But there was another way to see the data, as well—as being emotionally related to patterning, that essential treatment activity for some brain-damaged children, the repetitive placing of the children’s limbs in the positions of crawling so that they could learn how to do it themselves, by creating a false sense memory. Morgan had been placing Blue, emotionally, spiritually if you will, in the positions needed for love and dreams. She had been putting the body of the alien into positions that in humans required touch and REM-sleep.
Why were love and sleep suddenly related, perhaps even conflated, in this sudden flash of understanding? Morgan saw that her touch was calming Blue, that something was flowing between them, that Blue’s outward-spiraling data trance had been interrupted, centered by her presence, by the need to focus. But the bodily touch was not enough. There had to be some focus for Blue’s spirit, emotions—for the alien’s soul? wondered Morgan suddenly—to counterbalance the flood of information.
Information is not always balanced by entropy, Morgan remembered. Sometimes it is balanced by chaos, by letting go. Humans used the sleep time for this, and the seemingly random yet often organized and meaningful images surfacing in dreams were palimpsests, artifacts, or iceberg-tips of a deeper and more significant process.
How would an alien body, burning so hot usually, learn that kind of letting-go? Morgan was thinking at the speed of data herself. “Have you read about meditation?” she said. Blue’s gaze unfocused for a disconcerting second, then, “Yes,” the alien said brightly.
“We are going to teach you to meditate.”
Blue’s hands spasmed. “I do not want empty mind!”
“Empty mind is a metaphor. It means still thoughts, with no traffic jam in there.” Blue knew “traffic jam”, and giggled. “Then, I hope, I will teach you to find something like dreaming in the midst of the peace that a still mind brings.”
Did Blue even have a subconscious mind? She guessed they would find out.
It was grey outside the windows, the flat post-sunset miasma which seems to leach the intensity from colors. Morgan remembered walking home from high school in winter in the same kind of half-daylight, twenty-five years before. It struck her as strange that the emotions of our childhood become artifacts for the rest of our lives, so that some events, sensations, or feelings only moments or hours long govern the rest of our experience.
How would Blue’s strange accelerated learning curve replicate human existence?
Blue stayed on the bed, eyes closed, for the rest of the night and some of the morning. Morgan, kipped out on the couch in the next room, slept badly, dreamed of death and data and blue light and terrible confusion, woke often and checked on Blue, and finally, giving up on sleep, sat dozily in the big armchair by the window and watched over Blue.
When Blue decided to rejoin the world, the calm face and smile were restored.
“I understand much more,” said the alien. “Things fit. Their edges meet, like those puzzles you used to make me do. Why don’t we do those any more?”
“For kids, they’re learning disguised as play; for adults, they’re optional recreation.”
“So you think I am an adult now?”
“Well, I’d say a young teenager.”
“Oh, must I misbehave and learn to drive cars too fast? What about recreational drug use and wireheading?”
Morgan laughed. “If you think it will seriously advance your knowledge base of human behavior, I suppose you could try some of those things, but I recommend the non-destructive ones—like driving a car fast, but only on a divided highway!”
“You are too conservative. I should do something importantly dangerous.”
“Why?”
“Because humans do.”
“Some humans. Some, like me, would rather avoid remorse.”
“What does that mean—oh. I see.”
Morgan grinned and hugged Blue with one arm around the waist, and Blue hugged back around her shoulders. Morgan was always surprised at the heat—but today, she was simply grateful. If anything last night had frightened her most, it was the coldness of Blue’s hands, a sign of spasming circulation, or even clinical shock. But now Blue was comfortingly warm again.
“Did that feeling of being overwhelmed ever happen to you before?” Morgan asked.
“Yes, one time, when the man died.”
“What did you do about it?”
“I can’t remember. When can I learn to drive?”
“After you learn what a metaphor is.” This time, it was Blue who laughed first.
journal:
Blue takes to the idea of dreaming and suddenly the word is everywhere. For instance, I asked Blue if Blue had any knowledge of the other aliens in the other countries. Blue said, I see them in my dreams. but they are indistinct. they are in far places, with different cameras and security forces. this, we all know.
You speak so well, I said.
I have a good speech therapist, Blue said, and grinned. and I read Fowler’s English Usage, and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and Modern English Grammar.
And, though I stopped Blue’s listing there, linguistics textbooks and speech therapy textbooks and all the ancient and modern novels we could find, on microfiche or paper or disc, or on audiotape to play in the background, with rich trained voices like Orson Welles and Dame Edith Evans and Jessica Tandy and Richard Burton reading the books and plays; and films and video recordings of everything from Shakespeare to Albee, Brecht to Tallis, Antonioni to Hitchcock, Kubrick to Shyamalan, Smythe to Mollel, mostly in English after experts assured us that it was better for Blue to learn one language deeply than several in brief. Despite my doubts, for I knew and know that a language defines the concepts it can express, and the concepts of a people limit its language, the most obvious example being the sexism of English with its he and she and no word for a person who is neither or for whom it doesn’t matter, like Blue or the letter carrier.
But because I know that around the world, some in known places and some not, other empty aliens are soaking up humanity, the minority view as well as next door to the imperium (the imperium gloats: they have two, so the media report), I feel no lingering guilt about teaching Blue only English with its inbuilt prejudices, its inherent bias. There are many different paradigms by which our world can be ordered and expressed, all of them equal and valid, though some contradict others.
In the dream Morgan is swimming in a blue fog that becomes a blue ocean. For the first time in her life, she is swimming in comfort. That’s all.
When she woke up, Morgan remembered only the sense of power in knowing how to swim. There’s a staff pool in the Atrium, she thought. Wonder if Blue and I can have swimming lessons? They began two days later, taught by, of all people, Flora, who in the water was square-bodied and blocky: Morgan realized suddenly that Flora was likely a trans.
In the real world, Morgan found that the dream has improved her bare ability to float not at all. She is still afraid to put her face in the water. Blue picked up on her nervousness. Flora began slowly, gently, and quickly the alien began to play in the water. Morgan, too, unbent a bit, but she could see it would take time.
On the brink of despair is tranquillity. Or, more precisely, over the brink, in the void. That’s okay with the dreaming Morgan: she needs a rest. She has been walking a long time in this unfamiliar landscape.
In the country she knew, where her parents were an immutable part of familiar scenery, she had mapped out all the pitfalls. Now she has gone away from there in every way, and nothing is the same. They are not going back the way they came, and nothing will ever be the same again. She has changed her name, her job, her location, her membership status in human concerns (member: inactive).
Across the plain to meet her walks a blue being who came from a country separated by a real, not metaphorical, void from even the most extravagant locale of Morgan’s imagination.
The dining table conversation was a sprightly exchange of editing terms
that Morgan could barely follow, but even Delany was keeping up with John and Russ.
“I’m interested in putting dimension into flatware,” she said. “I deliberately work in paint, but it doesn’t always dance like I want it to.”
“You can delaminate it easy,” said John. “It comes apart any way you want. Fractal division, color layers, density contour maps—depends on what you want to develop. What mood.”
“All very well with something that begins as static, something you create and then animate,” said Jakob, “but what about taking something that already exists—like my dance—and doing more than documentary? Half the stuff on the web harks back to before I was born—psychedelia as rank as any on vintage TV. The most modern stuff does MuchMusic or MTV nostalgia. There’s no space for innovation. I end up settling for documentation, hoping that there is a shadow of the liveware there.”
“The nature of the video experience has always been different. That’s stale news now. What do you expect? The only frontier is fucking with the paradigm.”
“And how exactly do you go about that?” Russ put in. “When all the available models have been modeled?”
“Cellular transformation,” said John.
Morgan thought that none of them was splitting out of their paradigm. Each one was instead trying to get further inside, burrowing like a worm into the heart of the classical knowledge of their field. There was a lesson in it somewhere for her. What she was doing in the Atrium was not groundbreaking either. The gestalt portrait of humanity was taking shape in the alien: Blue was becoming a human being. No human was being forced to think outside the frame. No alien knowledge had been leaked to Earth. And the same skills were being used that would be used to “civilize” a feral child or, perhaps a better analogy since few feral children respond to the efforts to teach them humanity, to rehabilitate an amnesiac. No new skills for her to write a textbook about when the project got declassified.
“Classification,” said John, startling her, but then he went on, “classifying the pixel density into families to make the most of the bandwidth—of course, that’s completely misleading; the terminology is so old.”
“I see what you mean,” said Russ. “But you aren’t using it to convey information. It’s entropic in nature. Isn’t that contradicted by the very fact that you create it?”
“Yes,” said Delany, “because art cannot by its nature be entropic.”
“That’s a very traditional viewpoint,” said John witheringly.
“Look who’s talking,” Jakob mocked. “You still make full motion for the net. Isn’t that traditional, compared to virtuality?”
Morgan was a bit surprised to see John take this not lightly, in the spirit of Jakob’s chaffing, but sullenly. “You don’t understand the statement,” he said. “That’s not surprising, given the kind of effete vocabulary of motion you use. At least, I wasn’t surprised.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Delany sharply.
“Nothing,” said John. “Just that a non-expert can’t be expected to be on the cutting edge. Especially when you use the medium for documentary.” He said the last word with his voice dripping with scorn.
“Hey, hey, take it easy,” said Russ. “This is a friendly discussion, remember? You’re not dealing with critics here.”
“Maybe,” said John, but he relaxed, and the conversation moved on. Within a few minutes he was joking again, and Russ was guffawing.
While they were doing the dishes—it was John’s turn, with Jakob drying, but John had had an opening to attend, so Morgan had volunteered—Morgan said, “John has a hair-trigger on the subject of his work, it seems.”
“No, it’s me,” said Jakob. “He doesn’t like fags.”
“What on earth … ?”
“He doesn’t let it hit the surface, but haven’t you noticed, darling, that he won’t even share a touching domestic moment like this with me?”
Her mouth open to say, “I’m sure you’re mistaken,” Morgan stopped and said instead, “I hope you’re wrong. Given the nature of this household, he’s in for trouble. When I interviewed him, he didn’t seem to bristle at the idea.”
“It could just be that he’s not used to my style, sugah,” Jakob said, exaggerating his style for a moment.
“I suppose it takes some getting used to—but you’d think that someone in video and virch would have met all sorts of people …”
“You’d think,” said Jakob, “but there’s different kinds of meet. Maybe he never had to share a bathroom with any before.”
“He’s a sharp guy, and funny. He seems to liven everybody up.”
“It’s competition. He has an edge, and so we unsheathe our little blades as well. I haven’t felt so sharp in years.”
Morgan hoped that Jakob and John didn’t end up sharpening their claws on each other. Last thing she needed were feuding prima donnas. She had noticed a certain edginess in John, but Jakob was not immune: come to think of it, none of this had started until John had criticized Jakob’s old-fashioned use of video. Sighing internally, she added a watching brief to her internal list of things to do. I could do without the vagaries of human nature, she thought, and surfaced to hear Jakob cleverly dissing John.
“Hush,” she said. “Manners …” and thought, not for the first time, that queens were getting bitchier the more the external world cracked down on them. On us, she amended. On the deviants.
“Could we go rock-climbing then?” Blue nagged.
“Rock climbing?”
“Something dangerous. ‘Adventurous men and women from the Canadian Rockies Sheer Face Explorers pit their strength and agility against the most challenging vertical terrain. Weekend packages include three nights at the charming Black Cat Guest Ranch, nestled at the foot of Solomon Mountain, and three climbs of increasing difficulty—’”
“All right! All right! When I get back on day shift we’ll find you something risky to do to channel your teenaged joyriding urges!”
But they didn’t, because that night, some hours after Morgan had gone off duty, the alien ran away.
5
A new tenant
Morgan was careful never to speak a lie, but still, the fact was, Morgan was a friend of denial. Through her father’s dying, she had managed to ignore all her grudges, and now she would have to abandon them unsolved. What a cheat death could be. And her mother’s death, the possibility that it was suicide, that in itself was a great ball of anger hanging below her belly.
To feel empty, she had to deny all this.
In denial, she did not heal. Trying for truth in speech, she was still somehow a liar.
And that, she thought bitterly, invalidated all her fine tragic acting on the riverbank; that, she knew, was fatal to the future; that, she believed, was too human to be hers.
Being human, she recognized, was harder for her than it was for Blue, but more necessary both because she could not escape the reality of it, and because she didn’t want to be human. As long as she could feel alien, she was safe. So, she asked herself scornfully, she denied her common cause with the rest of “mankind’s unco’ squad” and retained her romantic notions of how to suffer through her inevitable life?
“You’re nobody special,” she heard, in a voice from the past, a flashback to some moment, a moment before her knowledge, when she must have decided to prove that voice a liar.
She won’t do it by lying herself.
She hated knowing that. It made her so petty.
The noise on the porch came at about eleven-thirty. Morgan was just dozing over her book when she heard the scraping of feet on wood. She made a habit of noting who was home and not home; everyone was accounted for. She walked downstairs quietly and in one quick motion turned on the porch light and opened the front door.
She was not prepared for:
—a pale, bluish face, a quiet studied voice saying, “May I come in?” The falling of a slight body against the door frame, then a stumbling step and a final
collapse at her feet.
Blue. She closed the door, crouched to the fallen body, pulled the shoulders around so the body lay straight. She was used to dealing with bodies unable to co-operate, though Blue had never been unresponsive like this in her presence before, despite the “sleep” on her last shift. Mr. Grey would have found this catatonia familiar, but she didn’t know that. She leaned with legs on either side of the waist, crouched to lift under the arms, dragged the heavy weight across the hall and into the small sitting room by the door. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When she returned to the little room, the alien was struggling to sit up. She turned on the lights.
Blue stirred, moved as if swimming in deep water, up from the Mariana Trench. She crouched beside the sluggish body, put her hand out, brushed the strands of hair away from the damp forehead. Blue’s eyelids fluttered. She pulled her hand back more quickly than it had gone out. The eyes opened fully, fixed on her face.
“I ran away. I’m sorry. Will I get you in trouble with the people behind the mirror? I will go as soon as I can. But you are the only place I know.”
“What do you mean?” What a stupid thing to say, she thought.
“They are chasing me about the dead man. They asked me many questions. What do I know about a dead man, even though I read everything I could read? I don’t know anything!”
A Paradigm of Earth Page 7