“My God,” Darcy whispered.
“I was seeing if Lorne might be interested in some novels by one of my clients,” Mary said. “I’d already sold alternate rights to them in Parallel World 8, but I thought I’d feel Lorne out. We’ve been waiting for alternate publishers to come to us, but I figured it was time to be a little more aggressive.”
“And?” Darcy asked.
“Lorne explained—very nicely, not that it helped—that I didn’t have those rights to offer him. ‘Look at your contracts,’ he told me, so I did. I never signed those contracts, I’m positive of that, but my name was on them, and every contract had the same damned clause. I know it wasn’t in any of my alternate rights contracts before—I’d never have approved any of them if it were. But it’s there now, and I have no way to prove that I didn’t let that clause go through!”
Mary put out her cigarette and lit another. “What clause?” Darcy asked.
“The clause that says we haven’t been selling to just one universe when we sign those contracts. We’ve been giving one publisher in that particular universe rights to sell any book we give them to every other universe. And we don’t get one extra fucking cent!”
“Let me put it this way,” Leonard muttered from the other end of the sofa. “Seems the contracts go into uncertainty and then don’t match the worlds they were written in. They drift. You end up with a different contract than the one you started with.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “A lot of you writers would say that’s nothing new.”
“But I get royalties,” Darcy said, “don’t I?”
“That’s just on sales in Parallel World 3,” Leonard replied. “I checked your contracts. You get your share of book club money and foreign sales and everything else, but only from sales in that universe. They get to keep everything else. That’s probably how they can pay such nice advances to everybody.” He glared at the blank TV screen. “That’s how some dipshit little assistant editor can have an office big enough to hold the goddamn Frankfurt Book Fair in.”
“But—” Darcy began.
“I put in a call to that physicist Sterling Blake,” Mary said. “Our agents’ association put him on retainer a while back. He said something about uncertainty creeping into our continuum, about the wave functions of perception shifting or whatever. I think it means we’re in a different universe from the one we were in a few days ago.” She let out her breath. “Blake has some new equations to play with now, so of course he’s just thrilled to death.”
They were all silent for a long time. At last Darcy said, “Does it really matter? Elysium House paid me some serious money. They did beautiful editions, even if I can’t get any author’s copies. I could retire and never have to worry about money again, and you and the other agents are raking in plenty from the deals anyway.”
“That isn’t the point,” Leonard said.
Darcy had known that even as she spoke. The agents would never forgive themselves for letting all those alternate rights slip away, however inadvertently. And she, along with her now-wealthy colleagues, would have to live with the knowledge that, even in other continua, publishers could still rip you off and not pay you what your work was really worth.
Not that this newly acquired wisdom should have come as much of a surprise to any writer.
* * * *
Mary and Leonard were feeling a little better by the time Darcy left them to go back to her hotel. The two agents had to be philosophical about matters. Anyway, according to the grapevine, it looked as though this alternate rights business was heading toward a downturn of sorts. Mary hadn’t heard of any new alternate rights contracts being signed for nearly a month, and a couple of agents she knew had reported that their calls were no longer going through to a couple of continua. Time to collect as much as they could for their clients just in case things got even more uncertain and they ended up cut off from other parallel worlds altogether. They probably wouldn’t be able to sue for any uncollected payments later on unless attorneys in this universe got even more ingenious than they already were.
Darcy was set. She had to look at it that way. If Donahue’s audience had been more interested in whether she knew Stephen King or in how she was going to spend her money than in her books, she could live with that. Edwina Maris might get better reviews, but raves on the front page of the New York Times Book Review hadn’t noticeably fattened Edwina’s bank account. If Elysium House was ripping Darcy off, then at least there would still be all those millions of readers in Gertrude Banner’s world reading In Terms of Terror and Terror Takes No Time Out.
She had to think of it that way. It was the work that mattered. Her true reward was the writing itself, wasn’t it? No one could deprive her of the vivid moments she spent in worlds of her own creation, or of the sense of accomplishment she felt after finishing a final draft.
But then the image of a publisher somewhere, sitting in the midst of splendor greater than that of the Hearst estate at San Simeon, came to her. The bastards of this world, and every other world, always won in the end; they didn’t care about the writers they exploited. Darcy ground her teeth. She would have to get hold of the Lucky Scribes and ask them for some advice. She could feel a writer’s block coming on.
THE FIRE EGGS, by Darrell Schweitzer
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 going 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 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 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 2020s, 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 labeled 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 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.”
Once Upon a Future Page 19