The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online

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’sWager 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