“I thought you were in Saskatoon.”
“Well, I’m not. Can I talk to Blue?”
“Sure.” Bemusedly, she turned the phone over to Blue and walked into Delany’s room. “Robyn has just been in Tibet with the new little Dalai Lama. Tibet. That is so weird.”
“So, he developed a secret life after all. I knew he couldn’t be your brother and be so—”
“Boring?”
“Well, a little staid anyway.”
“I am totally astonished. Apparently he has also made me some money on some stock exchange deal. Now
that’s
tainted money!”
Delany chuckled. “But I’m sure it will come in useful. For little junkets to Tibet, sometime in the future.”
“You think I’m going to develop itchy feet?”
Blue appeared in the doorway, grinning widely. “He says it’s my fault he’s there and not in his office. He says that meeting aliens makes you look at the world differently. He says—”
“I’m sure he does,” said Morgan. “He just wants you at the wedding.”
“If I’m here,” said Blue. “If not, I already got his present. It’s in my bottom drawer.”
“When did you have time to shop?”
“Never mind,” said the satisfied, secretive alien.
One cool night they built the fire, and sat before it quietly. “I have loved this so much, Blue,” Morgan said. “In case you don’t know.”
“I know,” said Blue. “Thank you for saying so. I am so used to thinking that you gave me everything. I like it when you remind me that you think I have given to you also.”
“But that is what is so complete,” she said, thoughtfully. “I didn’t know at the time, but I was getting as much as giving.”
“‘Is this love?’” Blue quoted gently, and they laughed.
“A course of loving,” said Morgan. “Not perhaps what the bureaucrats expected.”
“Your bureaucrats or mine?” Blue said, and Morgan laughed.
“And a sense of humor to boot. I really do love you, Blue.”
“I love you too,” said Blue. “May I have some more of that juice, please?”
Blue reached out a hand with the other blown glass in it: Morgan’s act of faith, after the other day, had been to make sure that was the glass Blue used every time. Morgan poured dark red juice into it from the pitcher on the table. The iridescence of the glass in the firelight, the darkness of the contents, made it look like melted rubies flowing as Blue drank deeply of its cool beauty. Blue settled back in the armchair and carefully set the glass on the flat arm of the chair. Marbl jumped up on Blue’s lap and settled down, purring under the long blue fingers stroking her.
Delany wheeled in and Morgan poured more juice and handed over the plate of lemon cake.
“Thanks, love,” said Delany, and they sat in companionable silence, watching the fire.
“Interesting,” Blue said at last. “I have enjoyed this evening very much, even though we did little but sit and think.”
“So have I,” said Morgan.
“Tomorrow maybe we can—”
There was a pop, as if a fireplace log had released a reservoir of pitch. The cat’s purring stopped. “Can what?” said Morgan, and looked up to see an empty chair. Delany drew in a shocked breath. The glass, pulled by the wind of a silent, subtle implosion of air, slid in from the arm of the chair onto the seat, then rolled off. Miraculously, it didn’t break as it thumped onto the hearthrug.
Blue and Marbl were gone.
“Gone? Gone where?” asked Salomé.
The grey man was silent.
“Gone
back?”
He nodded. “As suddenly as the arrival. The ships were behind the moon or something. If we ever meet these people, the first thing they’ll have to explain is that lovely
Star Trek
effect. Better than on vid. And not a trace in the air. The boffins are in ecstasy. How the bloody
hell …”
He was sitting on the edge of his comfortable armchair, unable to lean back in it. He sprang up, began to pace.
“Dad. Dad! What is it?”
“I don’t know. Well, I know, but it’s stupid. Envy. Jealousy. Whatever it’s called. Of what they had, of the possibilities. In the end, Blue actually wondered if there was a way Morgan could go too. But clearly there wasn’t. Morgan’s still here.” He was silent for a moment. “But Earth has sent an emissary after all. Besides Blue, I mean.”
“Blue was the alien. The emissary to us. How can it be an emissary to its own people?”
“That’s a long story, kiddo, but believe me, Blue’s only choice was to be human.”
“Just like the rest of us.”
“Yeah.”
“But what do you mean about another emissary?”
The grey man looked at his clasped hands, then laughed a little and reversed them, pushing intertwined fingers, palms out, away from himself to hear the joints crackle. Then suddenly, he did laugh, throwing his arms wide, and if it was a bit hysterical, so what, he thought—but Salomé looked worried, though, so he relaxed a little.
“The cat,” he said. “Blue took the cat.”
Finale, benedicte
Cast into the void again, Morgan struggled to regain her center. Sick, lonely, tired, and bereaved: she had been here once before. Then, it took years to come back. Now she had had only a few stormy days, but though she could foresee the end of the process, she could not teleport to that glimpsed resolution, had to live through the center of the storm.
Morgan had slept alone since Blue and Marbl left, her body unused to the absence of the small warmth against her back, the large warmth against her mind. The last few nights of Blue’s body curled against hers had reassured them both against the coming departure, but she had thought she would have something left, even if it was only a small purr against the night. That Marbl could go where she could not go was another in the series of envies, losses, and challenges to accept.
She thought of Marbl’s small absence to avoid Blue’s large one; eventually the world would come rushing back to fill the emptiness. For the moment, however, she had the task of listening to the empty space, of encircling it with her mind, of deciding, in this infinity of loss and completion, where she would float, how she would remember, what she would accept, and how she would continue to live.
The difference between now and the beginning, when Occam’s Razor had carved her hollow, was that although the void was as always the void, and she knew it with a deep and abiding and essential knowledge, yet she was empty no more. She had become an entity, a human, an alien, completed by everything she allowed herself to give to Blue. Everything she allowed herself to feel. She knew that the center would be there for her to find when she exhausted her pain with this wild and careless flying through the clouds of her grief.
She was lying on her bed, looking at the light through the circle of stained glass, reflecting on the changeless prairie and the landscape of change; Furbl, the new cat from the SPCA, was sitting on the trunk by the window, watching her, reflecting on whatever cats consider.
Probably wondering what he’s been drafted into
, she thought wryly. Morgan would never share Blue’s ability to listen to cats think,
so, what else is new?
she asked herself.
I couldn’t talk to cats in a common language before, I can’t now, what have I lost, really?
Cheered and amused by this thought, she was smiling when Delany wheeled her chair through the door. She turned her head to extend the smile to her friend.
“How are you?” said Delany.
“I’m very sad, but I’m living,” said Morgan.
“The thing I remember best,” said Delany, “is a dream of flying. I was laughing at myself for having it. Even asleep I knew I was a fool, but I didn’t care. I saw you below me. Your head was surrounded by blue dreams. I was so sad. I thought, after I woke up, how far you were from me. I knew I could never reach you.”
“That was a true dream, a gift,” said Morgan.
“Will I ever reach you?” said Delany.
Morgan felt a wave of exhilaration sweep her feet from some sandy shore. “Never,” she said, her lips curving into a grin despite herself. “The question you want to answer is, does it matter? What a lovely time we’ll have, trying.”
Delany grinned too. “No, I don’t think it matters.”
“What will it be?”
“It’s worth taking a chance on this.”
“I don’t know the future,” said Morgan, “except in all the ways I don’t want to. Knowing what they’re going to do to me now. Knowing the media will give us no rest. All that.”
“You don’t have to make excuses to me. You always did want to protect me from this darkness in you. Don’t you think I know you? Don’t you trust me?”
“You don’t mess around,” said Morgan.
“You have evidence that’s not true,” said Delany. “Think on that. Look at you. You think I don’t know you’re an existential fool, and you think I don’t know that you love every solitary minute of it.”
“But if you—”
“I can live with that; I never did want to be part of anything else. What autonomy means to a cripple—or as much of a cripple as I’m left after Blue’s repair job. But I won’t be patronized. You’d better open the lonely human race now, and let me in, or we won’t last a second.”
“We’ve lasted years already, my friend,” said Morgan, “and we’ll keep on. We are always faithful to something, in our fashion.”
“Oh, well, that,” said Delany dismissively, and Morgan laughed aloud.
“Well,
you’re
gonna be all right,” Delany said. Morgan laughed more.
“Nancy is downstairs,” Delany said, “waiting to have the same conversation with you.”
“And?”
“She wants to know when it’s okay to come in.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Morgan said impatiently, “am I supposed to hold court? Have hours of reception? Turn into the queen of the moon?”
“Do what you want.”
“Don’t be cute,” said Morgan.
This time it was Delany who laughed. “You’ll be just fine. And to think we all worried about you.”
“Come along, my friend,” said Morgan. “Lets go down and commence our ambiguous future.”
“Will you let Nancy rent the other room?”
“I don’t know. It might be fun to take a crack at living with the younger generation. But she takes everything too seriously.”
“What’s going to happen with Russ?” Delany asked as they walked and wheeled down the hall. “I miss him. This recent walkabout …”
“Well, tempting as it is to do a tidy wrap-up and say, he’ll be back, I really have no idea. I don’t know at all. The grey man says that he might get away without a jail sentence. But really I don’t know. I hope we see him again.”
“I’d like that,” said Delany wistfully. Morgan looked down at her sharply, but Delany was intent on maneuvering her chair into the elevator.
“Come on,” said Morgan, “I told you not to be cute.”
“Russ and I spent a lot of time together the last few weeks. I seemed to him to be a lot like him. So, I just made it clear to him how I was and how I wasn’t.” Delany grinned. “It was kind of nice. Not that he really noticed. But that was what I liked. He was so wrapped in his own fog that he didn’t bother to worry about how fragile I was. Yes,” she repeated reflectively, “it was nice.” And she smiled, not at Morgan.
“Well, well,” said Morgan, and she reached down and lifted Delany’s hand, and kissed it, fingers and palm. “The magic healing fingers.” And she bent and kissed Delany, and thought,
the world is full of fools like me.
Which by a backward wynd confirmed to her that the world was full.
The elevator bumped to a halt, Morgan pulled the door open, and she went out ahead of Delany to the living room where Nancy sat, where Nancy rose to meet her, and to smile and hug her tightly.
“I was afraid you’d go away again,” said Nancy.
Morgan felt Nancy’s arms around her, not as a shield against adversity, but as a symbol of the responsibility involved in rejoining the human race. Delany she knew would be fine, Delany in fact insisted on being independent, but Nancy had already once demanded salvation from Morgan in a form Morgan couldn’t give. She felt the tension just below the surface, the tension that lingered beneath the comfort, which meant:
If I let my arms remain around her too long, as long as I would with a friend when I needed to cry or be comforted, Nancy would take that moment as an invitation to camp again in the middle of my life. No, I don’t think I will be able to find a safe space for her here.
Morgan had the weight of all her life ahead of her, to keep making these tiny adjustments, these minute compensations, these gestures in deference to reality.
“Again?” said Morgan.
“You know what I mean.”
It was the human paradox again, the infinite along one axis, the other bounded by one—one step, one vision, one real world.
So she opened her arms and thus signaled that Nancy must let her go, and only Morgan felt the double meaning.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Morgan, “everything is going to be all right,” and felt the doors opening in her heart.
“I know that,” said Nancy.
“I wasn’t telling you,” said Morgan.
Morgan still floats in the void. It has always been there; she will always live there. Like the intimate other alien who is now away in the vacuum of space Morgan is nowhere, everywhere, and alone—
—but she remembers, and she can see and dream. She will not dream with Blue again, and she will have her time of mourning as she feels Blue taken apart until no trace remains of that beloved consciousness, that pale strong fire. She cries for Blue, for the void, but not for herself. She has stopped blaming the cosmos for her pain, she has taken it into herself, she has eaten its bitter flavor beside the sweet taste of understanding. She had taken them both for her daily fare, she is content.
Content in a way where she does not lose her anger, her sorrow, her pain, her love, but gains it instead, along with the rest of her alien, her all-too-human birthright.
The doorbell was unusually
deus ex machina;
Morgan knew who’d be there before she opened the door. Her Mr. Grey was wearing a sweater and corduroy slacks this time. Morgan was almost shocked to see him like this, somehow expected the suit again, as at their first meeting. She stood looking at him and his companions without speaking.
“Hello,” Blue Suit—Kowalski—said nervously.
“Shut up,” said Morgan’s friend, enemy, or ally. Which? Friend, she supposed. He was silent too for a moment.
The stranger with him said, “Are you ready for us now?”
“This is Andris,” said the grey man. “He’s my boss. He’ll be taking care of your debriefing.”
“Debriefing? What about you?”
“I have … too personal a relationship with you. Someone objective has to take over now.”
“Don’t worry,” said Andris. He was a solid, square-faced man with wavy black hair and beard, both heavily shot with white. He looked like a lion photographed in black-and-white. He looked like the patriarch of some prairie religion. He looked trustworthy. On principle, Morgan didn’t trust him—but she would have to learn how.
Morgan walked out onto the porch. “Come here,” she said, and walked down the steps and across the grass. From behind the wrought-iron fence they could see the city. She opened and led them through the ornamental gate which was kept closed now that the tall weeds had been cut away and the hinge repaired, all no doubt by the minions, faceless to Morgan, who answered this grey man’s powerful word.
She walked across the road until she stood on the brink of the valley. Andris and the grey man walked beside her silently, Andris giving Kowalski, trailing them, a piercing look to stop comment.
“Look,” said Morgan, and swept her arm across the decorated horizon’s plane. “What do you see?”
“What do you see?” said Andris.
“When Jakob first saw this,” she said, “he said, ‘It looks fine, from up here!’ That was why he came to stay with us. He felt safe. In the end, he learned the hard way that there’s no safety. That’s what I learned. I wanted to live quietly, but I made one motion in the direction of life, and my resolution exploded. Now I’ve got nothing to keep me safe.”
“Do you want a guarantee from me?”
“What would it be worth?”
Kowalski started to speak, but the grey man said, flatly, “Nothing. Come with me, Ko,” and they walked back across to the car.
“Yes,” said Andris.
“Well, that’s about what I expected. Don’t worry, I’m very reasonable really.”
“You can’t go around with a chip on your shoulder,” said Andris. “Neither can I. My people and I have jobs to do.”
Morgan looked out at the city. “So do mine,” she said, “all of them. Can’t you see them? Every life in its balloon of context, all living tangled up in one another. Everyone looking for the answer. Caruso’s voice teacher couldn’t sing a note, you know.”
“Probably had perfect pitch, though,” said Andris. “You have to know what you’re listening for, as well.”
“I’m not a rebel,” said Morgan. “I’m not. I just can’t live any other way.”
“You know I can’t promise to understand,” he answered, “but I’ll try to listen. But you have to try to talk.”
“That’s very formal,” she said, “‘A limb for the risk of a limb.’”
“I’m trying to be fair.”
“I’m trying too.”
“Yes, you are trying, sometimes. Mac has kept me posted. Do you think,” Andris said, looking out as she had done, “that you are responsible for all this? That you control something there?” His hand snapped at the city skyline.
“As much as I ever did,” she said. “Do you see where the city police have a cordon and a tape line down there? A woman was taken at knifepoint and raped there last night, and then he cut her, and she was lucky to get away with her life. They were within a stone’s throw of the greatest show on earth, and all he cared about was to revenge himself on her for the ills of his life. Maybe you or I could have told him why that wouldn’t work, but would he care? Maybe he enjoyed how that knife went like butter through her throat—and now I know—” she waved her hand with its hairline scar—“that it feels exactly like that stupid analogy, from her end. Maybe it worked for him, in the short run. But she wasn’t saved by the New Consciousness that was supposed to follow the millennium, nor by whatever human transcendence is supposed to follow First Contact. We can barely save our own lives these days. But we manage.”