BRONTE’S EGG by Richard Chwedyk There is an old house at the edge of the woods about sixty kilometers out from the extremes of the nearest megalopolis. It was built in another century and resembles the architecture of the century before that one. In some ways it evokes the end of many things: the end of the road, the end of a time, the end of a search (which the house has been, and on occasion it still is). But it is also a good place for beginnings, a good place to begin a story about beginnings—as good as any and better than most. And it began at dawn. As the first hint of daylight entered the large second floor bedroom where the saurs slept in a great pile, Axel opened his eyes and whispered, “Yeah!” There was stuff to do and he was ready. He pulled himself out from under Agnes’s spiked tail and Rosie’s bony crest and horns, then over Charlie’s big rear end, almost stepping into Pierrot’s gaping mouth. He pressed, prodded and pushed his way until he could lift up the blanket and make a straight dash to the window. He hopped onto a wooden stool and from there climbed up another step to the box-seated window ledge. His little blue head moved left to right like a rolling turret as he stared out at the wall of trees past the yard, silhouetted against the brightening sky. The sun is coming! And the sun is a star! And it’s spinning through space! And we’re spinning through space around the sun! And—there’s stuff to do! “Stuff to do!” he whispered, hopped back to the stool and then to the floor. Axel looked back at the sleep-pile. It was a great, blanket-covered mound. Except for the breathing, a few grumbled syllables and occasional twitches, none of the other saurs stirred. They were good sleepers for the most part—all but Axel. Axel could run about all day long from one end of the old Victorian house to the other, and when sleep time came and the saurs gathered themselves into a pile, he would shut his eyes—but nothing happened. His mind kept running. Even when he did manage to drift off, his dreams were of running, of traveling in speeding vehicles, like interstellar cruisers. And even if he wasn’t moving, he dreamed of motion, of stars and planets and asteroids, of winds and birds and leaves in autumn. The whole universe was whirling and spinning like an enormous amusement park ride. He’d been to an amusement park once, so long ago he couldn’t distinguish it anymore from the rest of life. He had no need to creep out of the room. The thump-thump-thump of his big padded feet disturbed no one. His tail in the air didn’t make a sound. He ran past the room of the big human, Tom Groverton. The human ran and ran all day long too, cleaning and feeding and keeping the saurs out of trouble—but he got tired and slept almost as hard as the saurs. Axel headed down to the first floor. Descending human stairs should have been difficult for a bipedal creature only forty centimeters tall, but he flew down them with ease. There were so many things to do today! The universe was so big—that is, sooooo big! How could anyone just lie about when the sky was already lighting up the world? No way! Axel thumped the floor with his tail. Space and Time and Time and Space! The Universe is one big place! He’d learned that from the computer. The computer was on a desk in the dining room, or what had been the dining room when the house was just a place for humans, before it became a shelter for the saurs. The desk sat over by the east-facing window. The computer was old in many respects, but the old computers were often more easily upgraded, and as long as they were linked to all the marvelous systems out there in the world past the porch and the yard, there was nothing this old model couldn’t do. “Yeah!” Axel rolled a set of plastic steps up to the desk and dashed straight up until he stood before the huge gray monitor—huge to Axel, at least. “Hey! Reggie!” Axel addressed the computer by name. The computer could be voice-activated and voice-actuated. The brain box chirped at Axel’s greeting and the screen came to life. Icons were displayed in the corners and along the top, one of them being the Reggiesystems icon: “Reggie” himself, the light green seahorse-or-baby-sea-serpent thing, with its round black eyes and orange wattle that drooped down his jaw like a handlebar mustache. The icon dropped to the center of the screen and grew until it was almost half the height of the screen. The figure of Reggie rotated from profile to head-on and in a smooth, slightly androgynous voice he spoke: “Reggie is ready.” “Hiya!” Axel waved a forepaw and smiled, mouth opened wide, revealing all his tiny, thorn-like teeth. “Good morning, Axel” said Reggie. “What can Reggie do for you today?” Reggie always referred to himself in the third person. “A whole bunch of stuff!” Axel stretched his forepaws far apart. “Important stuff! Fate of the universe stuff! Really truly big important stuff!” His head bobbed with each exclamation. “Where would you like to begin?” Reggie said with patience. Axel looked sharply to one side, then the other. “Don’t know! I forgot. Wait!” He nodded vigorously. “The screensaver! Show me the screensaver!” The icon’s head seemed to jiggle slightly, affirmatively, as if acknowledging the request. Reggie disappeared and the screen darkened to black. Axel drew his paws together in anticipation. A bright speck appeared in the center of the darkness. It grew until it flickered gently, like a star, then grew some more until it looked as big as the sun. It was the sun—as it might look if you were flying through space, directly toward it. It filled the screen until it seemed you were in imminent danger of crashing right into it. “Aaaaaaaahh!” Axel screamed with delight. The sun moved off to the right corner of the screen, as if you were veering away and passing it by. Darkness again. Another bright speck started to grow in the screen’s center: Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. It was followed by Venus, then the Earth, and Mars, and Jupiter—all the way through the solar system until a pudgy oblong bump rolled past odd-wise and all that was left on the screen were hundreds, thousands of bright specks, changing their positions at differing speeds, as you might see them if you were flying through space. “Yeah!” cried Axel. “Yeah!!” Through the haze of the Oort Cloud, then out past the solar system, the stars kept coming and coming until you could make out a bright little smudge, like a smeared thumbprint in luminous paint. It was a galaxy! Another galaxy! “Yeah!” shouted Axel. “Yeah yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah YEAH!” The galaxy grew in size until you could just about make out some of the more individuated members of the star cluster. Axel cheered them on. “Yes! Galaxies! Let’s go!” The screensaver cycle was over and it was back to the beginning: the little speck grows into the sun, then the planets, then the far off galaxy— Axel watched it all again, and then one more time before Reggie interrupted his reverie. “There was something else you wished Reggie to do?” “Ohhhh. That’s-right that’s-right that’s-right!” Axel kept his eyes on the moving stars. He remembered someone from the dream he’d had during his brief sleep: he couldn’t remember who, but it was someone he wanted to talk to. “I gotta send a message!” “And where do you wish to send the message?” Still looking at the screensaver, he said, “To space!” Reggie took an instant longer than usual to reply. “Space, as an address, is not very specific. Are there any particular coordinates in space to which you wish your message directed?” “What are coordinates?” Axel kept looking at the stars. The screensaver blinked away. In its place appeared numbers from top to bottom: numbers with decimal points and superscripted degree signs— “Coordinates,” Reggie said, “are a way to divide space by increments, so that one can more accurately determine which part of space one is looking at or to which section one might want to direct a message.” “Ohhhhh.” Reggie scrolled the numbers upward. Axel gaped at them, partly perplexed at the notion of numbers as directions, partly in awe at the sheer volume of them. Numbers, decimal points, degree signs—space was threatening to become an impenetrable wall of numbers. If he thought about it any more his head would heat up and explode. “That one!” Axel pointed with his left forepaw. “I’ll take that one!” The numbers stopped scrolling. “Which one?” asked Reggie. “That one!” He pressed the forepaw to the glass screen, then tapped against it adamantly. The numbers were so small—and his forepaw so big in comparison—that Reggie could still not discern which coordinate Axel had chosen. Reggie highlighted one of the numbers in bright red. “This one?” “Yeah! That’s it!” In truth it wasn’t. But the red highlighting was distracting to Axel, whose choice of number was already purely arbitrary. Facing a wall of numbers, one seemed as good as another. “Send it there!” “What kind of message?” Reggie asked. “Vocal? Alphabetical characters? Equations?” “Like, maybe radio,” Axel said. “Or whatever you’ve got that’s faster, like micro-tachy-tot waves, or super-hydro-electro-neutrinos.” “One moment,” said Reggie. “At what frequency?” “Frequency? Just once is okay.” He rubbed a little spot just under his jaw. A machine, even one as sophisticated as this Reggiesystems model, is not given to sighing, though one might imagine this model had many occasions to do so. What Reggie did was increase his pauses and slow down his speech delivery. “What is meant by ‘frequency,’ Axel—“ Reggie explained it all carefully. Axel faced another wall of numbers and made another choice—exactly the same way he’d made the first. The numbers di...
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