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 2020s, a kind of mania, which sp.a.w.ned 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 cased 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 favourite 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 Rumour. During the period in which the world"s governments had a.s.signed 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 a.s.sured 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 h.e.l.l cares any more?"

"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 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 35 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 pa.s.sive. 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 c.r.a.p, Glenn. You know it. You"re an educated man. Before I retired, I was the world"s top science guru.

We"re G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 sceptics. We"ve both published articles debunking all the crazy stories and rumours about the Fire Eggs. You were the one who pointed out that the stories ofpeople 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 s.p.a.ce 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 which 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 d.a.m.n 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 inst.i.tution. 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 neighbourhood talking to the Fire Eggs?

Which is a bureaucratic euphemism for n.o.body gives a s.h.i.t.

"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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.sic, 2001: A s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 thewhole 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 gunblinkin stars and of the Fire Eggs.