Читать книгу The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories - Darrell Schweitzer - Страница 9

THE FIRE EGGS

Uncle Rob’s voice was breaking up, either from emotion or a bad transmission or a combination of both. I tapped the enhancer key and he came through a little better.

“It’s your Aunt Louise. She’s worse.”

“She’s already dying,” I said without thinking, and just barely stopped myself before blurting out, so how could she be any worse? Even over the phone, at that distance, I knew I had caused my uncle pain. “I’m sorry, I—”

How hideously selfish we can be at such moments.

But the moment passed. Rob was beyond grief, I think, into some sort of acceptance of the fact that his Louise was doing to die soon of one of those new and untreatable cancer-like diseases that were going around.

Then he told me.

“She’s talking to the Fire Eggs, Glenn.”

“Jesus—” to use a slightly obsolete expression. Of course lots of people had talked to the luminous, two-and-a-half meter high ovoids since they first appeared all over the world in the course of half an hour on January 23rd, 2004, anchoring themselves in the air precisely 1.3 meters above the ground. Sure, lots of people claimed the Eggs answered back by some means which evaded all recording devices but was an article of faith among believers. More than one religion had started that way. There were dozens of bestselling books from the revelations. Countless millions had merely surrendered to the inexplicable and were comforted.

But not Louise. She and Rob were both too supremely rational for that, even Louise, who liked to tweak his pride by pretending to believe in astrology or psychic healing. It was just a game with her. Or had been.

Uncle Rob had once told me that he regarded true mental decay, meaning organic senility, as the worst of all possible fates. “If I get like that, shoot me,” he said, and he wasn’t joking.

And now Louise was talking to the Fire Eggs.

She’d once compared them to lava lamps, from the way they glow in the night, the darker colors rising and swirling and flowing within the almost translucent skin to no discernible purpose. She was old enough to remember lava lamps. She explained to me what they were and what they were for, which was, in essence, nothing. Purely aesthetic objects.

* * * * * * *

But I am ahead of myself. The first theory to explain the presence of Fire Eggs was that they were bombs, the initial barrage in an invasion from space. I am old enough to remember that. I was almost six in 2004, the night of the Arrival, when the things popped into existence with muted thunderclaps (though some reported a crackling sound). There was panic then, the roadways clogged with carloads of people trying to flee somewhere where there weren’t any Fire Eggs, all devolving into one huge, continent-wide traffic jam when it became clear that there was no such place.

My own family never got that far. My father bundled us all into the car, backed out of the garage with a roar, and then made the discovery shared by so many others that first night,that a Fire Egg could not be removed from where it had situated itself by any human agency. We crashed into the one which blocked our driveway. I remember the trunk of the car flying open, my mother screaming, my father screaming back.

Later, I saw that the rear of the car was crumpled like a soda can. That night, we all sat up bleary-eyed in front of the television, slowly concluding that the world’s governments and scientists were just as helpless as we were.

We also learned that it had been worse elsewhere. Innumerable traffic accidents. In the London underground, a train hit one of the things in the tunnel just north of Charing Cross. The first car disintegrated, the second accordioned, and almost a hundred people were killed.

Another one, on a runway in South Africa, had destroyed an airliner, which “fortunately” was empty at the time, but for the crew, who died.

My father made a noise of disgust and shut off the TV.

I remember that we prayed together that night, something we didn’t often do. I think my parents, like a lot of people just then, were waiting for, expecting imminent death.

But nothing happened. Days, weeks, months passed. Life settled down, nervously. If the Fire Eggs are bombs, they’re still ticking away, silently, thirty-five years later.

* * * * * * *

So I dropped down from orbit, invoking the compassionate leave clause in my contract in ways I never would have gotten away with if I were not tenured, and as I drove from the airport I did something very few members of my generation have ever bothered to do and certainly none of my students would ever have tried.

I counted the Fire Eggs, the ones hovering above lawns, others in abandoned stretches of roadway off to my right or left. There was a larger accumulation near the city limits, which might have made some sort of sense, but then they were so thick in an empty field that they reminded me of a herd of sheep mindlessly grazing on the gently sloping hillside.

But I couldn’t count them any more than anybody really knew how many had been served by that fast-food restaurant, the one with the Golden Eggs; but of course those were man-made imitations, since, as was apparent from innumerable tests, not to mention attempts to adorn them with graffiti or redecorate them as conceptual art, nothing of terrestrial origin would adhere to a Fire Egg. Indeed, you really couldn’t touch them. There was some kind of electrical barrier which made the surface totally frictionless.

I gave up counting somewhere in the low thousands. Of course there were no such easy answers, though numerologists and even serious mathematicians had done their best.

The next theory was that Fire Eggs were alien probes. All the religions were based on that one, The Church of Somebody Watching. This was not wholly without merit, or even benefit. There had been no wars since the Fire Eggs arrived. Maybe they’d put mankind on good behavior.

* * * * * * *

Uncle Rob’s house looked pretty much as it always had, the towering tulip-poplars along the driveway now leafless and waiting for winter, the house’s split-level “ranch” design a leftover from the previous century, even a decorative “mailbox” out front, for all nobody had actually received mail that way in years; and of course the Fire Eggs on the front lawn, arranged by random chance into a neat semi-circle. We’d named them once, years after they’d arrived, when few people were afraid of them anymore and Fire Eggs had become just part of the landscape and Uncle Rob’s last book, What to Name Your Fire Egg had enjoyed a modest success. We called ours Eenie, Meenie, Moe, and Shemp. They glowed as they always did in the evening twilight, completely unchanged. The one on the far right was Shemp.

And there was Uncle Rob in the driveway, who was very much changed, not merely showing his years, but worn out, defeated. Here was a man who had been a world-famous celebrity before his retirement, the ebullient apostle of rationality to the world, his generation’s successor to Carl Sagan, and he had four utterly defiant enigmas practically on his doorstep and Louise was dying and she’d started talking to them.

“I’m glad you could come,” was all he said. He insisted on taking my bag, a leftover courtesy from a time long ago, when there were no Fire Eggs.

* * * * * * *

My students could never remember such a time. Many couldn’t even imagine it. A landscape without Fire Eggs wasn’t real to them. Art gallery attendance dropped off, first from disinterest, then from security problems as every now and then someone tried to “improve” various famous canvases by painting Fire Eggs onto them. It was a compulsion for a while in the 2020’s, a kind of mania, which spawned several cults of its own.

Then came the fads, the t-shirts with the Mona Lisa Fire Egg, Starry Night with Fire Eggs hovering somewhat unrealistically up in the sky, The Last Supper with a Fire Egg on either side of Christ.

I’ve even seen a redigitalized version of Casablanca, still in black and white to satisfy the purists, but with the occasional Fire Egg added to the background in some of the scenes.

I did my graduate thesis on the retro-impact of Fire Eggs on the arts. You know, Hamlet addressing his famous soliloquy to an Egg.

* * * * * * *

Uncle Rob, Aunt Louise, and I had a very uncomfortable dinner together. It was a shock that she came downstairs to see me at all. I had envisioned her bedridden, with tubes and drips, surrounded by monitors. I knew they’d sent her home to die, so I was shocked, not just mildly surprised, when she descended the stairs in her bathrobe and slippers. She flashed me her patented mischievous smile and a wink, and sashayed down, swinging her hips and bathrobe belt in time like a showgirl.

Then she stumbled and I could see the pain on her face. Uncle Rob and I caught her by either arm and eased her into a chair.

“Take it easy,” he whispered. “Just take it easy. Glenn is here. You’ll be all right.”

“I can see for myself that he’s here and you don’t really believe I will be all right. Stop lying.”

“Louise, please—”

She was still able to eat a little, or at least go through the motions for my benefit. We three went through the motions of a nice friendly meal, doting uncle and aunt and favorite nephew, the Fire Eggs on the lawn glowing through the curtains of the front picture window like Christmas lights glimpsed through snow.

“How was your conference, Glenn?” Louise said.

“I, ah...had to leave early. I missed most of it.”

“Oh.”

“And what’s...with you?”

* * * * * * *

One of the other things I investigated in the course of becoming one of the leading academic experts on Fire Eggs was what I labelled the Nuke Rumor. During the period in which the world’s governments had assigned their top scientists the task of Finding Out What Those Things Are At All Costs, after the attempts to probe, scan, drill through, transmit into, or otherwise penetrate the Eggs had failed, so the story goes, somebody somewhere—always in a nasty, remote place where They Have No Respect For Human Life—set off a nuclear device under a Fire Egg. It made a huge crater, destroyed much of the countryside, killed thousands directly and thousands more from the subsequent radiation, but the Egg was utterly unperturbed. The world held its breath, waiting for retaliation.

And nothing happened.

As I first heard the story, it happened in China, but a colleague at Beijing University I knew on the Worldnet assured me no, it was in India. In India they said it was in the Pan-Arabic Union and the Arabs said it was the Russians and the Russians said the French; and I was able to follow the story all the way back to Wyoming, where people were sure the blast had wiped out some luckless desert town and the CIA had covered the whole thing up.

“I think the aliens are trying to exterminate us with boredom,” some late-night comedian quipped. “I mean, who the hell cares anymore?”

* * * * * * *

“I’ve been having dreams,” Louise said.

“Please—” Rob whispered.

She reached over and patted his hand. “Now you hush. This is what you called the boy all the way down from his conference to listen to, so he might as well hear it. You can’t fool me, Robert. You never could.”

“Just...dreams?” I said.

“You know the kind where you know you’re dreaming, and you say to yourself, this isn’t right, but you go on dreaming anyway? It was like that. I fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up inside my dream, and it was The Smothers Brothers on the screen, and I was a girl again. Then somebody turned it off and the room filled up with my friends from school—and I knew a lot of them had to be dead by now, so they couldn’t be here—but they were all young ago too, and dressed in bell-bottoms and beads, and barefoot with their toenails painted, the whole works. You know, like hippies, which is what we pretended to be. Somebody put on a Jefferson Airplane record and it was going on about sister lovers and how in time there’d be others. And there were Fire Eggs with us, there in my own living room—here, in this house, not where my parents lived when I was a girl—one Egg for each of us, and they seemed to radiate warmth and love. Fred Hemmings, Fat Freddie we called him, tried to get his Egg to take a toke of pot, and it seemed so funny that I was still laughing when I woke up, and you know, there were ashes on the rug!”

Aunt Louise laughed softly, and for a while seemed lost in a world of her own, and Rob and I exchanged wordless glances which said, I don’t get it and You wouldn’t want to, believe me.

“It was just a dream, Aunt Louise. I’m glad it made you happy.”

“I didn’t use to have dreams like that.”

“Maybe now—”

“Yes, maybe now it’s time. I can hear my dreams now.”

“Hear them?”

She sat for a time, oblivious to us both, and she seemed to be listening to her dreams from long ago, which had Fire Eggs in them.

As always, nothing happened. The four Fire Eggs glowed softly on the lawn and the world was still.

* * * * * * *

Uncle Rob took me aside into the kitchen.

“If this weren’t so awful, I suppose you’d find it academically interesting.”

“Is there anything I can actually do? Why exactly did you ask me to come here?”

“She’s going away, Glenn.”

“Don’t mince words. She’s dying. You know that. I know that. She knows that. It is not news. If there is anything I can do to provide comfort, Uncle Rob, or otherwise help you cope, please tell me. Right now I feel about as useless as an ornamental mailbox.”

“Or a Fire Egg, doing nothing.”

“Maybe they’re supposed to do nothing. For thirty-five years, they’ve just sat there. We’ve waited for them to speak, to open up, to explode, to vanish and leave gifts behind, to hatch, for Christ’s sake. But they will not hatch, which may be the whole point.”

“Always you change the subject, Glenn. I suppose it is helpful to have a questing mind, but you are changing the subject.”

“Not entirely. Please. Hear me out. Maybe they’re like the plastic sunken ships and mermaids and stuff we put into the fishbowl. They’re decorations, and make little sense to the goldfish. Most of the goldfish, after a while, just keep on swimming, but maybe a few, the sensitive ones, respond in some way. That’s what the objects are for. That’s why they’re passive. They’re waiting for just the right people to respond.”

Uncle Rob began to cry. He held onto my shoulder. I was afraid he was going to fall over. I just stood there, wondering exactly what I’d said wrong, but he explained soon enough. “You’re talking crap, Glenn. You know it. You’re an educated man. Before I retired, I was the world’s top science guru. We’re goddamn experts, both of us. Our job is to know. When we’re up against something we can’t know, it just tears us down. We’ve both been skeptics. We’ve both published articles debunking all the crazy stories and rumors about the Fire Eggs. You were the one who pointed out that the stories of people being taken inside were just a continuation of the UFO mythology of the last century. We kept ourselves clean of mysticism. We were rational. Now this. Louise wants me to believe that as she approaches the threshold of death she can hear things from the beyond, and the beyond is inside those Fire Eggs, as if whoever sent them is building a gateway to Heaven—”

“I thought it was a stairway.”

“What?”

“One of her old songs.”

“Can’t we at least retain a little dignity? That’s what you’re here for, Glenn. I want you to help her retain a little dignity.”

* * * * * * *

The presence of Fire Eggs actually stimulated the moribund space programs of the world, a bit cautiously at first, as if everybody were afraid that They would swoop down and crush us if we started pressing out into the universe. This was called the Tripwire Theory, the Fire Eggs as alarm device, ready to start screaming if the goldfish tried to climb out of the bowl. But, as always, nothing happened. The Eggs remained inert. No pattern was ever detected in their subtle, shifting interior light. There was no interference as robots, then live astronauts, then a combination of the two proved definitively that there were no Fire Eggs on the Moon or on Mercury, or Venus, or Mars, or on the rocky or ice satellites of the gas planets. The results from Pluto, I understand, are still being evaluated, but meanwhile the first interstellar probes have been launched, and some people began to look out into the universe again for an answer, rather into their own navels. They began to regard the Fire Egg problem as one that could be solved.

The optimists said that was the whole purpose of the Fire Eggs being here in the first place.

* * * * * * *

I looked back into the dining room.

“She’s gone.”

“Another damn thing after another I have to put up with,” said Uncle Rob, opening a closet, getting out a coat, handing me mine. “She wanders sometimes. But she never goes very far.”

I put on my coat. “In her condition? Should she be out at all?”

“No. But her mind is sick too, not just her body.”

I didn’t ask any more. There was no sense making him review the endless futilities, the grinding, subtle agonies he’d gone through as each and every medical option had been exhausted. She couldn’t be put in an institution. There was no money for that. All his was gone. The various plans had long since run out of coverage. Besides, the legalistic wisdom went, what actual harm was there in an old lady wandering around the neighborhood talking to the Fire Eggs? Which is a bureaucratic euphemism for nobody gives a shit.

“Come on,” I said, nudging Uncle Rob toward the door. “I’ll help you find her.”

* * * * * * *

If they’d appeared precisely in the year 2000, things would have been really crazy, but in any case the Fire Eggs rekindled millennialist fears. Clergymen denounced them as tools or emissaries of Satan and searched the scriptures, particularly Revelations, to come up with a variety of imaginative answers. There had been a time when Uncle Rob and I had enjoyed deflating this sort of thing. “The Beast of the Apocalypse does not lay eggs,” I had concluded an article, and Rob had used that line on his TV show and gotten a lot of applause.

But the Spiritualists took over anyway. Fire Eggs were Chariots of the Dead, they told us, come to carry us into the next life. They were also alive, like angels. They knew our innermost secrets. They could speak to us through mediums, or in dreams.

* * * * * * *

Rob and I found Louise on the front lawn, sitting cross-legged on the icy ground in her bathrobe, gazing up at the Fire Eggs. It was almost winter. The night air was clear, sharp.

“Come on.” She patted the ground beside her. “There’s plenty of room.” “Louise, please go back inside,” Rob said.

“Tush! No, you sit. You have to see this.”

“Let me at least get you a coat.”

“No, you sit.”

Rob and I sat.

“Just look at them for a while,” she said, meaning the Fire Eggs. “I think that it’s important there’s one for each of us.”

“But there are four, Aunt Louise.”

She smiled and laughed and punched me lightly on the shoulder and said, “Well isn’t that lovely? There’s room for one more. Ask your wife to join us, Glenn.”

“I’m not married, Aunt Louise.”

She pretended to frown, then smiled again. “Don’t worry. You will be.” “Did...they tell you that?” She ignored me. To both of us she said, “I want you to just sit here with me and look and listen. Aren’t they beautiful?” I regarded Eenie, Meenie, Moe, and Shemp, and they looked as they always had. I suppose in other circumstances they could indeed have seemed beautiful, but just now they were not.

I started to say something, but then Louise put her dry, bony hand over my mouth and whispered, “Quiet! They’re singing! Can’t you hear it? Isn’t it heavenly?”

I only heard the faint whine and whoosh of a police skimmer drifting along the block behind us. Otherwise the night was still.

Uncle Rob began sobbing.

“I can’t stand any more of this,” he said, and got up and went toward the door. “Can’t we have a little dignity?”

I hauled Louise to her feet and said, “You’ve got to come inside, now.” But she looked up at me with such a hurt expression that I let go of her. She wobbled. I caught hold of her. “Yes,” she said, “let me have a little dignity.” I think she was completely lucid at that moment. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. She sat down again.

I turned to Uncle Rob. “You go on in. We’ll stay out here a while longer.” So we sat in the cold, autumn air, in front of the Fire Eggs, like couch potatoes in front of a four-panel TV. No, that’s not right. It doesn’t describe what Louise did at all. She listened raptly, rapturously, to voices I could not hear, to something which, perhaps, only dying people can hear as they slide out of this life. She turned from one Fire Egg to the next, to the next, as if all of them were conversing together. She reached out to touch them, hesitantly, like one of the apes in the ancient flatvideo classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but of course she could not touch them, and her fingers slid away as if her hand couldn’t quite locate the points of space where the Fire Eggs were.

At times she answered back, and sang something, as if accompanying old voices, but I think it was some rock-and-roll song from her psychedelic childhood, not an ethereal hymn from the Hereafter.

Or maybe the Hereafter just likes Jefferson Airplane. Or the Fire Eggs do. I would like to be able to say that I achieved some epiphany myself, that I saw the Fire Eggs in a new way, as if the scales had fallen from my eyes and I saw truly for the first time. I would like to say that I heard something, that I received some revelation.

But I only watched the pale reds and oranges drifting within the creamy, luminous white. I only saw the Fire Eggs, as every human being on Earth sees Fire Eggs every day of his or her life.

I only heard the police skimmer slide around the block. Maybe one of the cops was staring at us through the darkened windows. Maybe not. The skimmer didn’t stop.

And I looked up and saw the autumn stars, as inscrutable as the Fire Eggs, never twinkling, almost as if I were looking at them from space.

Louise died during the night. She started drooling blood, but she looked content where she was, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, which may be a euphemism for something too painful to put into words.

I just stayed there with her. After a while, her breathing had a gurgling sound to it, and she leaned over into my lap. I could see by the light of the Fire Eggs that she was bleeding from the bowels and the whole back of her bathrobe was stained dark. But she didn’t want to leave. She had what I suppose someone else might have called a beatific expression on her face. She reached up toward the Fire Eggs once more, groping in the air.

And then I rocked her to sleep, by the light of the unblinking stars and of the Fire Eggs.

* * * * * * *

Somehow I fell asleep too. At dawn, Uncle Rob shook me awake. I got up stiffly, but I’d been dressed warmly enough that I was all right.

He couldn’t bring himself to say anything, but the look in his eyes told me everything.

I didn’t have to ask. I didn’t have to search. Aunt Louise was gone, bloody bathrobe and all.

Of course any number of disappearances and murders had been attributed to the Fire Eggs in the past, as had so much else. “The Fire Egg ate my homework” was an old joke. “The Fire Egg ate Aunt Louise” didn’t go over well with the authorities, so there was an investigation, which concluded, for lack of any real evidence, that, despite what the two of us claimed, Louise had wandered off in the night and died of exposure or her disease, and finding her body would only be a matter of time.

* * * * * * *

“I’ll tell you what the fucking things are,” said Uncle Rob. “They’re pest-disposal units. They’re roach motels. They’re here to kill us, then to clean the place out to make room for somebody else. Maybe the poison tastes good to the roach and it dies happy, but does it make any difference?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. I really don’t.”

The night before I was to leave, he went out on the lawn and lay down underneath one of the Fire Eggs and blew his brains out with a pistol. I heard the shot. I saw him lying there.

I just waited. I wanted to see what would happen. But I fell asleep again, or somehow failed to perceive the passing of time, and when I came to myself again, he was gone. The pistol was left behind.

* * * * * * *

It was Aunt Louise who first named them Fire Eggs. Not everybody knows that. Uncle Rob used the term on his television show, and it caught on. He gave her credit, over and over again, but no one listened and the whole world believes he was the one who coined it.

That’s what his obituaries said, too.

* * * * * * *

I think that we’re wrong to wait for something to happen.

I think it’s been happening all along.