“I’ll try to think like that,” said Blue. “But you are being kind to me. What if I had made that mistake with a person?” Morgan shivered at this echo of her thought. “And who says,” Blue continued, “that a cat is not a person? I don’t know.”
The alien turned to the little grave, took a handful of soil, stood for a moment, then with a ceremonial gesture poured the sandy soil in: something Morgan was sure was learned from the movies. Morgan took the spade and pushed a great heap of dirt onto the little curled bodies. She was still upset with the wrongness of covering their bright fur, but she did not have any powers to reincarnate cats, people, or any other organism, so she and Blue filled the hole as quickly as possible, and they went into the house. Delany had been watching from the window, and her face showed some tears, but she smiled at them both gently and said, “Welcome back from Shadowland.” Morgan touched her shoulder, and Blue’s, and then went away to her room for a while, putting Marbl out into the hall and closing the door, trying to get cats and the power of life and death out of her mind.
Morgan felt as if she were reaching for something brittle, hard to grab. As if she were a thin deposit of silver on the inside of a photographer’s plate, emulsion, waiting for something to develop.
For people who sleep through it, night becomes a mythological time, full of symbols, moon, stars, northern lights, all that. For Morgan, who was wakeful through many a long night, going to sleep when the dawn birds sang (in summer; in winter, it was still dark when she retired), night was a healing time full of natural resonances:
why else is the moon a symbol for change, the stars for destiny, the northern lights for spirit life
? She lived then.
Morgan dreams she is Marbl. She is thinking Marbl’s thoughts. Marbl misses the marmalade cats too, but in an odd way: not because they were her kittens but because they were there and now they are not. This annoys her. She likes things to be where they belong. Marbl looks at her kitten Morgan, is pleased that she is in bed asleep, where she belongs at this time of day, and decides to groom her.
Morgan woke to Marbl licking the hair at her forehead, a firm paw holding her still by pressure on the third eye. Marbl leapt away at Morgan’s gust of laughter and stalked from the room, affronted. Morgan, wakeful, followed her down the stairs.
Blue sat awake also, and when Morgan walked through the living room Blue sat there, shadowed, with Marbl already lying alongside Blue’s leg with belly turned up to the stroking warm hand.
“Marbl likes you.”
“Marbl forgives me for the other two. For murder.”
“No. A killer, perhaps, but a murderer usually kills humans, and knows what is being done, and is often glad. Accidents, mistakes, that sort of thing, are killings, or even deaths, which has no blaming connotation.” Morgan was precise in her little language lesson, determined.
Blue wasn’t stupid. “You don’t want me to be called a murderer, even if I am the one who calls it.”
“Someone might hear you and misunderstand. After all, there was a death back at the Atrium, and you are not responsible for that.”
“I think I could have stopped it while it was going on, if I had known what it was. I didn’t know until afterward what the dream meant. I didn’t even know then it was a dream. Something happening in another room.”
“You dreamed it?”
“I dream everything.”
And would say no more, but sat silent with a little frown creasing the wide forehead, until Morgan said, “Go to bed. You should get some sleep.”
“Is that it? Am I tired? It doesn’t feel like tired.”
“Tired is part of it. Look, the sky is getting lighter. Go to sleep.”
“Morgan, what are dreams for you?”
She thought of the vivid voices in the night, the blue presence, the cat’s leap at a voice Morgan thought she had dreamed, and said, “I don’t know any more. I don’t know.”
She looked after Blue’s departing form, then at the empty air that was left. “But someday, my blue friend,” she said finally, “someday we will find out. Give me time.”
She sat for a while with Marbl, who complained at Blue’s absence and had to be placated with affection. The stroking motion calmed them both. Finally the sky was suffused with sun’s first light, and Morgan felt sleep looking for her and went back upstairs to meet it.
After the others came home, the household seemed to gravitate to the living room where Russ had taken his guitar to strum. It seemed to Morgan a long time since she had heard a song made by the hands and voices of real people; she took her dulcimer from the trunk and tuned it in her room, still undecided about whether she would play. She sat with the instrument on her lap for a long time, listening to the distant chords and voices.
The alien came to see her.
“What is this thing?”
“It’s a musical instrument called a dulcimer. It originated far from here. A friend made it for me. It is made from sweet woods, like cherry and pine, I think; it was originally associated with courtship and betrothal and love. That’s why the holes here are heart-shaped. Modern dulcimers are made with many different shapes of holes and even different shapes of bodies, but this one was made for me by a lover, so it was kept very traditional.”
She had not thought of Vik in a long time; she got lost for a minute in reverie. “You should go down and listen to the music,” she said finally. “Russ is good. He used to play professionally.”
“And you will come to the music also?”
“Maybe in a few minutes.”
Her mother had taught her to play this instrument after Vik gave it to a bemused and charmed new lover. Why did her mother know how? She’d always wondered, another question she’d never have answered. She remembered the conversation with her mother:
“How much did she charge you?”
“Nothing. She gave it to me.”
“What for?”
“She’s my friend.”
Morgan never came out to her parents, but she wondered if her mother had known what was implicit in that blush and labeling of a “friend.” They had always treated Vik well, in all the years she and Morgan lived together.
After years of experiments, flirtations, and friendly brief companionships, Morgan’s first long-term lover had been a man, an older man who was tender with a fresh-faced near-child, and Morgan remembered him with fondness of a sort, but also with the memory of bitterness; his choice after years of vacillation was to stay with a wife with whom he was unhappy, though somehow happier in the end than with the woman he had sought out to reclaim the free feeling of his youth. Vik had been her friend and confidante through the happiness and the pain; the change in their relationship had surprised them both: Vik because she’d given up thinking Morgan was anything but straight as she romped through the discovery of sex and then suffered through the years with Scott, Morgan because she had never even paused to speculate on making love with a woman, hardly even knew it was possible for her, despite her social awareness of its centrality to others.
Until the night. Morgan smiled at the memory of their sudden sensuality, the backrubs that transformed without planning into body rubs, and the bodies waking up, and the awakened young women clinging to each others’ hands, shocked at the joyous intensity of the most minute physical contact. Afraid to go any further, and clumsy, always clumsy, when they did.
We were always clumsy,
Morgan thought,
at first hardly
knowing enough about our own bodies to touch the right places, let alone touch them right. And did we get better at all in those years? Or did we just find out how little we really knew?
She was swept with a wave of sadness
. People are so clumsy,
she thought,
nothing changes that. We learn so slowly. Look at us in this house, the sum of experience that should mean that we have all progressed and are happy. Yet we are caught in the traps we make for ourselves, the blind spots where we don’t learn, the mysteries we’re afraid to touch, the secrets we keep even from ourselves. If we could only open to the soft flow of music through space, listen to that mysterious song, and loose our hold on the need to control our understanding, we’d be so free, and so wise.
Instead wisdom eludes us more the more desperately we pursue it. And we live our clumsy well-meaning lives, pretending with bravado that we’d rather not be wise anyway, it’s much more fun to be willful.
But she took up the feather, the plectrum nature provided, and strummed the dulcimer softly. The resonant notes vibrated behind her forehead. When she was young she had been afraid to sing, afraid her hard voice would not be perfect. But like the search for wisdom, her search for perfection had been abandoned; now she concerned herself only with remembering the words to the songs and rendering their tunes accurately, and left the judgment up to others. She took the dulcimer with its soft curves like a human body’s, lifted it in her tired hands, went downstairs, and joined the circle of singers.
I saw the sky was orange above the white-rimed trees tonight, before I turned on the light and the room folded around me. Simple then to think I hadn’t seen the world burning. What is it that fire against the black sky? And the trees standing solid up against it like iron, tracing their determination against the Hallowe’en sky
The alien one sits at the window and watches, and is silent
What’s left for me in the ghost of the night? I miss my mother, she always knew my heart. Came walking to me in my dream last night with tears in her eyes, said, are you lonely? I said, what do you think? What about you? She said, it’s nothing, it’s just the blues. The alien was there, took my mother in pale arms, rocked her like a kitten, said, don’t cry, you’re over the barrier now. And she smiled at me and said, yes, that’s true, dear. Take care of the traveler. I don’t have to travel anymore. And I woke up crying and I’m crying now, because it wasn’t her, it wasn’t me, and she doesn’t talk to me anymore, but I make a simulacrum of her to prove me foolish in my sleep
Darlin’ mother, we are in such a story. If only you were with me to hear the end
But I’ll hear the end, she says as clear as the night sky, in my mind, right now. You’re the one who’s gonna miss the good-byes
And the alien unfolds from the window seat and the cat jumps down from beside, Marbl, she’s the one who takes to that one, and me? I’m in the middle weeping for my dead. And my dead heart
There’s a heart in the sky, burning. Like the sacred heart the Catholics wear, post above their beds to bleed on their sleep. O mother, I’m tired, I can’t see the night without thinking of you, it turns to fire and bleeds on my dreams
Who’s this cool one who floats thru the house? Nothing is mine but my sleep. Who’s making a memory for me? And who is the woman who floats in my mind? I don’t know her; she’s me
She and I together. We never get a good night’s sleep. If only it was passion drove me, but not even that. Can’t give it to myself, can’t take it anywhere. Too far from all those secret and not so secret loves. Whose hand was it made me come and go so far out in space I never saw a way to go, and only came back like a particle pulled slowly by my gravity, reluctant to fall, leaping back up and sinking, flying and sinking, until my feet were on the ground and my hand on her heart?
I can remember with my head, but my soul can’t remember any more. There’s no distance longer than death, except this one
“Blue’s not seeing enough of the world,” said Kowalski.
“Most people don’t see much of the world,” said the grey man, but he regretted his automatic contradiction almost immediately. It was just that he was used to having to disagree with Ko, and not used to Ko saying anything brilliant. “What do you have in mind?”
“Why don’t we teach them to use the F
/X
latex?”
“The
Mission: Impossible
stuff?” said Lemieux, who was the oldest of them, and whose media references were often decades out of date. McKenzie was surprised.
“Yeah,” said Kowalski. “That stuff. All they need to do is face and hands. The eyes are blue, that’s okay, and people DNA their hair all the time, or do dye jobs. Then they can invite friends home without us worrying as much about security.”
Grey had to admit it was a good idea. “Sure, good call, Ko. We’ll send the make-up guys over there tomorrow to show ’em how.”
Through slow glass
Jakob’s new friend was a dance student who, according to the netlog, had watched
Night Through Slow Glass
(the final elongated title of the
VesperslSlow Glass
vid) more times than any other audience member. He had then sought Jakob out at the university building where Jakob taught an advanced course, and had clung to him like cat hair. Jakob invited him to join the household for supper, but coming into the house, he had to run a gauntlet of security personnel.
“Are we prisoners here?” Jakob demanded to the guards and to Morgan, who had been attracted by the shouting. Blue had come along with her, and watched with interest, quietly imitating the body postures of the various actors in the drama.
“No, we are not,” said Morgan. “Come in, Aziz, and we’ll sort this out. Blue, cut it out, that’s rude.”
Aziz was staring at Blue. “The pictures, they, the pictures just don’t give it,” he said. “Gramercy.”
“For what?” said Blue, and the youth looked at him blankly.
“It means ‘thank you for
grandes mercies’,”
said Blue helpfully.
“Not in street slang,” said Jakob. “There it’s a fancy version of ‘Mercy!’”
“But that’s wrong,” fretted Blue.
“Words transform, languages transmute,” said Morgan.
“Cool,” said Aziz blankly. “Where’s the whiz zone? I gotta, gotta go.”
Jakob rolled his eyes at Morgan. “Go on in, kid,” he said. “Bathroom is up and on the left. Then come on back down to the living room—over there.”
Aziz ran lightly up the stairs into the shadow of the upper hallway. Jakob turned to Morgan. “Yeah, I know, chile, but he’s pretty. What can I say?”
“Is he legal?”
“Far as I know.”
“Find out.”
“Yes, Mum. And we promise to have safer, safest, supersafe sex …”
At the old-fashioned term Morgan laughed. “Fine, but I’m serious. Busted we don’t need to be.”
“Honeychile, everything I do, and I mean
every thing
, is legal.”
Blue laughed. “I get it,” the alien said. “Every
thing.”
Morgan shook her head, grinning, and went back to her desk. There, feeling like a collaborator, she called the grey man to talk about visitor protocols.
“I thought I’d better come see you, since you weren’t getting back home … er, back to my place,” said Robyn. He looked around the living room uneasily. They sat like strangers there.
“The house is nice,” he said. “Show me around?” She took him through the main-floor public rooms, showed him the guest room behind the kitchen.
“Do you want to stay here?” she said, but he shook his head.
“Not that I wouldn’t want to, sis, but I’m in town for a reason. That’s what I want to talk about. And I’m staying there … oh, dammit, this is ridiculous.” He dived toward her and hugged her, so quickly that Marbl, on the kitchen counter illegally, crouched and hissed reflexively. “I’m getting married,” he said. “I’m staying with my fiancée’s grandparents. It’s a family reunion—I’m meeting the family. I’d really like you to come too. And I’d like you to come to the wedding, and be my witness. Like the best man, only not a guy, right?”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, really.”
She took him up to the third floor in the elevator. “These brass call buttons, they’re so cool,” he exclaimed. “This house is like a museum piece. I can’t believe that Mom never brought us here. Never told us about it.”
Jakob was out with Aziz, leaving the studio door open. “It used to be the gym for the school, I think,” Morgan said. They walked down one flight to find John’s door was shut with the Do Not Disturb sign up, and Russ was sleeping. Delany was in her room working when Morgan knocked.
“This is my brother Robyn,” Morgan said to Delany’s quizzical look.
“So,” said Delany. “You’re the one who knows all Morgan’s secrets!”
“Secrets! Tchaa!” said Morgan even as Robyn grinned and said, “For a price I’ll tell all!”
“What price?”
“Oh, cut it out,” said Morgan uncomfortably, but Robyn laughed aloud. “Dinner,” he said, “and an explanation of that painting you’re working on.”
“Oh, well, that’s easy,” replied Delany. “It’s my turn to cook, and the painting is about life, love, the universe, and everything. Now, it’s your turn. What was she like as a kid?”
“Smaller,” said Robyn.
“It’s a little complicated,” said Morgan. They had taken a walk down the park before dinner, despite the stormy weather, and as she tried to find words, she watched Robyn’s long hair whipping in the wind. It was the same lush dark sable as her own, and almost as long. Robyn was a stockbroker, and he was wearing “office drag,” but he’d loosed his hair with a sigh when he felt the wind, now faced into it and let his hair tangle. He seemed to be happy.
“What else is new?” said Robyn. “Your life is always complicated. But I’d like to know why there’s some kind of armed guardpost at the gate of the house you live in.”
“How polite of you not to mention it until now!” Morgan laughed.
“Not polite, just, I never did ask you questions. I realized it the other day. I hung around and hoped, but I was expecting you to read my mind. Like that’s a smart way of communicating.”
“I suppose it’s not impossible,” said Morgan, “but I never managed it. I should have been better at trying, though, or asking you what was going on. I’ve been feeling bad about that.”
“It looks to me like you’ve been feeling bad about a lot of things, sis,” and Robyn reached out his hand, such a familiar family-shaped hand, and stroked her brow where the two vertical worry lines were starting to appear chronic. “It’s been hard for you?”
“It’s been complicated. I’ve felt pretty … .”
“Come on, out with it. That’s what my therapist says.”
“Your therapist?”
“It’s a joke. I mean Twylla. She makes me talk about stuff. It’s amazing what I didn’t know I had to say.”
“I should have been better, that’s all. I feel guilty. I think about it every day. Should have helped you more, should have, oh, I don’t know, taught you to play the piano, should have told you things so you wouldn’t have to not ask …”
“The scary thing is I understood that! Listen to me, sis. I probably won’t say this very well, but you were just the sister I needed to have. All through school I ran with the boy pack, you remember that. It was stupid, but at the time it was bread and butter to me. They teased me if I hung out too much with my big sister. Called me a sissy. Now I know that isn’t an insult, but I didn’t then. If you’d been the kind of sister that wanted me to be with her all the time, it would have just hurt your feelings. I wanted to have secrets. That made you a good model. You had them so gracefully.”
Morgan looked at this familiar creature, her brother, and felt she had never seen him before. He put his arms around her, hugged her awkwardly. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks. It’s a start. But let’s not have so many secrets from now on, all right? We’re the only ones of our blood left. These families we enter, it’s not quite the same with them. Look,” and she spread her hand out beside Robyn’s. The shapes echoed, though Robyn’s was bigger. “We need to remember that.”
“First secret’s the hardest, I find,” said Robyn. “So tell me right away why you’re under guard. Is it a halfway house or something? Did these assholes finally pass a law you had to break out loud?”
She laughed. “Oh, little brother, you have no idea. Too bad I can’t just wait until dinner and let you see for yourself. No, I’m not under arrest. It’s just that someone lives in our house who needs constant bodyguarding. It’s—”
“No,” interrupted Robyn, “in that case, let’s go with plan A. Let’s wait and let me meet this celebrity unawares. See if I recognize him or her. That will be fun. It was finding out whether or not you were in some kinda subtle jail that wasn’t fun.”
“Sure,” said Morgan. “It
will
be fun, I think.”
And it was.
“I like your brother,” said Blue ingenuously.
“Yes, so do I,” said Morgan. “He liked you too, once he got over the shock.”
“Why was it a shock? Oh, of course, more people are not blue in color.”
“Also, most people come from somewhere on this planet.”
“Oh, right. I forget, sometimes, because
I
feel like I come from this planet too. It’s my life. So when someone tells me again that I don’t, it’s like … religion? Do you know what I mean? Like I was told where I came from and I have to take it on faith. So when people look at me oddly, I feel bad. Like they judge me for something I can’t help.”
Morgan’s laugh shocked Blue, and she hurried to say, “Oh, honey, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just that for the people in this house, the same thing has happened to all of us, for one reason or another. We’re from Earth too, Earth is all we know, and yet we’ve often been looked at like aliens.”
“What am I supposed to do to fix that?”
“Nothing. You can’t fix other people. You can only become the best person you can manage to be yourself. Other people have to fix themselves.”
Later, John turned on the TVid Talk Channel, and they saw an interviewer in the middle of an on-the-street poll about some civil rights issue.
“You see,” the woman on the TVid screen said, “you can’t trust their kind. It’s been proved: they’re all carrying the disease now.”
Morgan watched Blue turn away abruptly. She followed Blue into the kitchen. “What did you think of that?” she said.
“Is this a test?” Blue said grumpily.
“Hey, hey, what is it?”
“I don’t understand people like that.”
“You and me both.”
“Say again please?”
“You and me both.”
“It is idiom, yes? Means—well, that’s obvious. What does she tell lies for?”
“I don’t know,” said Morgan, suddenly tired. “Some people do. They seem to be able to convince themselves that their lies are true. And before you ask, I don’t know how they do that, either. You’ll have to look it up on the net.”
“Hey, you are unhappy about it too, about it too.” The alien was ingenuously pleased. Morgan, pleased that Blue understood enough to dislike the propagandist, smiled at the anxious blue face. “Yes, indeed. Don’t repeat yourself like that. That’s slang.”
That night, lying awake with Marbl draping and redraping across her in restless warm crisscrosses, Morgan realized suddenly that even in that relentless flash of insight which on the night before her parents’ funeral had struck her down with the appearance of an epiphany, she had left out an important part of the equation. She had taken full responsibility for all the damage ever done to herself and family, no matter what the true source. Even after allowing for the hyperbole of blame with which she had ruthlessly assigned fault to what she should have just categorized as the necessary humiliations of childhood and the inevitable omissions of humanity, there was more to it. There was more to the world than herself, than the four of them. There were billions of humans, untold billions of other organisms, all acting together, all interacting, all acting upon each other, some blindly and some with intent: processes, entities, organisms, natural laws, and the overriders: Chaos, Order, Entropy, and Information, galloping across the cosmos doing and undoing each other’s work. It was not all Morgan’s fault.
Amazingly, she managed not to recursively blame herself for blaming herself—
a step in the direction of self-nurturing, anyway
, she thought: the
universe is too big for blame.
But it was another irony.
God is an iron
, said the writer: against the impersonal processes of this infinite regression of chaoses, Morgan continued to place her stubborn belief in information.
And yet, she hadn’t known until this moment that she had such a belief at all.
She would go with Robyn to meet his new extended family, she thought, and she would try to love them too.
Morgan was half-joking when she suggested that Blue come with her, in the new pinkface, to the dinner with Robyn’s new in-laws. But Robyn thought it would be a grand joke, and Blue immediately went online and did three hours of reading on family reunions, etiquette of formal and informal meals, and even included a sideline of old prairie-realism short fiction dealing with family dynamics. Morgan was committed.
At the meeting where the household discussed the new rules, the Boy Wonder was understandably appalled.
“We will send surveillance,” said Mr. Grey. “It can’t happen any other way. We’ll be discreet, but nobody leaves on one of these trips without a chip.”
“But—”
“This isn’t a civil rights issue, it’s a safety issue,” the grey man interrupted Morgan. “How would you feel if Blue got disappeared? We know that other governments are watching this operation too—what if some of the more unscrupulous, Burma or England for instance, decided to nab our alien and compare progress the natural way?”