Free The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

which fresh seed is generated and broadcast.
    “Robin is a flower,” he said, “but there’s nothing special about that. Roger hastened the process with his drugs and paraphernalia and symbolic magic. So he could be among the first. The avant-garde. But the time is coming for all of us, Michael, and soon we won’t need props. The thing that’s haunted us as a species, the thing we painted on our cave walls and carved into our pillars and cornices and worshipped on our bloody altars and movie screens, it’s almost here. We’ll all be flowers, I think, before long.
    “But even a flower can be sterile—set apart, functionally alone, a genetic fluke.
    But in another sense the flower is our culture itself, and I can’t help wondering what happens to that flower after it broadcasts its seed. Maybe it wilts. Maybe it dies.
    Maybe that’s already happening. Have you looked at a newspaper lately?
    Or maybe, like every other process in the slow ecology of the stars, it’ll take a few centuries more.

    I cashed in my investments and bought a house in rural British Columbia. Fled the city for reasons I preferred not to consider.
    The night sky is dark here, the stars as close as the rooftop and the tall pines—but I seldom look at the sky.
    When I do, I focus my telescope on the moon. It seems to me that sparks of light are gathering and moving in the Reiner Gamma area of Oceanus Procellarum. Faintly, almost furtively. Look for yourself. But there’s been nothing in the journals about it. So it might be an optical illusion. Or my imagination.
    The imagination is also a place where things live.
    I’m alone.
    It gets cold here in winter.
    Robin called once. She said she’d tracked down my new number, that she wanted to talk. She had broken up with Roger. Whatever had happened that night in the city, she said, it was finished now. Life goes on.
    Life goes on.
    She said she got lonely these days, and maybe she understood how it was for me, out there looking at the sky while everyone else sleeps.
    (And maybe the watchman sees something coming, Robin, something large and terrible and indistinct in the darkness, but he knows he can’t stop it and he can’t wake anyone up….)
    She said we weren’t finished. She said she wanted to see me. She had a little money, she said, and she wanted to fly out. Please, she said. Please, Michael. Please.
    God help me, I hung up the phone.

THE INNER INNER CITY
    “Invent a religion,” John Carver said, and for the first time I really took notice of him.
    It wasn’t the invitation. All of us in the group had been asked to do stranger things. It was the way he said it. I had pegged Carver as one of those affluent post-grads perfectly content to while away a decade in a focusless quest for a Ph.D., one of the krill of the academic ocean. He would float until he was swallowed … by the final onus of a degree, by an ambitious woman, by his own aimlessness. In the meantime he was charming enough company.
    But he posed his challenge with an insouciance and an air of mischief that took me by surprise. He perched on the arm of the leather recliner and looked straight at me, though there were fifteen of us crowded into the living room. He wore casually expensive clothes, tailored jeans and a pastel sweatshirt, the sort of items whose brand names I felt I was expected to recognize, though I never did. His face was lean and handsome. Not blandly handsome—aggressively handsome. He looked, not like a rapist, but like the sort of actor who would be cast as one in an afternoon drama.
    Deirdre Frank peered at him through the multiplying lenses of her enormous eyeglasses. “What kind of religion?
Any
kind of religion?”
    “A new religious doctrine,” Carver said, “or dogma, article of faith, heresy, occultism, cosmology. Original in its elements. Submissionsmarked on a ten-point sliding scale, we all mark each other, and in the event of a tie I cast the deciding vote.” All this was as usual.