A Paradigm of Earth (6 page)

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Authors: Candas Jane Dorsey

Tags: #Science Fiction

BOOK: A Paradigm of Earth
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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 to 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 behind 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.”
At four people are vain. The alien turned away, smiling smugly.
On the street, on the way to work, Morgan saw a pregnant woman. All she could think was, what a pity another child was coming into the world, and how appalling the swollen woman looked. Distantly, she noted the danger of such thoughts, but like everything else the awareness of despair’s peril was far away. Closer—and more uncomfortable—was the thought that perhaps her perceptions had been skewed by her circumstances. If she had to question the cold clarity of her self-judgment on the night before her parents’ funeral, she would lose the only benchmark she had, and she would have to leap into the void of loss. So, she watched the heavily gravid woman impassively, noting her lumbering walk, and dutifully tried not to see her as grotesque.
“He must have been injured on arrival. Whatever the arrival process was must have given him, like, a retrograde amnesia, a functional amnesia.” In the daily-report meeting, Rahim was holding forth again on his opinion of the Alien Question.
“Him?”
“Don’t keep harping on that, Connie. We have enough to think about without that.”
“My name is Morgan, and harping on that is my job. Do you really want to make this alien into a Man?”
He didn’t hear her. He hadn’t read the old books. He was the new breed of
fin-de-siècle
specialist, who had grown up language-challenged and idea-poor, believing the political cant of selfishness. He owned a big house and a designer wife and dog, and Morgan found him unbelievably stupid in almost any situation, without imagination and without charm. It amazed her to see that some of the other women found him attractive. I’ve been around queers too long, she thought, to ever look the same way at those hetero Men-with-a-capital-
M
who have somehow reembraced the Father-Knows-Best ideal their parents rejected midway through the previous century—and who still thought themselves harmless as they plowed through the future.
If they didn’t do such damage, she would be sorry for them. But they and their social Darwinist uncles, dads, and mentors were taking her country step-by-step backward into a dictatorship of meanness, a victory of haves over have-nots, which still had the power to disgust Morgan, even through her fog of personal incapability.
“They are watching all the time,” said Blue. “Even when I poop.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like that.”
“I can see why. People like to have some privacy. They wouldn’t like it if you watched them poop, I bet.”
Blue giggled, but after her shift, Morgan was taken back into the office by Rahim and chastised again.
“I am the only one your precious alien trusts,” she said, “and part of the reason is that I tell the truth. Do you want me to change that? I don’t think so.”
She stared at the Boy Wonder, and he shook his head. “I was against employing you,” he said. “I was overruled by the Chief Inspector. If he is transferred off this case, you’re out of here tomorrow.”
“And does he show signs of being transferred?” Morgan said, and gathered her things together.
“Anything can happen if the right people get to be in charge,” Rahim said as she walked out. Good exit line for him, she thought, but on the bus going home she lapsed into the same glum mental silence as usual.

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