16. MISTRESS FLUTTERBY

THE CASE OF MERCURY RISING, 16

And that was all it could tell us about the strange rusted sphere, and from what it intimated I knew that most of what it said was little better than silicon-educated guesswork. The rusted globe was on its way to Venus (there was probably nowhere else it could be heading on its present trajectory), and the little information that Mercury Rising could extract from the few and very compressed transmissions it flung into the galaxy at unpredictable moments made very little sense, and if the computer confessed that much they must indeed have been incomprehensible.

“Mercury Rising, Let us know the moment you get any positive information,” I instructed it, and Angelina and I went back to the bunk upstairs. You may get the impression that all we did was sleep, and I was beginning to believe there might have been something in the artificially purified air that made us like that.

I’d just got myself comfortable when Angelina whispered something in my ear that I’d prefer not to make public, because it had to do with the fact that, in our underwear, we were both overdressed for bed and oughtn’t we do something about it?

I knew what she meant and agreed with her.

The thing about romance and passion in a bunk like the one we had to share was the excessive amount of intimacy it forced upon us. Sharing a bed at home was one thing and we both delighted in it and the way it almost encouraged, without me sounding at all smutty, one thing to lead to another, but this bunk was no good for that. Even in the warmth and passion of a bed, lovers need a little bit of room for manoeuvre, and that was denied us.

And then there was the already-alluded to air we were breathing. It didn’t smell stale or anything, in fact it had a rather pleasant almost floral tinge to it, but it did little to keep us awake. I made a mental note to ask the computer whether there was any narcotic or sleep inducing chemical added to it, and whispered to Angelina,

“It’s no good, darling, much as I’d like to...”

And she replied,

“Don’t you worry, Royston, I understand. You can’t get it up and I can’t help you.”

“It’s not a matter of can’t” I protested.

“You mean you don’t want to?”

“Of course I do, my darling angel, and you have no idea how badly I want to! It’s just that I feel so darned knackered.”

“Then you feel exactly the same as me,” she yawned, “you want to, but can’t.”

I was floored by that. “I can, but I can’t,” was the only gobbledegook I could come out with, and I very gently, very lovingly, cupped one of her breasts in my hand before leaning the tiny distance towards it, and kissing it.

“That’ll do,” she whispered, “that says enough,” and she reached over me with a lovely arm and squeezed me very gently before yawning again and adding, “until we wake up properly.”

And I do believe she went back to sleep before I did.

And when I slept the dream had changed. The Yorkshire man was smiling at me, just like he had back on the moon before making half a threat regarding his return to Earth, and then he morphed into an alien with a shiny black gun, and I still had my supply of turnips.

Now, the only aliens I had any experience of are from the pages of schoolboy magazines or the imaginations of the directors of science fiction films, and, of course, Dr Who on the television. So they were almost certainly not representative of any life forms from any other planet in the real Universe, and on top of it all, plaguing my unconscious mind, was the spherical rust-bucket on its way to Venus and who, if anyone, might be aboard it. In my sleep I peopled that vessel with aliens from my imagination, and my aliens were any colour but the varying shades of flesh found amongst homo sapiens on Earth. I liked green, but that, even in my sleep I thought any shade of green was a bit corny (think the fictitious stereotype of little green men from Mars), so I ended up with purple.

Purple female aliens. They had to be female because that’s what Mercury Rising had decided they all were, those inside the rusted globe, anyway. But I am a man from Earth and know what females look like. Alien females might have any number of unfamiliar facial features, multiple eyes, the odd extra nose, teeth of any shade and shape under the sun, but they all wore the sweetest little skirts you could dream of in your wildest fantasies. And protruding from those skirts were legs of a shape that made my heart beat all the faster. In short, the alien females in my dreams were a combination of the grotesque and the erotic, and I must say that I found them most endearing as I danced a jive with them, and their little skirts flew round and round and round…

“Attention!” barked Mercury Rising.

The floral aroma in the air faded away until it smelt of nothing in particular, and that may have been because it had been altered by some computer program, or because familiarity with it had nullified it to my olfactory sense.

But in addition to that I felt suddenly alert.

“We have visual communication with Mistress Flutterby,” announced the computer, “and this you’ve just got to see! Down stairs if you will, and pay attention to the monitor!”

Mercury Rising had never been this assertive before. It was almost ordering us about! I didn’t feel comfortable about that at all, and I could tell from the frown on her lovely face that neither did Angelina.

Once downstairs we took our seats next to the coffee table and I asked thin air what was going on, and thin air didn’t answer.

“Mercury Rising, what is the emergency?” I asked in my most peremptory voice.

“Your attention is required, if you don’t mind,” came the reply, sounding, perhaps, a little apologetic, “please look at the monitor and I will ask Mistress Flutterby to reveal herself.”

Then the screen cleared, and all my fanciful notions of purple aliens in miniskirts crashed into dust in my mind.

In front of me, on the screen which for the first time I wished was bigger stood a magnificent creature in pure green, and my immediate reaction was to classify it as a huge and very beautiful butterfly.

It opened a gorgeous mouth, and spoke, and the sound crashed like audio poison when I realised I would never either understand a word she said or ever speak her language, for it was an ethereal mixture of sighs and whistles with the odd peremptory click.

“I will translate if you need it,” interjected Mercury Rising, “for I have arranged a lexicon of a language that puts your own to shame.”

“Go ahead,” I said, a little unhappy about its assumption that any language could be sweeter than my own.

“Then I will,” said Mercury Rising in sombre tones that it hadn’t used before. “Here goes.

“We are pleased to greet you, man of the third planet from your sun. We will soon become your neighbours, for we are intending to make a home on the planet you happily call Venus. We enjoy already many of your television broadcasts and find your nakedness most amusing.”

Then the Monitor faded as Mistress Flutterby opened a pair of gorgeous gossamer wings and drifted away from what must have been a camera. Moments later the image on the monitor returned to one of the rusty hulk seen against the backdrop of a Universe of stars.

“”What does it mean, our nakedness?” asked Angelina, “not you and me, I hope.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I murmured, teasing her, “but didn’t you think she was gorgeous? And in all my wildest dreams I never dreamed of a race of butterflies as superior beings.”

“If they’re real,” sighed Angelina, frowning.

“Pardon me, but they’re real,” confirmed our ever vigilant computer.

© Peter Rogerson 28.02.20