A Paradigm of Earth Read online

  “Marbl! You’re a star!” Morgan said, and Marbl, as always when her name was spoken, meowed a fierce alto response. Morgan and Delany laughed together, and Morgan reluctantly drew away from the image. Delany waited for her to go out, wheeled through the door, and then turned to pull the pocket door shut.

  “It’s very good,” said Morgan.

  “She comes in and models now and again,” said Delany, and Morgan was not sure if Delany misunderstood accidentally or on purpose. Morgan let Marbl go, and the cat poured down from her hands to the stairs and leapt away, vanished through the open door of Morgan’s room.

  “Hmph,” said Morgan. “She doesn’t think much of our company!”

  “She only loves me for my paints,” said Delany, and wheeled ahead to the elevator.

  Morgan watched her, and something readjusted in her mind. When Delany said, “I need room to paint,” Morgan had unconsciously supplied her laughing, joking, physically-limited friend with a talent for minor landscape watercolor, hobbyist pap, or at best the kind of interchangeable scenic painting loved by the decorators of show homes. She should have known better: the Delany she knew in university was wild and angry: her meticulous good manners, obviously learned since, had misled even Morgan.

  Delany turned. “Coming?” Morgan, startled, hopped into the elevator after her, and they went down.

  Morgan sat at the house terminal in the house office, working out budgets. She was setting up the monthly funds transfer to the teenager who had the recycling route, and sighing at the bank balance, when Russ breezed in to pay his rent.

  “Here, I’d like to pay for six months right now,” he said, “while I have it. You know how I am.” Morgan opened an entry port into her bank account into which he could direct his deposit.

  “I won’t even argue about what a bad money-management choice that is,” said Morgan, hitting the enter code. “I need the money. Look at this. All that insurance, and I still am going to have to get a job.”

  “The insurance paid out?” He perched on the edge of her chair to enter his password, and the transfer flashed as complete. “There,” he said with satisfaction.

  “Yes, there was no way to prove that her diary was a suicide note. Robyn got on their case. I wouldn’t have, but hey, now I have a house, right?”

  “Don’t be bitter, sweetie, it doesn’t suit you.”

  She turned her bleak look on him, but he glared back, and finally she smiled slightly.

  “Fine. I have a house. But the settlement was spent before it arrived. Now there will be no money for food or utilities, unless I get work soon. When did all these laws get passed, anyway?”

  “Laws?”

  “New death duties. Inheritance taxes on top of those. The dead pay, the living pay. Taxes on insurance pay-out, despite the policy. Property tax surcharges.”

  “They passed while you were fighting the sex laws and human rights code violations, and I was fighting racism and the tightening of immigration. We were busy. And face it, did you ever think you’d have to worry about the joys of having money?”

  “Problem is, I don’t really have money. The truly rich pay almost nothing at all. The accidentally fortunate, with no long-term capital to buffer expenditures, are dinged just like the working poor. Well, I’ve had a windfall, like some perverse lottery of the damned, and paid the price of it, and here I am.”

  “You might find a good job. Something fun.”

  “If I can wait for one I like. I may not have time to be picky.”

  “How long can you hold out?”

  “About three more months and I’ll be on my face.”

  “And such a lovely face it is too.”

  She glared at him and he laughed. “That’s what I heard my boss say to the supervisor of engineering yesterday,” he said. “I thought she’d kill him. But, unfortunately, she didn’t.”

  “How’s it going there, anyway?” Russ had returned to the government office where he worked before his “sabbatical” overseas; he spent his days now programming computers and creating net interfaces to inform or, as he darkly grumbled, mislead the public. Morgan figured he’d last a year, two at most.

  “I’ll survive.”

  “Don’t we all.” But she knew that the answer to that was no: we don’t all survive.

  The sky was dark blue in summer intensity when the aliens arrived. In the park down by the river the cyclists on their intricate machines crisscrossed the bicycle trails. Above them on the bluff, looking down over the river toward the towers of the city, sat Morgana le fay, home from the wars.

  If ever a vessel sat empty, scoured by sand and fire, it was Morgan then as she sat looking over the city. Sun’s heat only accentuated her inner chill; she watched the cyclists with the detachment of despair. If suicide had been a word in her lexicon she would have been spelling it, but it was not, so she sat on the riverbank looking out without emotion across the valley.

  She had come from a long distance, and she felt the distance, every moment of it, as she waited for the story she did not know was about to happen.

  Though that day the aliens had arrived, she didn’t know it then, could think of little but her twisted gut. The wind was blowing all the day, out of the south-east, blowing the sky clean of clouds and scouring it dark, blowing as if to wipe the city away. A day or three ago something she ate was wrong, coursed through her body, migraine headache this day and the day before, then suddenly, after she had retreated from the riverbank gale, as she sat reading the newspaper, but starting from the back page as always, the knot loosened in her belly, into a rush of gas and diarrhea, barely controlled, and she missed the front-page news until hours later. Then Russ came in, excited, to her room where she sat on the bed, leaning on the wall at its head, knees up, writing sporadically at a letter between runs to the toilet.

  “Fantastic, eh?”

  “What?”

  “The big news!”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know? Haven’t you seen the paper? Heard the news? It’s practically being shouted in the street!”

  “So what, already? I’ve been sick half the day. I can’t stand the noise when my head aches.”

  “The alien, the spaceman who’s come to see us! We really are not alone!”

  She shouldered him aside, tangentially remembering her dream as she did so, and ran for the discarded newspaper, and sure enough, front page and whole first section said it:

  We Are Not Alone!

  Man From Outer Space Lands in Zurich!

  Alien Makes Visit to Peace Talks!

  The blurry photo could as easily have been anyone, though the color balance was all wrong for human skin. The blue aliens in her dream had had her parents’ faces: that was obvious symbolism; this was just coincidence. She was too ill to read the small print. She went back to bed.

  Someone left the newspaper open to the help wanted ads, and Morgan saw there—she thought Russ must have marked it for her—a child care job. Teaching certificate required. Working with disadvantaged adult clients. A child care job with adults? Must be low-IQ, thought Morgan, as she printed out a resume and sent it off.

  Getting an interview was unexpected. Her application had been so perfunctory that it was almost worse than no effort at all; clearly, her subconscious had hoped to sabotage the process. But now there she was, walking through the door of an unlabeled government building. There were decontam procedures at the entry, strong security. She thought the interviews must be far from the job site: who would keep kids in a place like this? But inside, the building opened out into a giant atrium, with huge trees and running water in a courtyard big enough to hold—holding, in fact—a couple of smaller buildings.

  She was placed in a waiting area with benches, under one of the clusters of trees. Small birds flitted through the branches. Morgan felt itchy, watched. She looked up, around, irritated at herself for the cliché: if she was thinking about surveillance, why not use her mind, rather than the hair on the back of h
er neck? But there were no cameras. She turned impatiently, and under the thick branches of the tropical mini-forest there was someone crouching, watching.

  Adult body, to be sure, but certainly childlike pose and gaze. She had just met one of the “clients”, she thought, unsurprised. In the green shadows under the boughs, the pale skin looked blue.

  “Hello, person,” said the being, sounding like a recording. Autism sometimes presents this way, Morgan thought, and waited for more evidence.

  “Hello, person to you too,” said Morgan.

  “‘You too you too you too.’ ‘That’s okay, just stay right there while I look at you.’” The second imitated voice was deeper and differently accented: Mennonite Manitoban? Morgan thought. There were many causes of this kind of imitativeness.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Morgan said. “Are you going to come out and let me look at you?”

  The being sighed exaggeratedly, another imitation, and crawled out from the jungle.

  The skin was blue.

  Morgan was looking at one of the aliens.

  “Blue,” she said, involuntarily.

  “Blue,” it said. “Blue blue blue blue?” The face was blue, but blue in a thick undertone to ivory, an undertone that took no life away from the rich texture of the skin. The eyes were dark. The hair was long, and knotted behind the head, carelessly through itself. Strands were loose. They were a dark blue, close to black, the way dark brown is close to black. Gleaming dark strands. Morgan’s own long hair was tied in a knot; she wondered who had taught the visitor that trick, not foolish enough to believe that such details are universal.

  “That about covers it. What’s your name?”

  “Blue.”

  “My name is Morgan. What is your name?”

  “Blue. Blue. My name is—Blue.” In Morgan’s voice.

  This was very silly. Not at all like in all those SF books. Exactly like. What was she doing here? This was stupid.

  Another voice, from another being this time: “You’re hired.”

  “Say what?”

  “You’re hired.” A grey man—no, thought Morgan, a man in a silver-grey suit, a man with prematurely white-grey hair and grey eyes, figures of speech could too easily become real around here—stood on the path behind them.

  “I haven’t even had my interview yet.”

  “Yes you have,” and he gestured at Blue. “Blue hasn’t responded to any of the other candidates. Hasn’t talked, answered, approached. You have clearly been chosen.”

  “Some selection process.”

  “Yes, well, I’m not too keen on it myself, but we’ve done all the screening we can do at our end,” Mr. Grey said grimly. “We had to have someone the … Blue would work with. Blue’s been on a work-to-rule campaign lately.”

  “Is this the first time Blue has named … um, itself?”

  “Yes.”

  Morgan had a job. It almost interested her.

  The dream is a murky sea of waterlike air or airy water, hazy and dark blue as the sky at dusk on a winter’s day. Morgan is swimming. She alternates between a sense of freedom and a terrible drowning panic. Below her, she sees a dark form curled into a fetal position, sinking slowly, spinning. She calls sharply, and dives. When her hand grasps the naked, livid shoulder, which despite her expectation of cadaverous cold is hot under her fingers, the motion of grasping—

  —woke her. Her hand was in the air above her, fingers still reaching for the drowning victim.

  That’s pretty obvious, she said to herself. Nonetheless, each time she returned to sleep that oppressive yet liberating presence is there, the rescue continues in ever more surreal surroundings. Finally she spoke to the house for some light, and in the sudden glare blinked at Marbl. She got up and, downstairs, made herself a cup of hot chocolate without turning on the light. Outside, she thought she saw a shred of motion behind a nearby hedge but when she looked out cannily, concerned with safety for the house, there was no lurking shadow. Shaking her head at her paranoia, she went back to bed, this time to sleep.

  In the shadows the silver-haired man in the grey track suit turned away, satisfied with the night’s surveillance. As he walked toward the dark car waiting in deeper darkness under the arching trees beyond the property, he thought, strange bunch of people. And she has insomnia. I wonder why.

  3

  Explaining kitty litter to the aliens

  Call him Mr. Grey, as Morgan had done. That was the premature state of his hair, that was his favorite color and attitude. There was more to him than met the eye but not many were allowed to see that. He had worked himself up the law enforcement ladder far enough to be a bureaucrat, but not far enough to lose his anonymity or his power. His wife died birthing a second, late child, who also died; their first daughter grew up rebellious against authority in ways he luckily had had no cause to question: they were a fine young nuclear family once, but fission set in: one of the reasons he secretly cheered his daughter as she crusaded for social justice, personal freedom, safe alternatives to nuclear energy. He was all for fusion or even sunshine, whatever warmed the heart.

  What rebellion was in his own heart was carefully curbed and directed into channels. He knew all about channels. So when the alien came into the world of humankind, flowed down the channels into our consciousness, he was in the way. In the way, but whether he was swept away or not was a matter of opinion. Eventually he was questioned by his superiors, even mentioned in Parliament, but he was kept on the job. That’s the test of a bureaucrat’s security, if not efficiency. So Mr. Grey managed to keep his footing when all around him were losing theirs, without having to be a Man or have a son, and the alien was initiated into human values in ways no politician could have visualized.

  If this was good, we have him to thank. If we don’t like what he did, we can lay traps for him, write letters to our Member of Parliament, demand in the popular press that Mr. Grey be demoted.

  He might have cared about that once, but he looks at his work differently now.

  What does a career policeman think when first he walks into the room where an alien is crouching quietly, watching everything? Does he think perhaps of the soft color of blue smoke drifting above mountain valleys, the color of a gust of rain on a grey day, the fog of punctuation marks that measure out his life? For the alien is a blue color such as might inhabit his dreams, a dusky soft blue as human skins can be a dusky soft pink or a dusky soft tan or a dusky soft brown, and the alien’s hair which is long and unbound is a dark dark blue of midnight.

  The grey man thinks nothing, but he is struck by some stunning astonishment of heart. He wants to reach out and touch the face of this being, reach into this being’s beginning and find the mystery, reveal the source, invent the common language. This being makes him hungry for things he hasn’t been seeking since his youth. He remembers his cheap telescope, he remembers the yellow-covered novels he used to read and trade with his Boy Scout companions before they all graduated to serious adulthood, he remembers his discomfort with their insistence he belonged only to their club, he remembers reading Stoltenberg and trying to understand why the world told him he must be a Man when he only wanted to be a human being. Now this new being makes being human something exclusive, also. He is afraid for Earth, but his job will not allow him to be rough with the alien who curls in the posture of an infant.

  “Can I help you?” he says reflexively, then curses himself internally for a fool.

  But of all the aliens only one had spoken, only once, and not a word from any of them since. He had seen the tape.

  On the tape, the first alien had said, “To learn from you. Yes. That is the assignment.”

  “What do you mean, assignment?” the astonished diplomat, prepared with all the right greetings, had said.

  “Earth is needed to know. So one is sent to know Earth.”

  “And that one is you?”

  “Yes. That one is you.”

  “We too must study and understand. We want to a
sk you questions, examine you, find out where you are from.”

  “To find out from this one is not to happen. This script is complete, and will erase. Do not erase the recording you make. This bodies will stay. It will not much known. But to learn and take knowledge back. An assignment.”

  The eyes blanked, the body fell. After that moment, as he now knew too intimately, watching through the one-way glass, all the alien bodies had been like newborns: helpless, incontinent, and without language. As if, the grey man thought, a recording had self-destructed after being heard by the necessary people. Mr. Grey knew that trope from reruns. We, he thinks wryly, old enough to remember this allusion, are the I.M. Force, whether we choose to accept it or not.

  Assignment. Whatever the alien’s assignment was—and it seemed peculiarly clear that human beings were now expected to educate these empty beings starting at the very beginning—the grey man had his too.

  It was the grey man who decided that the alien should be moved, and where. He established security and arranged that the alien be taught. The alien had no more language, just a nonfunctional eulalia, so could not supply a name, and upon examination was demonstrably neither male nor female, but similar to both. When the child care worker was finally hired, for a baby now toddling and graduated to eulalic phrases from syllables, she called the alien “Blue”. Or, she said, that the alien had chosen to be called that. Whether or not it was true that the alien had named itself, “Blue” sufficed.

  “We want to start your orientation with the first-contact film,” said the tall woman in the green flowered dress with the smoothly-pulled-back hair. She had introduced herself as a staff sergeant in charge of training for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Services, then fussed about making Morgan a cup of hot chocolate with a couple of biscotti on the saucer. Almost milk and cookies: Morgan grinned to herself. Morgan, who had dressed in her usual neutral black-leather skinsuit, felt as warmed as she was intended to feel by the old-fashioned motherly image of this senior-management otter. She knew CSIS’s brief and reputation, suspected that the ease with which she played auntie meant that the woman was hard as nails and could as easily play bad cop in more serious CSIS interviews, but Morgan allowed herself to go with the reflexively returned smiles her body produced.