Once Upon a Future

by Robert Reginald (ed)

  “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 than 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 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.”

  * * * *

  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 circumstances 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 col
d, 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 classic, 2001: A Space 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 space 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 space.

  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 the whole 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 unblinking stars and of the Fire Eggs.

  * * * *

  Somehow I fell asleep too. At dawn, Uncle Rob shook me awake. I got up stiffly, but I’d been dressed warmly enough that I was all right.

  He couldn’t bring himself to say anything, but the look in his eyes told me everything.

  I didn’t have to ask. I didn’t have to search. Aunt Louise was gone, bloody bathrobe and all.

  Of course, any number of disappearances and murders had been attributed to the Fire Eggs in the past, as had so much else. “The Fire Egg ate my homework” was an old joke. “The Fire Egg ate Aunt Louise” didn’t go over well with the authorities, so there was an investigation, which concluded, for lack of any real evidence, that, despite what the two of us claimed, Louise had wandered off in the night and died of exposure or her disease, and finding her body would only be a matter of time.

  * * * *

  “I’ll tell you what the fucking things are,” said Uncle Rob. “They’re pest-disposal units. They’re roach motels. They’re here to kill us, then to clean the place out to make room for somebody else. Maybe the poison tastes good to the roach and it dies happy, but does it make any difference?”

  “I don’t know, Uncle. I really don’t.”

  The night before I was to leave, he went out on the lawn and lay down underneath one of the Fire Eggs and blew his brains out with a pistol. I heard the shot. I saw him lying there.

  I just waited. I wanted to see what would happen. But I fell asleep again, or somehow failed to perceive the passing of time, and when I came to myself again, he was gone. The pistol was left behind.

  * * * *

  It was Aunt Louise who first named them Fire Eggs. Not everybody knows that. Uncle Rob used the term on his television show, and it caught on. He gave her credit, over and over again, but no one listened, and the whole world believes he was the one who coined it.

  That’s what his obituaries said, too.

  * * * *

  I think that we’re wrong to wait for something to happen.

  I think it’s been happening all along.

  THE SKIN TRADE, by Brian Stableford

  They say that you can’t judge a man by the color of his skin, but a good tailor can. A state-of-the-art skin is an adept chameleon, of course, but it can only do so much to cosset and shape and mask its wearer. Nowadays, when everybody has a skin of some kind, you never hear people saying “Dead clothes make dead men” any more, but the fact is that a person who’s hollow inside can take the luster off the finest skin. A tailor can always see that slight discoloration at a glance, and a good tailor can make a pretty fair diagnosis of the particular kind of soul-sickness involved.

  I’m a very good tailor.

  There’s a saying in the trade that all customers are good and that bad customers are best. It means that, if there weren’t a steady supply of clients who stubbornly insist on changing their skins at ludicrously frequent intervals, a lot of competent tailors might go bankrupt. That’s why tailors are so scrupulously polite to neurotic fashion-victims, and so patient with those freaks whose bodily secretions are so prolific or so noxious that even the most avid skin has difficulty turning them to good effect.

  I suppose it’s true that it’ll be a sad day for the business when the presently-hectic advancement of skin technology slows down to a mere crawl, and the world finally attains the kind of collective sanity that will allow everyone to keep their first post-pubertal skin until the day they choose to die. Speaking purely for myself, though, I won’t be unhappy to see it. There’s something infinitely depressing about constant customers who simply cannot find a skin that suits them, and insist on blaming their tailors for their failure instead of themselves. It’s always a bad day for me when someone like Ritchie Halliday walks through the door of my fitting-room.

  Ritchie thinks of himself as a very smart person, and in his way I suppose he must be. At any rate, he earns a good deal of money—enough to change his skin as often as he likes, for any reason that occurs to him, and always for the most up-to-date model. He likes to boast that no one in the world has greater expertise than he does in handling very distant machines by ultra-remote telepresence. I believe him, although I’m not as certain as he is that it’s a gift and not a flaw in his personality.

  “Your average run-of-the-mill Waldo can’t adapt his stream of consciousness to deal efficiently with the time-delay involved in being on the moon,” he usually tells me, as soon as I begin rubbing him down with the virus-solution that instructs the skin to go into fission mode. “I’m the only man I know who can lag down for the kind of meld you need to worm around in the Trojans, get in the groove, and stay there for as long as it takes. When we start in on the Jovian satellites, Mr. Invisible Mender, I’ll be there, at the cutting edge of human progress.”

  He has a rich assortment of silly nicknames by which to address me; I think he does it to everybody.

  “I suppose you think working my kind of machinery is pretty boring,” he often adds, chuckling over the double-meaning, “but believe you me, there’s a real art to it—just like there is to your game.”

  I’ve always swallowed the implied insult, the way any good tailor would. That’s part of his problem; he thinks of each of his skins as just another machine for living in, essentially similar to the metal creepy-crawlies that provide him with other-worldly eyes and other-worldly hands. He can’t quite grasp the fact that there’s all the difference in the world between skins and cybersuits.

  Ritchie parades his ignorance and his misunderstanding every time I peel him, as little bothered by the fact that he’s said it all before as by the fact that it’s all nonsense. A lot of people talk all the time
while their tailors are laying them bare. These days, tailors and parents collecting their newly-decanted offspring from the hatchery are the only people who ever get to see the naked flesh of their fellow human beings. Everybody gets embarrassed about being peeled, and many of them react to that embarrassment with obsessive garrulity. I suppose people of that kind are preferable to the few who retreat into awful silence, requiring that I should talk incessantly to them; but Ritchie isn’t the easiest man to listen to, and he usually doesn’t take a blind bit of notice of my replies.

  I’d heard Ritchie’s spiel so many times before that I was quite astonished the day he suddenly veered away from his usual script and started telling me a story. Not unnaturally, he turned the story into a catalogue of complaints about his latest skin, but I didn’t mind that at all. What could be more revealing of a man’s true self than the complaints he makes against his skin?

  * * * *

  “It’s a great skin, Old Needleman, from a purely functional point of view. Never a moment’s chill, mops up the nasties like a dream. I’ve never been in better shape, and that sweet tooth of mine has put an unsightly bulge into more than one skin in my time; but this one mops up surplus calories like a hungry rat. I did some bad psychedelics a few weeks back and the skin had me sorted in no time—no hangover at all. The colors are great—dutifully sober by day and a riot of imagination by night. You really have a flair for kaleidoscopics, you know—best in the West, I reckon. As for the gentle caress, well, it’s just fine...as far as it goes. No, that’s the wrong way to put it. It might be more realistic to put it the other way around...maybe it goes just a little too far. Hell, I’m not explaining this very well, am I? Look, I never thought much about this before, so I’m still trying to figure it out. These things’re alive, right?”