Read The Perseids and Other Stories Online
Authors: Robert Charles Wilson
The Perseids and Other Stories (29 page)
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”
“If it’s yours, why don’t you give it what it wants?”
“Do you have your house key on you? Because I’m calling a taxi. You need to go home while I sort this out.”
“You can lock it up down here or you can keep it upstairs, but you’re still keeping it away from what it wants.”
“And how the holy fuck would
you
know what it wants?”
Persey didn’t flinch. Her eyes grew distant in a way Deirdre didn’t like at all. “I can hear it,” she said. “You must be able to hear it too. If I can hear it, you can hear it. It wants what’s down there. Not your stupid plants. Nobody cares about that. It wants what’s under the floor.”
And be damned, Deirdre thought, if the words didn’t ring in her head like a bell:
true true true.
Which made it not better but worse. This rage she was feeling, was it jealousy? That the pearl baby’s small voiceless appeals had been audible to someone not herself? She said, “You’ve been in the cellar?”
“Because it was knocking at the door. You put that box there to muffle the sound, right? But I heard it anyway. It
digs
down there. Digs the best it can with its little round fingers. It wants—”
“What?”
“The light.”
“The lamp,” Deirdre said. She had guessed as much.
“No,” Persey said, “not the stupid lamp or anything to do with the pot plants. And I won’t tell anyone about that anyway, if
that’s
what you’re worried about. The
other
light.”
“What other light?”
“That comes up through the ground.” Persey’s expression went blank and distant. “Through the dirt.”
Deirdre felt suddenly cold. “You’re going home.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“Of course I’m not your mother, but what do you imagine your mother would do if she was here right now? Or Nick, for that matter? Fuck it. I’m calling that cab.”
Deirdre stalked up the stairs to the telephone in the shop. She thumbed through the old desktop Rolodex for a taxi company—she never took cabs herself—and punched a local number. The dispatcher told her she would have to wait twenty minutes. The bars were closing. Busy time. “Thank you,” Deirdre said, “but hurry it up if you can.” Her voice was unsteady.
Back downstairs, she discovered without suprise that Persey had pushed aside the box, opened the subcellar door and gone down there with the pearl baby.
Deirdre imagined herself telling the girl: This is not just because I’m envious. You can hear the pearl baby but it’s not talking to
you
, not really. You live in that world with the good-looking husband and the nice clothes and the Woods Hole Océanographie Institute, which is where you fucking
belong.
I could have had those things too, I really could, but I went after something else instead, and here it is, here it is, and you can’t have it, you
shouldn’t
have it….
And I’m not your mother but I could have been somebody’s mother and if I had been I would have said don’t go in the cellar my daughter don’t go in the cellar….
Persey stood over the pearl baby, which was digging in the pebbled clay beyond the green extravagance of the marijuana plants. “The light,” Persey said without looking at her.
“See?”
Light came up between the rounded joints of the pearl baby’s
fingers. The pearl baby wasn’t an efficient digger but it was working very quickly. Specks of soil clung to the pearl baby’s body. The light that came up from under the ground was faint at first and then brighter, the light of something rising, rising.
Deirdre grabbed Persey’s hand. Persey’s hand was slippery with sweat and the girl pulled savagely. Deirdre pulled harder. She got Persey in a kind of headlock and forced her up the narrow steps into the basement and then up more steps to the bookstore, where Persey’s anger collapsed into fear and she began to shake and cry. Deirdre felt the tears on her arm. She backed off a little but kept her hands firmly on Persey’s heaving shoulders.
“Come outside,” Deirdre said, crisply but not angrily. “I’ll wait for the taxi with you.”
“I don’t have my sweater.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
They stood on the sidewalk outside the door of Finders. Cars came down Harbord Street in clusters whenever the stoplights changed. It had started to drizzle.
Persey, still crying, sat down on the storefront steps. Deirdre said, “You’ll get all wet.”
“I don’t care.”
Was there a sound from inside the building? A rumbling, an upheaval under the foundation? But here was the cab, reflecting the rain and the streetlights like a dark gem, sooner than promised. Deirdre opened the back door and helped Persey inside. She gave the driver thirty dollars and the address of Nick’s apartment building.
Persey leaned out the window. “Deirdre? What’ll you do?”
“Never you mind.”
The cab disappeared down the rainy street.
Searching for volatiles in the kitchen and the bathroom, Deirdre came up with a nearly full bottle of vodka, a can of lighter fluid, and a plastic bottle of isopropyl rubbing alcohol. She took these things down to the bookstore.
She sprinkled the fluids on the low shelves liberally, leaving a
sort of corridor between the basement and the front door. Room, perhaps, for a final act of indecision.
Then she struck a match.
The thing that came up through the floor of the subcellar was brighter than the halide bulb (now flickering) and probably hotter. It made its own light, deep in the furnace of its body.
It held the pearl baby in its radiant arms.
It was a fountain of strangeness, as if mineral life had attempted to construct a multicellular organism from scanty blueprints and with the materials at hand: molten lava, coal, silica, random gems; a head like an immense half-geode; black pearls for eyes. Blood perhaps of thick murmurous oil. It bent into the small room like an enormous wasp.
And Deirdre didn’t flee. She had waited for this all her life. Waited a little too long. But Persey was safe. That was important. She said, “I’m sorry about the girl. But she doesn’t belong here.”
The radiant beast said nothing, only reached for her with one of its shining appendages.
You can’t live in two worlds at once. That’s what she should have told Persey. You can love the human, or you can love… something else. But not both. Not both.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” she said. She went to the mute beast willingly, like a child going home, and she smiled, even though the air had grown terribly hot.
The Diligent Reader will have noticed that the stories in
The Perseids
are interrelated. The same Diligent Reader might also have noticed that the connections between them are often obscure. That’s because the stories were never intended to be a coherent common narrative or “fix-up” novel. The links are arbitrary and largely whimsical, borrowing a character here, a plot thread there. The significance of Finders, the imaginary secondhand bookshop that is the real connective tissue between these tales, emerged only after the earliest stories had been written. I’ve done minor retrofitting but made no effort to reconcile a number of inconsistencies. How can Rachel of “The Fields of Abraham” and William Keller of “Divided By Infinity” meet such different fates? The only explanation I can offer is Oscar Ziegler’s: “There are as many afterlives as there are caverns in the earth, and each one is a unique ecology, godless and strange.”
“The Fields of Abraham” is original to this collection, one of three previously unpublished stories. (The other two are “Ulysses Sees the Moon in the Bedroom Window” and “Pearl Baby”). All three were written specifically for this book, which gave me latitude to play with the common background and leave a few loose threads for other stories to pick up.
“The Fields of Abraham” (the title is borrowed from a song by Daniel Lanois) is the story to which the epigram from David Lindsay most closely applies. Groff Conklin once described Lindsay’s
antique novel
A Voyage to Arcturus
as a book “immensely worth reading, even though one is never really sure what it is all about.” I hope “Fields of Abraham” is worth reading, but you may unwind the aboutness of it at your own risk. The story hovers around questions of sacrifice, duty, and love, but—
Sometimes a writer jumps into a narrative just to see what he can find there. This one, in retrospect, feels like a cold reservoir with something dark and spoiled adrift at the bottom. I’ve touched its carcass, but I don’t really care to know what it is.
The setting—at least that part of it dealing with immigrant Toronto and “the Ward” at the beginning of the twentieth century—is as accurate as I am able to make it. Most of the stories herein have Canadian settings and several were written for nominally Canadian anthologies, but one of my ambitions was to write stories that reflected the urban Canadian experience, as opposed to extended meditations on ice, tundra, “the North,” and so on. Margaret Atwood makes a good case for the brooding omnipresence of the wilderness in Canadian literature, but my own experience is necessarily more personal. I have lived almost exclusively in large, multiethnic cities. I can spell “muskeg” but I’m not sure I could define the word. I’ve visited the Canadian Arctic, and in my opinion it’s a fabulous and daunting wild frontier about which someone else really ought to write.
Thanks are due to my thoroughly nonschizophrenic sister, Barbara, who suffers from migraine headaches. One night when I was five years old and just ready for bed—fumbling in the kitchen for a glass of water—Barbara wandered in with an expression of exquisite pain on her face and muttered, “There are people on the roof … I can hear them moving around. Tell them to stop.”
She woke up the next morning feeling fine and to this day claims to have no memory of the incident. I, on the other hand, spent a long night under the blankets listening for “men on the roof.”
Listen hard enough and
you
can hear them, too. They’re up there, and they’re up to no good.
“The Perseids” is the earliest of these tales. The story (and as a result virtually every story between these covers) owes its genesis to Don Hutchison, editor of the long–running Canadian dark–fantasy anthology series
Northern Frights.
I had not written a short story for many years when Don tapped me for a contribution to
Northern Frights
3 (Mosaic Press, 1995). He allowed me the latitude to cross some genre borders (i.e., to mount a science fiction engine in a horror–story chassis), and the result was this novelette, which met with a surprisingly positive reaction. (It won an Aurora Award for Canadian short fiction in English and was a finalist for the Nebula Award.) For which I thank Don profusely, and I recommend that the Diligent Reader seek out these anthologies as well as Don’s other work, including the massively entertaining nonfiction
The Great Pulp Heroes.
The bad guys in “The Perseids” are using the hallucinogen DMT to facilitate their (in the words of
Booklist)
“curious human evolutionary utility,” but the story shouldn’t be taken as an antidrug tract. The União Vegetale (technically, the Centro Esp´rita Beneficente União do Vegetal) is a real and perfectly legitimate Christian!—essentially Catholic—religious movement. The UDV brought Ayahuasca, a traditional shamanic mixture of DMT–bearing
Psychotria viridis
and
Banisteriopsis caapi
, out of the Amazonian jungle and into urban Brazil. The church also has its North American adherents, who are obliged by our drug laws to be extremely circumspect about their spiritual behavior.
I don’t do the church thing, but like many of my generation I have occasionally sipped from the mossy well of the hallucinogens. If there is a cautionary element in “The Perseids,” it’s a caution against those who step out from behind the Chrysanthemum Curtain with a dubious and apocalyptic historical agenda. The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal—maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.
“The Inner Inner City” appeared first in
Northern Frights 4
(Mosaic Press, 1997). The long late–night walks were a feature of my
younger days. The crowd I hung with was almost pathologically nocturnal and addicted to what my friend Phil Paine called “foot–fes ting.” I was very young and very naive and I learned a lot on those walks … how deliciously mysterious doughnut shop waitresses look at four A.M., for instance, or how much closer the stars are when the buses stop running, or why there are so many men in the park at midnight.
“The Observer” appeared in
The UFO Files
(DAW Books, 1998), an original anthology of UFO–related fiction edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg.
In Southern California, in the early to mid fifties, the distinct universes of astronomer Edwin Hubble, author/pacifist/mescaline–drinker Aldous Huxley, and famed saucer crank George Adamski did at least to some degree overlap. (Hubble and Huxley were close friends, and Adamski ran the burger joint on the road to Palomar.) This in the solstice years of California’s prosperous and seemingly eternal summer.
I was born in that California. When my parents took me to Toronto in 1962 I was eight years old, exiled to an austere foreign town where the shops closed on Sunday and the weather actually
hurt.
Well, California ain’t what it used to be, and I’m a patriotic Canadian now … even if I haven’t taken out citizenship. Sandra makes the opposite journey, but she’s invested with my childhood nostalgia for that lost world, that lofty plateau of eucalyptus and peacocks and winter sunlight.
Diligent Reader may harbor the suspicion that I don’t actually believe in flying saucers or alien abduction. Diligent Reader is right.
(Did Sandra ever visit Finders, even though the shop isn’t mentioned in the text? Yes. Because I say so.)
“Protocols of Consumption” first appeared in
Tesseracts
6 (Tesseract Books, 1997), edited by Robert Sawyer and Carolyn Clink. It was subsequently reprinted in the U.S. magazine
Realms of Fantasy. RoF
also reprinted “The Inner Inner City” and “The Perseids,” and quite nicely, too, but for some reason I wasn’t sent
or didn’t receive the proofs of “Protocols” and it appeared in
Realms
with transposed paragraphs and other typographical errors. Making it seem, perhaps, more an example of madness than a story
about
madness. It appears here intact.
I don’t blame
Realms
editor Shawna McCarthy for any of this. Shawna was almost single–handedly responsible for jump–starting my career (another benefactor was Ed Ferman at
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
, and she is my literary agent today. “Protocols” just happened to slip through a crack.
There really is a Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto (now Sunnybrook & Women’s College Health Sciences Centre after a series of disastrous health–care funding cuts by the Provincial government). F–wing is the mental–health department, and there really are no waiting rooms in F–wing. My psychiatrist used to practice in F–wing, and when I arrived early for an appointment I got to share the hallway with lots of folks who were (please, God) less functional than myself. “Protocols” and Mikey had their genesis when I eavesdropped on an outpatient therapy group waiting for their doc to show up. Pharmaceutical science has built only the flimsiest of bridges across the
mare tenebrarum
, it seems to me. But look: I made a short story out of it.
“Ulysses Sees the Moon in the Bedroom Window” was written expressly for this collection.
People love cats. Because we love them, we surgically alter their genitalia, keep them confined in our homes, and subject them to lethal injection when they become ill or inconvenient. At work in this story is the awful suspicion that something out there loves
people.
(No, don’t e–mail me. I know house cats have evolved into domesticity and need human care and attention for their well–being. But ask a panther or a kaffir cat his opinion.)
“Plato’s Mirror” appeared in
Northern Frights
5 (Mosaic Press, 1999).
“Now I know in part,” St. Paul says somewhere in Corinthians,
“but then shall I know even as also I am known.” For better or worse.
One of the pleasures of the first–person narrative is that you get to confess to sins you haven’t committed. Which stand in for all the sins you
have
committed, but without the troublesome potential for embarrassment.
The narrator isn’t me, but he’s what I’m afraid of being, nights when I can’t sleep and the rain ticks like a fast clock on the windowsill.
“‘It seems to me,’ said she, ‘that if we could have discovered a good while ago some sort of ray by which we could see into each other’s souls, we should have gained a great many hours which are now lost.’” (Frank R. Stockton,
The Great Stone of Sardis
, 1891.)
“Divided by Infinity” appeared in
Starlight 2
(Tor, 1998), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
The story (and its denouement on the barren plains of an irradiated Earth) pays homage to all those book and magazine covers that lured me into science fiction at a tender age. I have always loved the written word above the visual arts, but there was something utterly compelling about closing an old Ballantine edition of, say, Arthur C. Clarke’s
Expedition to Earth
and daydreaming over the Powers cover, making up stories of my own to explain the yellow sky, the enigmatic lacquered statuary, the Dali harps and bedsprings. Or discovering Joe Mugnaini’s stark, strange, sensuous drawings wrapped in Ray Bradbury’s equally strange and sensuous prose. Check out an old copy of
The October Country
, find the Mugnaini illustrations for “Touched With Fire” or “The Crowd” and feel the eviscerating sunlight on those dry Victorian tenements. Humble magic.
“Divided by Infinity” was a Hugo Award finalist for its year, not, I suspect, because it’s a particularly fresh or accomplished story, but because I was trying so hard to pluck the fundamental sf chord that it did in fact ring out for a moment.
“Pearl Baby” was written for this collection, about ten minutes before the deadline.
The idea here was to get a closer look at Deirdre Frank, who appears in a couple of the other stories as a minor character but who clamored for a story of her own. (I also wanted to turn the Demeter story inside out, like an old pocket, and see if I could find a shiny penny.)
Deirdre’s love of the strange represents, I think, a real and legitimate esthetic impulse, though one not held in much esteem. Science fiction and fantasy cater to that urge the way “literary” fiction caters to the human need for intelligent gossip. The nineteenth century gave the impulse its due (that Pleasure Dome, that Raven), but the twentieth dropped it like a hot Freudian potato.
So the Strange put on its Appollonian suit and tie and went to live in the low–rent neighborhood of
Astounding Stories
and
Thrilling Wonder.
You hear talk now and again of the death of science fiction, but I suspect the twenty–first century will be good for us—that the Strange will come leaping out of the closet with its ray gun in one hand and its bottle of laudanum in the other, delirious with possibility.
Thanks to those who were present at the creation: Jo, Jesse, and Devon; Tarai (because I’ve been mining our conversations for story ideas for years); Phil (for being hard to impress); Janet and Paul; Alan Rosenthal (thanks, Alan) and Hope Leibowitz (thanks, Hope); Don Hutchison; and Sharry, who supplied research material, proofreading, and inspiration.
