A Paradigm of Earth (19 page)

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Authors: Candas Jane Dorsey

Tags: #Science Fiction

BOOK: A Paradigm of Earth
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“In the accurate sense of the word,” murmured Morgan. “Blue is certainly a phenomenon.”
“We’ll start in the studio tomorrow.” And they did.
It was another one of those rare warm days of late autumn that should have been winter, but wasn’t yet, and Morgan and Delany had come down into the park. The chair was always slow and whiny on the withered grass, and today it had seemed even jouncier: Delany had sworn at it several times.
“I remember when I realized I would have to be in the chair for the rest of my life,” Delany said. She looked across the valley and shivered.
Morgan didn’t ask if she was cold.
“I felt,” said Delany slowly, “as if that moment would be the most important one in my life, forever. As if each moment were going to be defined by that one change. Before then, I was somehow on the side of the able-bodied. After that, I had crossed the line forever. But … .”
“Mmm?”
“But memory fades for a reason,” Delany went on, “and you know, Morgan, my dear, I can hardly re-create that indignation any more, though at the time I called it anguish. Too many other things have happened to me. That was—what, twenty years ago?”
“That long?”
“Yes, it was when I was fourteen. No, perhaps I had just turned fifteen. You see? I thought I would remember everything about that night forever. And I can’t even remember if it was before or after my birthday.”
“Which is when?”
“May thirty-first, but never mind. It must have been July—school was out. Fifteen, then, I was fifteen. So not quite twenty years ago.”
“A long time. And yesterday.”
“Yes, but not quite yesterday. I am not one of those unfortunate people to whom life all happens forever, in the moment.”
“How do you mean?”
“Where everything is alive to them forever. Perhaps a good memory is a curse.”
Morgan laughed. “I have a good memory,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you!” Delany seemed flustered.
“Well, mean it or not, you described me. I remember everything that ever happened to me—no, I
believe
I remember everything that ever happened, which is a bit different, and more accurate. I run the risk of holding grudges forever. I live in that eternal present, the immanence of memory, and I know
exactly
what you mean. I’m only sorry that I don’t know how to change it. I would rather be forgetful and free.”
“I don’t think so,” said Delany, but said no more, and the moment passed.
A few moments later Blue and Russ joined them, and Morgan walked back to the park entrance and sat down on the bench there, looking out over the valley. After contemplating the rotation of the galaxy for an afternoon, Morgan was dizzy. She thought this might be the time vertigo won out. She was afraid to get up from the park bench. She was afraid of entropy. With an effort, she turned from the vertiginous sky and looked back down the length of the park.
Blue was walking toward her with Russ and Delany. Morgan saw them like a silent apparition bearing down on her. Russ was pushing Delany’s chair through the heavy grass so that even the motor was silent. He must be strong to do that, Morgan thought idly. Blue was wearing a loose sweater, designer pants, and leather boots, and strode confidently, hands in pockets and head thrown back, wind through the strange hair, eyes squinted against the bright sun. Except for the blue skin, the image could have been straight from a
Vogue
magazine or
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
fashion feature.
I wonder what
Vogue
would do about makeup for blue skin?
thought Morgan,
then, how beautiful that one always is, and how immune.
The skin tight over the fine cheekbones. It would be too linear, too simplex, to fall in love. With some strange blue chameleon-like being? (She deliberately ignored the parallel with falling in love with beautiful, non-standard Delany. ) Even lust was pointless. And would she always suspect her own Pygmalion impulse ?
Life’s too short,
thought Morgan roughly, overruling the catch at her heart that Blue’s windswept beauty always made.
The concert had been advertised in the Womoncentre newsletter, and Morgan, remembering the Ferron records (yes, records) to which her mother and father had loved to listen, and remembering sitting as a child on the hill at the Folk Festival and listening to the smoky, low voice weave its beautiful magic, decided that she and Blue should attend. When the singer walked out on stage, leaning heavily on her handcarved cane, and sat down to pick up her guitar and sing, Morgan was struck again with deep despair at the march of time, at entropy’s erosion of beauty and power. Yet the concert was enthralling, the music as strong as she remembered and then some, and Morgan felt a reluctant sense of wonder too, at how the music, the artistry—and the woman herself—stood so strongly against the flood.
Morgan wondered how strongly this performer, who seemed to have so gracefully let the years drape her with enigma and sexual richness, had actually fought entropy, in her heart. The recent songs were as fiery as any of the earlier work, but with a darkness Morgan recognized too well: the darkness of loss in the midst of love, the darkness of too many questions answered by no. Morgan selfishly wished that her darkness had taken her more creatively, but, looking at Blue’s rapt pinkfaced visage, she thought, perhaps it had. Perhaps it had.
It was Jakob of all people who took Blue climbing at last, and spelunking too in the eerie Cadamon caves: Jakob whose passion for movement, for dance suited him well in the convoluted wilderness. Lithe as a ferret, he seemed to cling and flow around and across the jumbled, cracked, crazed cliff face as he led Blue higher and higher, while Morgan, below in the base camp, catching occasional glimpses of them in their brightly colored climbing clothes, thought they looked like tropical lizards darting randomly across the face of the world. She tried not to think about Blue falling, what the implications might be.
Blue is all grown up now,
she admonished herself—grinning all the while at the trope—
and you have to let go.
Despite the F/X face, which was dark brown this time (“I want to be Jakob’s sibling,” Blue had said; they’d settled for “sister”), Blue returned tanned. Morgan was shocked by the deepening Delft of the alien skin. She railed at the advisory committee meeting : “Why didn’t you tell me Blue had a melanin process? We should have been using sunblock, and a hat!” but they hadn’t known either. Blue, who even before attaining speech had already fought like a tiger against having any medical sampling done, so that the benchmark samples had been attained at the cost of much human
and
alien blood, sweat, and tears, refused again—this time politely—the polite request for blood tests and a small tissue sample.
“I liked what you said we looked like,” said Blue as they watched Morgan’s slides and recordings of the camping trip. “Like the lizards in that film.”
“I’ve never been in the tropics,” said Morgan. “But I hear that real lizards dart across the sidewalks there.”
“Can we go?”
The answer was
no
, of course: Morgan looked at Blue’s rebellious face and said, “Don’t run away again. We’ll find a way, or we won’t.”
“And if we don’t?” Blue said.
“Then you will be just like the rest of us. Unable to do what we want if it costs too much, or is too risky, or we can’t get a holiday from our job …”
Blue was silent. Morgan watched the pliable face cycle through the emotions.
“I’m sorry. It’s how life goes.”
“No,
I’m
sorry,” said Blue. “I was being—immature. I should have known that wanting is not the same thing as being able to get. It is an—elementary learning. I am ashamed.”
“Shame is useful for a time, but don’t get stuck there.”
“You are very protective.”
But Morgan did not feel protective. Blue’s innocent arrogance had echoed uncomfortably the desires that low income had always thwarted in her own heart. She had never been to most of the places around whose virtual landscapes she guided Blue’s computer learning. She had wished, but never been able to hope, to go. The few travels she had done, on her own continent, so many years ago now, on that brief holiday from university studies, had only whetted a desire that her life, her always-low salaries, and the recent political realities had meant would never be fulfilled.
When she realized the power that teaching Blue created, she had hoped to parlay that power into mobility: shouldn’t the alien have every experience the world had to offer? She soon found out that the alien was restricted to the safest places Canada had to offer: preferrably close to “home”—even rock-climbing had been battled out so strenuously that the negotiations had taken months. The final blow to her dreams had been administered by the knowledge that there were twelve other “empty aliens”,
kara-i-ti
(“empty-ET”) as they were called in Japan, scattered around the planet. The composite portrait of Earth was clearly to be built up like a living jigsaw puzzle, and it would not be necessary to conduct a Grand Parade around the globe.
Despite herself, Morgan wished it weren’t so.
She as always was surprised to find desire stirring, even desire for good scenery.
Having to teach Blue that one wants and cannot get would have been easier, she reflected bitterly as she yet again did dishes it was not her turn to do, had she been able to do so from a detached, Zen-like lack of desire—even if it was that lack of desire her recent despair had made seem reasonable. But in her the empty orchestra played again, and the hollow spaces rang with its wistful strain.
She had always hated
karaoke
when it was the fad of birthday parties of her childhood friends. Now she knew that she had hated it not just because her family couldn’t afford to rent the machine. It had been a jealous dislike, unworthy of a mature person such as she wanted to teach Blue to be, and it burned within her still. She wanted to be a star, and tour the world. She wanted to win the lottery. She didn’t want to mouth someone else’s lyrics to someone else’s background music.
Only later she remembered that some people did win the lottery and still never traveled—and that wanting as intense and generic as hers sometimes produced from the universe a completely different answer than expected. She did, after all, have Blue.
Morgan lay in the darkness, hands clenched between her thighs. She could taste her loneliness, a cuprous flatness on her tongue. She was a stone.
She could feel the alien, in the other room, like a nightlight, like phosphorous on the night ocean, glowing. Like radioactive elements, glowing through the walls and through her skin. Making her transparent.
It was not longing like she longed for a leg between hers, grinding against her lust in the dance, or like she longed for a form beside her in bed right now, to whom she could turn in passion, for release. It was a longing to be somewhere outside the reality, the loneliness, the out-on-a-limb feeling, among all these people. It was a longing to know something new and real and intimate and other-worldly.
Today she had found herself staring at Delany with a desire so intense she was sure it vibrated the air. Wanting to make that glowing beauty glow for her. She could not understand the wanting, after years of friendly intimacy and bodily indifference; was it some kind of titillation to wonder whether that thin body could feel, could respond, could reach Morgan in turn?
Morgana le fay. The witches burned,
she thought,
for feeling too much.
A dry lightning storm crackled outside, and the tension Morgan always felt before the storm broke into rain had her pacing the dark halls. The occasional flashes of lightning accompanied a flash of awareness that some of her nighttime restlessness was not
angst, anomie, Sturm und Drang
or any of the other respectably italicized states of higher anguish, but only sexual starvation. It surprised her to realize that not only tonight’s edginess, but even some of her dreaming could be ascribed to being ready for sex again. It was an irritating awareness: Morgan had always had a horror of predictability, and now she felt her hermit status challenged, betrayed from within. Additionally, she knew that she was not just passively horny but actively interested in casual sex: how desperately old-fashioned. She got up and went downstairs, prowling the dark corridor like Marbl, who this time was more sensible and stayed on the bed asleep, not bothered at all by the lightning and thunder.
But it was not dark all over the house. There was a light in the kitchen, and Morgan, expecting to see one of her housemates, was startled by a stranger. As he turned, cup in one hand and coffee carafe in the other, she saw it was just one of the policemen, the one she and Delany laughingly called Sal the Handsome, helping himself to coffee. On the heels of relief came indignation.
“You scared me! What are you doing in here?”
“It’s raining. I needed something to warm me up.” He lifted the mug and coffeepot and she grinned, but warily—she was still spooked, her body fizzing with adrenaline. She pulled the silk kimono tighter around herself, sat down by him, conscious of his square body, conscious of the official distance between them, the dream still hungry in her, restless.

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