A Paradigm of Earth Page 5

  “I saw it on TV,” she said.

  “This is the director’s cut,” said the woman. Without further signal, the room went dark and a vid began to play on what had formerly seemed to be a mirror wall, back-projected onto the one-way glass. Morgan was reminded that in facilities like this, everything is secret but nothing is private.

  The familiar speech, replayed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times by TV stations, vid programs, netcasters, played out. The blue alien said primly, “To learn from you. Yes. That is the assignment.” The astonished diplomat had said something unscripted, and the alien went on, “Earth is needed to know. So one is sent to know Earth.”

  “And that one is you?”

  “Yes. That one is you.”

  The tapes always stopped there. But this one continued. The diplomat spoke soothingly about studying and understanding the alien too, and the alien said cryptically, “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.” Then it seemed to snap into some fugue state, and fell sideways from the chair. The confusion afterward did not arouse it. After a moment the otter woman raised her hand and the film stopped on the scene of bureaucratic shock and chaos. The lights faded up in the interview room.

  “That’s not ours, of course, it’s the one at the UN. Ours appeared curled up on the floor of the Senate Chamber. If they were trying for Parliament, or the Prime Minister’s Office, they missed. Anyway, this was all any of them have ever said,” she said. “We never heard another word out of them until Blue started imitating us. It’s possible that is happening elsewhere in the world. So far we know of twelve other aliens. They likely all came in this vegetative—well, call it infantile—state.”

  “Possible? Likely? You aren’t in touch with the other …”

  “Like our government, the other governments hosting the aliens believe that discretion is the better part of valor.” The quiet, ironic voice from behind her made Morgan jump despite herself. She turned to the grey man—for it was indeed the man she had seen so briefly several days ago—and met his eyes. He’s pretty, she thought, like some kind of bird. Raptor, she modified her thought as she saw him tilt his head at the otter-mother and the woman moved to a side chair to allow him to sit. Behind the grey man, a large, untidy man in a rumpled blue suit and a younger, sharp-faced junior in perfect corporate gear—the kind that Morgan thought of as a “boy wonder”—crowded into the room.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said the grey man. “Glad you started, Flora. Go on.”

  “All we can determine is that they have the ability to learn,” Flora went on. “We’ve tested ours as much as we can, given that from the start it fought like a panther if we tried to get samples”—she pulled up her sleeve to show bruises and several long, healing scratches, and made a moue of frustration—“and it appears to be a newborn in everything but body size and strength. Our doctors suggested that we treat it like an infant, ‘raise it’ like an infant. It grows fast, developmentally. It’s walking, eating solid foods, and babbling already.”

  “What is its metabolism? What does it eat?”

  “It eats our food. What it wants of our food. As far as we can tell, it is a human clone. We don’t know why the blue color,” Flora replied.

  “Unless their TVs are out of adjustment,” said the Boy Wonder.

  “As far as you can tell?” said Morgan.

  “It still fights when we try to take tissue samples or do tests. We tested its wastes. Mostly leftovers from what went in. Different trace elements every time. As if the body is learning too,” said the man in the blue suit. He glanced at his boss. “As far as we can tell.”

  “I thought it best not to traumatize Blue by pressing the issue,” said the grey man. “I’ve taken some flak for that decision.”

  Filing that for further reference, Morgan went on, “They’ve been here for three months. This is all you—”

  “No,” interrupted the grey man, “we know a great deal. But none of it is—what they want, or where they come from, or how to unlock any memory from that beautiful blue head. We have to assume that what we have here is a tabula rasa. An infant. We teach it, we train it. There are indications that the ship will be back in somewhere between two and five years. Depends on which theory you believe about their drive capacity. Maybe by then they will expect their data shells to be full.”

  “Creating a paradigm of Earth,” said Morgan.

  “Elegant phrase. Yes. That’s our theory.”

  “Your theory, Mac,” said the Boy Wonder.

  “Yes, well,” said the grey man mildly, smiling, “but I rank high enough that I’m allowed to have a theory. When you rank me, you can have a theory too.”

  The CSIS agents all laughed politely. Morgan didn’t laugh. She looked at the freeze-frame on the wall, a blue body curled fetally on the floor of an office, surrounded by an almost comic array of panicky UN officials, security staff, and medics, crammed into the frame like the Marx Brothers in that scene from A Night at the Opera.

  The grey man stood up beside her. At a touch from him the image cleared and in its place was “her” alien, the beautiful Blue, in its nursery room, combing its hair and humming eerily, like the Siren. As if it could see them, it looked up toward the camera and smiled.

  “I have decided,” said the grey man quietly, “that it is better if you don’t know too much. We know everything, and we know nothing. We want you to teach Blue, and to learn, and we will all watch and learn, and if you can give it a good image of Earth, a kindly one, all the better.”

  Flora began to speak, coughed, shook her head, and turned her gaze to her sleek shoes. The untidy large man cleared his throat and said, “Rahim, maybe you and I could … ,” and went out, the Boy Wonder following him. Flora looked at Mr. Grey.

  “Sure,” he said, though she had said nothing. “Check back with me if you find anything.” Flora too left the room.

  “Blue doesn’t look at all like that other one,” Morgan said.

  “You think not?”

  “Well, superficially, maybe, but I’d say not.”

  “I don’t think so either. I’m told by others that they are identical. They started out identical.”

  “Really?”

  “The way some see it. Welcome to the team. No doubt you’ll hate it. Civilians always do. But report to me anyway. Through Rahim.”

  “The Boy Wonder?”

  “Yes. Him.”

  “Thank you,” said Morgan. “I’ll do my best.”

  The progress of Blue through toilet training, complex language learning, grammar and composition, geography, history, “social studies”, economics, sociology, comparative religions, was rapid but uneven, unpredictable. Of course there was the pronoun difficulty, but once that was surmounted there were few snags in imparting information. Manners and social behavior developed more slowly.

  The grey man had already thought of simply taking the alien home, but he could not justify the security risk. Right now, few knew one of the thirteen alien blue beings found on earth so far (were there more? The thought kept the Secretary General of the UN awake nights) was even in this country, let alone in the small prairie city where the Atrium facility was established. Those who knew were on special contract to the government and the United Nations, and sworn to secrecy. So far.

  Picture the grey man, a busy office worker with a matched desk set, trying to do the paperwork on the first extraterrestrial. It was a tribute to his mental ability that he managed at all. The forms hadn’t been printed that explained what this was all about or how to requisition answers.

  Mr. Grey’s subordinates were terrified by the lack of forms and conventions, but the grey man was not afraid of making new channels. He understood too well how channels work. Somebody was going to make them, it might as well be him.

  Opposition Party Says Canada Should Demand Access t
o Aliens

  CSIS Reveals That “Canadian” Alien Exists in Secret Facility

  New Photos of Canada’s Alien

  Fraser Institute Demands Custody of Alien:

  Government-owned think tank only suitable environment for proper

  education of alien, says director Suzette Bouchard

  Parkland Institute Decries Fraser Institute “Alien Grab” Report:

  Typical of the undemocratic processes common to the current regime,

  says spokesperson Tiffany Brand

  CSIS Watchdogs Refuse to Give Up Alien:

  Safety issues cited

  Amnesty International Declares Alien Political Prisoner, Demands Release

  to United Nations Joint Contact Committee:

  Canada says no

  Senior CSIS Bureaucrat Guarantees Safety of Alien, Invites Amnesty

  Committee to Visit Secret Facility

  CSIS Pledges to Block All Political Interference With Alien

  Amnesty Accepts Watching Brief:

  Prime Minister Claims Victory for Canadian Sovereignty

  Aliens Just Big Babies Says Unnamed Source

  journal:

  Someday I’ll be wise and serene. Perhaps at 80 I’ll be calm and beautiful and strong. Sit by the river smiling like Zen. Until then what? How do you learn? Every day I ask myself this as I try to teach Blue. flash cards of Earth? All the science of it aside, how do we do it, learn, soul and spirit?

  It seems a mystery I can’t imagine, passion a frenzy to which I am too susceptible, even though to date the results seem so disappointing.

  And I think maybe there must be a driving force or I would have learned from those results, there must be an imperative or an ideal but what is it, what moves me through this wicked landscape with such displacement and such impetus? What will move an alien when I can’t even move myself?

  Learn to love. It seems I never learned the right way. What untidy, what clumsy loves I offered, so stupid, so awkward. That was the problem. Love so often the unwelcomed gift. Who wants it/takes it? Who gives it, the crux of the biscuit, for damn it, I wanted it. I want it. I want, and I don’t get, I don’t find, I don’t live happily ever after—

  I’m tired of grief. the textbook knowledge that it will pass is nothing like the reality while it’s with me. and will it pass, or will I become one of those twisted people who get caught jammed between the phases and never work it out? For that matter, why not?

  Because I can ask the question. Simple enough.

  And must I conceal all of this, to give this Blue being a kinder, gentler Earth? I thought I was going to be better, but I can’t think how, if I join this conspiracy to start our conversation with the aliens with lies. Yet I am not sure I am right to share the darkness either. I am not stupid enough yet to think that my struggle defines our world. Can anyone tell lies about the world? It’s all as we see it. Schrodinger’s Cat taught us that, poor thing, caught between death and life forever.

  Morgan had considered advertising for more tenants to fill the last room on the second floor and the loft above what was once the garage, but before she could, someone showed up. John, a video artist, came with introductions from people Morgan knew and hadn’t seen in years, a request to help him get settled—and he appeared the very day she was trying to figure out how everyone’s rent, and her new salary, would stretch to cover the utilities and the city taxes—which she had discovered were going to be phenomenal now that the house was not occupied by a religious order.

  It was enough to make it worthwhile founding a cult, Russ had remarked when she had told the others, but Delany and Jakob had immediately objected that it would be too much work. “All that scripture to learn,” said Jakob, shuddering. “What do you mean, learn?” said Delany witheringly. “All that scripture to write.” Morgan’s respondent chuckle had been strained. Like many in the new millennium, Morgan was land-rich and increasingly cash-poor.

  By day an educator of aliens, she thought in frustration; by night becoming educated in the way the new economy screwed the poor. She remembered what someone once said about the lotteries: that a poor person who won a million dollars wasn’t a rich person but only a poor person with a million dollars.

  Morgan was not rich. What Morgan had was a house.

  John seemed engaging enough, and willing to pay enough for the other, smaller loft above the garage that she could slow down her search for someone else for the other room. When he’d given her the credit authorization, he settled back, but before he moved into the loft, she told him, he must sign an agreement specifying not only housing charge and security deposit but household duties.

  “This is cool. Like an old-fashioned co-op!” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “but it’s modern. I don’t want to have to hassle anyone to do their share, and I am certainly not here to do it for anyone.”

  “No, I understand.”

  “I expect you to get along with the others, too. They were here first. So if you have any prejudices about sexuality or minority politics or disabilities or artists, speak now.”

  “I’m an artist myself. I’ve been working in London and New York, but you know what they say: east west home’s best. I wasn’t born here,” he hurried to explain, “but it was always my favorite place. And for a vidiot, the scene is still great. Cutting edge.”

  She found his enthusiasm admirable—and exhausting, of course. But she didn’t tell him so. “Exhausting” was her problem. Morgan had questioned everything, and now she was bone tired: tired of the beat of the city against her body, the people against her mind: Morgan le fay did no magic in these mundane days.

  In the front hall she stumbled over one of the silver cases of video equipment the stranger, John, had dropped off. The stranger! One of the strangers—who isn’t? She knew so little about any of them.

  More signal-to-noise, blurring her angst. She snorted at herself. What would she do, stay alone and brood, without these people? She should find them interesting—and at the least, they filled up time and space.

  Shame at thoughts like this dogged her days.

  Morgan’s parcel from the U.S. had of course been opened. Back in the days when it might have done some good, she had written too many letters of protest about Canada Customs’ activities stopping queer literature, which they had always bracketed with pornography, at the border. Now she was on some sort of list, and received every order, package, and gift opened, and usually had to pay tax on the gifts. Appealing the tax and handling notices would have been a nice hobby had she cared any more. As it was, the stack of Customs forms torn from the parcel wrappings formed an increasingly untidy heap at the back of her big desktop.

  She was getting thinner too. She cared less about eating.

  Whatever the romantic novels say, the kind of hopeless angst gripping Morgan wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t romantic. It was life-threatening without being dramatic, it was boring and without justification, it was self-indulgent even as it sapped the sense of self.

  Morgan came face to face with this in unexpected department-store mirrors, shop windows of unusual reflectivity, and her own uncurtained windows at night. She was less aware of herself in the one-way mirrors through which people often watched her work with Blue. She didn’t want to stare at the shadowy ghosts she could see through the mirrors, so could avoid also her own ghostly shadow of self.

  This week the alien was about four. They had passed in only a few weeks the usually-difficult teaching of basic life skills like toilet training and eating with cutlery, basic speech and manners, and the alien was becoming interesting the same way Morgan found human children interesting once they become sapient.

  Four is a nice age. Wisdom is dawning, playfulness is creative, and the willfulness of three is starting to be replaced by cunning and even, occasionally, a mature perception of the outside world as other to self—which meant that Blue, whose language skills at present outstripped its social skills, was now itself interested in the people behi
nd the mirror.

  “You are seeing other people, not like TV,” said Morgan. “They are in another room, and part of the wall is made of this stuff, which is called one-way glass. It’s supposed to look like a mirror to us as long as it’s dark in their room. But some light always comes through from our room and shines on them, and we can see a bit of them.”

  “So they aren’t funny shadows like they look, they are real people like us?”

  “Think about it, Blue. At night when you go by the mirror, with no light but the spill from outside the windows, do you look different, like a funny shadow?”

  “Oh …”

  “And are you different?”

  “Oh. Yes. I am different in the night because I see differently.”

  “I mean in the body. Is your body different?”

  “Oh. No, not in the body.”

  “Well, then, why should they be different?”

  “What are they doing there?”

  “Watching us.”

  “Why?”

  “You are their first alien. They think everything you do is very very interesting.”