A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  I’ll do the dishes, Blue told her, but she was too tired to do more than snort again. Blue drew her down to the bed, lay down with her, warm against her from knee to neck, holding her. She relaxed against the comfortable form, felt the blue hand come to stroke her cheek, slowly and calmingly, like petting Marbl. Far away she heard the door of the room open, then after a brief rumble of voices close again. As quickly as that, she slept.

  When she wakened, Blue was watching her, smiling.

  “I was asleep!” That’s dissociation for you.

  “Yes.” But necessary, to rest.

  “But no dreams.”

  “There were some angry ones, but I took them away. I can give them back later. You were too tender right then.”

  “Blue, tell me, something I never thought to ask until now. If you learned nothing on the ship, how did you learn to project and receive thoughts? To reach into us like that?”

  “I don’t know. It started right at the beginning, but it was vague. When I saw you, it got sharper, so I knew I should try to get them to keep you. It became stronger and stronger after you taught me to dream, but it was kind of patchy, like storm clouds. Sometimes I just got thunder or lightning and no rain. I don’t know if it was an accident, something caused by … I don’t think I was supposed to have that effect.”

  “No. I imagine not. You were supposed to record. None of the others have it—”

  The blue face closer and closer, the mouth on hers for a moment. “I love you, Morgan. Strange, it is terrifying, isn’t it, this humanness? Much harder than people with knives, in one way. They are so simple. You just fight them. With this, you have to—surrender?”

  She nodded and smiled. “Or, accept.” She touched the face, then got up slowly. Marbl was lying curled up on the corner of the bed. Morgan ran a hand down the smooth fur.

  “I expect there is something I should be doing with the cops. I’ve kept them waiting.”

  “I told them to come back later. Your grey man was very nice about it.”

  Glancing out the window, she was shocked to see she had slept the day away. Outside it was the gloaming, the heavy twilight Morgan used to hate. Now she only regretted the sun was no longer splitting through the stained-glass prairie. Blue was turned to Marbl, stroking her paws. The cat flexed her feet around the blue fingertips, tightened pawpad muscles to curl her toes tight against blue fingerpads, and purred.

  “Morgan,” said Blue quietly. “I think that soon they will be taking me back. I can feel something. Getting closer. I hope that telling you now was not wrong.”

  Morgan shook her head. “No, I think it is time to know everything. This can no longer be a house for keeping secrets.” Blue nodded.

  Morgan opened the door and went out into the world.

  17

  My home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I never expect to see you any more …

  Before they left town, McKenzie debriefed Morgan, Blue, and the others from the house.

  “Make sure they don’t kill him,” Morgan said. “He’s crazy. He needs treatment.”

  “Capital punishment is the new law of the land. He murdered three people, and one was a cop.”

  “There must be a way.”

  “This from you? He would have killed you.”

  “This from me.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  Blue had another take on John: “He is broken. I felt it when I was touching him. Before then, I didn’t know anything about him, but I felt a great deal when he was so wild. He is fully broken.”

  “What do you mean, broken?”

  “I mean, not nutritional. Poison. The badness is all through his thoughts. There is nothing that does not act from it. To fix him, everything will have to stop and start again. Like what happened with me.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you know this sooner?”

  “Look—” said Blue impatiently, then stopped. “Listen to me. I sound like—”

  “Don’t try to distract me. I’m not the only one who wants to know. How you knew anything at all, how this ESP works—and why you didn’t know right from the beginning. Give it your best shot, Bluebell.”

  Blue stood and paced in the small office, stopped to stare at and prod the crinkled Mylar surface of the wallboard. Looked in the shiny surface of the bookcase doors.

  “Will you fucking stop that?” Grey snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” said Blue. “I don’t mean to make you more angry. I am angry too. I do know why I never felt it. Because he never touched me before. He never actually put his hands on me at any time, ever. Such a small thing, and we didn’t notice. It seems so stupid. I told Morgan this but she made sure you weren’t listening then: I couldn’t hear everyone the same.”

  “But you had this flash of insight. It’s even on the tapes. ‘So that’s who it is.’”

  “No. When we understood, just before he attacked, it wasn’t because I heard him. It was easier than that. We just remembered everything he had said—and figured it out.”

  “Figured it out,” said the grey man softly.

  “Yes. Like you did. If he said that, did this other, lied about yet another thing, and we finally knew what he had said and done with each of us—it meant he must be—well—even pathological liars lie for a reason. But it was clear that he cared for no-one, and that he didn’t care if what he did caused pain.”

  “Do you mean he is a psychopath?”

  “Maybe. Or that he is just evil. The effect is the same. He thinks he is the king of the world.”

  “God?”

  “Oh, no, John doesn’t believe in God. He believes in vid.”

  Later that week Andris saw Mac going by in the hallway and called him into his office. “I want you to remember the discretionary powers our watching brief gives us. I’ve been informed that this case is not to come to court.”

  “That’s vigilantism,” said the grey man.

  “It’s vigilantism if civilians do it. If we do it, it’s realpolitik,” said Andris. “Those are my orders. If you refuse to deal with it, I will have to, or else someone will supplant us.”

  “No,” said Mr. Grey. “I understand you. This is my responsibility.” He carried on from Andris’s office to the lab.

  A few days after that, he went to see John Lee again in his secure cell. He watched the monitor covering John’s cell for about half an hour before he leaned over and turned off the central breaker. The whole floor was plunged into unrelieved darkness for a second until the emergency solar kicked in and the hard bleak emergency lights came on. The self-contained cell locks still glowed active, but the monitors stayed dark. Jeffrey Bryant, the tech on duty, nodded, leaned back in his ergonomic chair, looked at the ceiling, and turned on the chair’s built-in massage function, which like the locks ran independently of the main power grid.

  “Later, mon,” he said tranquilly, and closed his eyes. The grey man went across the dim open space between the cells and stood before John’s cell. Without opening his eyes, Bryant—Jeffrey; now that Salomé was sleeping with him, Mac supposed he would have to call him Jeffrey—buzzed the grey man into the cell.

  As he had been doing for the last half hour under Mac’s view, and for hours every day as Jeffrey and the others had reported, John sat in the corner making notes about his documentary. With no paper or pen, and knowing he was being recorded, he was merely murmuring them in a clear, low voice. He did not seem to have noticed the change in lighting.

  “You might as well stop,” said Mr. Grey. “The camera and tape are off because of the power failures.”

  “What about my civil rights?” said John.

  “Dream on,” said the grey man. “That was when you were civil. You are now in my hands. You have no rights.” He thought of Rahim, his last disparu, who still cooled his heels down the hall; there was an eerie similarity of sociopathy, though as far as they could find out, Rahim had not murdered anyone in the service of his art.

  “Time to tell the truth
,” said Mac. “And you don’t have much time at that. The power outage will be over in ten minutes or so. What kind of shape you’re in afterward depends on how fast and how smart you talk now, off the record.”

  John looked alertly at him. “Tough guy.”

  “That’s what they tell me. Start with why you attacked Morgan.”

  John’s look sharpened and a wily slyness infused it. “Ooh, I see. It’s Morgan you care about. Not Blue at all. You have a case for Morgan! Don’t you? You’re not an otherfucker at all!” Seeing something in the grey man’s expression, though Mac was sure he hadn’t moved a muscle, John began to bluster. “Don’t you do it! You’re alone in here with me, you know. The odds are—”

  Mac picked him up by the throat and the belly, his small hands like iron claws. “—even,” John finished weakly, voice still on autopilot.

  “You are lucky,” said the grey man, “that I am civil, and that I am governed more by love than hate, and more to the point that I am in a hurry. I could kill you right now, but I don’t have the patience for a cleanup. But I’ll do it anyway if you jerk me around. I have absolute power over you. Do you believe me?”

  John shook his head minutely before converting it to a nod—not very practiced at hard interrogations, where his wits and his charm weren’t the only ingredient of success, Mac thought coldly. Mac slammed him a couple of times against the flaking pink bulkhead, almost idly. John was struggling now, so Mac tightened his left hand’s grip on John’s thin throat. John calmed gratifyingly. Mac let him drop back onto the pallet. “Do you believe me?” he repeated.

  John nodded.

  “Fine. Begin now.” The grey man reached into his pocket and keyed the remote, so that at the desk the monitors would come to life, the recording start again. “Why did you attack Morgan, and not Blue?” he began.

  “I didn’t want to. I liked her. She was cute. Kinda mean, but I like that in a woman. She would have been good, once we got together. She was getting normal, too, with Sal, but Sal was threatening me, had to go. Luckily she went with Russ. But then it all fell apart. Russ started with Jakob, so she was going to get dumped for a guy. I got rid of Jakob but it didn’t make her go back. She went to Delany. Then when Russ went with Delany instead of her, she had nobody else but me or the bug. And she didn’t …”

  “She didn’t like you. But why not kill the bug?”

  “There’s always another bug if you do it that way. This way, she’s dead, I don’t have to worry about her, and bonus, the bug goes back home mad. Icky aliens stay away, etc. Besides, Blue had to be there at the end. For the documentary.”

  “You had it all thought out.”

  “Yeah. Sell it on vid and virch. Make me rich. It’s a good plan.”

  “Ending with you rotting in jail for life.”

  “It’ll be poignant. Within two years, there’ll be a Free John Lee lobby. Six years, max, I’ll make you a bet, I’m out.”

  “Except you killed a cop. If we let you get to a public court, you get capital punishment for that, even if not for Jakob and Yuji-san.”

  “Appeals, no problem. Cap-pun has been back for ten years, everybody’s still hung up in appeal.”

  “You’ll be on death row. How do you suppose your documentary will get finished and marketed? Criminals aren’t allowed to profit from a crime.”

  “Oh, there are ways.” John’s eyes flicked sideways slightly, then steadied again, but with the tell, the grey man knew where John didn’t want him to look—at the wall near where he sat, where with the plastic cutlery, he had been carving the plaster away from the lines of the cell’s vid and power feeds. The feeds were starting to emerge from the wall like an addict’s tormented vein. Mac’s hand was still in his pocket, and he pressed the remote again, sending the recording back into the dark.

  The grey man reached into the inside pocket of his suit, pulled out the syringe case. The injector inside it was one of the new type, far more secure than a needle. Easy to administer, and negligible risk of detection, or, he should be thinking, of infection.

  John was suddenly still and, for the first time, showed himself afraid. “What is that, man? What are you gonna shoot into me?” He scooted back into the corner of the sleepshelf, pulled in his arms around his bent knees.

  “I don’t think you’ll be making your vid,” said the grey man. He reached out, pulled one of John’s legs. John tried to kick him away, but Mac’s hands were strong.

  “Hey, come on, I got a news permit, I kept your stupid code of silence, I did everything right, I did it all by the book!”

  The injector hissed. “When you learn how to read again,” said Mr. Grey quietly, “I hope you read different books.”

  He pocketed the syringe and toggled the remote again. “Bryant,” he said, “call the doc. He’s going into fugue again. We can’t get anything out of him in this state.”

  “Mr. McKenzie, the surveillance cutting in and out in the power failure, but I think I got some footage of him talking about who he killed.”

  “That will do. Buzz me out,” said the grey man, and he walked out of the cell, leaving the door open for the doctors. Behind him, harshly lit by the greenish emergency floodlight, John still pressed into the corner, shaking, blinking, and safe.

  At the desk, the grey man too was shaking. He reached for the breaker again, but Jeffrey gently pushed his hand away, turned the switch himself. “Look, mon,” he said. “Power come back on with just me flicking the breaker. What’s wrong with this system today? Just when you need it, a system break down.”

  Behind him, John, safe from capital punishment, blinked and swayed.

  “Thanks, anyway,” said McKenzie, and went up to pack for a country holiday.

  At the end of their time, Morgan wanted to make every moment with Blue count, make something special for her memories. She and Blue took Russ’s white car and drove into the spring landscape, Blue in pinkface to avoid notoriety, Morgan with her hair severely in a bun and wearing sunglasses covering most of her face, and Mr. Grey a kind of Mr. Talbot in the car behind, with his bevy of angels to watch over them from afar. After a few hours, Blue drove. Another human regulation broken, Morgan thought. She was tired, and very sad. She had had everything, what more did she want? I want to keep it, she thought. One last obstacle to grace.

  I’m not practical, she thought.

  “It seems to me,” Blue said, “—or maybe these are thoughts that came from you, because I remember floating through them while we were tangled up in making love—that this state of being human has a built-in paradox. If I look in one direction, I can encompass infinity. If I look in another, I come up against my limitations immediately. It all made sense then, but now I think: so what is my capacity? Infinite, or bounded?”

  “You ask easy questions! What do you think philosophers and skeptics have been studying for all of human history? That’s why so many mystics try to transcend their bodies,” said Morgan. “They want to leave the limitations behind. For me, there’s an essential problem in that: we are what we are because of what we are. The infinite grows out of the bounded. Our minds and souls exist because our bodies exist, and our bodies are inhabited by our psyches. Leave one half behind and we are no longer human, and not inhuman in a way I admire. I want to integrate, not disintegrate. Not that I’ll have time in this lifetime, but I’m working on it.”

  At the lodge in the foothills where they would be staying the night, they sat on the deck and watched the sun set behind the mountains. The interface of earth and sky was so sharp that it looked like stage scenery against a cyclorama, a skycloth. She said this to Blue.

  “But it is dimensional,” Blue said, smiling.

  “Oh, I know. You can ride forever and not reach the horizon. That’s the ‘infinite’ in your equation. Think of it as a Cartesian grid. One axis is bounded at 1. The other goes out forever.”

  “But Cartesian grids are two-dimensional. Where’s the third dimension?”

  “In chaos.” At Blu
e’s quizzical look, Morgan held her hand up in the dusk. The golden lamplight from inside the lodge limned one side’s contours. “Interfaces.” she said. “Look. Three dimensions. Think of that figure in chaos theory—remember, I showed you the triangles accreting like crystals onto the side of that triangle bounded in a circle—remember its infinite coastline? We fill only the space we displace, yet our skins are the coastline. We are finite in displacement, yet we have an infinite interface with the universe.”

  “You are saying we are infinite beings.”

  “I guess I am. I sound like an evangelist.”

  “Well, it’s good news to me.”

  Later, they snuck into the hot tub after the other guests were in bed. The sky was clear and the stars’ light was unimpeded by human light sources. The aurora borealis played across the lightsmear of the Milky Way.

  The tub was large enough that they could float between the edges. Blue dragged the bubble-plastic cover across the water and told Morgan to lie atop it. The edges of the tub disappeared behind the periphery of her vision. Blue began to pull her around in a circle.

  Suddenly she was afloat in the dark sky, spinning slowly amid the stars, falling into infinity, surrounded by the void: she was at peace.

  In the early morning Morgan and Blue went trail-riding with the other guests and Mr. Grey, who was being minder in a lighthanded, distant way, on placid horses trained to put up with the vagaries of citified tourists. They were led by two wranglers from the ranch, a slim, wordless woman Morgan would under other circumstances have tried to flirt with, just to see her blush, and a tanned, compact man who only last night had been showing them his new computer equipment—but today he looked the perfect cowboy from a century ago. The woman and the other guests chose a shorter trail and the groups divided. Blue and Morgan decided, despite Morgan’s awareness of the disadvantages of her small size and wretched condition of fitness when straddling the back of a mammal as large as this, to go on to the lookout at the top of one of the mountains that last night had been just two-dimensional cutouts. They were certainly real now, every bump and gully, Morgan thought wryly. But she was hoping the view would be worth it.