John Varley - Steel Beach

"Hildy, I feel-"

"Just go away, would you? I'd like to be alone."

He nodded, and left.

I wandered for a while, never getting out of sight of the bubble of light that was the tent, listening to Winston barking over the radio. Why would you put a radio in a dog's suit? Well, why not.

That was the kind of deep question I was asking myself. I couldn't seem to turn my mind to anything more important.

I'm not good at describing the painful feelings. It could be that I'm not good at feeling them. Did I feel a sense of emptiness? Yes, but not as awful as I might have expected. For one thing, I hadn't loved him long enough for the loss to leave that big a cavity. But more important, I hadn't given up. I don't think you can, not that easily. I knew I'd call on him again, and hell, I'd beg, and I might even cry. Such things have been known to work, and Cricket does have a heart in there somewhere, just like me.

So I was depressed, no question. Despondent? Not really. I was miles from suicidal, miles . Miles and miles and miles.

That was when I first noticed a low-grade headache. All those nanobots in that cranium, you'd think they'd have licked the common headache by now. The migraine has gone the way of the dodo, true, but those annoying little throbbing ones in the temple or forehead seem beyond the purview of medicine, most likely because we inflict them on ourselves; we want them, on some level.

But this one was different. Examining it, I realized it was centered in the eyes, and the reason was something had been monkeying with my vision for quite some time. Peripherally, I'd been seeing something, or rather not seeing something, and it was driving me crazy. I stopped my pacing and looked around. Several times I thought I was on the track of something, but it always flickered away. Maybe it was Brenda's ghosts. I was practically touching the hull of the famous Haunted Ship; what else could it be?

Winston came bounding along, leaping into the air, just as if he was chasing something. And at last I saw it, and smiled because it was so simple. The stupid dog was just chasing a butterfly. That's probably what I'd seen, out of the corner of my eye. A butterfly.

I turned and started back to the tent (the dog ), thinking I'd have a drink or two or three (was chasing ) or, hell, maybe get really blotto, I think I had a good excuse

a butterfly

and I turned around again but I couldn't find the insect, which made perfect sense because we weren't in Texas, we were in Delambre and there's no fucking air out here, Winston, and I'd about dismissed it as a drunken whimsy when a naked girl materialized out of very thin air and ran seven steps-I can see them now, in my mind's eye, clear as anything, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then gone again back to where ghosts go, and she'd come close enough to me to almost touch her.

I'm a reporter. I chase the news. I chased her, after an indeterminate time when I was as capable of movement as any statue in the park. I didn't find her; the only reason I'd seen her at all was the very last rays of the sun reflected from far overhead, not much more light than a good candle would give. I didn't find the butterfly, either.

I realized the dog was nudging my leg. I saw a red light was blinking inside his suit, which meant he had ten minutes of air left, and he'd been trained to go home when he saw the light. I reached down and patted his helmet, which did him no good but he seemed to appreciate the thought, licking his chops. I straightened and took one last look around.

"Winston," I said. "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

Ezekiel saw the wheel. Moses saw the burning bush. Joe Smith saw the Angel Moroni, and every electro-preacher since Billy Sunday saw a chance at good ratings in prime time and more money than he could lift.

Hayseed farmers, asteroid miners and chronic drug abusers have seen Unidentified Flying Objects and little guys who want to see our leaders. Drunks see pink elephants and brontosaurs and bugs crawling all over everything. The Buddha saw enlightenment and Mohammed must have seen something, though I was never clear just what it was. Dying people see a long tunnel full of light with all the people they hated while they were alive standing at the end of it. The Founding Flack knew a good thing when he saw it. Christians are looking to see Jesus, Walter is looking for a good story, and a gambler is looking for that fourth ace to turn up; sometimes they see these things.

People have been seeing things like that since the first caveman noticed dark shadows stirring out there beyond the light of the campfire, but until the day of the Bicentennial Hildy Johnson had never seen anything.

Give me a sign, O Lord, she had been crying, that I might know Thy shape. And behold, the Lord sent unto her a sign.

A butterfly.

It was a Monarch butterfly, quite lovely in its orange and black, quite ordinary at first glance, except for its location. But upon closer examination I found something on its back, about the size of a gelatin capsule, that looked for all the world like an air tank.

Yes, dear ones, never throw anything away. You don't know when you might need it. I'd had no use for my optic holocam for quite a while, since the Texian isn't equipped to print pictures. But Walter had never asked me to give it back and I'd not gone to the bother of having it removed, so it was still there in my left eye, recording everything I saw, faithfully storing it all until capacity was exhausted, then wiping it to make way for the new stuff. Many a wild-eyed prophet before me would have killed to have a holocam, so he could prove to those doubting bastards he'd really seen those green cocker spaniels get out of the whistling gizmo that landed on the henhouse.

Considering the number of cameras made between the Brownie and the end of the twentieth century, you'd think more intriguing pictures would have been taken of paranormal events, but look for them-I did-and you'll come up with a bucket of space. After that, of course, computers got so good that any picture could be faked.

But the only person I had to convince was myself. The first thing I did, back in the tent, was to secure the data into permanent storage. The second thing I did was to not tell anybody what I'd seen. Part of that was reporter's instinct: you don't blab until the story's nailed down. The rest was admission of the weaknesses flesh is heir to: I hadn't been the soberest of witnesses. But more importantly… this was my vision. It had been granted to me . Not to Cricket, that ingrate, who'd have seen it if he'd said he loved me and thrown his arms around me and told me what a knuckle-headed dope he'd been. Not to Miss Pulitzer Prize Brenda (you think that, just because I gave her the big story, I wasn't jealous? You poor fool, you). Just me.

And Winston. How could I have thought that gorgeous hound was ugly? The third thing I did back in the tent was give that most sublime quadruped a pound of my best sausage, and apologize for not having anything better-like a Pomeranian, or a Siamese.

We're not talking about the butterfly now. That was amazing, but a few wonders short of a nonesuch.

It was an air tank on the insect's back. With suitable enlargement I could make out tiny lines going from it to the wings. The images got fuzzy when I tried to find out where they went. But I could guess: since there was no air for it to fly in, and since it seemed to be flying, I deduced it was kept aloft by reaction power, air squirting from the underside of its wings. Comparing this specimen to one mounted in a museum I noted differences in the carapace. A vacuum-proof shell? Probably. The air tank could dribble oxygen into the butterfly's blood.