“I endeavor to give satisfaction,” he replied calmly.
“If there weren’t a baker’s dozen of them around the world, we’d have the religious nutters out in force, but the second coming of Jesus and Jesus and Jesus and so on
ad absurdum
isn’t to their taste. Besides, after the millennium passed without incident …”
“You’re a cynic, Mac.”
The grey man reflected that if a cynic is a discouraged idealist, his boss was right. “This is my job, Andris,” he said. “It’s the job I was born for. You know that.”
“Yes, McKenzie, I know that. How did you?”
The grey man just looked at him, and Andris’s dark square face softened. “Go for it, my friend. It’s yours as long as you want it.”
“There’s going to be opposition. I’m an old-fashioned cop, Andris. Too soft, they say. Too sissy. The hardnosers are going to be on my case, and that means on your case, from now on.”
“Tell me something I
don’t
know.”
“Well, for one thing, the alien does a perfect imitation of your voice.”
“I heard it.”
“And the alien has skipped out and taken refuge with its child care worker.”
“I heard that too.”
“Who is a bisexual who lives in a house with a gay man, a crippled socialist, a radico-pop video artist who used to work for us as a technician, and … a web-crawling civil servant with a social conscience. A scurrilous line-up, all in all, according to our current democratically elected demagogues—by which I mean of course that we have a file on most of them. What happens when those files get leaked?”
“Deal with it. As for the files, I’ve read ’em. I like her already.”
“Who?”
“The child care worker.”
“Yes?” The grey man cocked his head in query.
“She has spirit. Did you see the stuff from back in the oh-ohs when she was doing the fieldwork at college? Very creative. Well, they’re all yours. Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.”
“I thought you were from Manitoba.”
“I took folklore in university. It was my minor.”
“That’s blackmail material, Andris.”
Laughing, Andris shooed him toward the door with a languid hand. “Keep the alien physically safe. Leave the rest up to God.”
“You believe in God, sir?”
“Church every Sunday. It’s required, at my rank.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“And I’m not going to. You have me on your side, Mac. You don’t have to worry about God—yet.”
The last word hung in the air. Grinning, Andris closed the door behind him, and the grey man stood alone in the corridor’s grim fluorescence, the smile fading from his mobile face.
A touch of arthritis
The grey man found Morgan in the kitchen, sitting at the antique Formica table with her hands wrapped around a glass of tea in a Russian holder. Green tea,
genmaicha,
he thought: high in caffeine.
She looked very small and tired sitting there, and his glance at the walls was involuntary.
“Come, we’re going for a walk,” he said. As if they couldn’t be heard out in the open. But there, at least, he could wave away the watchdogs with their portable microphones.
“Come, we’re going for a walk,” the grey man said, and Morgan looked up in surprise at the tone of his voice to see him watching her with a gentle expression she couldn’t fathom: concern? Affection? She didn’t want to guess, didn’t want to let her guard down enough. Days like today were bad enough without anyone’s concern interfering—especially this Mr. Grey with his power to steal Blue away to prison in the Atrium if she fucked up.
She got up wearily and found her sunhat.
Fine
, she thought.
We will walk.
The house was at the end of a thin spit of city thrusting out between the riverbank in front, and, behind, a ravine down which a creek had flowed heavily in spring and then dried to a trickle in midsummer. The spit ended with a long triangle of mowed grass and pruned trees on the tableland, which, at the ravine’s steep edge, rapidly gave way to a tangle of undisciplined native undergrowth, including berry bushes on the sunny slope and willows in the creek bed. Usually she walked in the sunny, grassy park, and the cats would walk with her—Dundee and Seville bounding back and forth in the sun, and Marbl cautiously ten feet behind and keeping to the valley edge where the bushes and grasses grew high enough to hide her if she wanted to retreat.
Today, however, the grey man went out the back door and across the yard past the surveillance shack. He gestured to Morgan to wait while he leaned into the shack. She heard a low rumble of talk from the two shadowy figures on duty, then heard him saying in a tone very different to that he had used in the house, “I
said,
leave us alone!” and pause. As he came out he was nodding his head. She reflected on the easy way he slid in and out of his authority. He was young for the power he had: most of the others she’d met in the Atrium were bald (or what hair they had left was thin and silver, unlike Mr. Grey’s vigorous brush cut of premature grey) and paunchy and probably ten years older than him, but he ranked them all.
“We will go down,” he said. “If they get too curious about what I want privacy for, the trees will run interference. As long as we keep moving.” He chuckled. She followed him through the wrought-iron gate, across the road at the back of the lot, and into the woods. Thinking of Sondheim, she chuckled too.
“What?” said Mr. Grey, and she sang,
“Into the woods … .”
He laughed too. “Yes, it is a perfect example. And there
are
giants in the sky, now.
Great tall terrible giants in the sky …”
Morgan looked up at the cloudless summer sky, felt the heat on her face. Last time she had climbed down into the wild valley, she had walked around the point and come out on the bicycle path, where she surprised a doe and her dappled fawns. She had watched them leap away across the meadow toward the river and had resolved with her desperate heart to try to find joy where the days offered it.
Today, that resolution was as far away for her, as unreachable, as her parents and her past life.
In the ravine, the trees and bushes first leopard-spotted them with shade then completely sheltered them from sunlight, and the temperature dropped until, on the footpath beside the creek bed, they stopped in cool, damp shade, and the grey man stood and leaned against a birch tree, his thumb—reflexively it seemed—stroking a feather of bark curled up along the trunk. Morgan stepped up beside him. What was left of the stream gurgled across a small fall of rocks, and he was watching the gentle eddies in the water. His voice when he finally spoke seemed as soft as the water.
“How long have you felt like this?”
“Say what?” said Morgan, recoiling.
“How long have you been so … empty? So … depressed?”
“None of your business how I feel.” Sounding as sulky as a child, and she knew it, she clamped her teeth together angrily.
“I brought you down here so that we could have a private conversation,” he said. “My team has been complaining to me of the security and surveillance problems this ravine poses.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
“So tell me.”
“Or you’ll what? Take Blue away?”
He laughed out loud. She looked at him in shock.
“I’m sure you’re familiar,” he said slowly, “with the concept of bureaucratic face.” He waited for her to nod: she hated that kind of storytelling, and it made her feel even more as if there were grit between her teeth. “Well, suffice it to say that if I were to ever move Blue from your home, at any time, for any reason, and no matter what I say up there to the microphones, I would lose so much ground that I may as well retire on the spot and open a convenience store. So you can relax.”
She bristled. “You’re saying any one of us could be completely psychotic and you would still have painted yourself into a corner? And Blue too?”
“You could be completely psychotic. I haven’t staked my career and my well-being for the rest of my life on the others. Just you. Now answer me. How long have you been this depressed?”
She shrugged. “Since I came here, I guess.”
“Your parents’ deaths? The split with Vik? That child’s death? Politics?”
She smiled wryly. “Goodness, I have no secrets from you, sirrah.” But she widened her smile a little to show him that she was joking. He nodded impatiently, gestured to the dim path, and they began to walk. A group of aging joggers rounded the bend ahead of them and Morgan and Mr. Grey stepped off the path onto the spongy, mossy needlefall from the evergreens. She shook her head.
“I was going to find a doctor one of these days. When I had the energy. But now, I can’t. The people in those meetings would …”
“Yes, I appreciate the problem.” He gestured at the woods above them and she took his meaning. “But still,” he went on, “you can’t go on like this.”
“A secure doctor, at the Atrium?”
“There are no secure doctors. I think you are going to develop a greater interest in health food stores.”
“What?”
“And a touch of arthritis. Yes, how about a touch of arthritis? Can’t you feel it coming on now?”
“What?”
“There’s a good herbal remedy for depression, and it’s also an anti-inflammatory. It works for arthritis too. I took it when my wife died, for about two years, and when I quit my back started bothering me again. So I started taking it again for that. No, don’t bother with the health food stores. I’ll bring it to you myself. It’s already established that I buy it.”
She laughed despite herself. “Doctor Grey, aren’t you taking a terrible risk prescribing after such a short examination? And no talk therapy?”
“Talk to Blue. That’ll be therapy enough. And at the moment, Blue’s sojourn depends on everything staying very very stable. Including you. If this helps, fine. You’ll know in a few weeks. If it doesn’t, we’ll take the risk of exposing you to the medical profession.”
“Don’t you trust doctors, sirrah?”
“I trust four—maybe five—people in the world. At the moment. One of them is myself.”
I shouldn’t ask this
, thought Morgan. “And the others?”
“My daughter. My boss. The alien.”
The alien? “The alien?”
“Yes.”
“And the fifth?” she said, when it became obvious that he was going to say no more about Blue.
“You,” he said shortly, and walked on.
They climbed out of the valley at the end of the park and walked back through the frolicking families and the teenagers’ soccer game. Mr. Grey stopped the soccer ball from caroming off the edge of the flat area into the bush, and kicked it expertly back into the game. The teenagers yelled something and he laughed.
“What did they say?” said Morgan.
“‘Not bad for an old man’, approximately,” said the grey man, but he was smiling. “I played soccer when I was a kid. We went to the nationals, one year. Now, we have been arguing all this time about the technicians coming in to install and maintain the hardware for Blue’s information network. I’m sorry, I agree with many of your points, but nevertheless they have to come into the house. Think of them as being like carpet cleaners.”
“I don’t have carpets because of the wheelchair,” said Morgan automatically. Technicians? He had forestalled her very nicely: she
couldn’t
argue, now that their argument was their cover story. She glared at him and he laughed.
“I’m sorry,
Madelle,”
he said, and bowed. “I do what I must.” He swept his arm out gracefully in the dramatic d’Artagnan manner. “Please tell your people that I am not their enemy. I will make sure the technicians are not obtrusive.”
“And that they install no more little eyes in the bathrooms.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, as if she had wrung a concession from him, and she grinned. Behind her grin a thought trickled in:
he is too good at lying. How many lies did he tell me in the woods?
Later that day, Blue said to her, “There are only two people here who tell the truth all the time. You and that man who visits.”
She looked at the alien measuringly. “You can tell when people are telling the truth?”
“Yes. Well, I think so. You do not tell all you think, but when you speak, you don’t lie. I have read about polygraph—maybe I have polygraph perceptions.”
“Cute phrase.” Marbl shifted in Morgan’s lap and settled herself by hooking a claw into Morgan’s knee through the fabric of her sarong. “Ow! And what about cats? Can you tell if they are truthful? For instance, this purring. What does it mean? Is she just pretending to like me?”
“She thinks you are her kitten, and she grooms you and worries about your safety when you go out of the house. That is why she walks with you, although she hates being outside her territory .”
Blue stood up between her and the window, and Morgan looked up at the looming figure looking suddenly dark and large. Could Blue really read thoughts? “How much do you read—take in, learn, I mean—from the world?”
“As much as I can,” said Blue. “Just like you.”
The next few days, the technicians descended quietly, like silverfish, and began to bring Blue’s third-floor bedroom into the twenty-first century. The side advantage was the new house system they installed, with new terminals for everyone; Morgan saw the grey man’s fine hand in this gift. The others were ecstatic about the new tech, far better than any of them could afford. Blue, who had never had to buy anything, hovered impatiently, waiting for a hot terminal. When the system was finally at temperature, the alien dived in like a swimmer; Morgan meanwhile began to take the St.-John’s-Wort tablets that Mr. Grey left in the bathroom on his next visit, and though she did not feel better, she had something to do. Blue must have an education in the world.
I am totally in the dark about what goes on behind those dark eyes. If that is where Blue’s thinking goes on. Yesterday after watching the videotape all night and half of the morning, that one comes out of the room to where I’m doing dishes, says:
Maybe you should call me Klaatu.
No, I said before thinking, not that!
Of course, it’s a golden oldie. Why do you think I got it for you?
With the power of life and death over the earth? Do you have the power of life and death over the earth?
Oh, of course. don’t you have it also?
Looking very innocent. I was terrified for a moment there, this exchange-student masquerade wasn’t gonna work any more. So I said, okay, Klaatu, what’s the plan? And do you sail away in your saucer at the end of it with your Michael Rennie smile?
So I said, of course I am, of course, I’m stuck with saving the world, haven’t you read enough of that pulp bullshit by now? I think that was when I started crying, with the tears dripping off my chin, up to my elbows in dishwater and suds and trying to wipe my face on my sleeve, and I suppose with a red nose and blotchy face as usual, damn, not gonna save the world this way.
And blue hands wiping off my face with the dishtowel, smoothing out my skin, until I shivered and trembled and was even more terrified and thinking what the hell am I worrying for, this one is so fucking dangerous and has us all in the palm of one hand, always has had.
And then Blue starts drying the fucking dishes, of all things, saying, what is this for? Why do you have these in so many different sizes? And what do you do with this?
And I explained, explained, and that was Tuesday.