“What would a lonely, middle aged man do with
a robot with four hands, and seven fingers on each one?”
The Uncertain Flight of the Butterfly is a thriller/mystery set in a generation ship, The Monarch
Starship Monarch left Earth generations ago on a quest to colonize the galaxy, but all attempts at finding a new home appear to have failed. The governing body of this ship is the council, of which Tho Unama is one of its five members. Tho is getting too old for the job and is feeling his strength wane and his mind slip, but can’t retire. Doing so would expose the secret they have kept for years. The Monarch is dying.
The council has discussed repeatedly how to move forward, but there is no consensus. A narrow window exists to abandon the ship and do a perilous trip to a nearby planet called Ak-thaya. But even if some of the evacuation ships arrive, conditions there are so harsh it may be a dead end. Tho has a gut feeling they must stay on course; if the Monarch can hold together, they may arrive at a more promising planet in another system.
When a decompression kills a large group of citizens in bizarre, unexplainable circumstances, the true condition of the ship is revealed. The citizens are now angry and afraid. They rebel and want to evacuate immediately. Tho still believes the trip to Ak-thaya is riskier than staying in the Monarch. Tho needs to recover his strength and contain the insurrectionists. If his mind is still sharp, he may decipher the mystery of the decompression just in time to convince the citizens to stay and save everybody.
M.G.Viterbo 