The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  I found Robin working the show floor at a retail shop called Scopes & Lenses in the suburban flatlands north of the city. If you’re like me, you often have a powerful reaction to people even before you speak to them: like or dislike, trust or fear. Robin was in the like column as soon as she spotted me and smiled. Her smile seemed genuine, though there was no earthly reason it should be: we were strangers, after all; I was a customer; we had these roles to play. She wore her hair short. Long, retro paisley skirt and two earrings in each ear. Sort of an art-school look. Her face was narrow, elfin, Mediterranean-dark. I guessed she was about twenty-five.

  Of course the only thing to talk about was telescopes. I wanted to buy one, a good one, something substantial, not a toy. I lived frugally, but every couple of years I would squeeze a little money out of my investments and buy myself an expensive present. Last year, my van. This year, I had decided, a telescope. (The divorce had been expensive, but that was a necessity, not a luxury.)

  There was plenty to talk about. ’Scopes had changed since I was teenager. Bewilderingly. It was all Dobsonians, CCD imagers, object-acquisition software…. I took a handful of literature and told her I’d think about it. She smiled and said, “But you’re serious, right? I mean, some people come in and look around and then do mail-order from the States….” And then laughed at her own presumption, as if it were a joke, between us.

  I said, “You’ll get your commission. Promise.”

  “Oh, God, I wasn’t angling … but here’s my card … I’m in the store most afternoons.”

  That was how I learned her name.

  Next week I put a 10-inch Meade Starfinder on my VISA card. I was back two days later for accessory eyepieces and a camera adapter. That was when I asked her out for coffee.

  She didn’t even blink. “Store closes in ten minutes,” she said, “but I have to do some paperwork and make a deposit. I could meet you in an hour or so.”

  “Fine. I’ll buy dinner.”

  “No, let me buy. You already paid for it. The commission—remember?”

  She was like that.

  Sometime during our dinner conversation she told me she had never looked through a telescope.

  “You have to be kidding.”

  “Really!”

  “But you know more about these things than I do, and I’ve looked through a lot of lenses.”

  She poked her fork at a plate of goat cheese torta as if wondering how much to say. “Well, I know telescopes. I don’t know much astronomy. See, my father was into telescopes. He took photographs, thirty-five-millimeter long exposures, deep-sky stuff. I looked at the pictures; the pictures were great. But never, you know, through the eyepiece.”

  “Why not?” I imagined a jealous parent guarding his investment from curious fingers.

  But Robin frowned as if I had asked a difficult question. “It’s hard to explain. I just didn’t want to. Refused to, really. Mmm … have you ever been alone somewhere on a windy night, maybe a dark night in winter? And you kind of get spooked? And you want to look out a window and see how bad the snow is but you get this idea in your head that if you open the curtain something truly horrible is going to be out there staring right back at you? And you know it’s childish, but you still don’t open the curtain. Just can’t bring yourself to do it. You know that feeling?”

  I said I’d had similar experiences.

  “I think it’s a primate thing,” Robin meditated. “Stay close to the fire or the leopard’ll get you. Anyway, that’s the way I feel about telescopes. Irrational, I know. But there it is. Here we are on this cozy planet, and out there are all kinds of things—vast, blazing suns and frigid planets and the dust of dead stars and whole galaxies dying. I always had this feeling that if you looked too close something might look back. Like, don’t open the curtain. Don’t look through the ’scope. Because something might look back.”

  Almost certainly someone or something was looking back. The arithmetic is plain: a hundred billion stars in the galaxy alone, many times that number of planets, and even if life is uncommon and intelligence an evolutionary trick shot, odds are that when you gaze at the stars, somewhere in that horizonless infinity another eye is turned back at you.

  But that wasn’t what Robin meant.

  I knew what she meant. Set against the scale of even a single galaxy, a human life is brief and human beings less than microscopic. Small things survive because, taken singly, they’re inconsequential. They escape notice. The ant is invisible in the shadow of a spruce bud or a cloverleaf. Insects survive because, by and large, we only kill what we can see. The insect prayer: Don’t see me!

  Now consider those wide roads between the stars, where the only wind is a few dry grains of hydrogen and the dust of exploded suns. What if something walked there? Something unseen, invisible, immaterial—vaster than planets?

  I think that’s what Robin felt: her own frailty against the abysses of distance and time. Don’t look. Don’t see me. Don’t look.

  It was a friend of Robin’s, a man who had been her lover, who first explained to me the concept of “domains.”

  By mid-September Robin and I were a couple. It was a relationship we walked into blindly, hypnotized by the sheer unlikeliness of it. I was ten years older, divorced, drifting like a swamped canoe toward the rapids of midlife; she was a tattooed Gen-Xer (the Worm Oroborous circling her left ankle in blue repose) for whom the death of Kurt Cobain had been a meaningful event. I think we aroused each other’s exogamous instincts. We liked to marvel at the chasm between us, that deep and defining gulf: Winona Ryder vs. Humbert Humbert.

  She threw a party to introduce me to her friends. The prospect was daunting but I knew this was one of those hurdles every relationship has to jump or kick the traces. So I came early and helped her clean and cook. Her apartment was the top of a subdivided house in Parkdale off Queen Street. Not the fashionable end of Queen Street; the hooker and junkie turf east of Ronces-valles Avenue. Rent was cheap. She had decorated the rambling attic space with religious bric-à-brac from Goodwill thrift shops and the East Indian dollar store around the corner: ankhs, crosses, bleeding hearts, gaudy Hindu iconography. “Cultural stew,” she said. “Artifacts from the new domain. You can ask Roger about that.”

  I thought: Roger?

  Her friends arrived by ones and twos. Lots of students, a few musicians, the creatively unemployed. Many of them thought black was a party color. I wondered when the tonsure and the goatee had come back into style. Felt set apart in jeans and sweatshirt, the wardrobe-for-all-occasions of another generation. But the people (beneath these appurtenances: people) were mostly friendly. Robin put on a CD of bhangra music and brought out a tall blue plastic water pipe, which circulated with that conspiratorial grace the cannabis culture inherits from its ancestors in Kennedy-era prehistory. This, at least, I recognized. Like Kennedy (they say), unlike Bill Clinton, I inhaled. But only a little. I wanted a clear head to get through the evening.

  Robin covered a trestle table with bowls of kasha, rice cooked in miso (her own invention), a curry of beef, curry of eggplant, curry of chicken; chutneys from Kensington Market, loaves of sourdough and French bread and chapatis. Cheap red wine. There was a collective murmur of appreciation and Robin gave me more credit than I deserved—all I had done was stir the pots.

  For an hour after dinner I was cornered by a U. of T. poli-sci student from Ethiopia who wanted me to understand how Mao had been betrayed by the revisionists who inherited his empire. He was, of course, the son of a well-to-do bureaucrat, and brutally earnest. I played vague until he gave up on me. Then, cut loose, I trawled through the room picking up fragments of conversation, names dropped: Alice in Chains, Kate Moss, Michaelangelo Signorile. Robin took me by the elbow. “I’m making tea. Talk to Roger!”

  Roger was tall and pale, with a shock of bleached hair threatening to obscure the vision in his right eye. He had the emaciated frame of a heroin addict, but it was willful, an aesthetic statement, and he dressed
expensively.

  Roger. “Domains.” Fortunately I didn’t have to ask; he was already explaining it to a pair of globe-eyed identical twins.

  It’s McCluhanesque,” one twin said; the other: “No, ecological …”

  Roger smiled, a little condescendingly, I thought, but I was already wondering what he meant to Robin, or Robin to him. He put out his hand: “You must be Michael. Robin told me about you.”

  But not me about Roger. At least not much. I said, “She mentioned something about ‘domains’—”

  “Well, Robin just likes to hear me bullshit.”

  “No!” (The twins.) “Roger is original.”

  It didn’t take much coaxing. I can’t reproduce his voice—cool, fluid, slightly nasal—but what he said, basically, was this:

  Life, the biological phenomenon, colonizes domains and turns them into ecologies. In the domain of the ocean, the first ecologies evolved. The dry surface of the continents was a dead domain until the first plants (lichens or molds, I suppose) took root. The air was an empty domain until the evolution of the wing.

  But domain theory, Roger said, wasn’t just a matter of biology versus geology. A living system could itself become a domain. In fact, once the geological domains were fully colonized, living systems became the last terrestrial domain and a kind of intensive recomplication followed: treetops, colonizing the air, were colonized in turn by insects, by birds; animal life by bacteria, viruses, parasites, each new array creating its own new domain, and so ad infinitum.

  What made Roger’s notion original was that he believed human beings had—for the first time in millennia—begun to colonize a wholly new domain, which he called the gnososphere: the domain of culture, art, religion, language. Because we were the first aboard, the gnososphere felt more like geology than ecology: a body of artifacts, lifeless as bricks. But that appearance was already beginning to change. We had seen in the last decade the first glimmerings of competition, specifically from the kind of computer program called “artificial life,” entities that live and evolve entirely in the logarithms of computers, the high alps of the gnososphere. Not competing for our ground, obviously, but that time might come (consider computer “viruses”), and—who knows?—the gnososphere might eventually evolve its own independent entities. Maybe already had. When the gnososphere was “made of” campfire stories and cave paintings it was clearly not complex enough to support life. But the gnososphere at the end of the twentieth century had grown vast and intricate, a landscape both cerebral and electronic, born at the juncture of technology and human population, in which crude self-replicating structures (Nazism, say; Communism) had already proven their ability to grow, feed, reproduce, and die. Ideologies were like primitive DNA floating in a nutrient soup of radio waves, television images, words. Who could say what a more highly evolved creature—with protein coat, nucleus, mitochondria; with eyes and genitals—might be like? We might not be able to experience it at all, since no single human being could be its host; it would live through our collectivity, as immense as it was unknowable.

  “Amazing,” the twins said, when Roger finished. “Awesome.”

  And suddenly Robin was beside me, handing out tea, taking my arm in a proprietary gesture meant, I hoped, for Roger, who smiled tolerantly. “He is amazing, isn’t he? Or else completely insane.”

  “Not for me to say,” Roger obliged. (The twins laughed.)

  “Roger used to be a Fine Arts T.A. at the University,” Robin said, “until he dropped out. Now he builds things.

  “Sculpture?” I asked.

  “Things. Maybe he’ll show you sometime.”

  Roger nodded, but I doubted he’d extend the invitation. We were circling each other like wary animals. I read him as bright, smug, and subtly hostile. He obviously felt a powerful need to impress an audience. Probably he had once greatly impressed Robin—she confirmed this later—and I imagined him abandoning her because, as audience, she had grown a little cynical. The twins (young, female) clearly delighted him. Just as clearly, I didn’t.

  But we were polite. We talked a little more. He knew the bookstore where I worked. “Been there often,” he said. And it was easy to imagine him posed against the philosophy shelves, long fingers opening Kierkegaard, the critical frown fixed in place. After a while I left him to the twins, who waved me good-bye: “Nice meeting you!” “Really!”

  When I was younger I read a lot of science fiction. Through my interest in astronomy I came to sf, and through both I happened across an astronomer’s puzzle, a cosmological version of Pascal’s Wager called the Fermi Paradox. It goes like this: If life can spread through the galaxy, then, logically, it already has. Our neighbors should be here. Should have been here for millennia. So where are they?

  I discussed it, while the party ran down, with the only guest older than I was, a graying science fiction writer who had been hitting the pipe with a certain bleak determination. “

  The Oort cloud,” he declared, “that’s where they are. I mean, why bother with planets? For dedicated space technologies—and I assume they would send machines, not something as short-lived and finicky as a biological organism—a planet’s not a really attractive place. Planets are heavy, corrosive, too hot for superconductors. Interesting places, maybe, because planets are where cultures grow, and why slog across all those light years unless you’re looking for something as complex and unpredictable as a sentient culture? But you don’t, for God’s sake, fill up their sky with spaceships. You stick around the Oort cloud, where it’s nice and cold and there are cometary bodies to draw resources from. You hang out, you listen. If you want to talk, you pick your own time.”The Oort cloud is that nebulous ring around the solar system, well beyond the orbit of Pluto, composed of small bodies of dust and water ice. Gravitational perturbation periodically knocks a few of these bodies into elliptical orbits; traversing the inner solar system, they become comets. Our annual meteor showers—the Perseids, the Geminids, the Quadrantids—are the remnants of ancient, fractured comets. Oort cloud visitors, old beyond memory.

  But in light of Roger’s thesis I wondered if the question was too narrowly posed, the science fiction writer’s answer too pat. Maybe our neighbours had already arrived, not in silver ships but in metaphysics, informing the very construction and representation of our lives. The cave paintings at Lascaux, Chartres Cathedral, the Fox Broadcasting System: not their physicality (and they become less physical as our technology advances) but their intangible grammar—maybe this is the evidence they left us, a ruined archeology of cognition, invisible because pervasive, inescapable: they are both here, in other words, and not here; they are us and not-us.

  When the last guest was gone, the last dish stacked, Robin pulled off her shirt and walked through the apartment, coolly unself-conscious, turning off lights.

  The heat of the party lingered. She opened the bedroom window to let in a breeze from the lakeshore. It was past two in the morning and the city was relatively quiet. I paid attention to the sounds she made, the rustle as she stepped out of her skirt, the easing of springs in the thrift-shop bed. She wore a ring through each nipple, delicate turquoise rings that gave back glimmers of ambient light. I remembered how unfamiliar her piercings had seemed the first time I encountered them with my tongue, the polished circles, their chilly, perfect geometry set against the warmer and more complex terrain of breast and aureole.

  We made love in that distracted after-a-party way, while the room was still alive with the musk of the crowd, feeling like exhibitionists (I think she felt that way too) even though we were alone.

  It was afterward, in a round of sleepy pillow talk, that she told me Roger had been her lover. I put a finger gently through one of her rings and she said Roger had piercings, too: one nipple and under the scrotum, penetrating the area between the testicles and the anus. Some men had the head of the penis pierced (a “Prince Albert”) but Roger hadn’t gone for that.

  I was jealous. Jealous, I suppose, of this extra dimensi
on of intimacy from which I was excluded. I had no wounds to show her.

  She said, “You never talk about your divorce.”

  “It’s not much fun to talk about.”

  “You left Carolyn, or she left you?”

  “It’s not that simple. But, ultimately, I guess she left me.”

  “Lots of fighting?”

  “No fighting.”

  “What, then?”I thought about it. “Continental drift.”

  “What was her problem?”

  “I’m not so sure it was her problem.”

  “She must have had a reason, though—or thought she did.”

  “She said I was never there.” Robin waited patiently. I went on, “Even when I was with her, I was never there—or so she claimed. I’m not sure I know what she meant. I suppose, that I wasn’t completely engaged. That I was apart. Held back. With her, with her friends, with her family—with anybody.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  It was a question I’d asked myself too often.

  Sure, in a sense it was true. I’m one of those people who are often called loners. Crowds don’t have much allure for me. I don’t confide easily and I don’t have many friends.

  That much I would admit to. The idea (which had come to obsess Carolyn during our divorce) that I was congenitally, hopelessly set apart, a kind of pariah dog, incapable of real intimacy … that was a whole ‘nother thing.

  We talked it around. Robin was solemn in the dark, propped on one elbow. Through the window, past the halo of her hair, I could see the setting moon. Far away down the dark street someone laughed.

  Robin, who had studied a little anthropology, liked to see things in evolutionary terms. “You have a night watch personality,” she decided, closing her eyes.