The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It’s everybody’s favorite Hymenoptera horror story. You can’t help imagining how the tarantula must feel, immobilized but for its frantic heartbeat, the wasp larvae beginning to stir inside it … stir, and feed.

  But maybe the tarantula isn’t only paralyzed. Maybe it’s entranced. Maybe wasp venom is a kind of insect ambrosia—soma, amrta, kykeon. Maybe the tarantula sees God, feels God turning in hungry spirals deep inside it.

  I think that would be worse—don’t you?

  Was I in love with Robin Slattery? I think this narrative doesn’t make that absolutely clear—too many second thoughts since—but yes, I was in love with Robin. In love with the way she looked at me (that mix of deference and pity), the way she moved, her strange blend of erudition and ignorance (the only Shakespeare she had read was The Tempest, but she had read it five times and attended a performance at Stratford), her skinny legs, her pyrotechnic fashion sense (one day black Goth, next day tartan miniskirt and knee socks).

  I paid her the close attention of a lover, and because I did I knew by spring (the Eta Aquarids … early May) that things had changed.

  She spent a night at my place, something she had been doing less often lately. We went into the bedroom with the sound of soca tapes pulsing like a heartbeat from the shop downstairs. I had covered one wall with astronomical photographs, stuck to the plaster with pushpins. She looked at the wall and said, “This is why men shouldn’t be allowed to live alone—they do things like this.”

  “Is that a proposition?” I was feeling, I guess, reckless.

  “No,” she said, looking worried, “I only meant….”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, it’s not exactly Good Housekeeping.”

  “Right.”

  We went to bed troubled. We made love, but tentatively, and later, when she had turned on her side and her breathing was night-quiet, I left the bed and walked naked to the kitchen.

  I didn’t need to turn on lights. The moon cast a gray radiance through the rippled glass of the kitchen window. I only wanted to sit a while in the cool of an empty room.

  But I guess Robin hadn’t been sleeping after all, because she came to the kitchen wrapped in my bath robe, standing in the silver light like a quizzical, barefoot monk.

  “Keeping the night watch,” I said.

  She leaned against a wall. “It’s lonely, isn’t it?”

  I just looked at her. Wished I could see her eyes.

  “Lonely,” she said, “out there on the African plains.”

  I wondered if her intuition was right, if there was a gene, a defective sequence of DNA, that marked me and set me apart from everyone else. The image of the watchman-hominid was a powerful one. I pictured that theoretical ancestor of mine. Our hominid ancestors were small, vulnerable, as much animal as human. The tribe sleeps. The watchman doesn’t. I imagine him awake in the long exile of the night, rump against a rock in a sea of wild grasses, shivering when the wind blows, watching the horizon for danger. The horizon and the sky.

  What does he see?

  The stars in their silent migrations. The annual meteor showers. A comet, perhaps, falling sunward from the far reefs of the solar system.

  What does he feel?

  Yes: lonely.

  And often afraid.

  In the morning, Robin said, “As a relationship, I don’t think we’re working. There’s this distance … I mean, it’s lonely for me, too …”

  But she didn’t really want to talk about and it and I didn’t really want to press her. The dynamic was clear enough.

  She was kinder than Carolyn had been, and for that I was grateful.

  I won’t chronicle the history of our breakup. You know how this goes. Phone calls less often, fewer visits; then times when the messages I left on her machine went unreturned, and a penultimate moment of drawing-room comedy when Roger picked up her phone and kindly summoned her from the shower for me. (I pictured her in a towel, hair dripping while she made her vague apologies—and Roger watching.)

  No hostility, just drift; and finally silence.

  Another spring, another summer—the Eta Aquarids, the Delta Aquarids, at last the Perseids in the sweltering heat of a humid, cicada-buzzing August, two and half months since the last time we talked.

  I was on the back deck of my apartment when the phone rang. It was still too hot to sleep, but by some miracle the air was clear and dry, and I kept the night watch in a lawn chair with my binoculars beside me. I heard the ring but ignored it—most of my phone calls lately had been sales pitches or marketing surveys, and the sky, even in the city (if you knew how to look), was alive with meteors, the best display in years. I thought about rock fragments old as the solar system, incinerated in the high atmosphere. The ash, I supposed, must eventually sift down through the air; we must breathe it, in some part; molecules of ancient carbon lodging in the soft tissue of the lung.

  Two hours after midnight I went inside, brushed my teeth, thought about bed—then played the message on my answering machine.

  It was from Robin.

  “Mike? Are you there? If you can hear me, pick up … come on, pick up! [Pause.] Well, okay. I guess it’s not really important. Shit! It’s only that … there’s something I’m not sure about. I just wanted to talk about it with someone. With you. [Pause.] You were always so solid. It thought it would be good to hear your voice again. Not tonight, huh? I guess not. Hey, don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. But if you—”

  The machine cut her off.

  I tried calling back, but nobody answered the phone.

  I knew her well enough to hear the anxiety in her voice. And she wouldn’t have called me unless she was in some kind of trouble.

  Robin, I thought, what lens or window did you look through? And what looked back?

  I drove through the empty city to Parkdale, where there was no traffic but cabs and a few bad-tempered hookers; parked and pounded on Robin’s door until her downstairs neighbors complained. She wasn’t home, she’d gone out earlier, and I should fuck off and die.

  I drove to Roger’s.

  The tall brick house was full of light.

  When I knocked, the twins answered. They had shaved their heads since the last time I saw them. The effect was to make them even less distinguishable. Both were naked, their skin glistening with a light sheen of sweat and something else: spatters of green paint. Drops of it hung in their wiry, short pubic hair.

  They blinked at me a moment before recognition set in. I couldn’t recall their names (I thought of them as Alpha and Beta)—but they remembered mine.

  “Michael!”

  “Robin’s friend!”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I told them I wanted to talk to Robin.

  “She’s real busy right now—”

  “I’d like to come in.”

  They looked at each other as if in mute consultation. Then (one a fraction of a second after the other) they smiled and nodded.

  Every downstairs light had been turned on, but the rooms I could see from the foyer were empty. One of Roger’s icaros was playing somewhere; the chanting coiled through the air like a tightening spring. I heard other voices, faintly, elsewhere in the house, upstairs.

  Alpha and Beta looked alarmed when I headed for the stairs. “Maybe you shouldn’t go up there, Michael.” “You weren’t invited.”

  I ignored them and took the steps two at a time. The twins hurried up behind me.

  Roger’s ghost trap was switched on, its video screens flashing faster than the last time I had seen it. No image lingered long enough to resolve, but the flickering light was more than random; I felt presences in it, the kind of motion that alerts the peripheral vision. The icaro was louder and more insinuating in this warehouse-like space, a sound that invaded the body through the pores.

  But the room was empty.

  The twins regarded me, smiling blandly, pupils big as half-dollars. “Of course, all this isn’t necessary—”

 
“You don’t have to summon something that’s already inside you—”

  “But it’s out there, too—”

  “In the images—”

  “In the gnososphere …”

  “Everywhere….”

  The third floor: more stairs at the opposite end of the room. I moved that way with the maddening sensation that time itself had slowed, that I was embedded in some invisible, congealed substance that made every footstep a labor. The twins were right behind me, still performing their mad Baedeker.

  “The greenhouse!” (Alpha.)

  “Yes, you should see it.” (Beta.)

  The stairs led to a door; the door opened into a jungle humidity lit by ranks of fluorescent bars. Plants were everywhere; I had to blink before I could make sense of it.

  “Psychotria viridis,” Alpha said.

  “And other plants—”

  “Common grasses—”

  “Desmanthus illinoensis—”

  “Phalaris arundinacea—”

  It was as Robin had described it, a greenhouse built over an expansion of the house, concealed from the street by an attic riser. The ceiling and the far walls were of glass, dripping with moisture. The air was thick and hard to breathe.

  “Plants that contain DMT.” (The twins, still babbling.)

  “It’s a drug—”

  “And a neurotransmitter.”

  “N, N-dimethyltryptamine….”

  “It’s what dreams are made of, Michael.”

  “Dreams and imagination.”

  “Culture.”

  “Religion!”

  “It’s the opening—”

  I said, “Is she drugged? For Christ’s sake, where is she?”

  But the twins didn’t answer.

  I saw motion through the glass. The deck extended beyond the greenhouse, but there was no obvious door. I stumbled down a corridor of slim-leaved potted plants and put my hands against the dripping glass.

  People out there.

  “She’s the Rainha da Floresta—”

  “And Roger is Santo Daime!”

  “All the archetypes, really….”

  “Male and female, sun and moon….”

  I swiped away the condensation with my sleeve. A group of maybe a dozen people had gathered on the wooden decking outside, night wind tugging at their hair. I recognized faces from Robin’s parties, dimly illuminated by the emerald glow of the greenhouse. They formed a semicircle with Robin at the center of it—Robin and Roger.

  She wore a white T-shirt but was naked below the waist. Roger was entirely naked and covered with glistening green dye. They held each other at arm’s length, as if performing some elaborate dance, but they were motionless, eyes fixed on one another.

  Sometime earlier the embrace must have been more intimate. His paint was smeared on Robin’s shirt and thighs.

  She was thinner than I remembered, almost anorexic.

  Alpha said, “It’s sort of a wedding—”

  “An alchemical wedding.”

  “And sort of a birth.”

  There had to be a door. I kicked over a brick and board platform, spilling plants and bonemeal as I followed the wall. The door, when I found it, was glass in a metal frame, and there was a padlock across the clasp.

  I rattled it, banged my palm against it. Where my hand had been I could see through the smear of humidity. A few heads turned at the noise, including, I recognized, the science fiction writer I had talked to long ago. But there was no curiosity in his gaze, only a desultory puzzlement. Roger and Robin remained locked in their peculiar trance, touching but apart, as if making room between them for … what?

  No, something had changed: now their eyes were closed. Robin was breathing in short, stertorous gasps that made me think of a woman in labor. (A birth, the twins had said.)

  I looked for something to break the glass—a brick, a pot.

  Alpha stepped forward, shaking her head. “Too late for that, Michael.”

  And I knew—with a flood of grief that seemed to well up from some neglected, swollen wound—that she was right.

  I turned back to the wall. This time, to watch.

  Past understanding, there is only observation. All I know is what I saw. What I saw, with the glass between myself and Robin. With my cheek against the dripping glass.

  Something came out of her.

  Something came out of her.

  Something came out of her and Roger, like ectoplasm; but especially from their eyes, flowing like hot blue smoke.

  I thought their heads were on fire.

  Then the smoke condensed between them, took on a solid form suspended weightless in the space between their bodies.

  The shape it took was complex, barbed, hard-edged, luminous, with the infolded symmetries of a star coral and the thousand facets of a geode. Suddenly translucent, it seemed made of frozen light. Strange as it was, it looked almost obscenely organic. I thought of a seed, the dense nucleus of something potentially enormous: a foetal god.

  I don’t know how long it hovered between their two tensed bodies. I was distantly aware of my own breathing. Of the hot moisture of my skin against the greenhouse glass. The icaro had stopped. I thought the world itself had fallen silent.

  Then the thing that had appeared between them, the bright impossibility they had given birth to, began to rise, at first almost imperceptibly, then accelerating until it was suddenly gone, transiting the sky at, I guessed, the speed of light.

  Commerce with the stars.

  Then Robin collapsed.

  I kicked at the door until the clasp gave way; then there were hands on me, restraining me, and I closed my eyes and let them carry me away.

  She was alive.

  I had seen her led down the stairs, groggy and emaciated but moving under her own volition. She needed sleep, the twins said. That was all.

  They brought me to a room and left me alone with my friend the science fiction writer.

  He poured a drink.

  “Do you know,” he asked, “can you even begin to grasp what you saw here tonight?”

  I shook my head.

  “But you’ve thought about it,” he said. “We talked. You’ve drawn some conclusions. And, as a matter of fact, in this territory, we’re all ignorant. In the gnososphere, Michael, intuition counts for more than knowledge. My intuition is that what you’ve seen here won’t be at all uncommon in the next few years. It may become a daily event—a part, maybe even the central part, of the human experience.”

  I stared at him.

  He said, “Your best move, and I mean this quite sincerely, would be to just get over it and get on with your life.”

  “Or else?”

  “No, ‘or else.’ No threats. It doesn’t matter what you do. One human being … we amount to nothing, you know. Maybe we dive into the future, like Roger, or we hang back, dig in our heels, but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. In the end you’ll do what you want.”

  “I want to leave.”

  “Then leave. I don’t have an explanation to offer. Only a few ideas of my own, if you care to hear them.”

  I stayed a while longer.

  The Orionids, the Leonids: the stars go on falling with their serene implacability, but I confess, it’s hard to look at them now. Bitter and hard.

  Consider, he said, living things as large as the galaxy itself. Consider their slow ecology, their evolution across spans of time in which history counts for much less than a heartbeat.

  Consider spores that lie dormant, perhaps for millennia, in the planetary clouds of newborn stars. Spores carried by cometary impact into the fresh biosphere (the domain) of a life-bearing world.

  Consider our own evolution, human evolution, as one stage in a reproductive process in which human culture itself is the flower: literally, a flower, gaudy and fertile, from which fresh seed is generated and broadcast.

  “Robin is a flower,” he said, “but there’s nothing special about that. Roger hastened the process with his
drugs and paraphernalia and symbolic magic. So he could be among the first. The avant-garde. But the time is coming for all of us, Michael, and soon we won’t need props. The thing that’s haunted us as a species, the thing we painted on our cave walls and carved into our pillars and cornices and worshipped on our bloody altars and movie screens, it’s almost here. We’ll all be flowers, I think, before long.

  “But even a flower can be sterile—set apart, functionally alone, a genetic fluke.

  But in another sense the flower is our culture itself, and I can’t help wondering what happens to that flower after it broadcasts its seed. Maybe it wilts. Maybe it dies.

  Maybe that’s already happening. Have you looked at a newspaper lately?

  Or maybe, like every other process in the slow ecology of the stars, it’ll take a few centuries more.

  I cashed in my investments and bought a house in rural British Columbia. Fled the city for reasons I preferred not to consider.

  The night sky is dark here, the stars as close as the rooftop and the tall pines—but I seldom look at the sky.

  When I do, I focus my telescope on the moon. It seems to me that sparks of light are gathering and moving in the Reiner Gamma area of Oceanus Procellarum. Faintly, almost furtively. Look for yourself. But there’s been nothing in the journals about it. So it might be an optical illusion. Or my imagination.

  The imagination is also a place where things live.

  I’m alone.

  It gets cold here in winter.

  Robin called once. She said she’d tracked down my new number, that she wanted to talk. She had broken up with Roger. Whatever had happened that night in the city, she said, it was finished now. Life goes on.

  Life goes on.

  She said she got lonely these days, and maybe she understood how it was for me, out there looking at the sky while everyone else sleeps.

  (And maybe the watchman sees something coming, Robin, something large and terrible and indistinct in the darkness, but he knows he can’t stop it and he can’t wake anyone up….)

  She said we weren’t finished. She said she wanted to see me. She had a little money, she said, and she wanted to fly out. Please, she said. Please, Michael. Please.