The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Yes?”

  “I really don’t want to know.”

  Items I noticed in the newspaper that evening:

  GENE THERAPY RENDERS HEART BYPASS OBSOLETE

  BANK OF ZURICH FIRST WITH QUANTUM ENCRYPTION

  SETI RESEARCHERS SPOT “POSSIBLE” ET RADIO SOURCE

  I didn’t want to go back to Ziegler, not immediately. It felt like admitting defeat—like looking up the answer to a magazine puzzle I couldn’t solve.

  But there was no obvious next step to take, so I put the whole thing out of my mind, or tried to; watched television, did laundry, shined my shoes.

  None of this pathetic sleight of hand provided the slightest distraction.

  I was not (just as I had told Deirdre) a mystery lover, and I didn’t love this mystery, but it was a turbulence in the flow of the passing days, therefore interesting. When I had savored the strangeness of it to a satisfying degree, I took myself in hand and carried the books back to Finders, meaning to demand an explanation.

  Oscar Ziegler was expecting me.

  The late-May weather was already too humid, a bright sun bearing down from the ozone-depleted sky. Walking wasn’t such a pleasure under the circumstances. I arrived at Finders plucking my shirt away from my body. Graceless. The woman Deirdre looked up from her niche at the rear of the store. “Mr. Keller, right?” She didn’t seem especially pleased to see me.

  I meant to ask if Ziegler was available, but she waved me off: “He said if you showed up you were to go on upstairs. That’s, uh, really unusual.”

  “Shouldn’t you let him know I’m here?”

  “Really, he’s expecting you.” She waved at the bead curtain, almost a challenge: Go on, if you must.

  The curtain made a sound like chattering teeth behind me. The stairway was dim. Dust balls quivered on the risers and clung to the threadbare coco-mat tread. At the top was a door silted under so many layers of ancient paint that the molding had softened into gentle dunes.

  Ziegler opened the door and waved me in.

  His room was lined with books. He stepped back, settled himself into an immense overstuffed easy chair, and invited me to look at his collection. But the titles at eye level were disappointing. They were old cloth volumes of Gurdjieff and Ouspenski, Velikovsky and Crowley—the usual pseudo-gnostic spiritualist bullshit, pardon my language. Like the room itself, the books radiated dust and boredom. I felt obscurely disappointed. So this was Oscar Ziegler, one more pathetic old man with a penchant for magic and cabalism.

  Between the books, medical supplies: inhalers, oxygen tanks, pill bottles.

  Ziegler might be old, but his eyesight was still keen. “Judging by the expression on your face, you find my den distasteful.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Oh, fess up, Mr. Keller. You’re too old to be polite and I’m too old to pretend I don’t notice.”

  I gestured at the books. “I was never much for the occult.”

  “That’s understandable. It’s claptrap, really. I keep those volumes

  for nostalgic reasons. To be honest, there was a time when I looked there for answers. That time is long past.” I see.

  “Now tell me why you came.”

  I showed him the softcover books, told him how I’d taken them to Niemand for a professional assessment. Confessed my own bafflement.

  Ziegler took the books into his lap. He looked at them briefly and took a long drag from his oxygen mask. He didn’t seem especially impressed. “I’m hardly responsible for every volume that comes into the store.”

  “Of course not. And I’m not complaining. I just wondered—”

  “If I knew where they came from? If I could offer you a meaningful explanation?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “Well,” Ziegler said. “Well. Yes and no. Yes and no.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That is… no, I can’t tell you precisely where they came from. Deirdre probably bought them from someone off the street. Cash or credit, and I don’t keep detailed records. But it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  He took another lungful from the oxygen bottle. “Oh, it could have been anyone. Even if you tracked down the original vendor—which I guarantee you won’t be able to do—you wouldn’t learn anything useful.”

  “You don’t seem especially surprised by this.”

  “Implying that I know more than I’m saying.” He smiled ruefully. “I’ve never been in this position before, though you’re right, it doesn’t surprise me. Did you know, Mr. Keller, that I am immortal?”

  Here we go, I thought. The pitch. Ziegler didn’t care about the books. I had come for an explanation; he wanted to sell me a religion.

  “And you, Mr. Keller. You’re immortal, too.”

  What was I doing here, in this shabby place with this shabby old man? There was nothing to say.

  “But I can’t explain it,” Ziegler went on; “that is, not in the depth it deserves. There’s a volume here—I’ll lend it to you—” He stood, precariously, and huffed across the room.

  I looked at his books again while he rummaged for the volume in question. Below the precambrian deposits of the occult was a small sediment of literature. First editions, presumably valuable.

  And not all familiar.

  Had Ernest Hemingway written a book called Pamplona? (But here it was, its Scribners dust jacket protected in brittle mylar.) Cromwell and Company, by Charles Dickens? Under the Absolute, by Aldous Huxley?

  “Ah, books.” Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. “They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles. This will tell you what you need to know.”

  The book he gave me was cheaply made, with a utilitarian olive-drab jacket. You Will Never Die, by one Carl G. Soziere.

  “Come back when you’ve read it.”

  “I will,” I lied.

  “I had a feeling,” Deirdre said, “you’d come downstairs with one of those.”

  The Soziere book. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Not until I took this job. Mr. Ziegler gave me a copy. But I speak from experience. Every once in a long while, somebody comes in with a question or a complaint. They go upstairs. And they come back down with that.”

  At which point I realized I had left the paperbacks in Ziegler’s room. I suppose I could have gone back for them, but it seemed somehow churlish. But it was a loss. Not that I loved the books, particularly, but they were the only concrete evidence I had of the mystery—they were the mystery. Now Ziegler had them back in his possession. And I had You Will Never Die.

  “It looks like a crank book.”

  “Oh, it is,” Deirdre said. “Kind of a parallel-worlds argument, you know, J. W. Dunne and so on, with some quantum physics thrown in; actually, I’m surprised a major publisher didn’t pick it up.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “I’m a sucker for that kind of thing, if you want the truth.” “Don’t tell me. It changed your life.” I was smiling. She smiled back. “It didn’t even change my mind.” But there was an odd note of worry in her voice.

  Of course I read it.

  Deirdre was right about You Will Never Die. It had been published by some private or vanity press, but the writing wasn’t crude. It was slick, even witty in places.

  And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, it came down to this:

  Consciousness, like matter, like energy, is preserved.

  You are born, not an individual, but an infinity of individuals, in an infinity of identical worlds. “Consciousness,” your individual awareness, is shared by this infinity of beings.

  At birth (or at conception; Soziere wasn’t explicit), this span of selves begins to divide, as alternate possibilities are indulged or rejected. The infant turns his head not to the left, or to the right, but both. One infinity of worlds becomes two; then four; then eight, and so on, exponential
ly.

  But the underlying essence of consciousness continues to connect all these disparate possibilities.

  The upshot? Soziere says it all in his title.

  You cannot die.

  Consider. Suppose, tomorrow afternoon, you walk in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler. The grillwork snaps your neck and what remains of you is sausaged under the chassis. Do you die? Well, yes; an infinity of you does die; but infinity is divisible by itself. Another infinity of you steps out of the path of the truck, or didn’t leave the house that day, or recovers in hospital. The you-ness of you doesn’t die; it simply continues to reside in those remnant selves.

  An infinite set has been subtracted from infinity; but what remains, remains infinite.

  The subjective experience is that the accident simply doesn’t happen.

  Consider that bottle of clonazepam I keep beside the bed. Six times I reached for it, meaning to kill myself. Six times stopped myself.

  In the great wilderness of worlds, I must have succeeded more often than I failed. My cold and vomit-stained corpse was carted off to whatever grave or urn awaits it, and a few acquaintances briefly mourned.

  But that’s not me. By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.

  I am the one who wakes up in the morning.

  Always.

  Every morning.

  I don’t die.

  I just become increasingly unlikely.

  I spent the next few days watching television, folding laundry, trimming my nails—spinning my wheels.

  I tossed Soziere’s little tome into a corner and left it there.

  And when I was done kidding myself, I went to see Deirdre.

  I didn’t even know her last name. All I knew was that she had read Soziere’s book and remained skeptical of it, and I was eager to have my own skepticism refreshed.

  You think odd things, sometimes, when you’re too often alone.

  I caught Deirdre on her lunch break. Ziegler didn’t come downstairs to man the desk; the store simply closed between noon and one every weekday. The May heat wave had broken; the sky was a soft, deep blue, the air balmy. We sat at a sidewalk table outside a lunch-and-coffee restaurant.

  Her full name was Deirdre Frank. She was fifty and unmarried and had run her own retail business until some legal difficulty closed her down. She was working at Finders while she reorganized her life. And she understood why I had come to her.

  “There’s a couple of tests I apply,” she said, “whenever I read this kind of book. First, is it likely to improve anyone’s life? Which is a trickier question than it sounds. Any number of people will tell you they found happiness with the Scientologists or the Moonies or whatever, but what that usually means is they narrowed their focus—they can’t see past the bars of their cage. Okay, You Will Never Die isn’t a cult book, but I doubt it will make anybody a better person.

  “Second, is there any way to test the author’s claims? Soziere aced that one beautifully, I have to admit. His argument is that there’s no subjective experience of death—your family might die, your friends, your grade-school teachers, the Princess of Wales, but never you. And in some other world, you die and other people go on living. How do you prove such a thing? Obviously, you can’t. What Soziere tries to do is infer it, from quantum physics and lots of less respectable sources. It’s a bubble theory—it floats over the landscape, touching nothing.”

  I was probably blushing by this time.

  Deirdre said, “You took it seriously, didn’t you? Or half seriously.…”

  “Half at most. I’m not stupid. But it’s an appealing idea.”

  Her eyes widened. “Appealing?”

  “Well—there are people who’ve died. People I miss. I like to think of them going on somewhere, even if it isn’t a place I can reach.”

  She was aghast. “God, no! Soziere’s book isn’t a fairy tale, Mr. Keller—it’s a horror story!”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Think about it! At first it sounds like an invitation to suicide. You don’t like where you are, put a pistol in your mouth and go somewhere else—somewhere better, maybe, even if it is inherently less likely. But take you for example. You’re what, sixty years old? Or so? Well, great, you inhabit a universe where a healthy human being can obtain the age of sixty, fine, but what next? Maybe you wake up tomorrow morning and find out they cured cancer, say, or heart disease—excluding you from all the worlds where William Keller dies of a colon tumor or an aneurism. And then? You’re a hundred years old, a hundred and twenty—do you turn into some kind of freak? So unlikely, in Soziere’s sense, that you end up in a circus or a research ward? Do they clone you a fresh body? Do you end up as some kind of half-human robot, a brain in a bottle? And in the meantime the world changes around you, everything familiar is left behind, you see others die, maybe millions of others, maybe the human race dies out or evolves into something else, and you go on, and on, while the universe groans under the weight of your unlikeliness, and there’s no escape, every death is just another rung up the ladder of weirdness and disorientation.…”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way.

  Yes, the reductio ad absurdum of Soziere’s theory was a kind of relativistic paradox: as the observer’s life grows more unlikely, he perceives the world around him becoming proportionately more strange; and down those unexplored, narrow rivers of mortality might well lie a cannibal village.

  Or the Temple of Gold.

  What if Deirdre was too pessimistic? What if, among the all the unlikely worlds, there was one in which Lorraine had survived her cancer?

  Wouldn’t that be worth waiting for?

  Worth looking for, no matter how strange the consequences might be?

  News items that night:

  NEURAL IMPLANTS RESTORE VISION IN FIFTEEN PATIENTS

  “TELOMERASE COCKTAIL” CREATES IMMORTAL LAB MICE

  TWINNED NEUTRON STARS POSE POTENTIAL THREAT, NASA SAYS

  My sin was longing.

  Not grief. Grief isn’t a sin, and is anyway unavoidable. Yes, I grieved for Lorraine, grieved long and hard, but I don’t remember having a choice. I miss her still. Which is as it should be.

  But I had given in too often to the vulgar yearnings. Mourned youth, mourned better days. Made an old man’s map of roads not taken, from the stale perspective of a dead end.

  Reached for the clonazepam and turned my hand away, freighted every inch with deaths beyond counting.

  I wonder if my captors understand this?

  I went back to Ziegler—nodding at Deirdre, who was disappointed to see me, as I vanished behind the bead curtain.

  “This doesn’t explain it.” I gave him back You Will Never Die.

  “Explain,” Ziegler said guilelessly, “what?”

  “The paperbacks I bought from you.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Or these—”

  I turned to his bookshelf.

  Copies of In Our Time, Our Mutual Friend, Beyond the Mexique Bay.

  “I didn’t realize they needed explaining.”

  I was the victim of a conjuror’s trick, gulled and embarrassed. I closed my mouth.

  “Anomalous experience,” Ziegler said knowingly. “You’re right, Soziere doesn’t explain it. Personally I think there must be a kind of critical limit—a degree of accumulated unlikeliness so great that the illusion of normalcy can no longer be wholly sustained.” He smiled, not pleasantly. “Things leak. I think especially books, books being little islands of mind. They trail their authors across phenomenological borders like lost puppies. That’s why I love them. But you’re awfully young to experience such phenomena. You must have made yourself very unlikely indeed—more and more unlikely, day after day! What have you been doing to yourself, Mr. Keller?”

  I left him sucking oxygen from a fogged plastic mask.

  Reaching for the bottle of
clonazepam.

  Drawing back my hand.

  But how far must the charade proceed? Does the universe gauge intent? What if I touch the bottle? What if I open it and peer inside?

  (These questions, of course, are answered now. I have only myself to blame.)

  I had tumbled a handful of the small white tablets into my hand and was regarding them with the cool curiosity of an entomologist when the telephone rang.

  Pills or telephone?

  Both, presumably, in Soziere’s multiverse.

  I answered the phone.

  It was Deirdre. “He’s dead,” she told me. “Ziegler. I thought you should know.”

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m taking care of the arrangements. He was so alone… no family, no friends, just nothing.”

  “Will there be a service?”

  “He wanted to be cremated. You’re welcome to come. It might be nice if somebody besides me showed up.”

  “I will. What about the store?”

  “That’s the crazy part. According to the bank, he left it to me.” Her voice was choked with emotion. “Can you imagine that? I never even called him by his first name! To be honest—oh, God, I didn’t even like him! Now he leaves me this tumbledown business of his!”

  I told her I’d see her at the mortuary.

  I paid no attention to the news that night, save to register the lead stories, which were ominous and strange.

  We live, Ziegler had said, in the science fiction of our youth.

  The “ET signals” NASA scientists had discovered were, it turned out, a simple star map, at the center of which was—not the putative aliens’ home world—but a previously undiscovered binary neutron star in the constellation Orion.

  The message, one astronomer speculated, might be a warning. Neutron-star pairs are unstable. When they eventually collide, drawn together by their enormous gravity, the collision produces a black hole—and in the process a burst of gamma rays and cosmic radiation, strong enough to scour the Earth of life if the event occurs within some two or three thousand light-years of us.

  The freshly discovered neutron stars were well within that range. As for the collision, it might happen in ten years, a thousand, ten thousand—none of the quoted authorities would commit to a date, though estimates had been shrinking daily.