The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  “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 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 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 worsened 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, and she died.

  * * * *

  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.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ALLEN STEELE

  Before becoming a science fiction author, Allen Steele was a journalist who’d worked for newspapers and magazines in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Missouri, and his home state of Tennessee. But SF was his first love, so he eventually ditched journalism and instead began producing that which made him want to be a writer in the first place.

  Since then,
Steele has published eighteen novels and nearly a hundred short stories. His work has received numerous awards, including three Hugos, and has been translated worldwide, mainly in languages he can’t read. He serves on the Board of Advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He also belongs to Sigma, a group of SF writers who frequently serve as unpaid consultants on matters regarding technology and security.

  Allen Steele is a lifelong space buff, and this interest has not only influenced his writing, but also taken him to some interesting places. He has witnessed numerous space shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center and has flown NASA’s shuttle cockpit simulator at the Johnson Space Center. In 2001, he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in hearings regarding the future of space exploration. He would like very much to go into orbit, and hopes that one day he’ll to be able to afford to do so.

  Steele lives in western Massachusetts with his wife Linda and a continual procession of adopted dogs. He collects vintage science fiction books and magazines, spacecraft model kits, and dreams.

  JAY LAKE

  Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His books for 2012 and 2013 include Kalimpura from Tor and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

  KEN SCHOLES

  Ken Scholes grew up in a trailer outside a smallish logging town not far from the base of Mount Rainier in the Pacific Northwest. Baptized into Story at a young age, he fed himself on Speed Racer, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants and Marine Boy sprinkled with a generous dose of dinosaur picture books. One day, his parents brought home two science fiction books—Trapped in Space, by Jack Williamson, and Runaway Robot, by Lester Del Rey. They set him on a reading path that eventually swept across genres—mysteries, westerns, science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, thrillers, horror. Still, speculative fiction remained home base for Ken; he cites Bradbury and Burroughs, Howard, Moorcock and King as strong influences.

  He sold his first story to Talebones magazine in 2000 and won the Writers of the Future contest in 2004. His quirky, offbeat fiction continues to show up in various magazines and anthologies like Polyphony 6, Weird Tales and Clarkesworld Magazine. More recently, his novel Lamentation appeared as the first in a five-book series from Tor called “The Psalms of Isaak.”

  GARDNER DOZOIS

  Gardner Dozois is the former editor of Asimov’s magazine and currently edits the annual anthology series, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, now in its Twenty-Ninth annual edition. He has won fifteen Hugo Awards and thirty-four Locus Awards for his editing, plus two Nebula Awards and a Sidewise Award for his own writing. He is the author or editor of over a hundred books. Coming up are two new anthologies edited with George R.R. Martin, Old Mars and Old Venus.

  AVRAM DAVIDSON

  Avram Davidson, one of the most celebrated Grand Masters of Science Fiction, won a Hugo Award in 1958 for his story “Or All the Seas with Oysters.” Most of his books are currently available from Wildside Press, and Audible recently released several of his books in audiobook format, including The Adventures of Dr. Eszterhazy. Visit Audible.com to check it out.

  CAROL EMSHWILLER

  Carol Emshwiller (born April 12, 1921) is an American writer of avant garde short stories and science fiction who has won prizes ranging from the Nebula Award to the Philip K. Dick Award. Ursula K. Le Guin has called her “a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.” Among her novels are Carmen Dog and The Mount. She has also written two cowboy novels called Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill. Her most recent novel, The Secret City, was published in April 2007.

  CHARLES L. FONTENAY

  Charles Louis Fontenay (1917–2007) was an American journalist and science fiction writer. He wrote science fiction novels and short stories. His non-fiction includes the biography of prominent New Deal era politician Estes Kefauver.Fontenay served as editor of the Nashville Tennessean, among other newspapers, worked with the Associated Press and Gannett News Service. He retired to St. Petersburg, Florida where he continued to write science fiction until shortly before his death.

  CORY DORCOTOW

  Cory Doctorow writes: “In spring 2004, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf’s classic narratives.”

  His story “I, Robot” is part of this series.

  PAMELA SARGENT

  Pamela Sargent has won the Nebula and Locus Awards and is the author of the novels Cloned Lives, The Sudden Star, Watchstar, The Golden Space, The Alien Upstairs, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child, The Shore of Women, Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, Child of Venus, and Climb the Wind. Ruler of the Sky, her 1993 historical novel about Genghis Khan, was a bestseller in Germany and in Spain, where she was invited to speak at the Institute of American Studies, the University of Barcelona, and the Complutense University of Madrid. She also edited the Women of Wonder anthologies, the first collections of science fiction by women, published in the 1970s by Vintage/Random House and in updated editions during the 1990s by Harcourt Brace. A short story, “The Shrine,” was produced for the syndicated TV anthology series Tales from the Darkside.

  Tor Books reissued her 1983 young adult novel Earthseed, selected as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and a sequel, Farseed, in early 2007. Farseed was chosen by the New York Public Library for their 2008 Books for the Teen Age list of best books for young adults. A third novel, Seedship, was published in 2010. Earthseed has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Melissa Rosenberg, scriptwriter for all five Twilight films, set to write and produce through her Tall Girls Productions.

  GEORGE ZEBROWSKI

  George Zebrowski is an award-winning novelist, story writer, essayist, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of the novel Empties (Golden Gryphon Press) and the editor, with Gregory Benford, of Sentinels in Honor of Arthur C. Clarke (Hadley Rille Books). A new short story will appear in Nature this fall.

  BRANDA W. CLOUGH

  Brenda W. Clough (who also writes as B.W. Clough) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She was nominated for both the Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in 2002 for her Novella “May Be Some Time.” Currently she teaches writing workshops at the Writers Center in Bethesda, MD. Her most recent novel, Speak to Our Desires, is available through Book View Cafe: http://www.bookviewcafe.com—and her web site is:

  http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/

  BRUCE BETHKE

  Bruce Bethke coined the term “cyberpunk” with his story “Cyberpunk”—which he later expanded into the novel Cyberpunks. He works with computers (obviously) when not writing or editing. Check out his anthology series, Stupefying Stories, at www.stupefyingstories.com.

  EVERETT B. COLE

  Everett B. Cole was an American writer of science fiction short stories and a professional soldier. He worked as a signal maintenance and property officer at Fort Douglas, Utah. His first science fiction story, “Philosophical Corps” was published in the magazine Astounding in 1951. His fix-up of that story and two others, The Philosophical Corps, was published by Gnome Press in 1962. A second novel, The Best Made Plans, was serialized in Astounding in 1959, but never published in book form. He also co-authored historical books about the south Texas region.

  STERLING E. LANIER

  Sterling Edmund Lanier (1927–2007) was an American editor, science fiction author and sculptor who published as both Sterling Lanier and Sterling E. Lanier. He is perhaps known best as the editor who championed the publication of
Frank Herbert’s bestselling novel Dune—though he was an excellent author in his own right.

  KEITH LAUMER

  John Keith Laumer (1925–1993) was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the United States Air Force and a U.S. diplomat. His brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz (also mentioned in Keith Laumer’s The Other Side of Time).

  GRANIA DAVIS

  Grania Davis is an author and editor of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. She is also the primary editor of the posthumous work of her late former-husband, Avram Davidson. Her short stories have appeared in various genre magazines, anthologies, and ‘best of’ collections. Her story “The Boss in the Wall” (1998, with Avram Davidson) was nominated for a Nebula Award in the Best Novella category.

  LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

  Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of about fifty novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly in the SF, fantasy, and horror fields. He won the Hugo award in 1988 for his short story, “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” and was president of the Horror Writers Association for two years. Recent books include Tales of Ethshar, a collection of short stories set in the same universe as The Misenchanted Sword and many of his finest fantasy novels, and The Unwelcome Warlock, a new Ethshar novel.

  JAMES C. STEWART

  James C. Stewart appeared in the debut issue of Paradox: The Magazine of Historical & Speculative Fiction. He’s currently seeking a publisher for two novels, and is at home working on his third. He lives in North Bay, Ontario, Canada.

  ALAN E. NOURSE

  Alan Edward Nourse (1928–1992) was an American science fiction author and physician. He wrote both juvenile and adult science fiction, as well as nonfiction works about medicine and science. His SF works generally focused on medicine and/or psionics.

  RICK RAPHAEL

  Rick Raphael (1919-1994) was an American science fiction author. His story “Code Three” was a Hugo Award finalist in 1964. He expanded it into a novel under the same title in 1967.