“What?” Russ said.
“Lots of stuff. Life is absurd. When I was a kid, we all used to do dishes together; the whole family in the kitchen singing and laughing. Mostly. There was some snarling and fighting, but mostly it was a good time. Now here I am. Wondering if this houseful of weirdos can really be a new, self-made family. Does it ever occur to you?”
“No. I’m not looking for a family. Too much angst. It’s better here.”
“What do you mean? Jakob turns out to be a registered addict, Delany’s fighting with muscular dystrophy and bureaucracy, John changes his vid production schedule twice a week and agonizes about it-aren’t those angst? Or me, for that matter, mooning around the place?”
“Or me,” said Blue brightly. “I’m an alien, you know!” Morgan couldn’t decide whether to grin or glare, settled for simply putting her finger across her lips to shush Blue: she didn’t want Russ’s unexpected loquaciousness to be interrupted.
“No. It doesn’t bother me like a family would. You know I grew up with my grandparents after my folks were killed. They were all right, but old, and I felt like I was always too noisy and—just too active. Then when they died I went to live with my uncle and aunt. There was always that sense of duty, that feeling that I had to try hard just to earn my right to be there. And the criticism, and the—I don’t know. When I left at sixteen I swore I’d never live with anyone again.”
Half of this was new to Morgan, but she questioned carefully in case he closed up again. “And did you? Before here, I mean.”
“Oh, yes, when I got married.”
“Married?” This was the first time in the two years she had known Russ that he had given her a hint of this.
“Oh, yes, I was married for seven years. We had a kid, a girl.”
“Where are they now? Do you still see your child?”
“I don’t know where my wife is. I don’t hear from her. Except for the divorce. I got a notice of that. My little girl is dead.”
“Dead? How hard that must have been, after being divorced.”
“No, the other way around. We were together when she died. She died of leukemia when she was five. Things weren’t too bad for us then, but when my wife got pregnant again, she didn’t want the child. She got an abortion and left. I wanted another kid. I guess we were both wrong.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was wrong to pressure her to get pregnant again, to have another one so soon, and she was wrong to think I would understand her grief.”
“Oh, Russ, I’m so sorry.”
“That’s the way it goes. It was a mistake to get too involved. I thought it might turn out that way but I wanted to believe different.”
“But aren’t you glad you had the good times?”
“It doesn’t matter any more. That was a long time ago. Almost ten years.”
“And since then?”
“I keep myself clear.”
“What about us, here, in the house?”
“It’s not that I don’t care about the people here. But I could leave any time. That’s why I like it.”
“And will you?”
“I think so. Eventually. I’d like to go to Sri Lanka or India, do some studying there. At least see Benares.”
Morgan couldn’t resist. “We’ll miss you,” she said sententiously.
He looked at her suspiciously, but she hadn’t been able to avoid grinning.
“I’ll write,” he said, and they were both laughing, a soapy hand and a tea-towel-entangled hand intertwined for a moment. Then he began to bellow a Maritime sea chanty, and she joined in. Jakob, coming into the kitchen with a handful of dirty cups, took a wild dance around the room. Blue, holding up a Tupperware orange peeler, said, “What is this for?” Morgan thought, background to hilarity,
Everything he ever loved has left him. Everyone. How could one be that empty?
Except that she was too. Only she now knew that for some reason she believed in the future, stayed out on a limb. She felt that faith rising up from some diaphragmatic recess she had not known was there until her visceral reaction to—against—the way Russ had chosen, the other road, the road of closure. Damn. She might have to belong after all. Harsh.
The kitchen was full of the awkward family she had made for herself, Delany wheeling in with a lapful of plates, John holding up his camera for a quick shot; and in the door was Blue, smiling. Across the melee those dark eyes met Morgan’s.
This is ordinary life
, she thought with a shock,
with an extraterrestrial in it.
The thought arrested her motion, her voice for a moment. Her first memory of vid was when her family followed the progress of the
Voyagers
and
Pathfinder
; lately she had watched the image transmission of the first human step onto the Martian surface; and now this. There was a satellite moving across the sky this minute, she knew. She felt its sensor beam sweep over her, she felt those TV pictures coming in on ultra high frequency. The alien’s gaze was steady. Blue. To call someone a name makes them part of the world, she thought, recovered the verse of the song, and sang.
Morgan was seated in the living room thinking, as usual. The light was dim around her and she was looking out into the brilliant dining-room light, where John had his vidcam trained on the art lesson Delany was giving Blue. Morgan was wondering about the art lesson, the alien brain and its hemispheres, the whole idea of taking a picture of Earth and sending the film out to space to be developed. Blue was a photographic plate of a holographic and multiplex design.
What does that make me?
Morgan wondered. She drifted in and out of sleep, hearing the voices in waves alternating with waves of strange ephemeral dreams.
Morgan awakening to darkness, that blue body imposed like an afterburn on her retinas, imposed on the blackness, fading, until gradually she saw the dim outline, the door, the window frame, and the dream was only that, a dream of those hands reaching for her face, reaching with longing and menace and love, until she could do nothing through her terror but move toward them, into their orbit, through the sphere of their influence, until they touched.
And the voice came to her in the darkness, clearly, as she sat up among the sheets, saying,
you believe me now. You know me.
Marbl leapt back onto the bed, kneaded the covers, rolled her underbelly to Morgan’s cold hand, purring, until Morgan’s heart slowed and her breath came calmly again, stroking Marbl, and Morgan could think,
it’s the afterglow of the dream;
and then the voice said clearly, so that Marbl started up and leapt away:
You can do so much for me, to complete me, but you turn away. I am afraid to dream among you fragile people.
Then the night was shattered, and Morgan rocked in the chair until daybreak.
Simpler as an alien
There were three men come from the west …
When he was as tired as this, he found listening to the old Steeleye Span recordings comforting. They reminded him of a time he thought of as before his public existence. His childhood, listening to his mother play her favorite records. When he was not a cop, not a security-service cop, and especially not a guardian of aliens.
“Dad. Dad!” His daughter Salomé, in a hurry as always. She grinned at him. “In your armchair again? It’s getting to be a nest. Do you know where the kidvids are?” She meant the videos he’d taken of her as a child.
“In kidvid heaven. I don’t know. Aren’t they on the shelf in the den?”
Which they were, but it gave her a chance to hug him.
“Do you know a guy called John Dee or Lee? A video artist?” he asked the wind.
“There’s a video pretender called John Lee. He never releases anything. Well, he did the Doctor Dee tapes a while ago. Yeah, must be him then, he’s in the Downtown Video Co-op. Why?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you.”
“Da-ad. This is me, right?”
“He worked for us, in the Atrium, for a while. And he lives in that house.”
“With the Blue guy?”
“With the Blue guy and the Morgan guy. But they both took the oath”—he meant of confidentiality—“and he at least seems to have taken it to heart, so Morgan doesn’t even know they were on opposite sides of the mirrors. But until Blue took flight,
we
didn’t know he boarded with her.”
“With like
with
, or just with?”
“Just with. She doesn’t have any ‘with’ like
with
.”
“Poor being.”
“No, she isn’t. She seems completely self-contained.”
“Like you. You
seem
completely self-contained …”
“And I’m not?”
“What would you do if I were kidnapped? Killed? Would you mind?”
He looked at her. She said, “Well, then, you aren’t self-contained. What is it about this John Dee? Do you want me to ask around about him?”
“John Lee.
Dee
seems to be an a.k.a. for the videos. Neo-Elizabethan or something. Ask carefully. People know you’re my daughter. I don’t want any attention placed. It’s just that he seems too squeaky-clean. All the others …”
“Are heinous criminals, I know.”
“No. Not one of them has a criminal record yet, though between them they’ve run the gamut from demonstrations and activism to sexual variations and drugs. Oh, yeah, and ten years ago one of them had a couple of noise complaints, domestic disputes, but officers on-scene found no sign of violence. But that’s it. Okay, if the legislature gets its way next month, half of them could be charged. And it’s true they all have CSIS files. Watching briefs. Except this guy. He has a security clearance, squeaky-clean, but no data. It doesn’t make sense. Where did he come from? Why her place, or was it co-incidence? And why does he want to live there if he isn’t a social outlaw?”
“Social Outlaws. A new band. Catchy name. Very retro.”
“The most mainstream one works on government vid. Makes net sites, video and virch. Government department rah-rah propaganda, mostly. But he has been to Indonesia, and Burma, and Hong Kong, making vid of Amnesty International and
Médecins Sans Frontieres.
Smuggling memory back in hollow carvings, the whole thing. Russ Marks, heard of him?”
“Yeah. Powerful stuff. Well-shot, well-edited. Realworld, realtime. No artistic gloss, though.”
“I suppose it’s counterindicated, given the purpose.”
“Yeah, but—if you have it in your bones, you have it.”
“Then there’s a dancer. Jakob Ngogaba. He does video dance installations and performances.”
“Yeah, very old-fashioned. I know the stuff. The video is old-fashioned, anyway. Point-of-view stuff. Documentary, really,” she said dismissively.
“But skillful?”
“Oh, I suppose, in a technical way. But it’s the dance that
means,
for that guy. He’s a fabulous dancer. He should quit fooling around with video though. Full-motion net is so
old
. Even virch would be better.”
“Apparently he thinks virtual reality is too elitist.”
“Feh.”
“What about this Delany Johns? She does video too.”
“Flat artist,” said Salomé.
He laughed. “You make it sound like the last word in irrelevant!”
“Well, it is, kinda. I mean, nice color activation, and that, but to doc it she uses one camera and solarizes a couple of highlights, if you can imagine.”
“Imagine that!”
Salomé laughed. “Snobbery, I guess, eh?” She sprawled on the old, battered black leather couch and he settled back into the armchair, his leg up over the arm and his head against the wing of the back.
“Well, I detected a tiny tad of condescension … .”
“Do you talk to Kowalski this way?”
“I don’t talk to any of them this way, any more. If I ever did. Are you queer?”
“Dad!”
“Well?”
“I don’t think so. Not so far. Maybe. I am making a women’s sex virch and all the people in it are women.”
“Are you in it?”
“Nah. It’s a commission. For a bunch of the dykes at Womoncentre. People your age who still think queer kids need sex education too.”
“And you don’t think so?”
“Yeah, I think so. It’s worse now, with the government the way it is. But it’s different than it was in your day. Kids don’t shave their heads and get body piercings any more. They don’t get into that leather scene the way you guys did. Why can’t they see that?”
“I beg to differ. I was never ‘into that leather scene’.”
“Oh, Daddy, you know what I mean. Your
generation.”
“There were a lot of prudes in my generation too,” he said, not allowing his grin to show.
“Daddy, quit being deliberately obtuse. People like you grew up in the era of questions. People like me are stuck in the era of answers. Sometimes it’s crazy, like with the government. Who ever thought we’d need
samizdat in Canada?
But sometimes it’s fine. I don’t have to get tugged around by a ring in my nipple to prove I’m sexually hip.”
“Hip? My dear, your timeslip is showing.
We
didn’t even say ‘hip’. My
generation.”
“Oh, yes you did. I have Mom’s diaries, remember?” Seeing his face change, though he would have sworn he hadn’t moved a muscle, she said, “Oh, Dad, I’m sorry. Do you still … well, I guess you do.”
“Miss her? Yes. Pine over her? No.”
“Then how come you never found …”
“Nobody was interesting.”
“Nobody?”
“Daughter, you know where I work. You’ve seen Flora, who used to be Fred, and was ultra-conservative then too, about everything else besides gender reassignment. You’ve seen Kowalski in
both
of his blue suits. Do you think I should be tempted?”
“Daddy! Are
you
queer?”
“Oh, dear. Don’t you think it has gone beyond that by now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Beyond queer, except as a political stance or issue. Beyond Men and Women, Fags and Dykes, Homos and Heteros. I know”—he held up a hand like a TV pedant—“that the political scene has revived all that. But don’t you think more people are managing to get beyond that?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, that old gender thing again. Daddy, face it. You guys are losing. The conservatives are winning. Something in the human race
demands
categories, and theirs are winning. You are never going to get a chance to live like you want.”
“Never? You sure?” he mocked her.
“Daddy, don’t you condescend now. You are nursing a fantasy.”
“Daughter, don’t you condescend back. I have managed to stay alive, have sex, have you, get promotions, and get assigned to the alien. I am not living in a dream world.”
“Oh, Daddy, you are too. We all are. We dream we make a difference. Do you think I believe that? I don’t. I believe that I am doomed to dance the dance, just like a termite, but I do think
how
I dance doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. Babies still die.” Her face was shadowed for a moment as she looked down, swallowed.
“Babies always died,” he said roughly. “One of ours. One of yours. One of that guy’s in their house. Childbirth. Stillbirth. Meningitis. Leukemia. Starvation. Thirst. What the hell does that have to do with the price of fish in Newfoundland?” He was surprised to hear his father’s idiom, his father’s voice, in his own.
Salomé was not angry though. She laughed. “Daddy, you do so have a heart. Stop acting!”
“I can’t,” he said. “If I do, they’ll get to me, and I’ll lose the alien. And that, my Salomé, would be a tragedy. Because sometimes my slight bulk is all that stands in the way of a raid on that place, and in some of their scenarios, they don’t mind if the alien gets in the way.”
“Why did you name me after someone who demanded a prophet’s head on a platter?” She had often asked this, and he had always said, “Your mother named you. How could I say no?” This time, he didn’t say that.
“Because you were small, defenseless,” he said, “and I wanted you to be fierce. I wanted you to be able to look at death and life and sacrifice and not blink or flinch. I wanted you to be able to ask for what you want, and get it. Your mother—Sam—just thought it sounded nice. She wasn’t a Christian, after all. She didn’t care. She liked the sound. I chose that name and she chose the family name. Hester, after her grandmother, such a contrast. I could have chosen a safer name than Salomé. But I didn’t. I wanted you to crave the taste of blood.”
She got up, came over, hugged him again. “Daddy, blood’s a biohazard.”
“Daughter, life’s a biohazard.”
Morgan dreams her father falls in a snowbank. He is covered in snow, and he is not wearing a coat. She runs to help him, but he falls deeper and deeper, his face turning into the snow.
It’s pretty obvious what
that’s
about, she thinks, even in the dream. Still, she woke unsettled: another day of plodding ahead.
The obvious still has to be lived through.
“I’ve been expecting visits from the secret police for a long time, but not about this,” Morgan said, pouring the tea.
“About your lifestyle, to use the polite term, or about the customs business?” The grey man liked the fussy business of teacups and spoon-in-saucer, she could see that.
“So I
am
on some kind of a list. I was wondering about all the mail from the U.S.”
“Oh, yes, you are. Several. And there are some interesting photographs of you in the demonstrations.”
“Demonstrations? That was years ago! Long before I started writing letters.”
“You underestimate how long the preparations for this were going on.”
“This?”
“The revolution of the haves against the have-nots.”
“Ah, someone had a plan then. I didn’t know.” She laughed, and after a moment the grey man laughed also.
“Of course they had a plan. You are very innocent despite all this, aren’t you?”
“Smart-ass. More tea?”
“Is that all you ever drink?”
“Lemon? Sugar and cream?”
“No, I meant something stronger.”
“Something … oh, booze. No, I don’t drink. Don’t think to keep the stuff. Let’s see”—opening cupboard doors—“one of the others might have something …”
“I wasn’t asking for it. I just find it hard to believe you could get to your age and not have any of the usual vices.”
“Drink’s boring. I’ve seen too many people throw up. Then at our age, they forget they used to think it was for fun, and start drinking themselves to death. Boring and stupid. Same as the rest of it. Most of the time I’m glad I didn’t get a taste for any of it.”
“Most of the time?”
“Well, I have had the occasional desire to lose myself in dissipation and despair. But I had to settle for despair straight up.”
The grey man stood up suddenly, turned on the radio, and began to rinse his cup at the sink. “How stupid you are!” he said, vehement but quiet against the background noise. “Such a limited vision.”
“And you can see clearly?” Morgan asked, surprised but calm.
“More clearly than you. Think. Think what is going to happen to you when your alien goes away. Your freedom hangs by a thread.”
“A grey thread?”
“Yes, and not a reliable one. I could go either way. I could decide to save my own ass instead of yours. It’s one or the other, right now.”