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

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 loadedwith 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