A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

“Shh, it’s all right. Why didn’t you just get them to call me?”

  Blue looked around the room, gaze sharp on every object. “You said I was a teenager. Teenagers can run away to see the world. To go to a place where no-one talks about death. So I come here, and much is interesting to me here.”

  Again that sharp gaze, on her, strange acuity from such an exhausted beginning. She nodded absently, encouraging Blue to go on, as she always did. There was a dynamo in the back of her mind, setting a manic wheel in motion. The death, the interrogation she thought she had made them promise to put off, but it had only worked until she was off duty. Could Blue actually have had anything to do with the death? The on-line record showed nothing either way. The only knowledge was that for two days after, until Blue’s collapse when she came on duty, Blue had studied death, medicine, and Ouija. From the end of the chess game … Heart attacks happen to people … but was the death natural? Odds were that it was, and anyway, she couldn’t believe Blue capable of a murderous act. The alien eyes closed again, and the voice lost the vigor of a moment before.

  “Why are you so tired?” she said, sharply.

  “I have never been out here before. There are so many voices in my dreams. It is tiring. And you taught me to sleep.” It was a valid point. “Maybe I should have stayed and let that man in the blue suit yell at me.”

  “Blue suit? Not grey? Blue?”

  “Yes, blue, but not the same color as me. He was one of the ones that used to watch me from behind the mirror. I know if I stay they will come here and make you angry. No. Be angry with you. Now I see you I understand I should not bring that to you, no matter how I feel. But I am very worn.”

  “Tired,” she said automatically.

  “Very tired.” Eyes open and nodding, Blue was as always an obedient student.

  She laughed suddenly. The alien smiled carefully.

  “Would you like to sit on the furniture?” she said. “That’s how we earth folks usually do it.”

  “Yes, please.” Blue lifted up to perch in a chair. “You are making fun of me.”

  “It is a very strange situation,” said Morgan. She walked to the window. Outside, under the streetlights, two men were standing. One pointed at the house.

  Morgan felt as if she were in a movie. There wasn’t much difference however between being an observer of an unreal world and living in one. To the alien she said, “Would you like to stay here? All the time, I mean: live here?” Then she broke into a cold sweat at the presumption of what she had just said.

  The alien said, “Yes, please.”

  A third, smaller man joined the waiting two. He jerked his head toward the trees on the other side of the fence, and the pointing man walked into them and was lost in the shadow. The new man spoke to the other, who got into a car by the curb and started the engine. Clearly the newcomer was authority. Under the streetlight, their clothing looked the same: dark and nondescript. Was it her Mr. Grey? Morgan couldn’t understand why the watchers were not already on the step: she had watched enough spy movies and read enough cheap thrillers to know what the drill should be and to expect a knock, but the man made no such moves, just stood watching the house until Morgan imagined he saw her in depth.

  Just in case, Morgan dialed the number she had been given in case she needed to let them know she would be away or late for a shift. The telephone was answered on the first ring, and through the window Morgan saw the watcher answer a cellphone.

  “Hi, this is Morgan.”

  “What can I do for you?” said the voice of the grey man. Well, that answered that.

  “Blue is with me,” she said economically.

  “We know.”

  “And exhausted.”

  “Well, put it to bed and see if you can get it to practice its sleeping, and we’ll be there in the morning.”

  “Are you standing out in the street watching me?”

  “Yes.”

  She waved out the window and heard a chuckle from the ’phone headset. Then he said, “Don’t worry, really we’re watching out for you. Hasta mañana,” and cut the connection. As she watched, he got into the car, she saw him speak to the driver, and the vehicle moved away.

  Chief Inspector Roger T. McKenzie, AKA Mr. Grey, stood in the concealing darkness and watched the alien enter the strangers’ door. The face of the small, long-haired woman who opened and shut the door was in shadow. It didn’t matter. He already knew everything he needed to know about her. Or enough to seem like everything. Kowalski drove out into the light where the two duty guards were waiting to be deployed.

  The ’phone call delighted him—and won him his bet with Ko, who had been sure she would play Spy vs. Spy, would try to conceal Blue. Still chuckling as he cut the connection, he turned back to the car where the man in the blue suit was waiting. Mr. Grey could hardly contain his elation, but he was going to keep his excitement hidden from Ko, who he knew feared the alien and the alien effect on Earth. He would hide the delight he felt that the blue visitor had managed to graduate the training course with such expediency. He would also hide the apprehension that the alien’s flight (with attached to that flight the inevitable suspicion of complicity in the chessmaster’s death, autopsy verdict notwithstanding) had brought him. All the blue-suited man would ever be allowed to see would be the cool, efficient exterior Mr. Grey, doing everything right.

  The grey man had taken a gamble, and it was working. Nourished by private satisfactions as well as by public ones, he felt no need to share this knowledge, or smile about it. It was his nature, he thought, quoting the folk tale of the scorpion and the horse, and was, after all, almost tempted to smile.

  Instead, he got into the car and signaled the other man to drive on. They had a long night’s work ahead of them, and he wanted to get started.

  Morgan woke in the morning after a confused sleep of dreams to the realization that something monumental hung over her head, but it took a moment for her to remember what it was. She was as exhausted as if she were getting up early after a weekend at work. By the time she had put the alien to bed in the spare room the night before, she had felt as if she had worked a double shift.

  The alien. The sudden rush of fear was so strong it almost choked her. Following it was the urgency that had woken her, sharpened now. She was through Russ’s room, Delany’s room like a whirlwind, waking them with sharp hurried words, then up to Jakob’s studio to shake him into a stuporous wakefulness which she scarcely trusted. Then John, who woke confused and truculent, but caught her urgency. Finally they were all gathered in the kitchen, Russ making coffee in the drip maker while everyone else rumbled through their morning rituals: Delany laboriously assembled cereal, John teased Marbl, Jakob raked his long hair and braided its finely dreaded strands, twisted the silk headband around his forehead. Morgan was too keyed up to sit or to care what time of day it was.

  “We have to talk,” she said. “Something happened last night that’s going to affect us all. No, let’s be honest, I did something last night which will affect us all. I took in a stranger …”

  “That’s nothing unusual,” said Russ. “You’ve got a houseful of strays. Eh, Marbl?”

  The cat turned at its name, and showed pretty teeth in a silent meouw.

  “This one is different. It’s stranger than you know. It’s Blue, the extraterrestrial. That’s where I’ve been working, teaching the alien. Last night it ran away from the Atrium—that’s the place they kept it—and came here to ask for shelter. I asked it if it wanted to stay and it said yes.”

  Bedlam. She took a minute to think about where that word came from: yes, I am mad, this whole thing is mad. At the end of the chaos of explanation, Russ, of course, was saying, “Fahr auf!” John was burbling about vid memory, megabytes, getting his camera, where is it?—with his face white and the skin looking drawn across the bones, from shock. Jakob realized the heart of the matter.

  “But surely someone will come looking for it. They’ve had security like you wouldn’t b
elieve! The Mounties—CSIS I mean—a UN force, police from every damned country. You told us you practically had to have an anal probe to get in to work every day. And they just left him here? With the likes of us?”

  He was worried about his boys, his work, his source of income. Morgan was worried about their lives. But their concerns coincided here.

  “That’s just about it. None of us is what you might call mainstream, mundane. I can’t decide without you. Are you willing to have your life spread open for examination, in exchange for the chance to spend time with a real alien? I thought about it a long time last night before I went to sleep, and I think I have nothing more to lose. But some of you might feel differently.”

  “I don’t think it’s a matter of what we feel,” said Delany suddenly. “I think it’s a matter of history. People are always being caught in the whirlpool effect of some event. It’s not that we lose our freedom of choice, but that we shouldn’t assume we should use it at a time like this.

  “If you get my meaning,” she said after a pause during which the others looked at her in silence.

  “I don’t care either way,” said Russ. “It should be interesting.”

  “I’ve always wanted to be famous in the real world,” said Jakob, but Morgan noticed his hands were shaking, and she put a hand over one of his briefly (very briefly; she knew he felt ambivalent about touch).

  John was the last to speak, looking from one to the other, the pressure showing on his face, but finally he said, “I can make an event of it. A documentary. I’ll have to get more camera memory.”

  And with this collection of rationales they were joined together on their journey into the strange future.

  She met the security force in the living room. They had indeed come in force. The grey man and his flunky sat; the three silent spear-carriers (the man in uniform, the two women in “inconspicuous” civvies) spaced themselves around the room, one of them behind her, near the door to the kitchen.

  “Stand over there,” she said to the one behind her, amazed at her own peremptory tone. He looked at his senior officer and waited for a nod before he went over to stand beside the women, beside the window.

  “Your people are well-trained,” she said, thinking, this is crazy, ridiculous. “That will make things easier all around.”

  “The ET can’t stay here. The security isn’t good enough.” As usual when something rude was said, the speaker was blue suit. She’d met him in so many meetings. She’d met both of them, but never with a name attached. Need-to-know? Or just bad manners?

  “So don’t tell anybody.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Sure it is. Everybody in Canada thinks ‘our’ alien is in the Atrium, location unknown. Who’s going to suspect?”

  “The story will leak.”

  “And when it does, face the matter then.”

  “You seem so sure that we will allow it to stay here.” Grey suit had no problem with pronouns. He had always called Blue “it,” as if, Morgan thought, the alien were a commodity. Mind you, she’d used the same pronoun with her housemates: it was hard to avoid. She sighed, wrenched her mind back to the cut-and-parry.

  “You assume you have a choice.”

  “We’re in control of the situation,” said blue suit.

  “Isn’t that what you always say, at those meetings we have? But hasn’t the time come when you will have to do as Blue wishes? Unless you have decided to make a hostile response, unless Blue is a prisoner.”

  “There’s no question of that!” Blue suit was affronted. “But security must be maintained. Some crazy could decide to take him out.”

  “Him?”

  “The alien.” Blue suit, too, long ago had made a pronoun choice. Morgan grinned despite herself.

  “What I want to know,” she said, “is whether Blue has freedom of choice. To live wherever Blue chooses?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m afraid so.” Grey suit sounded almost amused for a moment. Morgan looked sharply at him, but he was impassive.

  “And us?”

  “I’m not sure I understand you.” Grey suit.

  “If this one comes here, are you going to harass us and molest our freedoms and destroy our way of life, and in general get in the way? No, don’t answer me now, take some time to think of it. You probably already know by now that there is nothing middle-of-the-road about any of us.”

  “That’s for damn sure!” Blue suit. “A couple of homosexuals … a crippled communist, and a crazy … what is he, anyway? … and that fellow with the van, who works for Amnesty and GovNet …”

  “That will do,” said grey suit, and answered Morgan’s curiosity in three words. He knew everything about them.

  “Communists are a few generations back,” Morgan said, laughing. “One and a half homosexuals, a disabled socialist, a video artist, and a civil servant … We have all agreed to offer Blue a place. But we don’t want legal problems, no harassment. Leave us alone.”

  “You don’t ask much.”

  “I’ll ask for far more before I’m done. Advice, support—but only when Blue asks for it. Blue’s a person, not a thing to be passed from agency to agency, not a thing to be studied. I take no responsibility, except to teach what I can. Just as I have done when I worked in the Atrium.”

  The reason for keeping the policeman away from the kitchen was the alien standing behind the door. Now Blue came out. The spear-carriers stirred, blue suit took a breath, grey suit sat looking.

  “I think you see us as adversaries,” grey suit said. “I am not your adversary.”

  Interesting pronoun choice, Morgan thought as he carried on, “We are doing our best. We are all new at this. It seems to me that if I had a guest in my house from an unknown country, and the guest were as appealing and as helpless, I would fly as quickly to the defense. But I want to try very hard to show you that we have common concerns. We want this person, Blue, to stay alive. That’s my job. You know that. I’ve kept popes and politicians alive and frankly, this is a damn sight harder and more important than any of that. We want this person to know about us. That’s not so easy either. You”—he looked directly at the blue one—“seemed at first to know nothing. We tried to teach you, and we have. Now you’ve taken off like my teenage kid, as soon as you knew how to dress yourself. Do you”—back to Morgan—“see the problem?”

  “Yes,” said Morgan, feeling a little ashamed of herself, though that was probably just what he wanted. Even worse, he reminded her suddenly of her father—the sweetness of “the sweet guy”—despite being so much younger and smaller. Could she afford to ever think he was a “sweet guy”? She kept her face stolid as she listened.

  “Okay now, we don’t know what Blue wants here. We don’t know what the aliens want to say to Earth. We don’t know what they want to learn. Blue spends a lot of time watching, just like now. Can it find what it needs here, what we were trying to give at the Atrium? The Great Literature, Great Music, Great Art?”

  The blue one moved restlessly to stand behind Morgan.

  “We can do better,” Morgan said with bravado. “We can offer real life.”

  “My daughter is a video artist,” said grey suit unexpectedly, “and for all I know she’s a homosexual too. And a socialist, and a civil servant, even. This is her world too. So don’t think you know everything.”

  “It isn’t everything,” Morgan burst out. “It isn’t anything. Just Blue in distress at the door, falling down into my arms just about, for goodness’ sakes. You think I’m gonna leave that for the officials to take care of, no matter how good the hearts? I’ve been teaching this child, this empty filling life, for a long time now.”

  “Not that long,” said the man in the blue suit.

  “It seems like a long time.” Morgan glared at him. “Do you think I would walk away? That I could?”

  “No,” the grey man interceded. “I know that about you. Why do you think I kept you there when you pissed everybody off?”

  Morgan
looked back at him. He was not exactly smiling, but he wasn’t glowering as he so often was in the meetings: progress? The man in the blue suit was glowering, but Mr. Grey spoke quietly. “It’s been happening in science fiction for years, the alien meets the ordinary people. You get to be the ordinary people.”

  Morgan snorted. “Ordinary? Sure, we’re the ones nobody else will have in their clubs.”

  “But what else is new about the world? There’s always somebody that doesn’t get chosen for the team.” Was he talking her into this?

  “Listen,” said Morgan, “I worked my heart out for those kids at the hospital for years teaching them to take their first steps all over again, teaching them to get used to their faces, their newly limited minds, their new limbs, all that bullshit. I got away, I left it behind, because it hurt. I apply for this nice safe job and get Blue instead. Do you think I want to be torn open like this? But who else will? Who else tried to take that one somewhere human? You have to rock those gargoyle children in your arms no matter how they look; you have to love them just the same. Do you think you can leave this one”—her arm around Blue—“inside some institution and teach life on Earth from videos and the net? From movies? And not anything else? It wouldn’t work, it doesn’t work. And what one of you tried to take the alien home and open your private life?”

  She saw the blue-suited one blush when she said “movies” and it fueled her anger, but she saw the grey suit lean forward to answer her last challenge, and her anger left her.

  “Besides,” she said, “it isn’t up to me. It’s up to Blue, and all my passion is for nothing if that one wants to ride the wind away from my door.”

  “I think the wind can blow on without me,” said the alien.

  journal:

  That ephemeral and perhaps sinister attraction this stranger to Earth has followed through the unfamiliar patterns of a eity built by minds still alien, hands driven by unknown visions, was not volitional and was scarcely recognized even by Blue as a compulsion. Yet it is possible that design could not have brought our dear blue alien more neatly to the right door.