A Paradigm of Earth (4 page)
She dreams of the six o’clock news, telling her that the aliens have landed, the aliens have her parents’ calm dead faces but she is not afraid. “What do you want?” she asks. “It’s not easy to go away without packing anything,” her father replies. Her mother says, “We’ll be in New Zealand if you need us.” The skyscrapers are impossible icicles of flesh; they fall slowly and silently and never break against the ground. There is an indigo mist around them, and it forms into a clutch of faces. Her parents’ bodies are blowing away, leaving only their smiles, like the Cheshire Cat—
—and she wakened with Marbl sleeping on her bed, purring a little.
As Morgan woke the purring faded, the cat went more soundly to sleep. It was full night and despite the room warmth Morgan was shivering. She stumbled up from the bed and into the cone of light where she sat down like a prisoner, tears drying on her face: the interrogation was not a success, where were you on the night of the—
—and the cat Marbl, wakened too by Morgan’s upheaval from the bed, raised her head and meouwed once, then put her head on her crossed paws and watched with an unblinking stare while Morgan weathered the agony of not weeping.
Finally the sawdust was all vacuumed away, the varnish smell aired out enough to be background, the last contractor’s bill paid with the last of Morgan’s inheritance, and they had the house to themselves. Morgan walked the corridors at midnight, checking that the windows were latched and the doors locked.
The house felt empty despite the people working or sleeping behind each door. Morgan realized she missed her dead—but in a distant way: she too was missing, presumed dead. She was a set of behaviors without a person inside. Since her night of self-scourging established a baseline of self-loathing, she had not allowed herself to go searching for the missing self. She did not yet believe she needed anything she had lost that night. But the truth was coming for her, stalking her through the silent corridors of her life as softly as the cat Marbl who followed her on her rounds.
One night as she passed Delany’s room, Delany opened the door. “Tea time?” she said, wheeling herself out into the corridor and toward the elevator. Marbl ducked into the room behind her, and Delany laughed. “You’ll get paint on your paws again, you silly thing!”
“Do you want me to get her out of there?”
“Sure. Last time she left little prints on the new floor. Teal, very fetching and old-fashioned; I’m gonna leave them there—but perhaps best if not continually augmented in other colors. I’m working in tiger yellow today.”
“That’s the same combination I have in that Simpson watercolor,” said Morgan. “I should leave her to it.” But she was chasing Marbl as she spoke.
Marbl was a fluid cat, always had been good at getting under the furniture. Morgan hadn’t been in this room since the renos were done and the furniture came, and she saw it from lower than her usual eye level, bent over to look for the cat, which meant perhaps at Delany’s usual eye level. The furniture was wood, and old, and had been ruined with paint. It looked, not like family hand-me-downs, but like some theater set seen up close: spattered and textured with paint and stain; what from the corridor looked like a patina of age seemed from three inches away to have been engineered that way from a standing start. Morgan was uneasy with its falsity.
“Like the antiquing,” she said to Delany. Delany wheeled back in, startling Marbl out from under the only easy chair in the room—which was stacked with art magazines and painting materials. The walls were still bare, white and smooth.
“Yeah, my brother and his ladies did it. Got the idea from one of those back-to-the-twentieth-century home decor mags. I plan to reverse it as soon as I can afford to get it stripped. The original finish was a beautiful rich dark brown. Fumed oak. Can you believe it?”
Morgan laughed. “I am so glad you said that. I was wondering if you’d had an aesthetics transplant since university!” She lunged for Marbl, who, emerging from behind a stack of canvases with their faces turned to the wall, was poised to leap up onto the painting table, and caught her just as she left the ground. One paw had indeed been leaving tiger yellow prints already, and Morgan wiped it with a paint rag. The cat protested with a tiny plaintive mew, and Morgan hugged her and petted her in apology.
Marbl hated cuddling, pushed away from Morgan with soft paws, her claws retracted. Morgan scratched under her chin and she half-purred, still struggling. “Ach, ye poor beastie!” Delany crooned, laughing. “Doomed to have affection lavished upon you.”
Morgan wasn’t listening. She was struck by the image on the easel, the only image in the room. The rich yellow light, created with rays of the “tiger yellow” which was almost saffron where the thick smears of paint had folded, cascaded behind a dark figure which, though small, dominated the canvas. In front of the figure, however, in a reversal of traditional road images, there was only darkness, and it was clear that the figure itself saw none of the light outlining it. Below the feet of the figure there was a brown tabby cat, realized in meticulous detail, almost as if it had been created hair by hair. Though the painting was clearly unfinished, it already had a disturbing, raw challenge about it.
“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.”
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.
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 her neck? But there were no cameras. She turned impatiently, and under the thick branches of the tropical mini-forest there was someone crouching, watching.
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