“Cool,” said Aziz blankly. “Where’s the whiz zone? I gotta, gotta go.”
Jakob rolled his eyes at Morgan. “Go on in, kid,” he said. “Bathroom is up and on the left. Then come on back down to the living room—over there.”
Aziz ran lightly up the stairs into the shadow of the upper hallway. Jakob turned to Morgan. “Yeah, I know, chile, but he’s pretty. What can I say?”
“Is he legal?”
“Far as I know.”
“Find out.”
“Yes, Mum. And we promise to have safer, safest, supersafe sex …”
At the old-fashioned term Morgan laughed. “Fine, but I’m serious. Busted we don’t need to be.”
“Honeychile, everything I do, and I mean every thing, is legal.”
Blue laughed. “I get it,” the alien said. “Every thing.”
Morgan shook her head, grinning, and went back to her desk. There, feeling like a collaborator, she called the grey man to talk about visitor protocols.
“I thought I’d better come see you, since you weren’t getting back home … er, back to my place,” said Robyn. He looked around the living room uneasily. They sat like strangers there.
“The house is nice,” he said. “Show me around?” She took him through the main-floor public rooms, showed him the guest room behind the kitchen.
“Do you want to stay here?” she said, but he shook his head.
“Not that I wouldn’t want to, sis, but I’m in town for a reason. That’s what I want to talk about. And I’m staying there … oh, dammit, this is ridiculous.” He dived toward her and hugged her, so quickly that Marbl, on the kitchen counter illegally, crouched and hissed reflexively. “I’m getting married,” he said. “I’m staying with my fiancée’s grandparents. It’s a family reunion—I’m meeting the family. I’d really like you to come too. And I’d like you to come to the wedding, and be my witness. Like the best man, only not a guy, right?”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, really.”
She took him up to the third floor in the elevator. “These brass call buttons, they’re so cool,” he exclaimed. “This house is like a museum piece. I can’t believe that Mom never brought us here. Never told us about it.”
Jakob was out with Aziz, leaving the studio door open. “It used to be the gym for the school, I think,” Morgan said. They walked down one flight to find John’s door was shut with the Do Not Disturb sign up, and Russ was sleeping. Delany was in her room working when Morgan knocked.
“This is my brother Robyn,” Morgan said to Delany’s quizzical look.
“So,” said Delany. “You’re the one who knows all Morgan’s secrets!”
“Secrets! Tchaa!” said Morgan even as Robyn grinned and said, “For a price I’ll tell all!”
“What price?”
“Oh, cut it out,” said Morgan uncomfortably, but Robyn laughed aloud. “Dinner,” he said, “and an explanation of that painting you’re working on.”
“Oh, well, that’s easy,” replied Delany. “It’s my turn to cook, and the painting is about life, love, the universe, and everything. Now, it’s your turn. What was she like as a kid?”
“Smaller,” said Robyn.
“It’s a little complicated,” said Morgan. They had taken a walk down the park before dinner, despite the stormy weather, and as she tried to find words, she watched Robyn’s long hair whipping in the wind. It was the same lush dark sable as her own, and almost as long. Robyn was a stockbroker, and he was wearing “office drag,” but he’d loosed his hair with a sigh when he felt the wind, now faced into it and let his hair tangle. He seemed to be happy.
“What else is new?” said Robyn. “Your life is always complicated. But I’d like to know why there’s some kind of armed guardpost at the gate of the house you live in.”
“How polite of you not to mention it until now!” Morgan laughed.
“Not polite, just, I never did ask you questions. I realized it the other day. I hung around and hoped, but I was expecting you to read my mind. Like that’s a smart way of communicating.”
“I suppose it’s not impossible,” said Morgan, “but I never managed it. I should have been better at trying, though, or asking you what was going on. I’ve been feeling bad about that.”
“It looks to me like you’ve been feeling bad about a lot of things, sis,” and Robyn reached out his hand, such a familiar family-shaped hand, and stroked her brow where the two vertical worry lines were starting to appear chronic. “It’s been hard for you?”
“It’s been complicated. I’ve felt pretty … .”
“Come on, out with it. That’s what my therapist says.”
“Your therapist?”
“It’s a joke. I mean Twylla. She makes me talk about stuff. It’s amazing what I didn’t know I had to say.”
“I should have been better, that’s all. I feel guilty. I think about it every day. Should have helped you more, should have, oh, I don’t know, taught you to play the piano, should have told you things so you wouldn’t have to not ask …”
“The scary thing is I understood that! Listen to me, sis. I probably won’t say this very well, but you were just the sister I needed to have. All through school I ran with the boy pack, you remember that. It was stupid, but at the time it was bread and butter to me. They teased me if I hung out too much with my big sister. Called me a sissy. Now I know that isn’t an insult, but I didn’t then. If you’d been the kind of sister that wanted me to be with her all the time, it would have just hurt your feelings. I wanted to have secrets. That made you a good model. You had them so gracefully.”
Morgan looked at this familiar creature, her brother, and felt she had never seen him before. He put his arms around her, hugged her awkwardly. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks. It’s a start. But let’s not have so many secrets from now on, all right? We’re the only ones of our blood left. These families we enter, it’s not quite the same with them. Look,” and she spread her hand out beside Robyn’s. The shapes echoed, though Robyn’s was bigger. “We need to remember that.”
“First secret’s the hardest, I find,” said Robyn. “So tell me right away why you’re under guard. Is it a halfway house or something? Did these assholes finally pass a law you had to break out loud?”
She laughed. “Oh, little brother, you have no idea. Too bad I can’t just wait until dinner and let you see for yourself. No, I’m not under arrest. It’s just that someone lives in our house who needs constant bodyguarding. It’s—”
“No,” interrupted Robyn, “in that case, let’s go with plan A. Let’s wait and let me meet this celebrity unawares. See if I recognize him or her. That will be fun. It was finding out whether or not you were in some kinda subtle jail that wasn’t fun.”
“Sure,” said Morgan. “It will be fun, I think.”
And it was.
“I like your brother,” said Blue ingenuously.
“Yes, so do I,” said Morgan. “He liked you too, once he got over the shock.”
“Why was it a shock? Oh, of course, more people are not blue in color.”
“Also, most people come from somewhere on this planet.”
“Oh, right. I forget, sometimes, because I feel like I come from this planet too. It’s my life. So when someone tells me again that I don’t, it’s like … religion? Do you know what I mean? Like I was told where I came from and I have to take it on faith. So when people look at me oddly, I feel bad. Like they judge me for something I can’t help.”
Morgan’s laugh shocked Blue, and she hurried to say, “Oh, honey, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just that for the people in this house, the same thing has happened to all of us, for one reason or another. We’re from Earth too, Earth is all we know, and yet we’ve often been looked at like aliens.”
“What am I supposed to do to fix that?”
“Nothing. You can’t fix other people. You can only become the best person you can manage to be yourself. Other peopl
e have to fix themselves.”
Later, John turned on the TVid Talk Channel, and they saw an interviewer in the middle of an on-the-street poll about some civil rights issue.
“You see,” the woman on the TVid screen said, “you can’t trust their kind. It’s been proved: they’re all carrying the disease now.”
Morgan watched Blue turn away abruptly. She followed Blue into the kitchen. “What did you think of that?” she said.
“Is this a test?” Blue said grumpily.
“Hey, hey, what is it?”
“I don’t understand people like that.”
“You and me both.”
“Say again please?”
“You and me both.”
“It is idiom, yes? Means—well, that’s obvious. What does she tell lies for?”
“I don’t know,” said Morgan, suddenly tired. “Some people do. They seem to be able to convince themselves that their lies are true. And before you ask, I don’t know how they do that, either. You’ll have to look it up on the net.”
“Hey, you are unhappy about it too, about it too.” The alien was ingenuously pleased. Morgan, pleased that Blue understood enough to dislike the propagandist, smiled at the anxious blue face. “Yes, indeed. Don’t repeat yourself like that. That’s slang.”
That night, lying awake with Marbl draping and redraping across her in restless warm crisscrosses, Morgan realized suddenly that even in that relentless flash of insight which on the night before her parents’ funeral had struck her down with the appearance of an epiphany, she had left out an important part of the equation. She had taken full responsibility for all the damage ever done to herself and family, no matter what the true source. Even after allowing for the hyperbole of blame with which she had ruthlessly assigned fault to what she should have just categorized as the necessary humiliations of childhood and the inevitable omissions of humanity, there was more to it. There was more to the world than herself, than the four of them. There were billions of humans, untold billions of other organisms, all acting together, all interacting, all acting upon each other, some blindly and some with intent: processes, entities, organisms, natural laws, and the overriders: Chaos, Order, Entropy, and Information, galloping across the cosmos doing and undoing each other’s work. It was not all Morgan’s fault.
Amazingly, she managed not to recursively blame herself for blaming herself—a step in the direction of self-nurturing, anyway, she thought: the universe is too big for blame. But it was another irony. God is an iron, said the writer: against the impersonal processes of this infinite regression of chaoses, Morgan continued to place her stubborn belief in information.
And yet, she hadn’t known until this moment that she had such a belief at all.
She would go with Robyn to meet his new extended family, she thought, and she would try to love them too.
Morgan was half-joking when she suggested that Blue come with her, in the new pinkface, to the dinner with Robyn’s new in-laws. But Robyn thought it would be a grand joke, and Blue immediately went online and did three hours of reading on family reunions, etiquette of formal and informal meals, and even included a sideline of old prairie-realism short fiction dealing with family dynamics. Morgan was committed.
At the meeting where the household discussed the new rules, the Boy Wonder was understandably appalled.
“We will send surveillance,” said Mr. Grey. “It can’t happen any other way. We’ll be discreet, but nobody leaves on one of these trips without a chip.”
“But—”
“This isn’t a civil rights issue, it’s a safety issue,” the grey man interrupted Morgan. “How would you feel if Blue got disappeared? We know that other governments are watching this operation too—what if some of the more unscrupulous, Burma or England for instance, decided to nab our alien and compare progress the natural way?”
“I think it is a good idea,” said Blue unexpectedly. “I will wear a chip bracelet. I am a baby in the woods—”
“—babe—” corrected Morgan automatically.
“—babe, and I don’t want to get lost. In my reading, I find too many tales of wolves in the woods.”
The grey man laughed, then looked at the Boy Wonder. “It’s a joke, Rahim,” he said gently.
“Oh. Heh,” said the Boy Wonder humorlessly. “Mac, you know I oppose this kind of risk.”
“I know,” said the grey man. “But I think it’s justifiable.”
“So do I,” said Blue Suit, to Morgan’s surprise. “As far as we can see, our alien is coming along best.” (Blue preened with innocent egoism.) “We want to take advantage of that. We are getting enormous PR value out of the secret normal life our alien has. Canada has never looked so good at the UN. So what if it’s far from normal? We work with it. A nice normal pre-wedding party with a man and a woman getting married is just what he needs.”
“He? Oh, Blue,” said Robyn. “Listen, it’s not exactly … normal … We’re writing our own vows, and it’s not a Christian ceremony.”
“It’s not queer,” said Blue Suit. “That’s good enough for me.”
“That’s enough, Ko,” said the grey man. “Where is this family get-to-know party, and when?”
“Er,” said Robyn, “tomorrow. Starts at noon. At the North Side Buddhist Hall. Twylla’s grandparents are ancestor worshipers, really, but the Buddhist Hall is right by their house, and it’s big.”
“Ancestor worshipers,” said the man in the blue suit, weakly.
“They’re Chinese,” said Robyn.
“Oh, that’s all right then,” said Blue Suit, and even Rahim laughed at his tone.
“Too soon,” said the grey man. “Can’t arrange security. Sorry.” Morgan felt, not annoyance, but relief. What was that about?
“Her other grandparents are Scots,” said Robyn. “It’s going to be quite a potluck. And there’ll be a piper at the wedding. The wedding is—”
“Can I go to the wedding instead, Morgan?” asked Blue eagerly. “I’ve always wanted to hear a piper, ever since I read about the Battle of Culloden. They sound very strange on recordings.”
“Don’t interrupt, honey. And usually one waits to be invited to these sorts of things,” said Morgan admonishingly.
“I invited you,” said Robyn. “You can bring any date you want. But I think bagpipes will surprise you in person, Blue. Recordings just don’t give the full effect.”
“We’ll have to warn the sound technicians,” said the grey man complacently.
Morgan looked at him covertly. He appeared to be extremely happy. I wonder why, she thought. This must be a logistical night-mare. But he was grinning at Blue with open enjoyment, and as if he could read Morgan’s thoughts, the grey man turned to her. “This will be very interesting,” he said.
“In the Gertrude Stein sense of the word, or the ancient Chinese curse sense?” Morgan asked.
“Both,” he said, still smiling. “I am going to enjoy this next phase very much.”
“I just can’t go tomorrow,” said Morgan. They sat in the living room after the CSIS delegation had gone. “It sounds dumb, I know, but I realized—there will be too many people there. It’s not because Blue can’t go. I just—can’t start knowing you again in a crowd that big. Or get to know Twylla that way. I’m sorry. I’ve been such a trial to you for the last few months, and here I am being temperamental again.”
“Don’t write my script,” said Robyn. “I understand. After all, I’m showing up the day before, to drop all this on you. We are not exactly doing this family stuff very well. But we are all we have left. We have to sort it out.”
“We will. What is the difference between family you’re born with and family you make?” asked Morgan.
“I don’t know, what is?”
“I was asking you.”
“Family you make … never saw you with baby food in your hair? Or vice versa?”
Morgan remembered, early in her time with Blue, washing junior puréed beans out of the alien’s
long tresses after a temper tantrum about the taste. She grinned. “As good a distinction as any.”
“Okay, how about supper with just the immediate family, in a couple of days?”
“That would work.”
“Can I come too?” said Blue, coming around the edge of the dining room pocket door.
“It’s not polite to eavesdrop,” said Morgan.
“I know. Can I?”
“Okay with me,” said Robyn.
“We’ll see,” said Morgan, but she already knew that she would take Blue with her. For a touchstone? Odd thought. Then she would have two familiars there.
The grey man’s voice on the other end of the ’phone line was a surprise: he never called in the evening. He sounded edgy. “The media have got it somehow. We’re looking for a leak here. That Aziz kid says it wasn’t him, polygraph-perfect, Rahim tells me. I assume your brother can be trusted, though I’m sure I don’t know why. Except for the tail we put on him, and the tedious family reunion we listened to all day. Believe me, he didn’t have time to make a phone call. Be glad you dodged that bullet. They didn’t even have any jellied salad. Oh, and the fact that he’s bonded at work. Anyone else at your end likely to have told them?”
“Not that I know …”
“Oh, never mind, it was bound to come out eventually. Too many people to keep a secret. But I thought I’d warn you. Keep the gates locked, use the electronic entry system.”
Nevertheless, for the first few days they were mobbed when going out for groceries, to work, anywhere. Videorazzi were constantly lurking outside the fence. It took each of them a different length of time to stop being polite—Morgan was the last to do so.
“Just a few words, Ms. Shelby?”
“Be realistic,” said Morgan. “You don’t want just a few words, you want my whole life.”
“What?”
“No comment. No words. Nada. Sorry.”
She regretted the last word instantly, but she was a Canadian—certain habits were difficult to break.
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