A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  She was lying on her bed, looking at the light through the circle of stained glass, reflecting on the changeless prairie and the landscape of change; Furbl, the new cat from the SPCA, was sitting on the trunk by the window, watching her, reflecting on whatever cats consider. Probably wondering what he’s been drafted into, she thought wryly. Morgan would never share Blue’s ability to listen to cats think, so, what else is new? she asked herself. I couldn’t talk to cats in a common language before, I can’t now, what have I lost, really?

  Cheered and amused by this thought, she was smiling when Delany wheeled her chair through the door. She turned her head to extend the smile to her friend.

  “How are you?” said Delany.

  “I’m very sad, but I’m living,” said Morgan.

  “The thing I remember best,” said Delany, “is a dream of flying. I was laughing at myself for having it. Even asleep I knew I was a fool, but I didn’t care. I saw you below me. Your head was surrounded by blue dreams. I was so sad. I thought, after I woke up, how far you were from me. I knew I could never reach you.”

  “That was a true dream, a gift,” said Morgan.

  “Will I ever reach you?” said Delany.

  Morgan felt a wave of exhilaration sweep her feet from some sandy shore. “Never,” she said, her lips curving into a grin despite herself. “The question you want to answer is, does it matter? What a lovely time we’ll have, trying.”

  Delany grinned too. “No, I don’t think it matters.”

  “What will it be?”

  “It’s worth taking a chance on this.”

  “I don’t know the future,” said Morgan, “except in all the ways I don’t want to. Knowing what they’re going to do to me now. Knowing the media will give us no rest. All that.”

  “You don’t have to make excuses to me. You always did want to protect me from this darkness in you. Don’t you think I know you? Don’t you trust me?”

  “You don’t mess around,” said Morgan.

  “You have evidence that’s not true,” said Delany. “Think on that. Look at you. You think I don’t know you’re an existential fool, and you think I don’t know that you love every solitary minute of it.”

  “But if you—”

  “I can live with that; I never did want to be part of anything else. What autonomy means to a cripple—or as much of a cripple as I’m left after Blue’s repair job. But I won’t be patronized. You’d better open the lonely human race now, and let me in, or we won’t last a second.”

  “We’ve lasted years already, my friend,” said Morgan, “and we’ll keep on. We are always faithful to something, in our fashion.”

  “Oh, well, that,” said Delany dismissively, and Morgan laughed aloud.

  “Well, you’re gonna be all right,” Delany said. Morgan laughed more.

  “Nancy is downstairs,” Delany said, “waiting to have the same conversation with you.”

  “And?”

  “She wants to know when it’s okay to come in.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Morgan said impatiently, “am I supposed to hold court? Have hours of reception? Turn into the queen of the moon?”

  “Do what you want.”

  “Don’t be cute,” said Morgan.

  This time it was Delany who laughed. “You’ll be just fine. And to think we all worried about you.”

  “Come along, my friend,” said Morgan. “Lets go down and commence our ambiguous future.”

  “Will you let Nancy rent the other room?”

  “I don’t know. It might be fun to take a crack at living with the younger generation. But she takes everything too seriously.”

  “What’s going to happen with Russ?” Delany asked as they walked and wheeled down the hall. “I miss him. This recent walkabout …”

  “Well, tempting as it is to do a tidy wrap-up and say, he’ll be back, I really have no idea. I don’t know at all. The grey man says that he might get away without a jail sentence. But really I don’t know. I hope we see him again.”

  “I’d like that,” said Delany wistfully. Morgan looked down at her sharply, but Delany was intent on maneuvering her chair into the elevator.

  “Come on,” said Morgan, “I told you not to be cute.”

  “Russ and I spent a lot of time together the last few weeks. I seemed to him to be a lot like him. So, I just made it clear to him how I was and how I wasn’t.” Delany grinned. “It was kind of nice. Not that he really noticed. But that was what I liked. He was so wrapped in his own fog that he didn’t bother to worry about how fragile I was. Yes,” she repeated reflectively, “it was nice.” And she smiled, not at Morgan.

  “Well, well,” said Morgan, and she reached down and lifted Delany’s hand, and kissed it, fingers and palm. “The magic healing fingers.” And she bent and kissed Delany, and thought, the world is full of fools like me.

  Which by a backward wynd confirmed to her that the world was full.

  The elevator bumped to a halt, Morgan pulled the door open, and she went out ahead of Delany to the living room where Nancy sat, where Nancy rose to meet her, and to smile and hug her tightly.

  “I was afraid you’d go away again,” said Nancy.

  Morgan felt Nancy’s arms around her, not as a shield against adversity, but as a symbol of the responsibility involved in rejoining the human race. Delany she knew would be fine, Delany in fact insisted on being independent, but Nancy had already once demanded salvation from Morgan in a form Morgan couldn’t give. She felt the tension just below the surface, the tension that lingered beneath the comfort, which meant: If I let my arms remain around her too long, as long as I would with a friend when I needed to cry or be comforted, Nancy would take that moment as an invitation to camp again in the middle of my life. No, I don’t think I will be able to find a safe space for her here. Morgan had the weight of all her life ahead of her, to keep making these tiny adjustments, these minute compensations, these gestures in deference to reality.

  “Again?” said Morgan.

  “You know what I mean.”

  It was the human paradox again, the infinite along one axis, the other bounded by one—one step, one vision, one real world.

  So she opened her arms and thus signaled that Nancy must let her go, and only Morgan felt the double meaning.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Morgan, “everything is going to be all right,” and felt the doors opening in her heart.

  “I know that,” said Nancy.

  “I wasn’t telling you,” said Morgan.

  Morgan still floats in the void. It has always been there; she will always live there. Like the intimate other alien who is now away in the vacuum of space Morgan is nowhere, everywhere, and alone—

  —but she remembers, and she can see and dream. She will not dream with Blue again, and she will have her time of mourning as she feels Blue taken apart until no trace remains of that beloved consciousness, that pale strong fire. She cries for Blue, for the void, but not for herself. She has stopped blaming the cosmos for her pain, she has taken it into herself, she has eaten its bitter flavor beside the sweet taste of understanding. She had taken them both for her daily fare, she is content.

  Content in a way where she does not lose her anger, her sorrow, her pain, her love, but gains it instead, along with the rest of her alien, her all-too-human birthright.

  The doorbell was unusually deus ex machina; Morgan knew who’d be there before she opened the door. Her Mr. Grey was wearing a sweater and corduroy slacks this time. Morgan was almost shocked to see him like this, somehow expected the suit again, as at their first meeting. She stood looking at him and his companions without speaking.

  “Hello,” Blue Suit—Kowalski—said nervously.

  “Shut up,” said Morgan’s friend, enemy, or ally. Which? Friend, she supposed. He was silent too for a moment.

  The stranger with him said, “Are you ready for us now?”

  “This is Andris,” said the grey man. “He’s my boss. He’ll be ta
king care of your debriefing.”

  “Debriefing? What about you?”

  “I have … too personal a relationship with you. Someone objective has to take over now.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Andris. He was a solid, square-faced man with wavy black hair and beard, both heavily shot with white. He looked like a lion photographed in black-and-white. He looked like the patriarch of some prairie religion. He looked trustworthy. On principle, Morgan didn’t trust him—but she would have to learn how.

  Morgan walked out onto the porch. “Come here,” she said, and walked down the steps and across the grass. From behind the wrought-iron fence they could see the city. She opened and led them through the ornamental gate which was kept closed now that the tall weeds had been cut away and the hinge repaired, all no doubt by the minions, faceless to Morgan, who answered this grey man’s powerful word.

  She walked across the road until she stood on the brink of the valley. Andris and the grey man walked beside her silently, Andris giving Kowalski, trailing them, a piercing look to stop comment.

  “Look,” said Morgan, and swept her arm across the decorated horizon’s plane. “What do you see?”

  “What do you see?” said Andris.

  “When Jakob first saw this,” she said, “he said, ‘It looks fine, from up here!’ That was why he came to stay with us. He felt safe. In the end, he learned the hard way that there’s no safety. That’s what I learned. I wanted to live quietly, but I made one motion in the direction of life, and my resolution exploded. Now I’ve got nothing to keep me safe.”

  “Do you want a guarantee from me?”

  “What would it be worth?”

  Kowalski started to speak, but the grey man said, flatly, “Nothing. Come with me, Ko,” and they walked back across to the car.

  “Yes,” said Andris.

  “Well, that’s about what I expected. Don’t worry, I’m very reasonable really.”

  “You can’t go around with a chip on your shoulder,” said Andris. “Neither can I. My people and I have jobs to do.”

  Morgan looked out at the city. “So do mine,” she said, “all of them. Can’t you see them? Every life in its balloon of context, all living tangled up in one another. Everyone looking for the answer. Caruso’s voice teacher couldn’t sing a note, you know.”

  “Probably had perfect pitch, though,” said Andris. “You have to know what you’re listening for, as well.”

  “I’m not a rebel,” said Morgan. “I’m not. I just can’t live any other way.”

  “You know I can’t promise to understand,” he answered, “but I’ll try to listen. But you have to try to talk.”

  “That’s very formal,” she said, “‘A limb for the risk of a limb.’”

  “I’m trying to be fair.”

  “I’m trying too.”

  “Yes, you are trying, sometimes. Mac has kept me posted. Do you think,” Andris said, looking out as she had done, “that you are responsible for all this? That you control something there?” His hand snapped at the city skyline.

  “As much as I ever did,” she said. “Do you see where the city police have a cordon and a tape line down there? A woman was taken at knifepoint and raped there last night, and then he cut her, and she was lucky to get away with her life. They were within a stone’s throw of the greatest show on earth, and all he cared about was to revenge himself on her for the ills of his life. Maybe you or I could have told him why that wouldn’t work, but would he care? Maybe he enjoyed how that knife went like butter through her throat—and now I know—” she waved her hand with its hairline scar—“that it feels exactly like that stupid analogy, from her end. Maybe it worked for him, in the short run. But she wasn’t saved by the New Consciousness that was supposed to follow the millennium, nor by whatever human transcendence is supposed to follow First Contact. We can barely save our own lives these days. But we manage.”

  “Are you so angry?”

  She looked at him directly. “Of course I am. Do you expect peace on earth, or even in my heart? Just because a few aliens were sent down to become human for a while, and one came down here? Blue wasn’t a Messiah, whatever parallels the tabloids made. Everyone’s life is the stuff of which myth is made, when you look at it close enough.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Everything,” she said simply. “Just what I always wanted, but I was afraid to admit it before. Now I accept that I couldn’t go with Blue; I’ll never even walk on the moon. But I want it. All of it. From Goddess to green cheese to grey rock. And everything that comes with it. And while I am still alive, I wouldn’t mind being able to walk with a lover down the street hand in hand no matter what sex we were. I know that would have made my father happy. He said that all human ills were caused by one bunch of people trying to make the others think like them. What do you want?”

  “I learned to want as little as possible. So as not to get disappointed too much.”

  “It’s a hard creed around which to live your life.”

  “Well, life isn’t easy. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and stepped up to him so she could put her fingertips to his face in an unconscious parody of Blue’s touch which she would use for the rest of her life to emphasize what was close to her heart. “But I have had a dream come real for me, and live in my house, and become as close to me as I am to myself. When I’ve had a moment like that it’s hard to remember even the moment of my own death.”

  “Do you want special treatment on that account?”

  “Do you think we have to make deals? Can’t you just accept me on the riverbank here, let me tell you how I see the view?”

  “I’m not the only person who wants something from you, you know that as well as I do. If it was only you and I we would soon talk ourselves around to some kind of understanding, as you and Mac have done. But you know you’ll be different things to everyone, and they’re not all likely to be tolerant or even friendly. You aren’t exactly what some people think of as an ambassador for Earth.”

  “I appreciate you making that clear.” She couldn’t help the edge in her voice.

  “I’m trying to be honest. Don’t make fun of that.”

  “I’m not making fun of you. But do you think we’ll ever meet across this valley?”

  “I don’t know. Is that what’s vital? Today, I mostly care about what happened when the alien was here. I want to know what went on. Not what’s recorded. What really went on. That’s what makes you different, not your sexuality or your roommates or your philosophia.”

  He walked a little farther, then turned back to her. “When I was first in the force, I used to have to take down reports of UFOs. We used to put them on file and now and again we’d correlate them with other files and in the end we had a great big pile of nothing. If you and I argue about this, we’ll end up with a great big pile of nothing. I can’t pretend I couldn’t make it hard for you. You know the generous mandate that went with Mac’s job? Well, I gave it to him. I have discretionary powers he only dreamt of having. But I’d rather use them to make things easier for you.”

  “That’s fine as long as I do what you want. But if I get out of line?”

  “Can’t you trust me?”

  “When you are doing your best to convince me we come from different worlds?”

  “Do we?” He gestured around the horizon as she had done. She laughed.

  “Well done!” she said. “Okay, I agree that if this has any point at all, it’s that we’re now one world whether we find it comfortable or not. I spent a year learning the lesson: eschew comfort.”

  “You speak so well. These tapes should be a helluva fine production.” Andris gestured to the grey man and Kowalski, and Mr. Grey walked back across the street to join them.

  “Maybe we can make a hit movie of them. After all, there’s all that footage of John’s that Mr. Grey here confiscated. Hester McKenzie can direct.”

  Andris laughed out loud. “She’s Mac�
��s daughter, you know. And she’s already had some truck with those tapes. All right, Ms. Morgan, world citizen, here we go. You without the chip on the shoulder, me without …”

  “Without preconceptions. Maybe we could even learn to like each other.”

  He smiled, tidily as a cat. “You hate being an optimist, don’t you?”

  Morgan grinned. “You got it, mister. But it’s a fate forced on me …”

  “As if fate could force you to do anything, on balance,” he said, “I have been listening to you for two years,” and Morgan laughed and laughed. He went on, “I’m the one who sent Ace here, you know. I thought it might be good for her.”

  “Was it?”

  “I don’t think it made much difference,” said the grey man.

  “We’ll see,” said Andris. “She’s young. There’s still time.”

  “I think,” said Morgan, “that I am ready for you now. For what it’s worth.”

  “We’ll decide what it’s worth.”

  “No,” said Morgan, looking out into the empty air of the valley, “no, we won’t. We’re not that important.”

  Morgan jerked a thumb at Kowalski. “Keep the queer-bashers away from me. If you can.”

  “I can’t promise,” said Andris. “After all, it’s the real world.”

  “You said it,” she said. “Welcome.”

  The grey man watched Andris and the man in the blue suit get into the car and drive away. After the car had hummed out of sight he turned to Morgan.

  “With Andris and Ko fighting over you, I might have to move in here,” he said. “To protect you.” And for the first time since he had known her, he smiled at her fully, grinned even: not the puckish smile of the manipulator, but an openmouthed, relaxed grin of joy. She smiled back with the same fullness, said lightly, “There are a lot of empty rooms.”