DALE BAILEY

NIGHT OF THE FIREFLIES

AT JUST AFTER NINE ON A warm midsummer night, Raymond Hollis dotted a final "i,"
crossed two "t's" with a single flourish, and set aside, along with his antique
ballpoint pen, the work of half a lifetime. Sighing, he lifted the final page,
turned it facedown atop the manuscript, and squared the edges. Then he sat for a
moment, gazing pensively into his dim study. Beside him, atop a bookcase stuffed
with crumbling aromatic volumes, a small lamp burned, on the desk, six fireflies
battered at the walls of a plastic jar.

Hollis let his gaze wander to the open window. More fireflies -- dozens of them
-- whirled and eddied there, tracing oddly formal patterns in the dark.
Occasionally, one bumped against the screen, staring in at him.

"Telephone, please," Hollis said.

Circuits chittered and hummed. A watery column of light dropped from the
ceiling. "What number, please?"

"Oh, anyone. Anyone who would be interested."

Silence. The house was immune to irony, it clothed and fed him, would sing to
him or rock him gently to sleep if he wished, but it could do nothing more.
Nothing that mattered.

"What number, please?"

Hollis spoke the number aloud.

The light flickered. Instantaneous connections fell into place. A phone uttered
its cicada rattle, and then a face appeared, three-dimensional in the column of
light.

"Done," Hollis said. "Blake, it's done."

"Done? Really done?"

"That's right. After all these years..."

"How does it feel?"

Wonderingly, Hollis said, "I...don't know." Then: "Would you like to see it?"

"I can be there in thirty minutes."

The light flickered and deliquesced. Hollis gazed at the manuscript for a
moment; then he lifted the jar of fireflies and started down the hall. He paused
at the door to his second office, the one where he made his living -- a bright
space with terminal and chair and shining liquid crystal walls -- and thought of
the work that awaited him: images and sound bites and snippets of disembodied
text to be arranged and indexed into the web of other such fragments, themselves
arranged and indexed by other such men in other such rooms in a thousand
different places around the world.

Hollis turned away.

At the front door, he stepped outside. The moonlit dark murmured with. air
conditioning and the thousand rustles of mechanical mice, grooming lush grass.
In the neighboring houses, remote on immaculate squares of green, blind windows
flickered with phantoms from the liquid crystal walls.

The neighborhood -- the street, the houses, the lawns themselves-projected a
bland identity. It was the miracle of the age that geography -- language,
culture -- no longer mattered. Turn on the wails in Spain, in Australia, in
Nairobi, and navigate the same scrolling nets of information as your neighbors
in Brazil and Romania and Japan. Jump on the web in the city of angels and jump
off in Addis Ababa -- it was all the same web.

But tonight -- Hollis gasped -- tonight, magic!

Fireflies w not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands! w spun and danced in those
oddly inevitable patterns. They glimmered and flickered and traced bright paths
against the night. Gazing at them, Hollis remembered slipping swiftly through
warm summer nights, hands outstretched to trap the bright insects in a mason
jar, beacons for the haunted boyhood (lark. Lightning bugs he had called them
then, and the notion still appealed to him -- tiny insects, translucent bellies
aflame with summer fury. Bottled lightning. Magic.

"Go on," he said as he peeled back the plastic lid. One by one the fireflies
hurled themselves into that stiff quadrille. A single insect lingered on the lip
of the jug, delicate antennae reading the air. Hollis nudged it with his index
finger. The firefly winked furiously, rocketing before his face to disappear
amid the thousand flaring sparks.

Hollis sighed, thinking of Blake.

They had met at a party years ago. While the rest of the party -- the rest of
the world -- gathered entranced before the walls -- the stunning new four-way
liquid crystal walls with their illusion of depth, of reality -- Hollis and
Blake had retreated to the fastness of the porch and there, like fellow spies
long sought for in a hostile land, exchanged their tokens of recognition.

"I've often seen a cat without a grin --" Blake had said.

"-- but a grin without a cat!" Hollis had responded.

And then, together: "It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

The two men paused for a moment, breathless, afraid to believe.

"No," Hollis had whispered.

"Yes," Blake said. "Yes, yes, yes!" He capered and danced, crying, "During the
whole of a dull, dark, and --"

"-- soundless day in the autumn of the year!"

"It is the flag of my disposition --"

"-- of hopeful green stuff woven!"

Blake said, "It was the worst of times," and Hollis had shouted aloud, "Oh, no
it was the best of times," and swept the other man into a delighted embrace. For
it was, it was the best of times. After a lifetime of looking for a fellow
book-lover in a world that had no use for books -- in a world that watched and
listened and surfed the endless cybernetic wave -- Hollis at last had found a
friend who read.

Remembering` he felt a small frisson of that old joy.

Just then a shiny mechanical beetle slid noiselessly down the street and stopped
before Hollis's house. Blake. Hollis trembled, full to bursting with a life's
enthusiasm, anxious to share it at last. He wanted to shout aloud, to sound his
barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world and wake his neighbors up!

Then the beetle's moonlit carapace slid aside, and his heart went cold within
him.

Two men came to him across the grass: Blake, squat as a fireplug, and another
man, tall and cadaverously thin, with praying mantis grace. Moonlight collected
on the stranger's wide shoulders and flashed from his grinning ivory teeth. His
eyes burned in the shadow of his fedora.

Hollis gasped as if gut-punched. The plastic jug slid from his nerveless
fingers.

"Blake?" he said.

Through the spinning motes of the fireflies, Blake came to him, followed by the
thin man.

"Blake? You were supposed -- that is -- I thought you would come alone."

Still Blake said nothing. A breeze lilted through the night, hurrying the grass
blade by blade before it, like a long wave rolling endlessly to shore. In the
windows of the nearby houses, the liquid crystal phantoms gyrated and threw out
grasping fingers. Fireflies carved hieroglyphs in the air, flickering trails
that burned with strange significance. The air smelled of oil and polished
steel.

The two men paused where he stood before his open door. The breeze seized the
plastic jug and tumbled it away.

"What is it?" Hollis said. "Blake?"

"Shall we step inside?" the stranger said, his voice reedy and passionless, with
a core of iron.

They stepped in. None of them bothered to shut the door. The living room was an
alien place to Hollis. He recognized nothing about it. The night had followed
them in.

"Blake," Hollis whispered and the word died on his lips. It trailed into the
night, dissipating, remote as the cry of a hunted beast across a moonlit hill.

But stalwart Blake said nothing.

Hollis drifted away from the two men, the thin stranger and the old friend --
his only friend -- become a stranger now, silhouetted against the moonlight in
his wide-standing door.

"What do you want?" Hollis said.

"Are you Raymond Hollis?"

"I should be asking who you are. What gives you the right to come in here like
this? Blake --"

The thin stranger looked at Blake. "Is this the man?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Hollis, if you'll come with us."

Hollis did not move. He stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the
liquid crystal walls, their surfaces silvery and inert.

"Where? Why?"

"Mr. Hollis, please."

"Why?"

"What is the First Principle, Mr. Hollis?"

Hollis had another flash from his childhood, his rote recital of the principles
in a chill and shining classroom. But the words would not come to his lips.

Quietly, as if explaining something to a recalcitrant child, the thin man said:
"Democracy, Mr. Hollis, that is the First Principle. And democracy means always
having the right to choose."

"But I haven't..."

"How have you passed your nights these last years?"

"I -- writing. Blake, please..."

But Blake's silent shade was retreating down the hall, toward the study.

"Writing, Mr. Hollis?"

"Writing -- just writing."

"And what did you write?"

"A story, a novel --"

"In that story -- that novel w who decides what happens, Mr. Hollis? Who decides
how things come out?"

"I do. It's what I do, I'm a writer."

"A content provider, Mr. Hollis."

Hollis thought of his long days indexing the countless snippets of music and
speech and text that flowed to him through the walls. All those billion
fragments sewn together in an endless web, every fragment a bridge to everywhere
and nowhere, journeys without destination, guided by no shaping artist's hand.
The men and women and children, the fathers and mothers, the sons and daughters
who day and night gazed transfixed into the liquid crystal walls -- let them
choose. Let them navigate their own journeys, a million unknown ways, guided by
a million idiosyncratic interests. No place anymore for a story to be told, the
First Principle decreed.

"Yes," he whispered, "but a writer, too."

"What gives you the right ? Why should you choose what direction the story
should take?"

"Alone, in private, I have sought no reader."

The thin man threw back his head. A thin cry erupted from his throat, and now
through the open door the fireflies came pouring -- more fireflies than Hollis
had ever seen or imagined, whirling and spinning, abdomens glitteringly alight
in their endless cotillion. They swarmed about the thin man, alighting by the
thousands upon his outflung arms and hands, his face and neck, the brim of his
fedora -- everywhere --until the black oval of his mouth alone remained, an inky
vacuum in the pulsing glare, giving vent to that eerie and accusing cry. Once
again, Hollis had that sense of angular hieroglyphs, bright with a significance
that still defied him, carved into the darkling air.

Hollis staggered back as the liquid crystal walls boiled to life, drowning the
moon-splashed room with double, treble, endlessly replicating images of his own
worried face. Through the distorting plastic lens of the firefly jar he had
placed on his desk, Hollis watched himself set aside the antique ballpoint pen;
through the intervening mesh of window screen studied his own pensive gaze into
the light-starved study; in a spinning vertiginous flash saw himself standing
before his door, his face looming down, magnified and distorted as the harvest
moon by the firefly camera circling by -- a spinning kaleidoscope of images.
From a dozen firefly angles, he witnessed the damning moment, his crime. Again
and again, from each of the surrounding walls, he saw himself lean forward and
speak the words into the phone's flickering column of light --

Would you like to see it?

Would you like to see it?

Would you like to see it?

Blake, he thought. I trusted you --

A single firefly barreled past him, mesmerized by the thin man's pulsing form.
Hollis's hand shot out and closed around the winking insect, crushing it. Then,
in the glare of that strange pulsing light, he leaned forward to study the
remains scattered piecemeal across his tremulous palm. His breath caught in his
throat as all at once the significance of those glowing hieroglyphs, that
queerly automated dance, came clear: shiny cogs and gears spilled from the
creature's shattered thorax; the extruding lens of a single camera eye stared up
at him, bound to the wreckage by a shining filament of wire.

The thin man's piercing cry fell to silence. The lurid walls flickered into
gray. The cloud of fireflies funneled away as they had come -- out the open door
and into the moonlit sky.

And then they came for him, the thin man with his predatory grace, Blake like an
apparition from the darkened hallway, the manuscript folded carefully against
his breast. Gentle hands, but resolute, closed about his arms.

"No, please," he said as they led him across the lawn.

But they turned upon him their flat, affectless eyes, saying nothing, and for
the second time that night, caught the scents of oil and polished steel. Summer
wind tore at the pages of his manuscript as the translucent carapace of the
beetle slid into place above him. And then they were speeding silently away.
Hollis glanced back, but all the houses looked the same. The fireflies were gone
and nothing moved but a single scrap of paper, rising and twisting in the
moonlit dark before the wind harried it away.