A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  But. But … information accretes around a life like sugar around a button dangled in a glass of supersaturated sugar-water. Life crystallizes around intentions: good, evil, loving, curious intentions: nightmares and dreams. That sea of dreams becomes a new and universal ocean, aliens meeting in amniotic accord; what birth, now? And what new consciousness to emerge?

  Only our own, thought someone, simply.

  Then again they turned together and it was not just a dreaming and a sharing of thought—it was a needing, a cry for touch, and for the commitment of passion, minds and bodies tuned for dreaming, to love someone, transcending the names: they had celebrated mind, now bodies heard the music, and rose to a tangled, sweaty, ecstatic dance.

  Morgan had always marveled, sometimes darkly, at that terrible paradox of mortality and consciousness, how the first contradicts and yet creates the other—and to date all her efforts to love well and to make love well had been in an attempt to trascend that paradox. Now, for the first time, she felt her body, her mind and her spirit—yes, she is willing to say her soul also—unite for one brief moment of Zen unconsciousness, satori, one moment when she understood one and not one, difficult and not difficult, mortal and immortal and all the other twinned and inseparable contradictions—and from which clear awareness she returned as soon as she noticed it, of course, bumping down into the physical and self-conscious with a laugh, to relax on the bed with the last shudder of climax relaxing into hot, languid, oceanic quiet—

  —and with a blue hand on her hip, and Blue’s breath caressing her shoulder, Morgan lay at last inside the dreams, thinking:

  That it should have come to this: in so short a measure, not even two years, from empty to full, from alien to human, a paradigm of earth.

  Which of us do I mean?

  Both of us.

  Like a work of art, completed. Perhaps not finished, no art is ever finished, but ready for the gallery. The gallery was far away, and the show was going to open far too soon. She snorted at the conceit. For some reason, perhaps only post-ecstatic well-being, this awareness of limited time did not give her the same dread it had earlier. She drifted back into the blue sleep.

  “Shit,” said the grey man. “Where are they?”

  “She’s in the house now, sleeping. Blue is with her. They’ve been …” Jeffrey Bryant turned to pull up the auto-transcripts.

  “Who gives a fuck what they’re doing?” Mac said curtly. “Where the hell is he?”

  “Daddy, your language!” said Salomé, and her shock might even have been real.

  Jeffrey punched up chip locations. “Well, his chip is in his room. Let’s see if he is. He seems to be … fuck me, man, he’s in our ice! He’s reading the logs!” Jeffrey and Salomé leapt to their hot terminals.

  “I have to get over there!” Mac said.

  “Daddy!” said Salomé urgently. He stopped at the door.

  “Be careful! He’s—”

  “Yeah, I know. But she’s there.”

  “With the Blue guy,” Salomé reminded him

  “Yeah, with Blue. Call Andris. He’ll need to take charge here. Call Ko. Get Ace over there with the hot key team. And get that little fucker the hell out of our system!”

  Later, Salomé would remember that “she”, but right now she and Jeffrey were too busy. Mac, running down the corridor, saw a familiar face, said, “You, come with me, I need backup.” She turned without question, followed him, and they ran for the parkade stairs. The strobing alarm started in Mac’s earpiece as they reached his car. He passed Andris on the ramps of the parkade, both of them driving like maniacs in opposite directions.

  When Morgan woke again the night’s candles really had burnt out, not just a quotation, and her bedroom was dark for all that the sky was lightening in the northeast—but streetlight backwash glinted rhythmically from the slowly spinning stained-glass circle which looked like black water, and coaxed lowlights from Blue’s raven hair and glistening eyes. Morgan lay for a moment silenced by beauty. Like Rilke in the museum, she had perceived in one moment, many months ago, that she had to change her life, and now she revisited the stab of fear that had choked her the first time she saw the alien. Then, she had not understood what was needed, and feared the commitment: now, she was overwhelmed with love, down in the flood. There is nothing that does not see you.

  She got up to go to Blue and in the yellowish, dim artificial skylight, she saw that it was tears that set the light afire in those eyes.

  “Ah, my beauty,” she said, “don’t cry. You’ll break my heart.”

  “Your heart is broken already,” said Blue, “and now you taught me how to break mine.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I have to go back,” said Blue, “and you taught me love. I don’t know if I can go, now. I don’t know how I’ll bear it. I don’t know how to be this … paragon of Earth any more. It’s all a lie.”

  “I’ve never seen you like this,” said Morgan, stupidly she felt, but Blue held her hands harder.

  “No,” said Blue, “because I just became like this. I just became an understanding of this. I have to leave you, and it is all for nothing.”

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  With a minuscule tilt of the head, Blue turned on the light. Morgan’s shocked irises strobed the familiar room first into the stuff of dream, then back out to normalcy. In the familiar glare, Blue’s expression looked desperate.

  “Listen,” said Blue. “You know why I am here. To be filled with Earth, taken home, emptied, understood. It seems logical, right?”

  “It has always seemed to me to be perverse and diabolical,” said Morgan, “arrogant, rude, and exploitive. But on some level it is logical, I suppose.”

  “You have never said this.”

  “How could I say this? It would be like telling you your life was for nothing. And I couldn’t do that. I love you.”

  “Logical. Hold on to logical for me, please.”

  “Okay, logical, I’ll hold that for a moment.”

  “But think,” said Blue. “Think what logic is in it. What we learned today, which shocked me so much—you didn’t listen to the physicists, did you? Or the science fiction writers?”

  “No, I was in the other room with the cute babes.” Morgan’s joke was just a thread.

  “With the cute babes. I wish I had stayed there. I wish I had remained a babe. In the other room, they said this. They sat and said this, and they had no idea what they were saying to me. They said: mathematics is not a universal language, it is a local grammar. A mathematician from Earth and an alien mathematician could spend their lives trying to even recognize that what they were trying to talk with each other about was mathematics. They have to build a symbology that has an agreed-upon grammar.”

  Morgan saw it immediately. “So the ones who made you will not understand you any better than they would have understood us if they had done this directly. They have made a mistake.”

  “And they have made it with my life. Our lives. Or say it rather that they have given us life and now they are taking it back to themselves for nothing. They wanted a Rosetta Stone, but you can’t make a Rosetta Stone if you only know one language. The stone helps others understand what you already know. It isn’t written so you can learn, because it can only be made to record what you already know. The correspondences you already know. Even if I have memories of another life somewhere in here, and they re-activate them, they will not line up into a translation table with the memories I have now. They will both be local grammars, with no way to integrate them.”

  “But maybe not. Maybe side by side they will line up.”

  “I don’t believe that. I believe they will be alien grammars, and they will be chaotic to each other.”

  “Oh, my dear, I am so sorry.”

  “Yes,” said Blue, “so am I,” and began to cry again, tears refracting aquamarine glamour to Morgan, so that the blue sorrow fell from her eyes too, and the light broke into shards which Morgan d
ispelled with her own unconscious sharp cluck to the light switch. As her eyes adjusted, pupils widened into the liquid halflight, Morgan saw Blue hide face in hands and sob, and she pulled her friend’s body toward an embrace that was as much an attempt to comfort herself as to soothe Blue.

  “It has one comfort,” said Morgan after a while. “It is the final proof that they are like us.” At Blue’s interrogative whimper, she chuckled despite herself. “They are fallible to the problem of point of view. They make the same errors of ego.”

  Blue sat up, wiping tears from cheeks with sweeps of fingertips, those graceful hands; Morgan pulled one to her mouth and kissed the palm gently.

  “They leave things out, important things out of theories. They aren’t the godly aliens of some science fiction dream. They are, if you will, human. They are molecular and finite, limited, as we are.”

  “This is a big comfort,” said Blue angrily. Morgan laughed harder, and stroked the blue cheek to take away the offense.

  “Listen, my darling,” she said, “I think we have made it. I think we have finally come to the perfect moment of love.”

  “For us?—or yes,” said Blue, “I think I understand. For them, right?”

  “Yes,” said Morgan. “For the first time, I really do forgive them. They are going to be so upset!”

  Blue giggled, the silly sound Morgan hadn’t heard since Blue’s “childhood”. “I see it,” said Blue. “They will be so chagrined, so—so disappointed. I will have to help them.”

  “I’m very proud of you for that,” said Morgan. Before she realized the wrongness of the scream from the door of the room, she had a split-second to be glad she had managed to finish her thought.

  Then a hand around her throat, dragging her away from Blue and slamming her against the wall. Shrieking in her ear, vast shouting, roaring, desperate sweat standing out in struggle.

  What John was saying was slurred nearly to incoherent how dare you, swearing bitch animal pervert, shaking her wasn’t it enough to be queer? taking the violent straight line through hatred, otherfucking bitch! Even as she struggled against the knife, even as she absolutely, in an instant, refused to countenance being killed, Morgan thought gladly that she had done everything she wanted to do before death. She felt the blade cut her flesh like butter. Really is like butter, she thought angrily, pulling her hand back and kicking John’s leg. She felt the pressure of his arm across her throat increase, then release, as Blue threw arms around his neck, full body weight pulling him back. Blue too was yelling, a hoarse unpracticed howl of anger. There were other voices, Katy yelling, Drop the knife! Drop it! and John swearing—swearing!—furious that his murder was being interrupted.

  He expects me to co-operate even with this, she thought, wonderingly, furiously, and then she felt the cool air against her sweat-drenched body as Katy, Ace, and the two cops from outside pulled John away. She struggled to stand, feeling for the first time the shocking amount of pain in her hand.

  Recalled to herself, but distantly, a tale told by an idiot, she looked down and was coolly annoyed at how wrong her hand looked, cut into two pieces like that, and bleeding hot dark red. With the other hand, she pulled it into its correct shape, held the burden of pain tight against her chest, and the blood stained her white silk shirt. Blue took her wrists and replaced her palliative hand with a hot blue grip. “Think!” Blue said urgently. “Think it shut. Hurry!”

  Her blood was dribbling onto Blue’s saffron silk sari. Morgan tried to pull it away, but Blue held tighter, and Morgan saw there was blue blood there too, and that the two bloods intertwined.

  “You’re hurt!”

  “I can fix that. You have to help me fix you first, before your hand forgets being whole. Hurry!”

  Together, they went into her hand and laced it together as it had been before, and Morgan understood the urgency when she felt herself adapting to the injury almost too quickly to reverse it. They did not fully finish before the forgetting happened, so there was still a shallow furrow, seeping blood, that took a series of butterfly closures and a bandage, put on by the police medic while across the room, other police fought to get John out of the doorway, his manic strength a reality (though the distant commentator within Morgan thought, there seem to be a lot of clichés involved in madness), until they had to call the medic over to sedate him, which he did as they read John the new Rights Code Warning, Mr. Grey of all people shouting it above John’s wailing.

  The medic turned to Blue and put another butterfly bandage-strip on the slice across Blue’s face, but Blue pulled it off angrily. “You’ll have a scar there if you’re not careful,” said the medic, seemingly indifferent to the magpie iridescence of the dark blue blood and the meaty lapis glister of cut blue flesh.

  “I want a scar,” said Blue, still angry. “This world is supposed to leave marks on me. I want something to show!” and Blue lifted a hand still stringy with Morgan’s blood and rubbed the blood in the wound. Morgan thought of scarification rituals, and wished her own wound had been a little more Heidelberg, it was such an effective gesture. Blue caught the thought and laughed.

  “I’m sorry, friend,” Blue said, as the medic, unimpressed, pushed Blue’s hands aside and placed another strip of adhesive. “I didn’t mean to become so primal when I became human!”

  Morgan gave a soft snort, and, hearing John protesting in something more like his usual whine, walked out into the corridor. She stood against the wall by the stairway and watched the grey man deal with John’s petulant demand for a lawyer, a doctor, release … until Mr. Grey gestured impatiently for the officers to take him out.

  When they reached Morgan, the police holding John by both arms, looking like something out of a television movie, and proud of it, all she could do was look at him. One of the officers was Ace, which Morgan realized for the first time was odd—hadn’t Ace been transferred back to the Atrium? John met her eyes for a second, then turned his gaze down. She got the feeling, a familiar one with John, that he was going to scuff the toe of his shoe like a naughty schoolchild caught out of bounds.

  “Why on earth … ?” she said reflexively.

  “I can see you don’t see it my way,” he said.

  “John, you tried to kill me. Am I supposed to like it? No, I don’t see it your way.” She paused. “Come to think of it, I never have. But videotape is different from all this, John.”

  He was silent.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. Why should it be? Everything can be made into a movie if you use your head.”

  “Thinking life is a movie is a little different than playing director in other people’s lives.”

  “You don’t understand. Why should you? You haven’t made anything.”

  Morgan thought of the struggle to remake her soul. She thought of Blue. Then she laughed, freely and with a gust of pleasure.

  “I have made the world, John. What else do I need?”

  Her grey man put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Let it go,” he said. “It won’t make sense to him.” With an impatient jerk of his hand, he ordered the officers to move John away.

  Russ was standing in his doorway, sleepy and alarmed, dressed only in his sarong. The grey man looked at him irritably. “And you, you idiot. After what you did to the GovNet, I’ll have to take you too. It’s going to be a pain in the ass trying to defend yourself with your confession on tape, you fuckwit. Get your clothes on.”

  Russ, surprisingly, grinned. “Hey, Mr. Grey, we have the best human rights lawyers in Canada on retainer. You’ll have a run for your money.”

  “Not my problem,” said the grey man. “If I had my way, you’d get a medal. But I’m not the only one who listens to the recordings made here, popular mythology aside. Do you want to hit the cells in Asean drag? You’d be popular. Get your clothes on. Hurry. I’m in a real bad mood, here.”

  John was still there, swaying now, the tranquilizer robbing him of volition. Ace was having a hard time fastening the stun
collar around his neck. “Didn’t I tell you—!” began the grey man, but just then she finally snapped the buckle and they pulled John into motion.

  “Goodbye,” said Morgan automatically, then shook her head disgustedly.

  “Goodbye,” John said just as automatically, and his wide smile was automatic too.

  Goodbye? She turned away into her room. There were splashes and spatters of blood—red, blue, and mixed in an odd rich plum color—on the hardwood, and the rug was wrinkled, but unbelievably there was no other trace of the conflict except on her shirt and Blue’s. The sun, however, had risen, and was sending a low ray through the stained-glass piece. Morgan walked over to the window and touched it. Her finger left a mark in the dust that had settled on its surface in the many months since she had first seen it there. While she was rubbing it against her sleeve to clean it, the leather cord holding it suspended broke.

  Now she began to shake and to cry, holding the little circle clenched in her hands. The warm hands surrounded hers, took the amulet away. She rubbed the tears away and looked at Blue, who now walked to the desk, looked in a drawer, pulled out the scissors.

  Lifted a long lock of that hip-length blue-black hair, Blue cut it close to the head. Plaited it somehow with fingers too fast to show a pattern. Threaded the strand through the hole in the little mosaic, tied it, put it back into Morgan’s hands.

  “Here is your little world back,” said Blue. With a half-sob, Morgan took it, reached up, hung it on the little nail in the windowframe, and as she did so, she started to cry again, for the eternal breaking of her little worlds. Blue’s arms encircled her, she was held again to the warm shoulder while she tried to puzzle what was going on with Russ, failed, felt the pain in her hand, thought of John’s attack again, failed to find purpose.

  What was he thinking? She shook her head. In the confusion, she had caught only a few of his snarled words. She would have to ask to listen to the tapes, but even then, would it make sense? Meanwhile, she felt the strangeness, so similar to the sense of loss with Jakob, so like another friend lost. But—not much of a friend, the relentless voice of her intelligence interjected; all you’ve lost is what you thought he was. Which is your problem, not his. Morgan snorted. Okay, so I’ve lost a homicidal maniac. Great. And it’s been his turn to do the dishes for three days. With Russ going too, now I suppose I’ll have to.