The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Night watch?”

  “Mm-hm. Primates … you know … protohominids … it’s where all our personality styles come from. We’re social animals, basically, but the group is more versatile if you have maybe a couple of hyperthymic types for cheerleaders, some dysthymics to sit home and mumble, and the one guy—let’s say, you—who edges away from the crowd, who sits up when everybody else is asleep, who basically keeps the watches of the night. The one who sees the lions coming. Good night vision and lousy social skills. Every tribe should have one.”

  “Is that what I am?”

  “It’s reassuring, actually.” She patted my ass and said, “Keep watch for me, okay?”

  I kept the watch a few minutes more.

  In the morning, on the way to lunch, we visited one of those East Indian/West Indian shops, the kind with the impossibly gaudy portraits of Shiva and Ganesh in chrome-flash plastic frames, a cooler full of ginger beer and coconut pop, shelves of sandalwood incense and patchouli oil and bottles of magic potions (Robin pointed them out): St. John Conqueror Root, Ghost Away, Luck Finder, with labels claiming the contents were an Excellent Floor Polish, which I suppose made them legal to sell. Robin was delighted: “Flotsam from the gnososphere,” she laughed, and it was easy to imagine one of Roger’s gnostic creatures made manifest in this shop—for that matter, in this city, this English-speaking, Cantonese-speaking, Urdu-speaking, Farsi-speaking city—a slouching, ethereal beast of which one cell might be Ganesh the Elephant-headed Boy and another Madonna, the Cone-breasted Woman.

  A city, for obvious reasons, is a lousy place to do astronomy. I worked the ’scope from the back deck of my apartment, shielded from streetlights, and Robin gave me a selection of broadband lens filters to cut the urban scatter. But I was interested in deep-sky observing and I knew I wasn’t getting everything I’d paid for.

  In October I arranged to truck the ’scope up north for a weekend. Robin reserved us a cabin at a private campground near Algonquin Park. It was way past tourist season, but Robin knew the woman who owned the property; we would have the place virtually to ourselves and we could cancel, no problem, if the weather didn’t look right.

  But the weather cooperated. It was the end of the month—coincidentally, the weekend of the Orionid meteor shower—and we were in the middle of a clean high-pressure cell that stretched from Alberta to Labrador. The air was brisk but cloudless, transparent as creek water. We arrived at the campsite Friday afternoon and I spent a couple of hours setting up the ’scope, calibrating it, and running an extension cord out to the automatic guider. I attached a thirty-five-millimeter SLR camera loaded with hypersensitized Tech Pan film, and I did all this despite the accompaniment of the owner’s five barking Yorkshire Terrier pups. The ground under my feet was glacier-scarred Laurentian Shield rock; the meadow I set up in was broad and flat; highway lights were pale and distant. Perfect. By the time I finished setting up, it was dusk. Robin had started a fire in the pit outside our cabin and was roasting chicken and bell peppers. The cabin overlooked a marshy lake thick with duckweed; the air was cool and moist and I fretted about ground mist.

  But the night was clear. After dinner Robin smoked marijuana in a tiny carved soapstone pipe (I didn’t) and then we went out to the meadow, bundled in winter jackets.

  I worked the ’scope. Robin wouldn’t look through the eyepiece—her old phobia—but took a great, grinning pleasure in the Orionids, exclaiming at each brief etching of the cave-dark, star-scattered sky. Her laughter was almost giddy.

  After a time, though, she complained of the cold, and I sent her back to the cabin (we had borrowed a space heater from the owner) and told her to get some sleep. I was cold, too, but intoxicated by the sky. It was my first attempt at deep-sky photography and surprisingly successful: when the photos were developed later that week I had a clean, hard shot of M100 in Coma Berenices, a spiral galaxy in full disk, arms sweeping toward the bright center; a city of stars beyond counting, alive, perhaps, with civilizations, so impossibly distant that the photons hoarded by the lens of the telescope were already millions of years old.

  When I finally came to bed Robin was asleep under two quilted blankets. She stirred at my pressure on the mattress and turned to me, opened her eyes briefly, then folded her cinnamon-scented warmth against my chest, and I lay awake smelling the hot coils of the space heater and the faint pungency of the marijuana she had smoked and the pine-resinous air that had swept in behind me, these night odors mysteriously familiar, intimate as memory.

  We made love in the morning, lazy and a little tired, and I thought there was something new in the way she looked at me, a certain calculating distance, but I wasn’t sure; it might have been the slant of light through the dusty window. In the afternoon we hiked out to a wild blueberry patch she knew about, but the season was over; frost had shriveled the last of the berries. (The Yorkshire Terriers were at our heels, there and back.)

  That night was much the same as the first except that Robin decided to stay back at the cabin reading an Anne Rice novel. I remembered that her father was an amateur astronomer and wondered if the parallel wasn’t a little unsettling for her, a symbolic incest. I photographed M33 in Triangulum, another elliptical galaxy, its arms luminous with stars, and in the morning we packed up the telescope and began the long drive south.

  She was moodier than usual. In the cabin of the van, huddled by the passenger door with her knees against her chest, she said, “We never talk about relationship things.”

  “Relationship things?”

  “For instance, monogamy.”

  That hung in the air for a while.

  Then she said, “Do you believe in it?

  “I said it didn’t really matter whether I “believed in” it; it just seemed to be something I did. I had never been unfaithful to Carolyn, unless you counted Robin; I had never been unfaithful to Robin.

  But she was twenty-five years old and hadn’t taken the measure of these things. “I think it’s a sexual preference,” she said. “Some people are, some people aren’t.”

  I said—carefully neutral—“Where do you stand?”

  “I don’t know.” She gazed out the window at October farms, brown fields, wind-canted barns. “I haven’t decided.”

  We left it at that.

  She threw a Halloween party, costumes optional—I wore street clothes, but most of her crowd welcomed the opportunity to dress up. Strange hair and body paint, mainly. Roger (I had learned his last name: Roger Russo) showed up wearing a feathered headdress, green dye, kohl circles around his eyes. He said he was Sacha Runa, the jungle spirit of the Peruvian ayahuas queros. Robin said he had been investigating the idea of shamanic spirit creatures as the first entities cohabiting the gnososphere: she thought the costume was perfect for him. She hugged him carefully and pecked his green-dyed cheek, merely friendly, but he glanced reflexively at me and quickly away, as if to confirm that I had seen her touch him.

  I had one of my photographs of the galaxy M33 enlarged and framed; I gave it to Robin as a gift.

  She hung it in her bedroom. I remember—it might have been November, maybe as late as the Leonids, mid-month—a night when she stared at it while we made love: she on her knees on the bed, head upturned, raw-cut hair darkly stubbled on her scalp, and me behind her, gripping her thin, almost fragile hips, knowing she was looking at the stars.

  Three optical illusions:

  (1) Retinal floaters. Those delicate, crystalline motes, like rainbow-colored diatoms, that swim through the field of vision.

  Some nights, when I’ve been too long at the scope, I see them drifting up from the horizon, a terrestrial commerce with the sky.

  (2) In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped what he believed were the canals of Mars. Mars has no canals; it is an airless desert. But for decades the educated world believed in a decadent Martian civilization, doomed to extinction when its water evaporated to the frigid poles.

  It was Schiaparelli who first suggested that mete
or showers represent the remains of ancient, shattered comets.

  (3) Computer-generated three-dimensional pictures—they were everywhere that summer, a fad. You know the kind? The picture looks like so much visual hash, until you focus your eyes well beyond it; then the image lofts out, a hidden bas-relief: ether sculpture.

  Robin believed TV worked the same way. “If you turn to a blank channel,” she told me (December: first snow outside the window), “you can see pictures in the static. Three-dee. And they move.

  What kind of pictures?

  “Strange.” She was clearly uncomfortable talking about it. “Kind of like animals. Or bugs. Lots of arms. The eyes are very … strange.” She gave me a shy look. “Am I crazy?”

  “No.” Everyone has a soft spot or two. “You look at these pictures often?”

  “Hardly ever. Frankly, it’s kind of scary. But it’s also….”

  “What?”

  “Tempting.”

  I don’t own a television set. One summer Carolyn and I had taken a trip to Mexico and we had seen the famous murals at Teotihuacán. Disembodied eyes everywhere: plants with eyes for flowers, flowers exuding eyes, eyes floating through the convolute images like lost balloons. Whenever people talk about television, I’m reminded of Teotihuacán.

  Like Robin, I was afraid to look through certain lenses for fear of what might be looking back.

  That winter, I learned more about Roger Russo.

  He was wealthy. At least, his family was wealthy. The family owned Russo Precision Parts, an electronics distributor with a near-monopoly of the Canadian manufacturing market. Roger’s older brother was the corporate heir-designate; Roger himself, I gather, was considered “creative” (i.e, unemployable) and allowed a generous annual remittance to do with as he pleased.

  Early in January (the Quadrantids, but they were disappointing that year) Robin took me to Roger’s place. He lived in a house off Queen West—leased it from a cousin—a three-story brick Edwardian bastion in a Chinese neighborhood where the houses on each side had been painted cherry red. We trekked from the streetcar through fresh ankle-high snow; the snow was still falling, cold and granular. Robin had made the date: we were supposed to have lunch, the three of us. I think she liked bringing Roger and me together, liked those faint proprietary sparks that passed between us; I think it flattered her. Myself, I didn’t enjoy it. I doubted Roger took much pleasure in it, either.

  He answered the door wearing nothing but jogging pants. His solitary silver nipple ring dangled on his hairless chest; if reminded me (sorry) of a pull-tab on a soft drink can. He shooed us in and latched the door. Inside, the air was warm and moist.

  The house was a shrine to his eccentricity: books everywhere, not only shelved but stacked in corners, an assortment too random to categorize, but I spotted early editions of William James (Psychology, the complete work) and Carl Jung; a ponderous hardcover Phenomenology of the Mind, Heidegger’s Being and Time, none of them books I had ever read or ever intended to read. We adjourned to a big wood-and-tile kitchen and made conversation while Roger chopped kohlrabi at a butcher-block counter. He had seen Natural Born Killers at a review theater and was impressed by it: “It’s completely post-post—a deconstruction of itself— very image-intensive and, you know, florid, like early church iconography….”

  The talk went on like this. High-toned media gossip, basically. After lunch, I excused myself and hunted down the bathroom.

  On the way back I paused at the kitchen door when I heard Roger mention my name.

  “Michael’s not much of a watcher, is he?”

  Robin: “Well, he is, actually—a certain kind of watcher.”

  “Oh—the astronomy….”

  “Yes.”

  “That photograph you showed me.”

  “Yes, right.”

  That photograph, I thought. The one on her bedroom wall.

  Later, in the winter-afternoon lull that softens outdoor sounds and amplifies the rumble of the furnace, Robin asked Roger to show me around the house. “The upstairs,” she said, and to me: “It’s so weird!”

  “Thanks,” Roger said.

  “You know what I mean! Don’t pretend to be insulted. Weird is your middle name.”

  I followed Roger’s pale back up the narrow stairway, creaking risers lined with faded red carpet. Then, suddenly, we were in another world: a cavernous space—walls must have been knocked out—crowded with electronic kibble. Video screens, raw circuit boards, ribbon wire snaking through the clutter like eels through a gloomy reef. He threw a wall switch, and it all came to life.

  “A dozen cathode-ray tubes,” Roger said, “mostly yard-sale and electronic-jobber trash.” Some were black-and-white, some crenellated with noise bars. “Each one cycles through every channel you can get from satellite. I wired in my own decoder for the scrambled channels. The cycles are staggered, so mostly you get chaos, but every so often they fall into sync and for a split second the same image is all around you. I meant to install another dish, feed in another hundred channels, but the mixer would have been … complex. Anyway, I lost interest.”

  “Not to sound like a Philistine,” I said, “but what is it—a work of art?”

  Roger smiled loftily. “In a way. Actually, it was meant to be a ghost trap.”

  “Ghost trap?”

  “In the Hegelian sense. The weltgeist.”

  “Summoned from the gnososphere,” Robin added.

  I asked about the music. The music had commenced when he threw the switch: a strange nasal melody, sometimes hummed, sometimes chanted, thick as incense. The words, when I could make them out, were foreign and punctuated with thick glottal stops. There were insect sounds in the background; I supposed it was a field recording, the kind of anthropological oddity a company called Nonesuch used to release on vinyl, years ago.

  “It’s called an icaro,” Roger said. “A supernatural melody. Certain Peruvian Indians drink ayahuasca and produce these songs, icaros. They learn them from the spirit world.”

  Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic potion made from a mixture of Banisteriopsis caapi vines and the leaves of Psychotria viridis, both rain-forest plants. (I spent a day at the Robarts looking it up.) Apparently it can be made from a variety of more common plant sources, and ayahuasca churches like the União do Vegetal have popularized its use in the urban centers of Brazil.

  “And the third floor,” Robin said, waving at the stairs dimly visible across the room, “that’s amazing, too. Roger built an addition over what used to be the roof of the building. There’s a greenhouse, an actual greenhouse! You can’t see it from the street because the facade hides it, but it’s huge. And there’s a big open-air deck. Show him, Roger.”

  Roger shook his head: “I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  We were about to leave the room when three of the video screens suddenly radiated the same image: waterfall and ferns in soft focus, and a pale woman in a white skirt standing beside a Datsun that matched her blue-green eyes. It snagged Roger’s attention. He stopped in his tracks.

  “Rainha da Floresta,” he murmured, looking from Robin to me and back again, his face obscure in the flickering light. “The lunar aspect.”

  The winter sky performed its long procession. One clear night in February, hungry for starlight, I zipped myself into my parka and drove a little distance west of the city—not with the telescope but with a pair of 10×50 Zeiss binoculars. Hardly Mount Palomar, but not far removed from the simple optics Galileo ground for himself some few centuries ago.

  I parked off an access road along the ridge top of Rattlesnake Point, with a clear view to the frozen rim of Lake Ontario. Sirius hung above the dark water, a little obscured by rising mist. Capella was high overhead, and to the west I was able to distinguish the faint oval of the Andromeda galaxy, two-million-odd light-years away. East, the sky was vague with city glare and etched by the running lights of airliners orbiting Pearson International.

  Alone in the van, breathing steam an
d balancing the binoculars on the rim of a half-open window, I found myself thinking about the Fermi Paradox. They ought to be here … where are they?

  The science fiction writer at Robin’s party had said they wouldn’t come in person. Organic life is too brief and too fragile for the eons-long journeys between stars. They would send machines. Maybe self-replicating machines. Maybe sentient machines.

  But, I thought, why machines at all? If the thing that travels most efficiently between stars is light (and all its avatars: X-rays, radio waves), then why not send light itself) Light modulated, of course; light alive with information. Light as medium. Sentient light.

  Light as domain, perhaps put in place by organic civilizations, but inherited by—something else.

  And if human beings are truly latecomers to the galaxy, then the network must already be ancient, a web of modulated signals stitching together the stars. A domain in which things—entities—creatures perhaps as diffuse and large as the galaxy itself, creatures made solely of information—live and compete and maybe even hunt.

  An ecology of starlight, or better: a jungle of starlight.

  The next day I called Robin’s sf-writer friend and tried out the idea on him. He said, “Well, it’s interesting….”

  “But is it possible?”

  “Sure it’s possible. Anything’s possible. Possible is my line of work. But you have to keep in mind the difference between a possibility and a likelihood.” He hesitated. “Are you thinking of becoming a writer, or just a career paranoid?”

  I laughed. “Neither one.” Though the laughter was a little forced.

  “Well, then, since we’re only playing, here’s another notion for you. Living things—species capable of evolving—don’t just live. They eat.” (Hunt, I thought.) “They die. And most important of all: they reproduce.”

  You’ve probably heard of the hunting wasp. The hunting wasp paralyzes insects (the tarantula is a popular choice) and uses the still-living bodies to incubate and feed its young.