A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  Laughing: “Then we’ll have to be friends; you already know more about me than I probably remember.”

  Kid—no, Katy, she must learn to think of herself like that—looked at this woman before her, who now stood and looked down on her calmly, and thought, she is utterly ordinary. Through the winter I thought of her as an ideal, an idol, but what is so compelling to me now is how completely human she is. Though she seems to see into me as if I were transparent, I don’t feel in the least threatened, because I know she is like me.

  Morgan, looking down at the almost sleeping ex-cop, thought, she can believe whatever she likes. She smiled, said, “We’ll get you some blankets. You can sleep here until you’ve decided what you want to do.” Katy stretched out on the couch, pillowed her head on her arms.

  “How did you know I wanted to stay?” she said sleepily.

  “You said so. I remembered.” Morgan brought a blanket, covered the woman she still thought of as a youth, but must learn to credit with twenty-four years, and call by another name, kissed her cheek, said, “Goodnight, Katy,” watched Katy’s answering smile fade into sleep.

  The factions are consolidating, Morgan thought. We’re in here, still believing; they’re out there, replacing the converted with skeptics. Something better break in this case soon, or we’ll have another Inquisition on our hands.

  Lucky thing the only mind-readers are on our side, she thought gratefully, and only after the fact was shocked at the commonplace nature of the thought.

  “Congratulations on handling Blue’s debut,” said Andris. “By the way, the one in Burma is changing color now. Apparently there’s something missing in its diet. It has turned pink. My medicos here say that it’s probably very ill. Unless the mechanism is sort of like hydrangeas. Or flamingos.”

  “We aren’t feeding ours anything special, are we?”

  “It eats apricot pits,” said Kowalski suddenly. “I saw it. Who knows what else it eats?”

  “It doesn’t matter much,” said the grey man. “Ours says it will have to go home soon. It isn’t sure how, but it says it knows. It says it feels—old.”

  “Old?” said Andris.

  “Old,” said the grey man. “I think Blue means middle-aged. Old, now—that’s how I feel.”

  16

  A local grammar

  “Look here, daddy-o,” said Salomé. He had given up trying to get her to at least call him Mac at the office. “This is old stuff. Your Atrium.”

  “What are you doing with that? For that matter, how did you get it? It’s classified.”

  “Jeffrey got it for me. I thought we might have a look backward.”

  “Jeffrey?”

  Salomé gestured toward the technician whom the grey man had always thought of simply as “Bryant”.

  “Oh. Jeffrey. Right.”

  “Hester was thinking … ,” Jeffrey said diffidently.

  “Three deaths, right? As well as the cats, but no-one can prove it wasn’t just cat-haters poisoning them.”

  Mac interrupted the long pause. “Okay, I get it. I even buy it. And … ?”

  “Who was your tech then?”

  “Bry—Jeffrey. He’s been one up on this project since the start.”

  “Hey, no, man, not me. We gettin’ a whole crew of relief tech that time. Seconded from three government departments, and hired some freelance. One of them was workin’ that day. I was walkin’ the beach back home, that time.” Bryant had immigrated from Jamaica to Prince Edward Island ten years before, but Mac, who knew him from other projects, had convinced him to join the Atrium project in this prairie city by offering him free air fare east three times a year. He loved the beaches of PEI with what the grey man considered an irrational but endearing love.

  “So who was on shift?”

  “First, let me show you this,” said Salomé impatiently. “We’ve only got the bandwidth for another half hour, then Kowalski has some kinda netference planned.”

  Here were the chessmaster and Blue bent over the chessboard. The grey man recognized with a shock how childlike and unformed the alien had seemed then, despite inhabiting the same body he had seen only a few hours ago as an adult sashaying charismatically through the halls at the SETI conference.

  “Look here,” said Salomé. “The technician claimed he was on a pee break. Tapes from the can. Look at the time codes.”

  A familiar figure slouched into the urinal stall, unzipped, peed. He seemed to be writing his name against the enamel, like a kid peeing into a snowbank. He was smirking.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” said the grey man. “Not him.”

  “Pay attention to the counter,” said Salomé.

  In one window, the man urinated. In another, Blue left the frame, the chessmaster sat and played, then clutched his chest, fell. Blue re-entered, looking confused. The man zipped, exited the stall. In a third window, he re-entered the tech booth. Blue turned to the camera, said, “Come fast here, something is wrong with this one.” On the bathroom camera, the timer was still running on a shot of an empty room. On the tech room camera, the technician turned to the window in shock, then hit a button to the left of the keyboard. On the sitting room camera, Blue said, “All chess has ceased. Perhaps death?”

  Salomé froze the frames.

  The three timers differed from each other by one onehundredth of a second each.

  “Did they synch at the start?” said Mac quietly.

  With one stab at the keypad, Salomé revisited the first shots, where the timers were synched. “This is interesting. Look here.”

  By the end of thirty seconds, the timers were in synch again. Salomé stopped at the moment where the seconds got slightly longer for five seconds on each tape.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “His edits weren’t perfectly timed, he didn’t have enough time, or he glitched the program slightly. So he had to kludge a five-hundredth of a second per second afterward, but before anybody showed up to answer the alarm. He had to get them back in synch because he knew the tapes were going to be seized as soon as someone in authority got there.”

  “Ja, man, the Boy Wonder and your man Ko had the memory in their hands within ten minutes,” said Bryant—Jeffrey—with a tinge of admiration in his voice. “And the man here was running the emergency procedures, and dealing with the alien. That’s smooth, man, real smooth.”

  Salomé had frozen the face of the tech in the center window. The grey man stared at it.

  “Smooth, yeah,” he said. “Can you figure out what was there for real?”

  “Not a chance. No permanent synchro-backup. But I can show you what he wrote.”

  “Wrote?”

  “When he peed. He wrote something. I can give you a pixel count on the impact point.”

  “‘Runs with scissors?’ Never mind.”

  “Close. How does ‘that’s one’ grab you?”

  “Great,” he said heavily. “Make me a tape of it, and sign an affidavit of continuity of evidence. Bryant, you have one of those on file. You might as well do it too.”

  “Good work, eh?” Salomé said, grinning.

  “Yeah. Smooth. Spinal. Thanks.” He turned, preoccupied now, and angry.

  “That’s not all,” said Jeffrey. “You better listen to this.”

  Morgan looked at the people at the conference and saw them as dead people. She glimpsed herself in a hallway mirror and turned to look: from the mirror her dead self stared back. But she had learned a great deal lately: what she thought instead of despair was: Dangerous signals. I must be careful not to mistake these thoughts for reality.

  Some days you eat bear and some days the bear eats you. Morgan felt like bear meat. The weekend SETI conference was endless stuffy rooms full of sycophantic scientists and former skeptics, Blue as resident alien of course, and, as the only one of Earth’s baker’s dozen of visitors to be this humanized, the talk of the town. The attempts to give or withhold from Morgan the credit for the transformation were in themselves theater, but M
organ was no longer amused by the playacting. The grey man had, with his few words, instilled an additional dread in her: what if the aliens were dying, or being killed? How safe was Blue? And here she was, unable to do a thing—except care. That caring was blunted by the chemistry of depression reaching for her, and by the enervation of fighting it off.

  By the time they finally arrived home, Morgan was so tired that dinner seemed like just another gauntlet to run. She tried to go to her room.

  “You need to eat,” said Delany. “Sit down. We’ve got everything ready.”

  Morgan ate with her head down, wanting the whole rat’s nest of problem situations to vanish. Russ and John were sniping at each other.

  She knew with another part of her mind that it was physical process, not mood, that influenced her thoughts; the grey, changeable weather didn’t help at all. Clouds promised but didn’t put out: a good thunderstorm would clear the air, she told herself. She felt the beginning of the migraine. Despite her lack of appetite, she forced herself to take bites of the tekka-maki Russ had made; she wished she could just go to bed with a brain-candy book.

  “ … couldn’t hack your way out of a paper bag,” said John. “What do you know?”

  “If that’s what you think,” Russ said, “then dial into GovNet tonight and see whether you change your mind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I predict that they’ll pull the plug about nine-thirty,” said Russ. “It’ll take them a while to catch on.”

  “Catch on?” Delany said.

  “I got tired of being a government hack,” said Russ. “I went back to my old club.”

  “You didn’t squid the vid …” Morgan glanced up, curious, to see a glow dawning on John’s face. Russ looked almost gleeful.

  “What have you done?” Morgan said sharply.

  “Made a few progressive changes to the feed,” said Russ. “It ought to be interesting.”

  “Are you crazy? We’re being monitored here! You want to get arrested?”

  “Not much,” said Russ, “but I expect I will. Would have, even if I didn’t let a peep out. Who else but me had that kind of access? Revolution requires sacrifices.”

  “Is that what you said to Sal and Jakob?” John sniped.

  “What?” Russ paled angrily.

  “Well, somebody was in danger, or they wouldn’t have died.”

  “John!” Delany said, aghast.

  “Murder is on a different order than vid hacking,” Russ said, his face still livid.

  “Sal said that people did a lot to cover up political crimes. He had a lot to say about”—John glared at Delany and Russ—“politicals.”

  “Sal said? You knew him?” Delany said.

  “We used to have coffee at the Atrium all the time.”

  The Atrium?

  “The Atrium?” Russ had spoken Morgan’s thought before she could.

  “Sure,” said John. “We were on the same shif—” He saw Morgan’s sharpened gaze fix on him. “Oops! Official Secrets blowout time. Sorry.”

  “You worked at the Atrium?” Morgan asked quietly.

  “Sure.”

  “Before you came here?”

  “Sure. I had a freelance gig …”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Took an oath.”

  “That’s a little more scrupulous than you usually are, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, they threatened me with all sorts of crap if I broke the oath. I want to keep my vid license.”

  “That’s if you told the world,” Morgan said icily. “I consider it a major problem that you didn’t tell me.”

  “Hey, come on, Russ worked there too. He has alien footage on his websites at work.”

  “Russ?” Morgan felt at sea.

  “I was seconded for some tech services, sure, but I never set foot in the place until after you and Blue were long gone,” Russ said easily. “Then later I had access to some of the tech stuff for the intergovernmental affairs website. I already had the security clearances for it. I suppose I could have gone there whenever I pleased.”

  “I suppose that was a secret too.”

  “I never talk about work at home,” Russ said, and she had to nod at that. John was getting up, using the plate-clearing ritual that he usually ignored to try to get out of the room without her notice.

  “Stop right there,” she said. “Tell me three good reasons why you didn’t tell me that you had been in the Atrium. And then tell me what you did there.”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal,” he said sullenly. “I worked a couple of tech shifts freelance when they needed someone who could deal with multiple feeds quicktime. I was only there maybe five times. It’s not like I saw you there or anything.”

  She kept silent, and he went on diffidently, “Well, maybe once in the staff room. That’s when I heard you talking about needing another roommate. You didn’t know there were staffroom feeds?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said, “though goodness knows I should have.”

  “Hey, come on, Morgan. I wasn’t allowed to tell. You know that. You never told us any of the stuff that went down in there. Same reason, right? And it worked out okay, didn’t it?” He looked at her like a hurt puppydog.

  “Yeah, John, it worked out fine. I just wish—never mind. Just never mind.”

  She got up and brushed past him out the door.

  “Morgan—” Delany said, placatingly.

  “Look, it’s fine,” she said, “but I’m not happy right now, all right? I’m going to have a hot bath, and I’m going to bed. John, if you don’t do the fucking dishes before I wake up you are out of this house tomorrow.”

  Tucked under the covers at last, she opened the mystery novel hoping for smooth prose and consequent trance, but as if she were captive in an ant farm, there was no relief; the book’s shortcomings and her aching head irritated her increasingly until finally she threw the book across the room, frightening Marbl who was dozing on the chair of Morgan’s desk. Marbl leapt to the ready, hissed.

  “Oh, calm down,” Morgan said crossly, and turned over, plumped her pillow into a knot under her ear, and went to sleep.

  In the dream she is standing alone in a flat wilderness, crying, but no-one will rescue her. Rather grimly she decides to rescue herself, only to find she can’t punch the numbers on the telephone right. She panics, tries to call 911 to get the police or the hospital, but can’t make her fingers complete any sequence.

  She woke sweating into darkness, shaking her throbbing head back and forth in protest, crying out. Blue took her shaking hands in long warm fingers, held tightly until the dream was dispelled.

  “Why wouldn’t you talk to me?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Blue, sounding wretched in the dimness.

  “What’s the matter?” With her head aching, the lamp would have been too bright; Morgan got up, shaking away sleep, and went to the desk to light the candles there.

  “I’m afraid … afraid it’s my fault … if I felt something, couldn’t find out what, they died, Jakob, and I could have gone out there and stopped it …”

  “It?”

  “It’s someone, I don’t know …” Blue was crying. Crying? Crying.

  “Why are you crying?” she said, as her arms went around the shaking body automatically.

  “You taught me how,” said Blue. At the words, with sudden tectonic upheaval Morgan was weeping too, great wrenching sobs convulsing her small body. For her father, for her mother, for Jakob, for cats, for strangers like Sal, for those left alive, for all human losses small and great, and for the loss of Blue which would come too soon. She had a lot to catch up with. Blue’s hand stroked her hair and a thumb wiped away the tears wilding across her face. With the touch she found a multiplicity of trust which focused the last months into a brilliance having nothing to do with the flaring, guttering candles.

  It is time to wake up, and to dream.

  There was no design in her motion as she pulled
both Blue’s hands against her face, seeing the color of them shining in the air in the candlelight as the long fingers moved toward her face, feeling the jolt of total body response as they touched, feeling then the flood of total contact, the blue presence suffusing her and she flowing out until there was a unity and an understanding that fulfilled the taste she had had of it in dreams. None of the fear that came with the dream of Jakob’s murder lingered; none of the fear of the unknown remained, only the necessity to comfort and calm each other. In the seeking out of confusion the ways were straightened, so that somewhere in it one of their voices said, “Oh, is that who it is?” and the wave of shocked sadness flashed after, like the flash of lightning that cut through the heavy air outside. The thunder of the cloudburst, the wanton fall of water, was background to the waves of consciousness that met and mingled with the ferocity and beauty of the storm, as above the ocean Morgan had seldom seen. Through it her spirit stumbled and leapt with Blue to more insights than she had time to notice: the first forgiveness she recognized must be for herself.

  She remembered the orgy of blame after her parents died. She had thought of that cold hard excoriation as truth and light: now she knew how dark it had really been. She remembered Daniel Webster’s truism that the Devil’s best work is to convince people that he doesn’t exist, but she now realized that she had followed rather Dostoyevsky and Browne: without believing in an external evil force she had fallen prey to internal devils of despair and doubt which had come to her clothed in false righteousness, and created a devil in her own image, which dwelt within her own heart, poisoning the clean clear music of life.

  She now stood bathed in a real and kindly light, and saw herself unbroken for the first time in her life. She now understood that her intuition had been better than her intellect, knew with certainty that love has more information to offer than does any other force—and that she was no more responsible than any other organism for the nature of life. She was no more, no less than an ordinary human, after all. It was not about perfection or lack of perfection, it was not about success or failure. She loved then and now she loved as well as she could. Things happen. Shit happens. People leave you. People die.