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

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      * * * * * * *

      “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.”

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