Ba'ku rhyl, Ba'ku butterfly
Read part 1: Ba’ku tortoise, Ba’ku goat
Read part 2: Ba’ku pterodactyl
November 21, 2113
Leonard Fitzmurdle’s personal log
Our journey had taken us through jungles and over mountains, across plains and along rivers. But now we were back where we had started, a serene lake surrounded by a ring of snow-capped mountain peaks, with never a sign of our butterfly quarry.
We sat in silence, side by side upon a mossy log; neither of us wanted to be the first to admit defeat. A gleaming green hummingbird with long black tail feathers flew past. It was so graceful that its wings seemed almost to beat in slow motion… until a well-aimed laser blast from Briswald knocked it from the sky.
Walking over to retrieve the glittering corpse, Briswald sighed. “Well, old chum,” he said, “At least we have some beautiful new plumage to show for our efforts.” But then his attention darted to something above my head. “What the devil is that?” I rose to my feet and gazed upward, and saw what had intrigued the captain. There was an odd brown shape on a branch high above me, making jerky movements.
I was just going to suggest fetching our bioptic digihancers to have a closer look, when suddenly I heard: “Execute the Ba’ku tortoise-goat maneuver!” Before I knew what was happening, the captain had vaulted into the air and planted his feet on my shoulders, putting him at the perfect vantage point to see the creature in question.
“It’s some sort of furry space slug,” I heard him say from on high, as I struggled to maintain my balance. “I’ll just grab ahold of him, here we go, and—whoopsadaisy!”
In a tumble of limbs, we crashed to the ground. After a moment’s stunned silence I heard the captain gasp. I opened my eyes. My vision was somewhat blurry from the impact, but as it cleared I saw the most wonderful sight. The space slug still clung to the branch that whipped back and forth above us, but around him, disrupted by the motion, were hundreds of butterflies—beautiful, transparent, almost invisible butterflies.
Octavio Briswald’s field notes
It would be vexatious if it weren’t so amusing, but once we understood what the butterflies looked like we saw them everywhere. Completely camouflaged with their surroundings, they clung to every surface. It is entirely possible they attended us along each step of the journey, if only we’d known how to look.
We gathered a multitude of specimens and brought them back to the ship, where, in a fit of whimsy, I released them to flutter about the deck.
Our subsequent studies have revealed that it is not in fact the butterflies themselves that are transparent. Instead, they owe their excellent concealment to a rarefied species of fungus that completely covers their bodies. This fungus has an uncanny knack for taking on the attributes of the world on the alternate side of the creature; thus, the underside of the butterfly mimics the sky, and the top of the butterfly projects the bark of a tree, or whatever it happens to be resting upon.
We were buoyed and ebullient with our long-sought discovery, and blasted past the planet’s outer rings with many a joyful huzzah. But this euphoria has faded. The fungus is apparently unable to live outside the Ba’ku atmosphere, and swiftly disintigrated, revealing the muddy tan of the butterflies’ natural coloring. The butterflies also seem to decline when removed from their native planet; and so Fitzmurdle and I motor through the stars, filled with a hebetudinous heaviness, while all around us falls the slow rain of a thousand dying insects.
