“Why are you crying?” she said, as her arms went around the shaking body automatically.
“You taught me how,” said Blue. At the words, with sudden tectonic upheaval Morgan was weeping too, great wrenching sobs convulsing her small body. For her father, for her mother, for Jakob, for cats, for strangers like Sal, for those left alive, for all human losses small and great, and for the loss of Blue which would come too soon. She had a lot to catch up with. Blue’s hand stroked her hair and a thumb wiped away the tears wilding across her face. With the touch she found a multiplicity of trust which focused the last months into a brilliance having nothing to do with the flaring, guttering candles.
It is time to wake up, and to dream.
There was no design in her motion as she pulled both Blue’s hands against her face, seeing the color of them shining in the air in the candlelight as the long fingers moved toward her face, feeling the jolt of total body response as they touched, feeling then the flood of total contact, the blue presence suffusing her and she flowing out until there was a unity and an understanding that fulfilled the taste she had had of it in dreams. None of the fear that came with the dream of Jakob’s murder lingered; none of the fear of the unknown remained, only the necessity to comfort and calm each other. In the seeking out of confusion the ways were straightened, so that somewhere in it one of their voices said, “Oh, is that who it is?” and the wave of shocked sadness flashed after, like the flash of lightning that cut through the heavy air outside. The thunder of the cloudburst, the wanton fall of water, was background to the waves of consciousness that met and mingled with the ferocity and beauty of the storm, as above the ocean Morgan had seldom seen. Through it her spirit stumbled and leapt with Blue to more insights than she had time to notice: the first forgiveness she recognized must be for herself.
She remembered the orgy of blame after her parents died. She had thought of that cold hard excoriation as truth and light: now she knew how dark it had really been. She remembered Daniel Webster’s truism that the Devil’s best work is to convince people that he doesn’t exist, but she now realized that she had followed rather Dostoyevsky and Browne: without believing in an external evil force she had fallen prey to internal devils of despair and doubt which had come to her clothed in false righteousness, and created a devil in her own image, which dwelt within her own heart, poisoning the clean clear music of life.
She now stood bathed in a real and kindly light, and saw herself unbroken for the first time in her life. She now understood that her intuition had been better than her intellect, knew with certainty that love has more information to offer than does any other force—and that she was no more responsible than any other organism for the nature of life. She was no more, no less than an ordinary human, after all. It was not about perfection or lack of perfection, it was not about success or failure. She loved then and now she loved as well as she could. Things happen. Shit happens. People leave you. People die.
But. But … information accretes around a life like sugar around a button dangled in a glass of supersaturated sugar-water. Life crystallizes around intentions: good, evil, loving, curious intentions: nightmares and dreams. That sea of dreams becomes a new and universal ocean, aliens meeting in amniotic accord; what birth, now? And what new consciousness to emerge?
Only our own, thought someone, simply.
Then again they turned together and it was not just a dreaming and a sharing of thought—it was a needing, a cry for touch, and for the commitment of passion, minds and bodies tuned for dreaming, to love someone, transcending the names: they had celebrated mind, now bodies heard the music, and rose to a tangled, sweaty, ecstatic dance.
Morgan had always marveled, sometimes darkly, at that terrible paradox of mortality and consciousness, how the first contradicts and yet creates the other—and to date all her efforts to love well and to make love well had been in an attempt to trascend that paradox. Now, for the first time, she felt her body, her mind and her spirit—yes, she is willing to say her soul also—unite for one brief moment of Zen unconsciousness,
satori,
one moment when she understood
one and not one
,
difficult and not difficult, mortal and immortal
and all the other twinned and inseparable contradictions—and from which clear awareness she returned as soon as she noticed it, of course, bumping down into the physical and self-conscious with a laugh, to relax on the bed with the last shudder of climax relaxing into hot, languid, oceanic quiet—
—and with a blue hand on her hip, and Blue’s breath caressing her shoulder, Morgan lay at last inside the dreams, thinking:
That it should have come to this: in so short a measure, not even two years, from empty to full, from alien to human, a paradigm of earth.
Which of us do I mean?
Both of us.
Like a work of art, completed. Perhaps not finished, no art is ever finished, but ready for the gallery. The gallery was far away, and the show was going to open far too soon. She snorted at the conceit. For some reason, perhaps only post-ecstatic well-being, this awareness of limited time did not give her the same dread it had earlier. She drifted back into the blue sleep.
“Shit,” said the grey man. “Where are they?”
“She’s in the house now, sleeping. Blue is with her. They’ve been …” Jeffrey Bryant turned to pull up the auto-transcripts.
“Who gives a fuck what they’re doing?” Mac said curtly. “Where the hell is
he?”
“Daddy, your
language!”
said Salomé, and her shock might even have been real.
Jeffrey punched up chip locations. “Well, his chip is in his room. Let’s see if he is. He seems to be … fuck me, man, he’s in our ice! He’s reading the logs!” Jeffrey and Salomé leapt to their hot terminals.
“I have to get over there!” Mac said.
“Daddy!” said Salomé urgently. He stopped at the door.
“Be careful! He’s—”
“Yeah, I know. But
she’s
there.”
“With the Blue guy,” Salomé reminded him
“Yeah, with Blue. Call Andris. He’ll need to take charge here. Call Ko. Get Ace over there with the hot key team. And get that little fucker the hell out of our system!”
Later, Salomé would remember that “
she
”, but right now she and Jeffrey were too busy. Mac, running down the corridor, saw a familiar face, said, “You, come with me, I need backup.” She turned without question, followed him, and they ran for the parkade stairs. The strobing alarm started in Mac’s earpiece as they reached his car. He passed Andris on the ramps of the parkade, both of them driving like maniacs in opposite directions.
When Morgan woke again the night’s candles really had burnt out, not just a quotation, and her bedroom was dark for all that the sky was lightening in the northeast—but streetlight backwash glinted rhythmically from the slowly spinning stained-glass circle which looked like black water, and coaxed lowlights from Blue’s raven hair and glistening eyes. Morgan lay for a moment silenced by beauty. Like Rilke in the museum, she had perceived in one moment, many months ago, that she had to change her life, and now she revisited the stab of fear that had choked her the first time she saw the alien. Then, she had not understood what was needed, and feared the commitment: now, she was overwhelmed with love, down in the flood.
There is nothing that does not see you.
She got up to go to Blue and in the yellowish, dim artificial skylight, she saw that it was tears that set the light afire in those eyes.
“Ah, my beauty,” she said, “don’t cry. You’ll break my heart.”
“Your heart is broken already,” said Blue, “and now you taught me how to break mine.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I have to go back,” said Blue, “and you taught me love. I don’t know if I can go, now. I don’t know how I’ll bear it. I don’t know how to be this … paragon of Earth any more. It’s all a lie.”
“I’ve never seen you like this,” said Morgan, stupidly she felt, but Blue held her hands harder.
“No,” said Blue, “because I just became like this. I just became an understanding of this. I have to leave you, and it is all for nothing.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
With a minuscule tilt of the head, Blue turned on the light. Morgan’s shocked irises strobed the familiar room first into the stuff of dream, then back out to normalcy. In the familiar glare, Blue’s expression looked desperate.
“Listen,” said Blue. “You know why I am here. To be filled with Earth, taken home, emptied, understood. It seems logical, right?”
“It has always seemed to me to be perverse and diabolical,” said Morgan, “arrogant, rude, and exploitive. But on some level it is logical, I suppose.”
“You have never said this.”
“How could I say this? It would be like telling you your life was for nothing. And I couldn’t do that. I love you.”
“Logical. Hold on to logical for me, please.”
“Okay, logical, I’ll hold that for a moment.”
“But think,” said Blue. “Think what logic is in it. What we learned today, which shocked me so much—you didn’t listen to the physicists, did you? Or the science fiction writers?”
“No, I was in the other room with the cute babes.” Morgan’s joke was just a thread.
“With the cute babes. I wish I had stayed there. I wish I had remained a babe. In the other room, they said this. They sat and said this, and they had no idea what they were saying to me. They said:
mathematics is not a universal language, it is a local grammar. A mathematician from Earth and an alien mathematician could spend their lives trying to even recognize that what they were trying to talk with each other about was mathematics. They have to build a symbology that has an agreed-upon grammar.”
Morgan saw it immediately. “So the ones who made you will not understand you any better than they would have understood us if they had done this directly. They have made a mistake.”
“And they have made it with my life. Our lives. Or say it rather that they have given us life and now they are taking it back to themselves for nothing. They wanted a Rosetta Stone, but you can’t make a Rosetta Stone if you only know one language. The stone helps others understand what you already know. It isn’t written so you can learn, because it can only be made to record what you already know. The correspondences you already know. Even if I have memories of another life somewhere in here, and they re-activate them, they will not line up into a translation table with the memories I have now. They will both be local grammars, with no way to integrate them.”
“But maybe not. Maybe side by side they will line up.”
“I don’t believe that. I believe they will be alien grammars, and they will be chaotic to each other.”
“Oh, my dear, I am so sorry.”
“Yes,” said Blue, “so am I,” and began to cry again, tears refracting aquamarine glamour to Morgan, so that the blue sorrow fell from her eyes too, and the light broke into shards which Morgan dispelled with her own unconscious sharp cluck to the light switch. As her eyes adjusted, pupils widened into the liquid halflight, Morgan saw Blue hide face in hands and sob, and she pulled her friend’s body toward an embrace that was as much an attempt to comfort herself as to soothe Blue.
“It has one comfort,” said Morgan after a while. “It is the final proof that they are like us.” At Blue’s interrogative whimper, she chuckled despite herself. “They are fallible to the problem of point of view. They make the same errors of ego.”
Blue sat up, wiping tears from cheeks with sweeps of fingertips, those graceful hands; Morgan pulled one to her mouth and kissed the palm gently.
“They leave things out, important things out of theories. They aren’t the godly aliens of some science fiction dream. They are, if you will, human. They are molecular and finite, limited, as we are.”
“This is a
big
comfort,” said Blue angrily. Morgan laughed harder, and stroked the blue cheek to take away the offense.
“Listen, my darling,” she said, “I think we have made it. I think we have finally come to the perfect moment of love.”
“For us?—or yes,” said Blue, “I think I understand. For them, right?”
“Yes,” said Morgan. “For the first time, I really do forgive them. They are going to be so upset!”
Blue giggled, the silly sound Morgan hadn’t heard since Blue’s “childhood”. “I see it,” said Blue. “They will be so chagrined, so—so disappointed. I will have to help them.”
“I’m very proud of you for that,” said Morgan. Before she realized the wrongness of the scream from the door of the room, she had a split-second to be glad she had managed to finish her thought.
Then a hand around her throat, dragging her away from Blue and slamming her against the wall. Shrieking in her ear, vast shouting, roaring, desperate sweat standing out in struggle.
What John was saying was slurred nearly to incoherent
how dare you,
swearing
bitch animal pervert,
shaking her
wasn’t it enough to be queer?
taking the violent straight line through hatred,
otherfucking bitch!
Even as she struggled against the knife, even as she absolutely, in an instant, refused to countenance being killed, Morgan thought gladly that she had done everything she wanted to do before death. She felt the blade cut her flesh like butter. Really is like butter, she thought angrily, pulling her hand back and kicking John’s leg. She felt the pressure of his arm across her throat increase, then release, as Blue threw arms around his neck, full body weight pulling him back. Blue too was yelling, a hoarse unpracticed howl of anger. There were other voices, Katy yelling,
Drop the knife! Drop it!
and John swearing—swearing!—furious that his murder was being interrupted.