Free The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson

gasps that made me think of a woman in labor.
(A birth
, the twins had said.)
    I looked for something to break the glass—a brick, a pot.
    Alpha stepped forward, shaking her head. “Too late for that, Michael.”
    And I knew—with a flood of grief that seemed to well up from some neglected, swollen wound—that she was right.
    I turned back to the wall. This time, to watch.
    Past understanding, there is only observation. All I know is what I saw. What I saw, with the glass between myself and Robin. With my cheek against the dripping glass.
    Something came out of her.
    Something came out of her.
    Something came out of her and Roger, like ectoplasm; but especially from their eyes, flowing like hot blue smoke.
    I thought their heads were on fire.
    Then the smoke condensed between them, took on a solid form suspended weightless in the space between their bodies.
    The shape it took was complex, barbed, hard-edged, luminous, with the infolded symmetries of a star coral and the thousand facets of a geode. Suddenly translucent, it seemed made of frozen light. Strange as it was, it looked almost obscenely organic. I thought of a seed, the dense nucleus of something potentially enormous: a foetal god.
    I don’t know how long it hovered between their two tensed bodies. I was distantly aware of my own breathing. Of the hot moisture of my skin against the greenhouse glass. The
icaro
had stopped. I thought the world itself had fallen silent.
    Then the thing that had appeared between them, the bright impossibility they had given birth to, began to rise, at first almost imperceptibly, then accelerating until it was suddenly gone, transiting the sky at, I guessed, the speed of light.
    Commerce with the stars.
    Then Robin collapsed.
    I kicked at the door until the clasp gave way; then there were hands on me, restraining me, and I closed my eyes and let them carry me away.
    She was alive.
    I had seen her led down the stairs, groggy and emaciated but moving under her own volition. She needed sleep, the twins said. That was all.
    They brought me to a room and left me alone with my friend the science fiction writer.
    He poured a drink.
    “Do you know,” he asked, “can you even begin to grasp what you saw here tonight?”
    I shook my head.
    “But you’ve thought about it,” he said. “We talked. You’ve drawn some conclusions. And, as a matter of fact, in this territory, we’re all ignorant. In the gnososphere, Michael, intuition counts for more than knowledge. My intuition is that what you’ve seen here won’t be at all uncommon in the next few years. It may become a daily event—a part, maybe even the central part, of the human experience.”
    I stared at him.
    He said, “Your best move, and I mean this quite sincerely, would be to just get over it and get on with your life.”
    “Or else?”
    “No, ‘or else.’ No threats. It doesn’t matter what you do. One human being … we amount to nothing, you know. Maybe we dive into the future, like Roger, or we hang back, dig in our heels, but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. In the end you’ll do what you want.”
    “I want to leave.”
    “Then leave. I don’t have an explanation to offer. Only a few ideas of my own, if you care to hear them.”
    I stayed a while longer.

    The Orionids, the Leonids: the stars go on falling with their serene implacability, but I confess, it’s hard to look at them now. Bitter and hard.
    Consider, he said, living things as large as the galaxy itself. Consider their slow ecology, their evolution across spans of time in which history counts for much less than a heartbeat.
    Consider spores that lie dormant, perhaps for millennia, in the planetary clouds of newborn stars. Spores carried by cometary impact into the fresh biosphere (the
domain)
of a life-bearing world.
    Consider our own evolution, human evolution, as one stage in a reproductive process in which human culture itself is the flower: literally, a flower, gaudy and fertile, from