sort of stopped in your tracks, and then I
couldn't see what you were looking at, said Pete, the practical,
And you sort of lurched a little like you 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
(07:32):
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, chewing gum or dog
mess or something. No, said Diana, scraped her foot backward,
and it was true. Who would see or believe a
(07:54):
crushed blade of grass here in the noise of fen station? Well,
come on, let's hurry and get the tray. Is there
really any hurry, she asked in sudden rebellion, 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, I wouldn't live anywhere else, neither
(08:16):
would you. Are you getting homesick for the corn fred Hills,
oio or something like that?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Pete? You not?
Speaker 2 (08:22):
You know I was born in Queen's It isn't even
nostalgia if you're some far away in lovely childhood.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
But what is it then?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
How can I be homesick for something I never saw
and never even dreamed? Maybe I've just had a little
too much of a good thing. Surely the city is
a good thing everything, man, if it wanted us. Hear culture, progress, companionship,
even beauty and Pete, Pete, do we have to finish
the shopping right now?
Speaker 1 (08:50):
No?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
No, certainly not. You're the one that was in a
hurry to pick out towels and spillets and things and
put them away for the day when we find an
apartment and get the license.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
But what shall we do instead? Then?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And he did.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
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 clayed in some part of herself. She knew it
was a hallucination, aberration of eyes and mind. But why
(09:36):
did she now and then find herself clasping a butterfly,
a flower, a blade of grass. But she did not
deceive herself about why she put off again and again
her promised a visit to.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
A doctor, or an optician or a psychiatrist next time,
she told herself.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Next time, for sure, But she knew why. It was
always next time and never this. If it's a hallucination,
the doctor wouldn't I could go away, and she didn't
want it to go away. She flattered herself that no
one knew. And yet one day she emerged from mina,
danced to the sound of distant pan pipes, her disheveled
(10:15):
hair hot and sweaty on her bare neck, and then
with a shock and jerk, feeling the pins taught in
the French knot at her neck, her hands just touching
the keys of her office, electric from 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 thread of the document she was copying.
(10:38):
What absolute utter rubbish, she thought. Cradling in her hand
the cool softness of the 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, er
(10:58):
kind of daydream. I guess it must have been a
real doozy. Jesse said, you looked all sort of soft
and radiant. Who was the guy, Michael Sarazun or somebody?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Or just Pete?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
If he turns you on that much, you're a one
lucky woman, Diana laughed softly. If it was anybody, it
would be Pete. No, I just I was daydreaming about
a wood, a kind of grove full of flowers and butterflies.
She had expected to flip and comment from the other woman,
(11:29):
but it did not come. Instead, Jesse's run 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 ferry boat. And
I thought all of a sudden that I was running
on a beach picking up shells. It seemed so real.
I could hear the gulls 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 to
(11:50):
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, Diana felt a choke lump in
her throat and her upper arms prickled goose flesh. You
won't believe me, but when I got home, I took
off my shoes. I always take my shoes off racing
when I get home. And yes, you won't believe it,
(12:11):
but there was sand in my shoes, sand sand might
sand like it was all over my rug. You're right,
Diana said, I won't believe it. If she did, what
else would she have to believe? She might have written
it off as frustration, for she was very much a
(12:32):
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 and
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 had dropped
(12:54):
off to sleep, and moved ever so gently to extricate
her arm, but he murmured, not opening his eyes, Oh yeah,
that wood smoke smells great, and the implication electrifier, so
that she jerked upright, as if an electric current had
jolted them apart. Pete, you too, He sat up with
a look she knew had been so often on her
(13:15):
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, a wood with butterflies
and grass. Pete, what's happening to people? I thought it
was only me, but a girl in my office, and
now you near here. Hold on his hands, seized her,
(13:36):
calmed her, but it's happened to me, oh, maybe a
dozen times. Suddenly I'm somewhere else. I know it's a dream,
but it seems so damned real, He looked, 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 bee, sure,
(13:59):
but people, is this the way a million years of
nature evolved man to live? And you, er city boy,
you always said the city was the end result of
man's progress, social evolution? I said, too many damn fool things. Yeah,
end result, all right? And that end? Oh yes, I
hate it. So now maybe I've always hated it and
(14:20):
didn't know. And maybe there's nothing nothing abnormal about this
day dream or her hallucination or whatever it is. Maybe
it's just our sub conscious minds warning us that we've
had enough city, that 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
(14:43):
fell from his lap. It was a tiny, brown scented
pine cone, no longer than her thumb nail. 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, last, suppose experiences are only a form of agreements.
(15:07):
Even the scientists are saying now that space and matter
and above all time are not what the material physicists
have always thought. Did 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 electrons and their nuclei. Maybe
(15:27):
we only see the material universe this way because this
is the way we learn to see it. And now
humanity is so overcrowded and our senses so bombarded with
stimuli that the texture of the agreements is breaking down.
Those little spaces between the electrons that are changing, they
can form to a new set of agreements, so that
we find that ice isn't necessarily cold, and fire doesn't
(15:49):
necessarily burn, and the chemical elements of smog might be
butterflies in the oxygen. But what would make that set
of agreements breakdown? Pete God knows Sensory deprivation can drive
a man's sense receptors to pick up very funny things. Diana.
Five hours in the deprivation tank, I found I was
(16:10):
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
dissolved in a green swirl, and she ran dancing through
the green glade. Only this time Pete was there too.
(16:32):
From that day she began to look for signs. Her
boss paused at her desk to ask for a 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 dazedly heading downstairs.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
For a drink.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
In a sudden rainstorm. She managed to be the first
in the crush for attack in a soft, curling green
oak leaf lay on the seat. Is it happening everywhere?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Then?
Speaker 2 (17:07):
And as everybody it happens to think ye, or she
is the only one. She found herself scanning newspapers for
strange happenings felt a curiously confirmatory thrill. The night a
news correspondent straight from wherever the front was this year
came on the air, sounding dazed with the story he
tried to refer to flippantly as the gremlins getting out
(17:28):
of hand again. It seemed that eight army tanks had
vanished without trace before the eyes of an entire regiment.
Sabotage was suggested, But then who had bothered to plant
half a dozen beds of tulips in their place? A
practical joke of enormous proportions. But Diana was beyond surprise.
Her own hands were filled with flowers she had gathered somewhere.
(17:53):
It made the cover of Time next week, when, after
a lengthy manhunt, a criminal serving a sentence for armed
robbery was found only a mile from the prison. Questioned,
he said, I just got into a mood while I
forgot the prison was there, and I walked out while
the guards on the walls bore repeatedly and light. The
tactics confirmed that no one had gone in or out,
(18:14):
not even the usual laundry truck, and a man might
have rifled the supermarket, only there weren't any in the locality.
For his arms were filled with exotic tropical fruits, all petes.
Under this, when the story was shown to him, was
the fabric of this reality is getting thinner and thinner.
I better day'll come when every morning more of the
(18:35):
cells in that prison will be empty, and they'll never
find most of the ones who walk out. After all,
their reality is a lot more unbearable than most. He frowned,
staring into space. She thought he had gone away again,
but he only knewsed. And it's getting pretty thin. I
wonder how long he will last, and where it'll rip
(18:56):
all the way across. She clung to him in terror. Oh, Pete,
I 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.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Hey, hey, hey, come on.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
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,
(19:30):
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,
(19:53):
but the fabric thinned. For Diana, daily shopping in the
East village for beads to back up an advertising display,
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
(20:16):
I think I know what. A delicate, wispy girl in
a 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 forest
(20:38):
light and gleaming butterflies, bare feet racing through the glades. No, no,
I'm here in the city and I have to live
with it. They seem to be living elsewhere. The hippy
girl smiled gently up at Diana and gave her a flower.
Diana would have sworn she had not been carrying flowers.
She whispered, Oh, don't you do your thing while you can,
(21:04):
if it's really your thing. It won't be long. And
in her eyes Diana saw a strange skies reflected, heard
the distant roll of breakers in the far away cry
of gulls from somewhere Jesse's speech. She murmured, I know
where you are. The sound of breakers died, and the
(21:25):
girl said sadly, 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 day,
it would just happen. The great God Pan would step
down off that statue in Central Park, the real one,
(21:48):
and stamp his hoof down through the concrete, and then
then violets 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
(22:10):
after her, into that place where she so obviously spent
so much of her time. Now but she forced her
feet on her own errand She and the girl were
indifferent layers of time, almost indifferent 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
(22:34):
two falling leaves just touching as they fell from separate trees.
She saw the street through a blur of tears, and
for the first time, tried deliberately to breach the vale,
to reach for that other world which broke through into
this so unpredictably and never when you wanted it. Even
(22:55):
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 ant
hill populated by mimic creatures in suits and ties, the
patterns so rigid that they seemed to have grown on
the semi human forms. The rush and pandemonium assaulted her
(23:17):
senses so 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
(23:39):
practical joke. If everyone who knew, everyone who seem 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 would just dissolve. Violets spring up. Oh listen,
(24:03):
she implored, her whole body and mind and senses, all
one strained hunger. Oh 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
(24:25):
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
(24:51):
aware that hers was only one voice in a vast,
swelling choral song. As perceptions slowly came back to her whole,
her loaded senses. She saw first one, then another, and
another of the rigidly suited form stop fling away umbrella
in briefcase, and then split like an insect, shedding his
chit in the shell, and burst into humanity again. The
(25:15):
veil of illusion shredded from top to bottom. Skyscrapers thinned
to transparency, melted and vanished, and the great towering real
trees could be seen through their wavering out lines through
the dead and splitting concrete. A shy blade of grass
poked up its head, wavered slightly, then erupted in a
(25:36):
joyous ride of green, swiftly blotting out the concrete. Great
green lawns expanded from horizon to horizon as the sky
quickly cleared to a delicious blue silence descended, threaded with
tracery of bird song. One lonely bewildered taxi horn lingered,
(25:57):
questioning and frantic before it died away in the canyons
of Manhattan, the real Manhattan breaking through. Men and women
ran naked on the grass, flowers in their hands and
garlands in their hair, as the jeweled butterflies flashed upward,
flaming and gleaming in the sun. Diana, sobbing with joy,
(26:20):
ran into the throng, knowing that Pete was there somewhere,
and Jessie and the hippie girl, and children and prisoners
and everyone for whom illusion had vanished. She ran on,
shedding butterflies at every step, and wondered once and never
(26:41):
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 him push.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
As ever.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
That was the Day of the Butterflies, a story by
Marion Zimmer Bradley. It appears in The Daw Science Fiction Reader,
edited by Donald Bullin and published by Daw Books. This
is Michael Hansen Technical operation for this program by Bob Chan.
Mind Webbs is a production of Wycha Radio and Madison,
(28:46):
a service of University of Wisconsin Extension
Speaker 1 (29:14):
At
My Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome to a half hour of mind Web short stories,
Worlds of spec a little fiction. This is Michael Hansen
(01:12):
for this half hour. The story comes from The daw
Science Fiction Reader. An anthology edited by Donald Wolheim. This
is Marian Zimmer Bradley's The Day of the Butterflies. Oh.
Diana was a city girl, had always been in a
(01:32):
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 of 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
(01:55):
sunshiny day in the city. She bought a paper from
a street vender without looking at her more it and
turned with the brisk three block walk to the subway,
which was her daily constitutional. And then what happened exactly
she never knew.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
There was a.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Tiny queer lurch, as if the sidewalk had shifted very slightly,
either this way or that, And the sun was golden, honey, warm,
and the green light filtered through a soft leaf kenopy, lying.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Like silk on her bare shoulders.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Soft scented wind rustled grass and cressed her bare feet,
and suddenly she was dancing a joyous, ecstatic whirl of
dance in 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, turgid
grass blades underfoot. A chilly scent of hyacinths refreshed her nose,
(02:51):
and as the butterflies flowed away from her fingertips, 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 smelling woman
shoved by, muttering any look where you're going, and Diana
shut her eyes, opened them again with a sort of shudder.
(03:11):
The sooty light of the subway struck her with almost
a physical pain. It's very strange, she thought, with confused detachment.
It's very strange that I never realized before quite how
ugly a subway staircase is, how grimy and dark. And
then the jolt delayed hit her. My goodness, she thought,
(03:33):
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 a hallucination, of course, I thought, pinked her cheek
with tingles. Did I really dance here on Lexington Avenue? Automatically,
(03:58):
she thrust her token into the subway turnstile. A golden
butterfly fluttered from her hand. Diana let the man behind
shove 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
(04:21):
at the butterfly, But none of the grim faces pouring
through the maw of the subway station faltered.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Or looked up.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Diana wedged herself into the train and grabbed, dazed at
a strap. The rattle and jolt under her feet was
acutely painful, though she.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Had never noticed it before.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Her toes wriggled, craving the cold grass. She breathed trying
to recapture hyacinth, and choked on garlic, sweaty bodies feted
with chemical deodorance, hair spray, she perfume and soot. But
what happened? She thought wildly that she wasn't the kind
of person things like that ever happened to. No ringed
(05:00):
it butterfly and all, or there's something wrong with my eyes.
And so. As a child of the twentieth century who
never had believed anything she could not see, and in
these days of TV and camera dynamation and special effects
only about half of what she did see, Diana managed
to close her mind against this incredible opening of the
(05:21):
door until the next time. The next time, she was
in the hurly burly of Penn Station mid morning of
a busy Saturday. Bodies 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 gloved
(05:43):
hands resting firmly on Pete's sir jarme her heels, racing
to keep pace with his stride. It was not that
they were in any particular hurry, but all the surroundings.
Screamed at them to hurry, hurry, hurry, and obediently they hurry, hurried.
It was as rapid as a thought, the fading of
the thick, noisy air, the descent of silence except for
(06:03):
the gently rustling wind and the long dry grass at
her feet. She was running, dancing in the whirl of
the jeweled butterflies, tossing her arms and wild abandoned the
play of chilly winds against her bare legs and feet.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
She was not.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
The air was thick and harsh in her lungs, and
she literally gasped at the impact of noise. In the
moment before she felt Pete stub in his tracks and
watched with a frown something the matter die. She felt
like saying, yes, everything, this horrible place. I've just realized
just how horrible it is. But she didn't. That would
be to give reality, to give preference even to that
(06:43):
that dream or hallucination or whatever it was. She moved
her feet inside the tight shoes, sighing a little, no, no, nothing.
I felt, it's just a little hot and stuff eat 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 leave of absence. Heaven
(07:05):
knows where her mind was.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
She asked, why.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Did you ask?
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Pete? Well, what did I do? Well?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
You sort of stopped in your tracks, and then I
couldn't see what you were looking at, said Pete, the practical,
And you sort of lurched a little like you 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
(07:32):
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, chewing gum or dog
mess or something. No, said Diana, scraped her foot backward,
and it was true. Who would see or believe a
(07:54):
crushed blade of grass here in the noise of fen station? Well,
come on, let's hurry and get the tray. Is there
really any hurry, she asked in sudden rebellion, 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, I wouldn't live anywhere else, neither
(08:16):
would you. Are you getting homesick for the corn fred Hills,
oio or something like that?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Pete? You not?
Speaker 2 (08:22):
You know I was born in Queen's It isn't even
nostalgia if you're some far away in lovely childhood.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
But what is it then?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
How can I be homesick for something I never saw
and never even dreamed? Maybe I've just had a little
too much of a good thing. Surely the city is
a good thing everything, man, if it wanted us. Hear culture, progress, companionship,
even beauty and Pete, Pete, do we have to finish
the shopping right now?
Speaker 1 (08:50):
No?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
No, certainly not. You're the one that was in a
hurry to pick out towels and spillets and things and
put them away for the day when we find an
apartment and get the license.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
But what shall we do instead? Then?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And he did.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
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 clayed in some part of herself. She knew it
was a hallucination, aberration of eyes and mind. But why
(09:36):
did she now and then find herself clasping a butterfly,
a flower, a blade of grass. But she did not
deceive herself about why she put off again and again
her promised a visit to.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
A doctor, or an optician or a psychiatrist next time,
she told herself.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Next time, for sure, But she knew why. It was
always next time and never this. If it's a hallucination,
the doctor wouldn't I could go away, and she didn't
want it to go away. She flattered herself that no
one knew. And yet one day she emerged from mina,
danced to the sound of distant pan pipes, her disheveled
(10:15):
hair hot and sweaty on her bare neck, and then
with a shock and jerk, feeling the pins taught in
the French knot at her neck, her hands just touching
the keys of her office, electric from 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 thread of the document she was copying.
(10:38):
What absolute utter rubbish, she thought. Cradling in her hand
the cool softness of the 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, er
(10:58):
kind of daydream. I guess it must have been a
real doozy. Jesse said, you looked all sort of soft
and radiant. Who was the guy, Michael Sarazun or somebody?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Or just Pete?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
If he turns you on that much, you're a one
lucky woman, Diana laughed softly. If it was anybody, it
would be Pete. No, I just I was daydreaming about
a wood, a kind of grove full of flowers and butterflies.
She had expected to flip and comment from the other woman,
(11:29):
but it did not come. Instead, Jesse's run 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 ferry boat. And
I thought all of a sudden that I was running
on a beach picking up shells. It seemed so real.
I could hear the gulls 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 to
(11:50):
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, Diana felt a choke lump in
her throat and her upper arms prickled goose flesh. You
won't believe me, but when I got home, I took
off my shoes. I always take my shoes off racing
when I get home. And yes, you won't believe it,
(12:11):
but there was sand in my shoes, sand sand might
sand like it was all over my rug. You're right,
Diana said, I won't believe it. If she did, what
else would she have to believe? She might have written
it off as frustration, for she was very much a
(12:32):
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 and
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 had dropped
(12:54):
off to sleep, and moved ever so gently to extricate
her arm, but he murmured, not opening his eyes, Oh yeah,
that wood smoke smells great, and the implication electrifier, so
that she jerked upright, as if an electric current had
jolted them apart. Pete, you too, He sat up with
a look she knew had been so often on her
(13:15):
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, a wood with butterflies
and grass. Pete, what's happening to people? I thought it
was only me, but a girl in my office, and
now you near here. Hold on his hands, seized her,
(13:36):
calmed her, but it's happened to me, oh, maybe a
dozen times. Suddenly I'm somewhere else. I know it's a dream,
but it seems so damned real, He looked, 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 bee, sure,
(13:59):
but people, is this the way a million years of
nature evolved man to live? And you, er city boy,
you always said the city was the end result of
man's progress, social evolution? I said, too many damn fool things. Yeah,
end result, all right? And that end? Oh yes, I
hate it. So now maybe I've always hated it and
(14:20):
didn't know. And maybe there's nothing nothing abnormal about this
day dream or her hallucination or whatever it is. Maybe
it's just our sub conscious minds warning us that we've
had enough city, that 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
(14:43):
fell from his lap. It was a tiny, brown scented
pine cone, no longer than her thumb nail. 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, last, suppose experiences are only a form of agreements.
(15:07):
Even the scientists are saying now that space and matter
and above all time are not what the material physicists
have always thought. Did 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 electrons and their nuclei. Maybe
(15:27):
we only see the material universe this way because this
is the way we learn to see it. And now
humanity is so overcrowded and our senses so bombarded with
stimuli that the texture of the agreements is breaking down.
Those little spaces between the electrons that are changing, they
can form to a new set of agreements, so that
we find that ice isn't necessarily cold, and fire doesn't
(15:49):
necessarily burn, and the chemical elements of smog might be
butterflies in the oxygen. But what would make that set
of agreements breakdown? Pete God knows Sensory deprivation can drive
a man's sense receptors to pick up very funny things. Diana.
Five hours in the deprivation tank, I found I was
(16:10):
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
dissolved in a green swirl, and she ran dancing through
the green glade. Only this time Pete was there too.
(16:32):
From that day she began to look for signs. Her
boss paused at her desk to ask for a 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 dazedly heading downstairs.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
For a drink.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
In a sudden rainstorm. She managed to be the first
in the crush for attack in a soft, curling green
oak leaf lay on the seat. Is it happening everywhere?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Then?
Speaker 2 (17:07):
And as everybody it happens to think ye, or she
is the only one. She found herself scanning newspapers for
strange happenings felt a curiously confirmatory thrill. The night a
news correspondent straight from wherever the front was this year
came on the air, sounding dazed with the story he
tried to refer to flippantly as the gremlins getting out
(17:28):
of hand again. It seemed that eight army tanks had
vanished without trace before the eyes of an entire regiment.
Sabotage was suggested, But then who had bothered to plant
half a dozen beds of tulips in their place? A
practical joke of enormous proportions. But Diana was beyond surprise.
Her own hands were filled with flowers she had gathered somewhere.
(17:53):
It made the cover of Time next week, when, after
a lengthy manhunt, a criminal serving a sentence for armed
robbery was found only a mile from the prison. Questioned,
he said, I just got into a mood while I
forgot the prison was there, and I walked out while
the guards on the walls bore repeatedly and light. The
tactics confirmed that no one had gone in or out,
(18:14):
not even the usual laundry truck, and a man might
have rifled the supermarket, only there weren't any in the locality.
For his arms were filled with exotic tropical fruits, all petes.
Under this, when the story was shown to him, was
the fabric of this reality is getting thinner and thinner.
I better day'll come when every morning more of the
(18:35):
cells in that prison will be empty, and they'll never
find most of the ones who walk out. After all,
their reality is a lot more unbearable than most. He frowned,
staring into space. She thought he had gone away again,
but he only knewsed. And it's getting pretty thin. I
wonder how long he will last, and where it'll rip
(18:56):
all the way across. She clung to him in terror. Oh, Pete,
I 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.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Hey, hey, hey, come on.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
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,
(19:30):
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,
(19:53):
but the fabric thinned. For Diana, daily shopping in the
East village for beads to back up an advertising display,
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
(20:16):
I think I know what. A delicate, wispy girl in
a 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 forest
(20:38):
light and gleaming butterflies, bare feet racing through the glades. No, no,
I'm here in the city and I have to live
with it. They seem to be living elsewhere. The hippy
girl smiled gently up at Diana and gave her a flower.
Diana would have sworn she had not been carrying flowers.
She whispered, Oh, don't you do your thing while you can,
(21:04):
if it's really your thing. It won't be long. And
in her eyes Diana saw a strange skies reflected, heard
the distant roll of breakers in the far away cry
of gulls from somewhere Jesse's speech. She murmured, I know
where you are. The sound of breakers died, and the
(21:25):
girl said sadly, 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 day,
it would just happen. The great God Pan would step
down off that statue in Central Park, the real one,
(21:48):
and stamp his hoof down through the concrete, and then
then violets 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
(22:10):
after her, into that place where she so obviously spent
so much of her time. Now but she forced her
feet on her own errand She and the girl were
indifferent layers of time, almost indifferent 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
(22:34):
two falling leaves just touching as they fell from separate trees.
She saw the street through a blur of tears, and
for the first time, tried deliberately to breach the vale,
to reach for that other world which broke through into
this so unpredictably and never when you wanted it. Even
(22:55):
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 ant
hill populated by mimic creatures in suits and ties, the
patterns so rigid that they seemed to have grown on
the semi human forms. The rush and pandemonium assaulted her
(23:17):
senses so 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
(23:39):
practical joke. If everyone who knew, everyone who seem 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 would just dissolve. Violets spring up. Oh listen,
(24:03):
she implored, her whole body and mind and senses, all
one strained hunger. Oh 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
(24:25):
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
(24:51):
aware that hers was only one voice in a vast,
swelling choral song. As perceptions slowly came back to her whole,
her loaded senses. She saw first one, then another, and
another of the rigidly suited form stop fling away umbrella
in briefcase, and then split like an insect, shedding his
chit in the shell, and burst into humanity again. The
(25:15):
veil of illusion shredded from top to bottom. Skyscrapers thinned
to transparency, melted and vanished, and the great towering real
trees could be seen through their wavering out lines through
the dead and splitting concrete. A shy blade of grass
poked up its head, wavered slightly, then erupted in a
(25:36):
joyous ride of green, swiftly blotting out the concrete. Great
green lawns expanded from horizon to horizon as the sky
quickly cleared to a delicious blue silence descended, threaded with
tracery of bird song. One lonely bewildered taxi horn lingered,
(25:57):
questioning and frantic before it died away in the canyons
of Manhattan, the real Manhattan breaking through. Men and women
ran naked on the grass, flowers in their hands and
garlands in their hair, as the jeweled butterflies flashed upward,
flaming and gleaming in the sun. Diana, sobbing with joy,
(26:20):
ran into the throng, knowing that Pete was there somewhere,
and Jessie and the hippie girl, and children and prisoners
and everyone for whom illusion had vanished. She ran on,
shedding butterflies at every step, and wondered once and never
(26:41):
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 him push.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
As ever.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
That was the Day of the Butterflies, a story by
Marion Zimmer Bradley. It appears in The Daw Science Fiction Reader,
edited by Donald Bullin and published by Daw Books. This
is Michael Hansen Technical operation for this program by Bob Chan.
Mind Webbs is a production of Wycha Radio and Madison,
(28:46):
a service of University of Wisconsin Extension
Speaker 1 (29:14):
At
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