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

he wrote many things, in notes and poems he slipped under my door. I guess he was too shy. I never found out who he was. I could have loved him.”

      “Oh, alas!” said Peter, sinking to his knees at her bedside.

      “Yes, alas,” said the old woman. She fumbled in a drawer by her bedside. She unfolded a piece of paper, and, though it was too dark to read in that room, he recited what was written thereon, for she had memorized it long, long before.

      “Well, I pray to God on high,

      That thou my constancy mayst see,

      And that yet once before I die,

      Thou will vouchsafe to love me.”

      Her hand went limp. She let the paper fall onto the bedclothes.

      “Not very good,” she said, “but written with real feeling. That’s what matters.”

      There on the paper was something that shone like a brilliant jewel, like a star fallen to earth and captured in the hand, a thing as delicate as a snowflake, but all of fire. It was his soul, his heart, the very source of his inspiration, which he had given away in hopeless love so long ago.

      First he reached under his clothing, removing a bit of cheese from where his heart used to be, putting the cheese into a pocket. Then gently, reverently, he took up the glowing thing and replaced it within himself, where it belonged.

      Now his fancies were under control.

      He looked at the lady sadly, but hardly weeping, and began thinking of the words to a sonnet he would write about this night, something elegant in form, like a deftly carven jewel.

      “Now I’ve got you!!” hissed the Hooded One, stepping out of the shadows, bones rattling, swinging his scythe wide. “I’ve figured it out! All I had to do was wait! Ha!”

      “And you shall have to wait a little longer,” said Tom O’Bedlam, “as anyone who is completely insane can understand readily enough.”

      He tapped the hourglass and sent it spinning, end over end. But as the lid had not been secured properly after Tom had opened it during their previous encounter, the Sands of Time spilled out all over the room, and there was much confusion.

      “That’s not fair!”

      * * * * * * *

      Tumbling, then, back through the days of their lives and the days they had never lived, Tom, Nick, Peter the Poet, and Rosalind found themselves once more in a London street, under the bright sky of summer (which is somewhat less obstreperous than many spring skies you could meet). It was an ordinary day. People went about their business. There was talk that the King was going to chop off another queen’s head, or maybe had invented a new kind of meat-pie. No one seemed entirely sure. Rumor, painted in tongues, wagged idly.

      The poet got out pen and paper, sat on a wall. Beyond the wall lay a lunatic who had shaped a lady out of rubbish; but she had come to life and the two made passionate love, each of them perfect in the other’s eyes.

      The poet started to write a sonnet.

      Tom, with the insight that comes only to the mad, stayed his hand, and said, “Have you considered becoming an accountant? Lots of lovely numbers in neat rows. Steady wages. No heartbreak or raging metaphors.”

      (The lunatic behind the wall and his lady-love began to sing, something with Hey nonny-nonny in it every other line. It was time for Tom and the others to move on.)

      * * * * * * *

      The ending was this: Peter married Rosalind, after a proposal that added up their accounts neatly and showed how one side balanced the other. They lived quietly and happily together for a long time. If theirs was not a fiery, all-consuming passion, it was just as well, for such love is only for madmen, as Tom O’Bedlam knew so well. It deprives one of reason by its very nature, but even so, you have to have a knack for it, as you do for really inspired madness.

      He explained as much to the Man in the Moon (there was only one) at night when he climbed to the top of the spire of old St. Paul’s and helped free the Moon, which had gotten stuck up there, like an apple on the end of a knife.

      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