The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories. Darrell Schweitzer

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,