The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  And here it was, Deirdre thought, and it had come to her in a way uniquely humiliating, appeared as an object she could neither understand nor discuss with others, and wasn’t that somehow appropriate? That her epiphany should be unspeakable?

  Three days later she noticed that the pearl baby had grown protruberances that resembled the stumps of arms and legs, and on the top a rounded nub that could have been a head.

  The day after that, the pearl baby opened its shiny black eyes.

  Persey wanted to be a marine biologist. Her great ambition was to work at the Woods Hole Océanographie Institute. At her last school she had taken two advanced courses in biology and was certain she could get into one of the good universities, especially if she improved her math.

  She felt okay talking about this with Deirdre, she said, because Deirdre knew about science and didn’t think it was stupid.

  Nick, Deirdre gathered, harbored the old contempt of the humanities people for the sciences. He dismissed her interests as “bugs and germs.” He didn’t actually, you know, mind it, Persey said, but he was obviously unimpressed. “I can’t talk about it to him, the way I can talk to you…. Uh, Deirdre? What’s that sound?”

  Deirdre looked up sharply.

  The sound was a staggered but somehow rhythmic knocking that came up through the joists of the building. It was louder than Deirdre had hoped, but she had prepared an explanation in case something like this happened.

  “Raccoons,” she said. “They get up under the eaves of old buildings like this. Get into the space behind the wall and make nests. You see a lot of young ones this time of year.”

  Raccoons moved at night, and it was night now, a blossomy summer night. A breeze lifted the curtains and cooled the kitchen air. The city roared distantly.

  Persey looked both nervous and skeptical, but the knocking, thank God, stopped.

  Nick had called Deirdre six weeks after his last visit. He said he’d been settling into his Bathurst Street apartment and had been too busy to get in touch, but it had been great seeing her and she ought to come for dinner sometime. And in the meantime he had a problem. He wasn’t comfortable leaving Persey by herself all evening, but he had a date, and Persey had been keen to go back to the bookstore anyhow, and he just thought… would it be okay?

  Deirdre had bitten back her disappointment, because after all what had she expected? That he would be asking her for a date? (God, she thought, please tell me that wasn’t what I wanted.) Yeah, she said, sure, she’d be happy to see Persephone, and that at least was true enough.

  Nick had dropped her off at seven. Persey had rummaged in the bookstore a bit, shared Kraft Dinner with Deirdre, watched a show on Deirdre’s tiny portable TV set. Was dismayed that Deirdre didn’t get Discovery or The Learning Channel. Deirdre played Boggle with her and won by a single point, but Persey was proud of finding SILICA and WASP (where Deirdre had found only WAS). Then they made tea and talked.

  Nick had said he would be back by eleven to pick up his daughter. It was ten to midnight now.

  “The oldest living things on Earth,” Persey was saying, “are called archaebacteria—or at least people thought they were the oldest living things. But that’s the interesting part. There might be something older. Scientists have dug up these ancient rocks, or the Martian meteorite is another example, with what look like tiny fossils. The problem is, they’re too tiny. You need an electron microscope even to see them.”

  “Why is that a problem, Persey?”

  “Because you need a certain size just to contain a long enough fragment of DNA to reproduce. And these things are too small, even smaller than viruses. So if they’re a form of life, they’re weird life. Nobody knows how they work. Maybe they’re not even extinct. Some people think—”

  Deirdre didn’t find out what some people think, because the telephone rang, startling her. She jumped out of her chair, almost spilled her tea.

  The phone call was Nick.

  “I know I’m late,” he said. “Things got a little complicated. I’m still out here in the fucking suburbs, Deirdre, and it occurred to me, even if I leave right now I’m still going to be an hour getting there, and by the time I get Persey home she’ll be exhausted…”

  This is not a guest house, Deirdre wanted to tell him. There are limits to our friendship, Nick. A few weeks of intimacy thirty years ago doesn’t oblige me to take care of your daughter while you’re out on some protracted pussy-chase.

  But she couldn’t say any of that because Persey was right here in the room with her, frowning at the phone like a disappointed infant.

  “Not a problem,” she said.

  “Honest? Because if it’s inconvenient—”

  “No,” she said, briefly hating him, “not at all. I can make the sofa into a bed. So when can we expect you?”

  “After breakfast. Sleep late.”

  “Okay, Nick.” She added, hoping the irony wasn’t too thick, “Enjoy yourself.”

  “You’re a goddamn saint, Deirdre.”

  A goddamn saint, she thought. What kind of saint is that?

  She turned to Persephone. “It’s your dad. He says—”

  “I figured it out,” Persey said flatly.

  Deirdre fixed up the sofa with her best blankets and pillows in a slightly guilty effort to make Persey feel at home. Persey didn’t have an overnight bag and she borrowed an old nightie of Deirdre’s, ridiculously tentlike on her narrow frame. When Persey was propped up with a table lamp behind her and a book in her hand, Deirdre told her good night. “Sleep well.”

  “I’ll try,” the girl said. “But I really wish that sound would stop.”

  It had come again, the periodic distant knocking.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Deirdre promised.

  When she was sure Persey was settled for the night Dierdre tiptoed down the stairs to the bookstore and through another bead curtain to the basement. She closed the basement door behind her, switched on the light and looked for the pearl baby.

  There was no sign of it, and Deirdre began to feel afraid.

  She wasn’t afraid of the pearl baby itself. In the weeks since the pearl baby first opened its eyes, it had never seemed even remotely threatening. Most of the time it didn’t even move, just sat in one place, turning its head like a radar dish, randomly looking. Its eyes were two black, glassy marbles. The eyes seemed never to move or focus, so it was hard to tell what the pearl baby was looking at or what it was seeing even when its head was aimed straight at her. Periodically the pearl baby would raise itself up on its stubby legs and walk from place to place, and its motion was surprisingly sure and smooth, its toeless flattened feet click-clacking on the floor. But mostly it was still. It didn’t seem very energetic. It wasn’t even hungry. The pearl baby didn’t eat; it had no mouth.

  It didn’t frighten her, but neither did Deirdre feel maternal toward the pearl baby. She had birthed it, indisputably, but it wasn’t a human child and she didn’t treat it like one. That would have been wrong, self-indulgent, somehow gauche. Deirdre liked children well enough but had never been a mother and never missed it. The tick of the proverbial biological clock hadn’t troubled her, and anyway that clock had run down a good fifteen years ago. Certainly the pearl baby would have made a poor substitute for a child. No, it was something much stranger. Something that had borrowed her creaking gynecological machinery for some purpose of its own.

  What really frightened her was the possibility that the pearl baby might escape the basement (or the upstairs apartment where Deirdre kept it when she was alone). It would be seen, and there would have to be some kind of explanation, a reckoning, an inevitable pollution of the magic it represented.

  She looked for the pearl baby behind the white-enameled washer and dryer, hunted for it between boxes of overflow stock from the bookstore. She began to imagine that it must have slipped out somehow—she pictured it lying in a back alley like a discarded china cat—when she saw that the door to the subcellar was ajar.r />
  The pearl baby had knocked the door open: that was the sound that had alarmed Persey.

  Deirdre followed the stairs downward.

  The subcellar was brightly illuminated by the halide bulb and its enormous reflector. Her second crop of female cannabis plants had just begun to flower, the huge fan leaves yellowing at the tips. One of the containers had fallen over—no, had been knocked over, because here was the pearl baby crouched in a far corner of the room, groping with its stubby ivory arms through the floorboards.

  It raised its head and looked in Deirdre’s direction.

  Deirdre ignored it for the moment and set about righting the fallen bucket. The stem of the plant had buckled, but not fatally; she set it right with a splint made of sticks and wire. When she raised the bucket she had to be careful, because the plant had grown a long central root through the perforated bucket-bottom and past the floorboards into the raw clay of the subcellar. The root was healthy and white and frankly enormous, thick as a beet.

  Then she took the pearl baby in her arms and carried it up to the basement. It moved against her, not struggling, Deirdre thought, though she couldn’t be sure, since the pearl baby’s motions were generally slow. But she sensed no particular urgency from it. Was it her imagination, she wondered, this idea that she could read the pearl baby’s intentions? That some mute impossible communication had begun between them?

  She braced a heavy box against the subcellar door so the pearl baby wouldn’t bother her plants again. Then she closed the upstairs door to keep the pearl baby confined, but this time she left the light on; she thought it might prefer the light.

  There were no further disruptive noises, and before morning Deirdre was able to drift off to sleep in the comforting warmth of her own bed. She dreamed about a family of bluejays made of obsidian and turquoise; when they flew, their wings rattled against their bodies like clinking china cups.

  She woke to the sound of Persey rattling pans in the kitchen.

  Deirdre stumbled out of her bedroom and found Nick’s daughter scrambling eggs in a Teflon pan. Persey’s uncombed hair was draped over the shoulders of the borrowed nightie, and it was astonishing, Deirdre thought, how much younger she looked when she wasn’t dressed up in MTV drag. She made a nice breakfast, too. Had probably made breakfast for Nick more often than not.

  Neither of them mentioned the noises of the night before.

  Deirdre opened Finders at ten. A couple of University students drifted in, eyed the shelves critically, purchased nothing. Persey picked another book out of the science section, this one something about deep-sea geology. Nick—who showed up at eleven looking shamefaced and wasted—had obviously underestimated his daughter’s intelligence. Or resented it.

  Nick was fulsomely grateful for Deirdre’s help and Persey seemed actually unhappy to leave. Deirdre gave her a hug, which Persey returned warmly.

  At twelve Deirdre hung up the BACK AT sign with the clock fingers pointing at twelve thirty. She rescued the pearl baby from the basement and locked it in her bedroom upstairs. It seemed to like the bed and it would stay there all day, sometimes, lolling in a patch of sunlight like an upside-down bug.

  Deirdre microwaved a Weight Watchers lunch and ate it without thinking of anything at all.

  Persey had left behind her book about nanofossils, which was probably not a coincidence, Deirdre thought. One thing Deirdre had learned about Finders was that it fostered meaningful coincidence (synchronicity, the Jungians would say) the way a house-plant attracts gnats. It was part of the sour magic of the place.

  She picked up the book idly, expecting to read a chapter or two, and found herself finishing it in bed that night. The world of deep life, hot life, and dark life was new to her, and she was fascinated by the idea of a parallel biology at work in granite and boiling water, a biology perhaps as old as the origin of the solar system. A biology operating in isolation from the gaudy chemistry of DNA-based life, intersecting it only rarely: the “prions” that caused so-called mad-cow disease, for instance. Another world, half-seen, barely discovered.

  And she thought, of course, of the pearl baby, mineral-bright but born of a human womb, neither one thing nor another. To suggest that the pearl baby represented some hybrid of the human and the mineral kingdom was absurdly speculative, but it sounded right to Deirdre. Who was to say how much of the mysterious in human history might be the work of just such abortive cross-breeding, the failed effort of dark life to enter a new environment, like human beings launching themselves into the void of space?

  But another question vexed her: Could mineral life be conscious, in the way human beings were conscious?

  How much, exactly, did the pearl baby understand?

  “Consciousness,” according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The “self” was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

  But if that was the case, could a different biology generate a different kind of consciousness?

  The pearl baby didn’t speak (couldn’t speak, mouthless as it was) and showed no sign of understanding when Deirdre spoke to it. It had demonstrated no preferences or tropisms, except perhaps for the bright light in the subcellar. She could not comfort it or be comforted by it.

  But it wanted something. Deirdre was sure of that. Often enough, at work in the store, Deirdre would hear it bumping against doors and windows upstairs. How strange this world must seem to it, Deirdre thought. Maybe that was its tropism: it was drawn to the strange. And she thought: Well, I know how that feels. She had been drawn to the strange all her life. She had pursued it relentlessly, knocked on its many doors, fucked it and married it. She had borne its child.

  Nick continued to call on Deirdre for baby-sitting duties. Persey was old enough to spend a night by herself, and Deirdre suspected Nick’s protectiveness was an expression of single-parent guilt. But that was okay. It got a little lonely in the store. So many of Deirdre’s old circle of friends had drifted away or died or simply didn’t call. Nick and Persey were a kind of surrogate family, and it wouldn’t last, Deirdre knew; Nick would find some emotionally labile graduate student to play with, Persey would make new friends, Deirdre would see them less often and then never.

  But in the meantime it was nice to have Persey over once in while. Deirdre didn’t envy all the things Persephone was so plainly about to acquire—the interesting work, the husband (some earnest but affectionate young man with a parallel career, with whom she could discuss the reproductive cycle of the sea slug), the nice house (by the seaside, perhaps)—but there was an odd vicarious satisfaction in feeling these things in Persey’s future, all the things Deirdre herself had refused or abandoned when she went chasing the wide world’s end.

  It can’t last, though, she thought, at the end of another Friday evening with Persey and Boggle and bad television.

  Deirdre had gone to bed early, sneaking a joint in the bathroom with the fan turned on to dispell the odor and protect Persey’s putative innocence, though God knows there was enough ganja floating around the high schools to corrupt whole legions of saints and martyrs. The resinous cannabis from her subcellar tasted earthy and complex, and Deirdre wondered if this was how the submicroscopic particles of dark life had entered her, fertilized her womb by way of her lungs, used her body as a conduit into the human bios. And if so, then so be it. The ganja eased her toward acceptance, toward sleep.

  She came awake to the ringing of the telephone.

  Persey will get it, she thought, because Persey was closer to the phone, but the ringing went on until Deirdre was faintly alarmed, and she sat up and fumbled for her eyeglasses and stumbled down the hallway to the kitchen, past the room where Persey should have been sleeping.

  The sofa was empty, the blankets tossed aside.

  She grabbed the phone.

  Nick. “Persey left her favorite sweater in t
he backseat of the car. Wanted to let you know in case she’s looking for it, but I guess you guys already turned in, huh? What is it, eleven o’clock?”

  “Ten to one, Nick.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry….”

  “I hope you haven’t been driving in this condition.”

  “No, I’m fine, but no, I haven’t. Okay. Sorry, Deirdre. Back to bed with you. Everything all right there?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes you just, you know, get a feeling.”

  “Everything’s fine,” Deirdre said, sweat beading on her forehead.

  “Get away from it,” Deirdre said.

  Persey looked up from the corner of the basement between the dryer and the gas furnace, guilty and startled. “I’m not hurting it.”

  “It’s not a doll. Stand up.” Persey hesitated. “Stand UP!”

  The girl jerked to her feet, eyes clouding, lip trembling. I’m just making it worse, Deirdre told herself, but it was too late to contain her anger. She thought the words nosy little bitch and bit her lip to keep the words inside. Persey demanded, “Well, if it’s not a doll, what is it, then, and why is it locked up down here?”

  The pearl baby paid no discernible attention. In its four months of life it hadn’t changed much. Deirdre didn’t think it was growing anymore. It was about the size of a lapdog. Round in all its dimensions, like the Michelin Tire Man, and shiny white, except for its eyes.

  “That’s really none of your business,” Deirdre said.

  “It’s alive,” Persey said. “You can’t just keep it locked up in the basement.”

  “It wouldn’t be locked up in the basement, except, except you—”

  “You wanted to hide it from me.”

  “Protect it. Yes.”

  “I’m not hurting it.”

  “Persey, you don’t think you’re hurting it, but it’s not—” Deirdre bit her lip. “It’s mine”