But today Larry wasn't saying much of anything. I watched him for a while, sweating in the sun, writing on the blackboard with a grease pencil, wiping it out, writing again, watching the Lineman patiently writing new stuff in symbols that might as well have been Swahili.

Then I remembered I had thought of something to ask the night before, lying there listening to Larry snoring in the other king-size bed.

"Excuse me," I said, and instantly a Lineman was standing beside me. The same one? I knew the question had little meaning.

"Before, I asked, 'Why butterflies?'You said because they are beautiful."

"The most beautiful things on your planet," he corrected.

"Right. But...isn't there a second best? Isn't there anything else, anything at all, that you're interested in?" I floundered, trying to think of something else that might be worth collecting to an aesthetic sense I could not possibly imagine. "Scarab beetles," I said, sticking to entomology. "Some of them are fabulously beautiful, to humans anyway."

"They are quite beautiful," he agreed. "However, we do not collect them. Our reasons would be difficult to explain." A diplomatic way of saying humans were blind, deaf, and ignorant, I supposed. "But yes, in a sense. Things are grown on other planets in this solar system, too. We are harvesting them now, in a temporal way of speaking."

Well, this was new. Maybe I could justify my presence here in some small way after all. Maybe I'd finally asked an intelligent question.

"Can you tell me about them?"

"Certainly. Deep in the atmospheres of your four gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, beautiful beings have evolved that...our leader treasures. On Mercury, creatures of quicksilver inhabit deep caves near the poles. These are being gathered as well. And there are life-forms we admire that thrive on very cold planets."

Gathering cryogenic butterflies on Pluto? Since he showed me no visual aids, the image would do until something better came along.

The Lineman didn't elaborate beyond that, and I couldn't think of another question that might be useful. I reported what I had learned at the end of the day. None of the team of expert analysts could think of a reason why this should concern us, but they assured me my findings would be bucked up the chain of command.

Nothing ever came of it.

The next day they said I could go home, and I was hustled out of California almost as fast as I'd arrived. On my way I met Larry, who looked haunted. We shook hands.

"Funny thing," he said. "All our answers, over thousands of years. Myths, gods, philosophers...What's it all about? Why are we here? Where do we come from, where do we go, what are we supposed to do while we're here? What's the meaning of life? So now we find out, and it was never about us at all. The meaning of life is...butterflies." He gave me a lopsided grin. "But you knew that all along, didn't you?"

Of all the people on the planet, I and a handful of others could make the case that we were most directly affected. Sure, lives were uprooted, many people died before order was restored. But the Linemen were as unobtrusive as they could possibly be, given their mind-numbing task, and things eventually got back to a semblance of normalcy. Some people lost their religious faith, but even more rejected out of hand the proposition that there was no God but the Line, so the holy men of the world registered a net gain.

But lepidopterists...let's face it, we were out of a job.

I spent my days haunting the dusty back rooms and narrow corridors of the museum, opening casesand drawers, some of which might not have been disturbed for decades. I would stare for hours at the thousands and thousands of preserved moths and butterflies, trying to connect with the childhood fascination that had led to my choice of career. I remembered expeditions to remote corners of the world, miserable, mosquito-bitten, and exhilarated at the same time. I recalled conversations, arguments about this or that taxonomic point. I tried to relive my elation at my first new species, Hypolimnes lewisii.

All ashes now. They didn't even look very pretty anymore.

On the twenty-eighth day of the invasion, a second Line appeared on the world's western coasts. By then the North American Line stretched from a point far in the Canadian north through Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, reaching the Gulf of Mexico somewhere south of Corpus Christi, Texas. The second Line began marching east, finding very few butterflies but not seeming to mind.

It is not in the nature of the governmental mind to simply do nothing when faced with a situation. But most people agreed there was little or nothing to be done. To save face, the military maintained a presence following the Line, but they knew better than to do anything.

On the fifty-sixth day the third Line appeared.

Lunar cycle? It appeared so. A famous mathematician claimed he had found an equation describing the Earth-Moon orbital pair in six dimensions, or was it seven? No one cared very much.

When the first Line reached New York, I was in the specimen halls, looking at moths under glass. A handful of Line-men appeared, took a quick look around. One looked over my shoulder at the displays for a moment. Then they all went away, in their multidimensional way.

And there it is.

I don't recall who it was that first suggested we write it all down, nor can I recall the reason put forward. Like most literate people of the Earth, though, I dutifully sat down and wrote my story. I understand many are writing entire biographies, possibly an attempt to shout out "I was here!" to an indifferent universe. I have limited myself to events from Day One to the present.

Perhaps someone else will come by, some distant day, and read these accounts. Yes, and perhaps the Moon is made of green butterflies.

It turned out that my question, that last day of my military career, was the key question, but I didn't realize I had been given the answer.

The Lineman never said they were growing creatures on Pluto.

He said there were things they grew on cold planets.

After one year of combing the Earth, the Linemen went away as quickly as they appeared.

On the way out, they switched off the light.

It was night in New York. From the other side of the planet the reports came in quickly, and I climbed up to the roof of my building. The moon, which should have been nearing full phase, was a pale ghost and soon became nothing but a black hole in the sky.

Another tenant had brought a small TV. An obviously frightened astronomer and a confused news anchor were counting seconds. When they reached zero, a bit over twenty minutes after the events at the antipodes, Mars began to dim. In thirty seconds it was invisible.

He never mentioned Pluto as their cold-planet nursery....

In an hour and a half Jupiter's light failed, then Saturn.

When the sun came up in America that day, it looked like a charcoal briquette, red flickerings here and there, and soon not even that. When the clocks and church bells struck noon, the Sun was gone.

Presently, it began to get cold.

Castaway

GENE WOLFE.

Gene Wolfe (tribute site: http://www.op.net/~pduggan/ wolfe.html and www.ultan.co.uk/) lives in Barrington, Illinois. Some people consider him among the greatest living American writers, an opinion printed more than once in the Washington Post Book World, a leading literary newspaper.

We concur. His four volume Book of the New Sun is an acknowledged masterpiece. His most recent book is The Knight, the first half of a huge fantasy meganovel, The Wizard Knight. The second half, The Wizard, is forthcoming. His previous SF novel was Return to the Whorl, the third volume of The Book of the Short Sun (really a single huge novel), which many of his most attentive readers feel is his best book yet. Collections of his short fiction include The Island of Dr.

Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, Storeys from the Old Hotel, Endangered Species, and Strange Travelers.

"Castaway" was published electronically by SciFiction, and this is perhaps its first time in print. It is a short, compressed SF allegory, in which a castaway in the distant future, stranded on an isolated planet that is itself dying, relates his melancholy recollections of his years there and his relation with the spirit of the place. Ironically, his memories are full of music and color, and his rescue ship sterile and mechanical.

We picked him up on some dead world nobody ever goes to. We did it because we had a field problem that required a lot of tests, and that stuff is easier if you can just dodge in and out of the ship without worrying about the airlocks and how much air you're dumping every time you go outside. Bad as this place was, you could breathe-the air turned out to be real good, in fact-so we set down in a warm belt around the middle.

Warm's one of those words, you know? It was still cold enough for hightherms, and even with hightherms I blew on my fingers a lot. The sun was red and real close, but there didn't seem to be a lot of heat in it.

Anyway, he had been there twenty-seven years, he said, and I said, standard years or world years, and he said, they were so close it didn't make any difference. World years were half an hour shorter now, he said, and I should've asked why now-had they been longer a while back? Only I didn't think of it right then.

"We got hit by the Atrothers," he said; so it had been back during the war all right, back before I was born. "We tried to get home, but we could see we couldn't make it. This place was close, and we landed here."

We're not there anymore, I told him, we took off. Well, that shut him up for the rest of the week. So next time I tried not to say things like that. I know they had him up to Debriefing three times. So you know they never got much out of him, didn't get what they wanted, or they wouldn't have talked to him so much. Somebody said his mind was blown, and I guess that was sort of right.

Only he used to open up to me sometimes in the break area, and that's what I want to tell about.

Then maybe I can stop thinking about him.

"There were only three of us," he said, "and Obert died the first year and Yarmouth the second year.

I thought we were dying off one by one, and I'd go next year if nobody came. But I didn't. We'd hung up the distress buoy. It didn't do a bit of good, but I stayed tough."

He looked at me then like I wanted to argue. I just said, sure.

"The rations ran out," he said. "I had to eat whatever I could find. There's still a few plants. They're not good, but you can eat them if you boil them long enough and keep changing the water."

I said you were there all alone, huh? It must've been double duty.

Of course that shut him up again, but next day he came in about ten minutes after I got off shift. He sat down right where he'd sat before. All the tables are white and so are the chairs, so it doesn't makeany difference where you sit, it's all the same. Only he knew somehow, and that's where he sat. I carried my caff over and sat down across from him and waited.

About ten minutes after that he said, "There was a woman. A woman was there with me. I wasn't alone. No. Not really. Not with her there."

I said you should have told us. We'd have taken her off, too.

He just shook his head.

Later he said it was too late for her. "She's old," he said. "Old and ugly, and she can't think any more. She tries to think of new things, but nothing comes. Nothing works now, and sometimes she can't think at all. She told me. You've got a good medpod. That's what they say."

I guess I nodded.

"I've been spending a lot of time in there. Maybe it's helping. I don't know. But it wouldn't help her."

Then he reached over and grabbed my wrist-his hand was like a vise. "We could have saved her.

Earlier. We could have made her young again. We could have taken her away. We could have done it.

Nothing stopping us."

Next day he wouldn't talk at all, or the day after that either. I guess I should have just let him alone, but I was sick of talking to the other guys in the crew. I'd been talking to them ever since I signed on, and I knew what they were going to say and the games they wanted to play and what all their jokes were.

So I tried to figure out a way to get him going again. Everybody likes to brag, right? Especially when you can't check up on them. The next time he was in the break room, I sat down next to him and said tell me some more about this woman that was dirtside with you. I guess you got plenty, huh?

He just looked at me for maybe two minutes. I knew he was talking in his head. He'd been alone for so long. I ran into a guy once who had tended a navigation beacon way out on the Rim for ten years.

You do that, and the severance pay's a fortune. Go in at thirty-you've got to be at least thirty-and come out at forty, rich for life. What they don't tell you is that most of them go crazy. Anyway, he said you get to talking to yourself. When they finally pull you out, you try to stop and you don't talk to anybody, just in your head. You haven't talked to anybody for so long that talking out loud is the same as talking to yourself, as far as you're concerned.

Finally he said, "She was old. Terribly old and dying. I thought I told you."

I said, yeah, I guess you did.

"Millions and millions of years old, and used to think she'd never die. But it was all over for her, and she knew it. We never wanted to help her. We never wanted to save her, and now we couldn't if we wanted to. It's too late. Too late..."

After that he started to cry. I listened to it and sort of tapped his shoulder and talked to him for as long as it took to finish my caff. But he didn't say anything else that day.

The next day he sort of motioned to me to come over and sit with him. He'd never done that before.

So I did.

"She could make pictures in your head." He was whispering. "Show you things. Did I tell you about that?"

He never had, and I said so.

"They're trying to make me forget the leaves. Billions and billions of leaves, all sizes and shapes and shades of green, and the rising sun turning them gold. Sometimes the bottom was a different color, and when the wind blew the whole tree would change."

I wanted to ask what a tree was, but I figured I could just look it up and kept quiet.

"She used to show me birds, too. Wonderful birds. Some that could sleep while they flew. Some that sang and flew at the same time. All kinds of colors and all kinds of shapes. You know what a bird is?"

Naturally I said I didn't.

"It's a kind of flying animal. Some of them made music. A lot of the little ones did. Singing, you know, only they sounded more like flutes. It was beautiful!"

I said, did they know "Going to Bunk with You Tonight," because that's my favorite song. He saidthey didn't play our music, they played their own, and he sang some of it for me, looking like he was going to kiss somebody. I didn't like it much, but I pretended I did. I wanted to know how she had showed him all this and made him hear it, because I think it would be really nice if I could do that, and useful, too. He said he didn't know, and after that he was pretty quiet 'til I'd finished my caff.

Then he said, "You know how a man puts part of himself into a woman?"

I said sure.

"It's like that, only in the brain. She puts part of herself into your brain."

Naturally I laughed, and I said was it as good for you as it was for her, and did you feel the ship jump?

And he said, "It wasn't good for her at all, but it was wonderful for me, even the time I watched the last bird die."

There was a lot of other stuff, too, some of it happy and some really, really sad. I will remember it, but I don't think you would want to hear about all of it. Finally he told me how sick she had been, and how he had sat beside her night after night. He would pick up her hand and hold it, and try to think of something he could say that would make her feel better, only he could never think of anything and every time he tried it was just so dumb he made himself shut up. He would hold her hand, like I said up there, and sort of stroke it, and after a while it would melt away and he would have to look for it and pick it up all over. I didn't understand that at all. I still don't.