A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  Morgan, like most gardeners, found late fall a distressing yet optimistic time, and she worked in that pleasant melancholy, cutting down the last of the surviving flowers along with all the dead stalks, taking up delicate bulbs, pruning down roses and heaping leaf mulch and peat around their bases. Blue helped her, asking only the most basic of practical questions.

  Morgan cut the last frost-nipped heads of the volunteering perennial snapdragons, finally killed by the heavy frost a week ago. Now the cold had been temporarily replaced by a false warmth so that the late-November air was as warm as late September: Morgan knew it wouldn’t last, and as she wrestled with the aged raspberry canes, cutting them to the ground and digging out the worst of their untended spread, she attempted to make the heap of withered greenery into a metaphor for something: life, death, the Universe … But her thoughts were sabotaged by the soothing reek of humus. Finally, as she bundled the last of the prickly canes and heaved them over the back fence into the garbage pickup bin, she was almost smiling. Blue chose this moment to launch again into the eternal Whys.

  “Why do humans do this planting and cutting? It’s not for food, and it’s hard work, when we could be reading books or swimming.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, are you on that again? Go read some gardening books!”

  Blue ignored her, maintained the questioning pose. Morgan straightened her back, involuntarily groaning as the strained muscles protested, and looked at the strange expanse of terraformed yard for a silent few moments. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t know, sweetie,” she said. “Maybe we do it because we are atavists, looking back to the wilderness, as some say. Me, I think that the strange hybrid of wilderness and structure that makes a city is in some ways as natural as the mounds of a termite species. We built and tend because we want to have our surroundings structured and yet softened. There are as many theories as there are ideologies, I’m sure. In the end, it’s individual, even if many individuals seem to have the same ideas.”

  “Do you have them because you imitate each other, or does everybody have them at once?”

  Morgan laughed. “Nature versus nurture again! Oh, you are tempting the day, aren’t you? This is an eternal argument!”

  “But what do you believe? Why did you come out here to do this today, after all these months when you just looked at it and grinned?”

  “Grinned? Is that what I did?” she teased Blue.

  “Yes, I think so. It was more than just a smile. It seemed to have genuine pleasure, even fun, in it.”

  Morgan imagined the taxonomies this alien must have developed for interpreting human expression, and she momentarily compared these to her own, acquired more slowly but perhaps no different. “I like the wordlessness of it,” she said. “It doesn’t need interpretation. It’s real, and it smells—oh, dusty and obvious. The things you have to know to do it are simple.”

  “Simple? How come you had to look in that book to figure out what to do with the roses?”

  “Just because I don’t know a thing doesn’t mean it isn’t simple,” said Morgan with dignity, and they dissolved into laughter. Morgan remembered the essence of a saying from some bumper sticker or motivational lecture: “It is a poor day if one hasn’t laughed.” Surprised that she had laughed on this particular day, she turned to her work.

  “Here,” she said to Blue. “Make yourself useful. Put these gloves on and bundle these twigs up.”

  Even with the gloves and jacket, both of them had scratches on their wrists when the job was done. Morgan secretly imagined getting in trouble for damaging the precious alien, but it was an internal joke. It had been some time now since she had seriously questioned Blue’s autonomy.

  “So, who tipped off the media Saturday night?” After only a small amount of thought, Morgan had telephoned Mr. Grey.

  “One of yours,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t think I should … oh, fuck it. John Lee.”

  “John?” She shouldn’t have felt so surprised, she realized.

  “What did I just say?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? Was he there too?”

  “I didn’t see him, but that means nothing. A lot without press permits just faded away.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Morgan said, and sighed.

  “No, I’m not supposed to have told you. I’ll talk to him. The jerk.”

  “Ach, he’s just being stupid.”

  “Duh.”

  “My goodness. I haven’t heard that in years.”

  “It’s been a slice,” said Mr. Grey, and hung up.

  What he didn’t tell Morgan was that John had said: “That’ll give the dyke bitch a hard time.” John was turning out to be a bit of a problem.

  As if anyone in that house wasn’t.

  That night, the first snow of the year began to fall.

  Morgan leaned on the wide windowsill in the stairwell, forearms on the ledge and weight on her arms, looking out at the slowly falling snow melting on the cement. Somewhere out there, behind a tree or a railing, there were security guards watching this house because somewhere in here there was an alien. She found the idea alien. She couldn’t think what to think about it, so, like all the months she had threaded this wynd, she had just accepted that it was.

  Behind her the soft voice said, “What is this now?”

  The blue body was beside her, wrapped in a long robe, Jakob’s silk kimono which was the only thing in the house that fit. Heat radiated out from the arm settled beside hers on the sill. The alien leaned forward in the same attitude as hers.

  “This?”

  “That which falls. White.” Blue was playing at being the baby alien again. Morgan laughed.

  “Snow. Frozen water. A manifestation of weather. There’s a book about it in the living room. I’m sure with a week or so of concentrated study you could learn to identify it.”

  Blue grinned. “It looks different than in the movies, or onscreen.”

  “Well, they make it with snow machines in the movies. Here, it’s the real thing.”

  “What means snow?” It was Blue’s latest question: the alien wanted connotation now, was tired of facts, was reading poetry, was pumping everyone for feelings, sensations, intuitions.

  “What does snow suggest to me? Winter, the dark time, the cold time, heavy with coats and scarves and gloves to keep in body heat.”

  “I am warmer than you. It is a faster rate of life. Would I live a longer time in the snow?”

  “Let’s not test it, okay? It looks pretty, but it’s cold out there. Cold is bad for unprotected mammals.”

  Morgan realized with a start that it had been one year since her parents died. One year ago, she was sitting in intensive care holding her father’s hand; one year ago, her mother drove the car into oblivion. Morgan was surprised to find she no longer blamed them for leaving her.

  Could it really be that sometime in the year, she had come to truly believe the useful knowledge she had always been so good at telling others? ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’t, Morgan thought wryly, even though I didn’t know I wished it at the time.

  At first it had appeared to Grey as if this Morgan creature saw everything as sexual. For all his conversation with Salomé, Grey did not see everything as sexual. He saw less of the world as sexual as time went on, unless the lascivious eagerness with which his colleagues played power games counted as sexual.

  He sat at his desk, trying to imagine the world as Morgan saw it. He watched the men and women walk by and tried to imagine all of them with sexual potential for him. But that, aside from being ludicrous, given that he was in senior management and also that most of the others were even more unprepossessing than Kowalski or himself, wasn’t quite right either. He tried instead to imagine himself with the potential to love them all.

  That frightened him as his other fantasy had not.

  If that was what Morgan was trying to do, she was doomed to fail.

  But it wa
s a grand experiment. If that was her intention.

  “I have no intention,” Morgan said to Grey, and her steady fingers squeezing the wedge of lemon above the cup did not belie her. The swirl of juice cleared the tea into a rich clear dark-amber. She picked up the cup and tipped it slightly in her hand, making a tiny tide.

  “People read a great deal into silence,” she said. “I learned that a long time ago. Do you know that proverb, ‘Sit on the bank of the river and wait. Your enemy’s corpse will soon float by’? Well, it could just as well say, sit on the bank of the river in silence, and soon you will be surrounded by volunteer disciples, sycophants, and admirers. You will learn that you have motives and understandings that you never dreamed possible. You can become a hero or a saint, or you can be reviled and vilified—if that’s not the same thing—the point being that an empty slate is a Rorschach blob waiting to happen.”

  “Or a mixed metaphor.”

  “Yes, or that. Of all these people, you are the only one I can trust to understand that I am simply who I am.”

  “Like Popeye the Sailorman.”

  “Who? Oh, yes, like him. I yam what I yam … Poor old crusader.”

  “No, that was Don Quixote. I always liked him.”

  “So I am Popeye, and you are Quixote. A mixed marriage, indeed.”

  She had warmed her hands on the teacup and now she began to drink the tea.

  “I will be forty years old soon,” she said. “Who will celebrate?”

  “I will be fifty-three. We can party together.”

  “Did you do that Men’s Movement thing when you were young? Like my dad did?”

  “Nah. Only old farts did that, no offense intended, Esalen survivors with pot bellies and caftans. I had long hair in a pony tail, and was a vegetarian. I refused to learn to fix my car because it was a guy thing, and I wasn’t going to make the error of being a guy. And unlike most of the old farts, I always liked women too—liked women and men the same amount, I mean.”

  “Why did you become a cop?”

  “I thought I could do some good.” He shook his head. “Really. I overestimated myself and the police force, and underestimated my dislike for public service.”

  “That must be why you ended up in CSIS.” She smiled to show she was kidding, and offered him more tea. His was still undrunk. He picked up the piece of lemon she had already used. When little juice squeezed out, he dropped the whole thing into the cup, watched as the tea cleared.

  “No, I ended up in CSIS because I took sides in the war.”

  He meant, again, the have/have-not war. She thought of the Leonard Cohen song her parents used to play: There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the man and the woman. There is a war between the wrong and right, a war between the left and right, a war between the odd and the even …

  She sang it to him, and he nodded.

  “What side did you take?” she asked.

  “Do you need to ask? I am sitting here in your kitchen.”

  “Still thinking you can do some good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, well,” she said. “Have some more tea.”

  Morgan stood sputtering in the center of the pool, having just regained her feet at the drop-off to the deep end, and watched Blue climb the high-diving tower.

  “It’s not that bad, dear,” said Flora. “Let’s do it again.”

  “I’m watching Blue,” said Morgan.

  “Amazing, isn’t it, how fast she learns?”

  “She? Oh, Blue. Yes, I’m envious. I still rather nostalgically think of these sessions as swimming lessons. They should be called Blue’s tryouts for the Olympics.”

  “Don’t worry, dear. You’ll catch on. Blue’s just a fast learner. Remember, she learned fast when she was first here, and she seems to be …”

  “Built for speed?”

  Flora laughed. “I guess you could say that. Come on, let’s try again. This time, try not to gasp with surprise when you hit the water, okay?”

  Morgan laughed and tried another inadvertent cannonball, this time without choking herself. When she surfaced, Blue was bobbing beside her.

  “Swimming is fun,” said Blue. “I like it as much as dancing.”

  “Are you learning a lot?”

  “I learned more since Jakob let me—dream him.”

  “What does that mean?” Morgan trod water rather desperately.

  “You are not doing that very well. Do you want me to help you?”

  “No! What are you talking about, ‘dream him’? What do you do?”

  “He sleeps, I dream, things change. I like it.” Blue swan to the edge and got out, using those deceptively slender arms to push on the edge and leaping out of the pool in one almost-splashless ascent.

  Morgan had worked harder than usual that day, and panted as she did a laborious push-up on the edge, then doubled over and rolled onto the deck. She lay there with the water draining away from her. “So that’s where you are spending all these nights, up in the studio.”

  Blue shook like a dog then flopped down beside her and imitated her spreadeagled pose. “It’s interesting. After this, I’d like to learn music, please.”

  “You have learned a lot of music.”

  “How to create music.”

  “How? Singing? Playing an instrument? Your days are pretty full already.”

  “I liked when we had that singing. I could do that anywhere. Even when I go back, I could sing even if I couldn’t take anything with me to play on.”

  Morgan turned her head just enough to see the shadow of her own profile, cast by the strong lights of the indoor pool, and the serene face of the blue alien, who under these lights was a remarkable color of light plum. Her heart seemed to drain out of her with the water that suddenly released from her ears and ran down her neck.

  The stinging in her eyes had to be the water purification chemistry, she thought angrily, ignoring her knowledge that this pool had a sonic purification system and that the water they swam in was like some pure tropical lake.

  She had forgotten that the alien would be going home. She had forgotten. For weeks, she had not thought of it once.

  Morgan floats in her own thoughts like a body in free fall. Because the body is not real, it is free. There in perfect balance between all the gravitational pulls in the universe, there is peace.

  Morgan sleeps the dream of freedom. She wakes to the world, where every dream turns into something else before it can come true. She dreams that her mother is alive, but all she gets for that is an ache where she thinks her heart used to be. She dreams that her heart should not feel, but for that the pain becomes more acute, then fades to be replaced by love. Love is worth feeling, she thinks, but love erodes into pain. There is a functional relationship there, she thinks. If I could come to a perfect balance between those two, in free fall in the space of the heart. The conceit overwhelms her until she has to laugh at her own self/ consciousness.

  Morgan dreams she awakens in free fall. But she awakens with a bump of gravity reasserting itself, into the world.

  “Promiscuity is unfashionable,” said John.

  “So is, so is video art,” said Aziz, and at the same moment “Unfashionable?” said Jakob, and Russ laughed. Morgan, watching them from the kitchen doorway, thought suddenly, we laugh at everything John says. The thought had menace running in background: why? Perhaps, she thought, because he is not mascot material, and we laugh not in amusement but in defusement.

  “Promiscuity is mythical,” Delany said. “People fuck other people—”

  “—make love—” said Aziz.

  “—or make love, or whatever, for all sorts of real reasons. Promiscuity is one of those garbage words that people use to trash others.”

  “Pun unintended?” said Morgan.

  “It’s one of those words that really only means, what I do is better than what you do. You know, I have meaningful relationships, you’re promiscuous. I have an agenda, you have obsessions. I’m part o
f a community of interest, you’re a special-interest group.”

  “I’m an artist, you’re an artisan—” Jakob.

  “—a craftsperson—” Russ.

  “—a dilettante—” Aziz.

  “—a hobbyist?” Blue.

  “—a flake—” Morgan.

  “Yeah. Just like that.”

  “So what?” said John. “Some people are better than others. Not by privilege, but by individual variation. Some people are smarter, more moral, more co-ordinated, more talented …”

  “But we assume that the rights inherent in being born in the world are equal, and we leave room for people to do different things within that sphere of tolerance,” said Russ.

  “Do we?” said John. “I don’t.”

  “Which is exactly why you won’t do your share of the dishes,” said Delany. “You assume you are better, and don’t have to.”

  Again the laughter and teasing catcalls, and again, to Morgan, the tone seemed tainted. She said, “But there is something new in every equation here, I think, whether it is an ideology of equals or does-not-equal, and that’s Blue and Blue’s source people. Once Blue returns to what our Mr. Grey stubbornly calls the ‘mothership’, the loop of contact has been widened. We are talking with people who are entirely new.”

  “Assuming they are people,” said Jakob, while Blue watched with sharpened alertness. “Could be like a hive mind, or AI, or some kind of rocks. How do we know? Blue is made, not …”

  “Not bespoke?”

  “Too much old-fashioned sci-fi TV,” said Delany. “Makes for right-wing ideology, bad sociology, and wrong science. I should know.”

  John was always uncomfortable with mention of Delany’s previous science career. “Nothing wrong with TV,” he said.