A Paradigm of Earth (32 page)
“I wanted to help you.”
“You do, you have …”
“Is this love?” asked this alien.
journal:The strain is getting harder for everyone. Seems never less than two people in a room, often mutually suspicious—Blue and I hardly ever alone together—I’m looking for a time to compare thoughts, to learn about this dreaming—time never seems right—one time I got Blue alone and John came to interrupt with his docudrama plans—what an appalling word, “docu-drama”—typical of John’s monomaniacal ability to distance everyone and everything—he has barely said anything important since the morning Jakob died except to approach me nervously and say that of course he wasn’t gay and never had been and that he wasn’t serious that morning, that he wouldn’t have slept with Jakob under any circumstances and he wanted me to understand that—I was so pissed off that he would take back the only thing he’s ever said that came anywhere close to unselfish or human that I said sarcastically that it was true, no-one would ever mistake him for a faggot—he didn’t take my meaning, was quite relieved (because after all I associated with those kind of people so I should know—it struck me rather oddly that it sounded almost as if he was forgetting that I am that kind, but if that’s the case he’s more of a fool than I’m already beginning to think, and I didn’t want to press it)—but he continues to plague Blue with requests for a dream session all his own, and Blue is getting a little frantic—says John has mirrors to the inside, not windows, whatever that means—then there’s Blue not asking again about the dream session between US, and when I suggest I might be ready, evading the idea, and won’t tell me why, and we have no privacy to talk so I can find out.At least Russ less of a zombie—talks a bit more now and has even surprised himself by laughing but he walks out of the room whenever we speak of Jakob, leaving a big empty silence and changing our grieving process from grieving for Jakob to grieving for Russ, or the part of him that can feel, or the friendship he seems to withhold from us now, won’t allow any intimacy. How can I bring him some healing? Delany sits with him when I can’t, but neither of us seems to be able to break through, or at least I can’t, and I need to talk with D., if she does figure out what to do—figure out what comes next—and she just says, oh, sweetie, it’ll be fine, in time—does Russ have the time? Nobody has time—people die—people go away—And look at me, feeling a need for people now, after all this time of feeling I’d be happier with people out of my hair—and even the people with whom I’ve had a growing closeness seem far away—Suppose I’m feeling sorry for myself to say the only one in dead center is me. The police are here every two days asking new questions about and of Blue—but not my grey man, who seems to be mysteriously absent—makes me nervous.We are all feeling the tension.Sleep is no refuge when dreams are real and dangerous. When do I get the REM sleep and rest a person needs to live sane? Glad I can count on the surveillance to rule me out because the others are starting to wonder about my state of mind.
“I’ve told Morgan that the surveillance rules her out, but really I ruled her out, on the basis of what I saw that morning. The surveillance doesn’t rule anybody out,” Mac said to Salomé. “The video’s been altered even more. There are cartoon characters galumphing around, there are switches of one person with another, but done in rollover so it’s obvious the feed’s been altered. We’ve been seeing intrusions for months, when we go back and check some of the archival footage. We just weren’t watching every moment of it, or parsing character movements. It’s all parody now. What you found after Sal’s death was subtle. This isn’t. It’s big ego speaking.”
“So it’s John Lee.”
“Well, it’s most likely John Lee playing with the feed, anyway, but is it John Lee doing anything else, or is this just his idea of playing around with us? He’s been fractious all the way along. And there’s no certainty that it’s Lee. Russ could do this too. He makes propaganda vid—that’s a constant stream of morphing shit into gold. I’ve often wondered what Russ does all day with that big secure network he gets to play with at work, and I can’t find out because his production facility is protected under the New Official Secrets Act. Even from me, dammit. Did he have an argument with his lover and get violent? He has said he was ambivalent about crossing the line. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. Delany does vid, and she could be helping someone else by faking it. She’s doing this big project with Nancy now, and guess what Nancy’s hobby has been for years … ? And as for ‘the Blue guy’, that one has spent so much time with these systems that by now it could do anything it wanted, I think …”
“What are you going to do?”
“Try to untangle some of it, for one thing. Who’d be your pick for the best in the field at analyzing the feed for tampering, maybe restoring the original signal?”
“Me.”
“Yes, you, your pick,” he said impatiently. “You know the field.”
“No, I mean, my pick is me. Just like last time.”
“No. No. Out of the question. Conflict of interest, and besides, I don’t want you this close. Some of it has to be on site.”
And could be dangerous
, he left unsaid.
And could be dangerous
, he left unsaid.
“You didn’t plead conflict of interest last time.”
“Yes, and I told you it was just that once, and just because it was in the lab.”
“Ask ten other video artists. Six of them will say me. Six or more. Hester McKenzie, spinal. I’ll make you a bet.”
If he’d agreed on a bet, he would have lost; Hester was the pick of eight of ten, including both the police techs. She had had the grace not to say anything triumphant, and started working in the computer lab the following Monday.
I can’t write in this journal—it all turns into an incoherent cri de coeur—and I can’t bear to read it either. what does it document? A life spent whingeing. too many deaths. so, enough.
The fire Morgan built with the loose pages of her journalwriting was burning briskly, and a stack of notebooks was waiting to be pulled apart and added to the fire, when Blue found her.
“What are you doing?” the alien asked, sitting down beside her on the log and looking alertly into the firepit.
Morgan looked up. “You look like that little dog of Judith’s when you tilt your head like that!”
Blue smiled and clowned a little, putting into the spry tilt of head the eager vacuousness of a dog, stopping to ask, “What does a dog think?”
“Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out,” Morgan said, imitating canine panting. “Why do you ask me? You should know.”
“It’s bad manners to pry,” Blue said in a perfect imitation of her voice.
Morgan chuckled, but the gritty smoke eddied into her eyes and she ended up coughing.
“Besides, dogs dream differently than we do. What are you doing burning your letters to yourself?” asked Blue, using the explanation Morgan herself had used to explain diaries to a much younger alien.
“They are not necessary any more,” she said, “and besides, I saw John eyeing them, and I didn’t want them to end up as voiceovers in his movie.”
“I do not think this is enough of a reason, even if they are yours to keep or not,” said Blue briskly. “I will have to think about this loss. Something in me objects to it. But there is another curious thing. Why is John having thieving ideas and yet everyone else does not become angry? Instead, you do damage to your dreams, and others turn away or laugh.”
It was a good question, one that had occurred to Morgan without an answer following.
“I believe we cherish our rogues,” she said. “We admire the impulse to define the world according to personal preference instead of community consensus. Especially these days, with boys and girls coming back into fashion, we glorify our ‘bad boys’ and ‘bad girls’. The hooker with the heart of gold is a trope of film, and the woman who says, ‘I can’t help it if I’m bad …’”
“‘I’m just drawn that way’,” quoted Blue, and grinned.
“You saw that? That’s an old example, all right. Or the Saint. Not the vid remake guy but the original, the one in the books. A noble man, a man of honor, but a thief and a trickster.”
“The trickster comes into it too, does he not? Or she. The one with the last laugh. Coyote. The Monkey King.”
“Indeed. Very good!”
“It also seems to me that there is the question of capitalism,” says Blue pensively. “Marx spoke of how capitalism creates individualism …”
Morgan laughed. “You’re becoming a Marxist now?”
“Perhaps not. But he was an interesting writer. ‘Commodities become fetishes under capitalism’—don’t you find that illuminating?”
“Oh, sure, but I still have trouble separating the book from the dogma that was created around it, and from the toll of human misery that ensued from the opportunistic use of that dogma.”
“That seems a limited point of view,” said Blue sternly, but Morgan was not cowed.
“Indeed it is limited,” she said, “and it is the exact problem I have with Christianity, marriage, capitalism, and for that matter Islam, Confucianism, and Taoism, though I don’t know as much about them, except what we read together. It’s the problem of philosophies that have amassed a history of pain. Can they ever exist in purity again? Can one ever come to them without remembering who has died to keep their purists happy?”
“It seems to me you could say that about the whole of the human race. We have … humans have such a history of brutality. What keeps us noble?”
“What indeed,” said Morgan.
“And why do we keep glorifying our bad guys?”
“Bad boys. And girls. Bad guys is something else.”
“Whatever. Why?”
“My dear,” said Morgan, “I haven’t the foggiest notion. All I have are guesses. Just like you.”
“Yes,” said Blue with satisfaction, “just like me,” and picked up the unburned notebooks. “I will put these away where John does not look if that is all right with you. You can get them back after.”
“After?”
“After I go home. I’m getting old. It won’t be long.”
“You’re getting
old?”
Morgan felt chilled.
old?”
Morgan felt chilled.
“Never mind. Can I have the books?”
“Oh, all right,” said Morgan, and watched Blue carry them back into the house, leaving Morgan with troubled thoughts. It was not until later that she remembered Blue had again said “we” about humans, and, distracted by Blue’s offhand reference to aging, Morgan had again not even noticed at the time. The realization pleased her, and she didn’t mind as much the empty corner of her desk where the stack of paper and notebooks had been building up.
“If I need what Blue didn’t take,” she thought later, just as she was dropping off to sleep, “I can just make the rest of it again.”
The pages in the flame are caught in an updraft, and the blue fire consumes them without destroying them. Morgan sees the fire swirled away by the wind and into the dried leaves of the autumn trees, and her convulsive motion to prevent a conflagration wakes her up from the dream.
Its immediacy, as usual, had her heart racing, but she did not feel as frightened as she sometimes had. Tonight she felt protected by her emptiness from the dangers of fire. After all, she had gotten rid of all that loose paper.
Nevertheless, too often the sense of menace enveloped them all. Late one night Morgan sat with John in front of the fireplace.
“It’s so spooky in here these days,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“Everyone suspicious of each other.”
“Oh, not everyone. You’re pretty much out of the picture since Jakob … died, and of course Delany couldn’t have done any of it except the cat … and really, there’s no proof that it was someone in this house. Jakob could have brought someone in, a trick who killed him, Sal was done in the alley, and cats will eat anything that is lying around and looks tasty.”
“I can’t believe it was any of us … even you …” she teased. He took her seriously.
“Of course it wasn’t me! I’m not so sure about Blue.”
“Oh, John, you can’t be serious! Blue doesn’t know enough to swat a mosquito.”
“Blue has no idea what death means. Haven’t you realized that by now? It could just as easily have been a mistake, an experiment on his part …”
“No!” But Morgan remembered uncomfortably the way Blue “changed” the living cat to be like the dead one, and Blue’s anarchistic disregard during the alien’s unsanctioned, unaccompanied adventure in the real world. Still, she stubbornly clung to the belief that Blue, whom she had seen in dreams, was innocent.
“I know it would be hard for you to accept. Hard for lots of people to accept. But Blue isn’t a person like you and me.”
“No?”
“Not human, like us, I mean.”
“No? What makes a human being?”
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