Dan Ystebo met Maura Della once more, five years later.

He met her at the entrance to the Houston ecodome, on a sweltering August day. Dan"s project in Africa had collapsed when ecoterrorists bombed the Brazzaville dome-two Americans were killed-and he"d come back to Houston, his birthplace.

He took her to his home, on the south side of downtown. It was a modern house, an armored box with fully-equipped closed life-support.

He gave her a beer.

When she took off her resp mask he was shocked; she was wasted, and her face was pitted like the surface of the Moon.

He said, "An eco-weapon? Another WASP plague from the Chinese?"

"No." She forced a hideous smile. "Not the war, as it happens. Just a closed-ecology crash, a prion plague." She drank her beer, and produced some hardcopy photographs. "Have you seen this?"

He squinted. A blurred green sphere. A NASA reference on the back showed these were Hubble II images. "I didn"t know Hubble II was still operating."

"It doesn"t do science. We use it to watch the Chinese Moon base. But some smart guy in the State Department thought we should keep an eye on-that."

She pa.s.sed him a pack of printouts. These proved to be results from spectrography and other remote sensors. If he was to believe what he saw, he was looking at a ball of water, floating in s.p.a.ce, within which chlorophyll reactions were proceeding.

"My G.o.d," he said. "They survived. How the h.e.l.l?"

"You showed them," she said heavily.

"But I didn"t expect this. It looks as if they transformed the whole d.a.m.n asteroid."

"That"s not all. We have evidence they"ve travelled to some of the other rocks out there. Methane rockets, maybe."

"I guess they forgot about us."

"I doubt it. Look at this."

It was a Doppler a.n.a.lysis of Reinmuth, the primary asteroid. It was moving. Fuzzily, he tried to interpret the numbers. "I can"t do orbital mechanics in my head. Where is this thing headed?"

"Take a guess."

There was a silence.

He said, "Why are you here?"

"We"re going to send them a message. We"ll use English, Chinese, and the sign system you devised with Sheena. We want your permission to put your name on it."

"Do I get to approve the contents?"

"No."

"What will you say?"

"We"ll be asking for forgiveness. For the way we treated Sheena."

"Do you think that will work?"

"No," she said. "They"re predators, like us. Only smarter. What would we do?"

"But we have to try."

She began to collect up her material. "Yes," she said. "We have to try."

As the water world approached, swimming out of the dark, Sheena 46 prowled through the heart of transformed Reinmuth.

On every hierarchical level mindshoals formed, merged, fragmented, combining restlessly, shimmers of group consciousness that pulsed through the million-strong cephalopod community, as sunlight glimmers on water. But the great shoals had abandoned their songdreams of Earth, of the deep past, and sang instead of the huge, deep future which lay ahead.

Sheena 46 was practical.

There was much to do, the demands of expansion endless: more, colony packets to send to the ice b.a.l.l.s around the outer planets, for instance, more studies of the greater ice worlds that seemed to orbit farfrom the central heat.

Nevertheless, she was intrigued. Was it possible this was Earth, of legend? The home of Dan, of NASA?.

If it were so, it seemed to Sheena that it must be terribly confining to be a human, to be trapped in the skinny layer of air that clung to the Earth.

But where the squid came from scarcely mattered. Where they were going was the thing.

Reinmuth entered orbit around the water world.

The great hierarchies of mind collapsed as the cephalopods gave themselves over to a joyous riot of celebration, of talk and love and war and hunting: Court me. Court me. See my weapons! I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! ...

Things had gone to h.e.l.l with startling, dismaying speed. People died, all over the planet, in conflicts and resource crashes n.o.body even kept track of any more-even before the first major nuclear exchanges.

But at least Dan got to see near-Earth object Reinmuth enter Earth orbit.

It was as if his old Project Bootstrap goals had at last been fulfilled. But he knew that the great artifact up there, like a shimmering green, translucent Moon, had nothing to do with him.

At first it was a peaceful presence, up there in the orange, smoggy sky. Even beautiful. Its hide flickered with squid signs, visible from the ground, some of which Dan even recognized, dimly.

He knew what they were doing. They were calling to their cousins who might still inhabit the oceans below.

Dan knew they would fail. There were almost certainly no squid left in Earth"s oceans: they had been wiped out for food, or starved or poisoned by the various plankton crashes, the red tides.

The old nations that had made up the USA briefly put aside their economic and ethnic and religious and nationalistic squabbles, and tried to respond to this threat from s.p.a.ce. They tried to talk to it again.

And then they opened one of the old silos and shot a nuke-tipped missile at it, by G.o.d.

But the nuke pa.s.sed straight through the watery sphere, without leaving a scratch.

It scarcely mattered anyway. He had sources which told him the signature of the squid had been seen throughout the asteroid belt, and on the ice moons, Europa and Ganymede and Triton, and even in the Oort Cloud, the comets at the rim of the system.

Their spread was exponential, explosive.

It was ironic, he thought. We sent the squid out there to bootstrap us into an expansion into s.p.a.ce.

Now it looks as if they"re doing it for themselves.

But they always were better adapted for s.p.a.ce than we were. As if they had evolved that way. As if they were waiting for us to come along, to lift them off the planet, to give them their break.

As if that was our only purpose.

Dan wondered if they remembered his name.

The first translucent ships began to descend, returning to Earth"s empty oceans.

The Fire Eggs

DARRELL SCHWEITZER.

Darrell Schweitzer is the co-editor of Weird Tales and a writer whose princ.i.p.al reputation has been as a fantasy and horror writer, editor, critic, and poet. He has been a familiar figure at SF conventions since the early 1970s as a dealer and a huckster of his own (mainly small press) books. His nonfiction includes books on Lord Dunsany and H.P. Lovecraft, a number of nonfiction anthologies ( Discovering Cla.s.sic Horror Fiction, etc.), On Writing Science Fiction: The Editors Strike Back (with George Scithers and John M. Ford) and numerous interviews. A recent volume of his critical and other essays is Windows Of The Imagination (1998). His reviewshave appeared widely and he currently has a review column in Aboriginal SF. He is the author of three published fantasy novels, The White Isle, The Shattered G.o.ddess, and The Mask Of The Sorcerer. He has published more than 250 stories; some of his stories are collected in the following volumes: We Are All Legends, Tom O"Bedlam"s Night Out, Transients, Refugees From An Imaginary Country, Nightscapes, Necromancies And Nether-worlds (in collaboration with Jason Van Hollander) and The Great World And The Small.

"The Fire Eggs" was published in Interzone. Floating Alien "Eggs" that appeared all over the world one day in 2004 are in our midst and have been for 35 years as this story takes place.

Schweitzer does an excellent job of sketching the societal reactions to the appearance of the objects. The story is perceptive as extrapolation, and insightful into human nature.

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 pa.s.sed. 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 metre 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 metres 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 colours 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 whichblocked 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 pa.s.sed. Life settled down, nervously. If the Fire Eggs are bombs, they"re still ticking away, silently, 35 years later.

So I dropped down from orbit, invoking the compa.s.sionate 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 acc.u.mulation 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. Ofcourse 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 behaviour.

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 n.o.body 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 any more 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.