I want to tell you a short story.

It begins with a blind larva, newly hatched from his egg. Let's call this larva Ray. Ray cannot yet see, but but he can feel with his antennae, and he spends most, if not all, of his time seeking out food. To Ray and his insatiable, there can never be enough. Over days and weeks, Ray grows, molting off his old skins.

One day, Ray feels too big for his tight, hard skin, and climbs a small plant. This plant, some instinct tells him, is perfect. Slowly and carefully, Ray crawls onto the underside of the leaf and anchors himself using spit. His skin hardens further, and Ray sleeps.

It is not sleep as we know it, but a chemical sleep. While he slumbers, gross and fantastic things happen to Ray's body. His soft innards grow, separate, and after a time, he finds that he can see much better than he ever could before. The world around him is warm and the light is soft, and as comfortable as his life is, there itch in his insect gut the pangs of hunger. It is a familiar sensation; Ray has known it his entire life.

Ray breaks free of his cocoon, wearing a body with little resemblence to the earthbound creature he once was. Most striking are his wings, glistening green and gold and black. After drying them in the warm sun, and shaking off the strange blue dust that tips his wings, he takes to the sky. None of the other flying things want to eat him; a strange sensation. No longer does Ray feel the constant threat of being food for another animal. Their screeches and honks and bangs go unheeded.

Out of the dense green below him, a single white flower beckons to him, and though he has spent his entire life eating leaves, he now knows that leaves will no longer sustain him. It is nectar his new body craves.

He sucks the sweet, sweet nectar of life from the white blossom and ponders this new form, this new life, the endless possibilities of the future ahead of him.

The sky goes dark suddenly, and Ray is no more. All that remains of him is stuck under a careless boot, mashed and mingled with thick slimy mud.

Many or most of you will recognize the butterfly as the catalyst for change in Ray Bradbury's short story, “A Sound of Thunder.” The protagonist (not the butterfly) returns from the past to find that something as inconsequential as stepping on a butterfly 65 million years ago has altered the future (for us; for him, it is the present) in significant ways.

The stories you are going to read concern themselves with the butterfly. From his crushed wings, never to taste the air again, the Aztecs had nothing to fear from Cortes. From his broken legs, still twitching with chemical motions, the Summer of Love became a year, then a decade, then centuries. From Ray's poor snapped proboscis, still wet with sweet nectar, the Soviets race with the West to the red planet. From this broken butterfly, all futures become possible.

I welcome you to explore the worlds of tomorrows never to be and the endless, fantastic possibilities of what and how the butterfly affects.

Adicus Ryan Garton
editor Cosmic