“No,” said Morgan, “I haven’t said it in a scientific way. But you will find in the research that if people don’t sleep they get obsessive and delusional.”
“That’s if they don’t dream. But what is ‘dream’? Except you said it is wish for the future, but that doesn’t make sense in context.”
Morgan, looking at the worried face, had a moment that she would later wonder if it had been epiphany, but which certainly she always understood was paradigm shift. She knew suddenly that information was not what the alien needed to survive, to do its job. She knew, she
knew
that dreams were at the core of some human gestalt, some fractal distribution of information, and she knew also that Blue must learn at least this if the alien was to understand why “dream” had so many meanings in the human lexicon.
Accidentally, she had been giving the alien data of another sort. She had been touching it, hugging it,
loving
it. Its drive for humanness was no longer just lexical, it was also tactile.
That relentless othermind of Morgan’s contributed the ironic memory of a study of social workers long ago. Workers and clients were asked to describe their feelings about a session. Clients said, “The worker was listening so carefully, was so focused. I felt like they really care about me.” The workers said, “I was thinking about how I had to pick up milk on the way home” or “I was thinking that I would have to leave early to get my kid at day care.” There was a cynical way to interpret this study, and Morgan with one part of herself indulged in that interpretation, realizing that she certainly
seemed
to be loving Blue, whatever her actual incapability to do so.
But there was another way to see the data, as well—as being emotionally related to patterning, that essential treatment activity for some brain-damaged children, the repetitive placing of the children’s limbs in the positions of crawling so that they could learn how to do it themselves, by creating a false sense memory. Morgan had been placing Blue, emotionally, spiritually if you will, in the positions needed for love and dreams. She had been putting the body of the alien into positions that in humans required touch and REM-sleep.
Why were love and sleep suddenly related, perhaps even conflated, in this sudden flash of understanding? Morgan saw that her touch was calming Blue, that something was flowing between them, that Blue’s outward-spiraling data trance had been interrupted, centered by her presence, by the need to focus. But the bodily touch was not enough. There had to be some focus for Blue’s spirit, emotions—for the alien’s soul? wondered Morgan suddenly—to counterbalance the flood of information.
Information is not always balanced by entropy, Morgan remembered. Sometimes it is balanced by chaos, by letting go. Humans used the sleep time for this, and the seemingly random yet often organized and meaningful images surfacing in dreams were palimpsests, artifacts, or iceberg-tips of a deeper and more significant process.
How would an alien body, burning so hot usually, learn that kind of letting-go? Morgan was thinking at the speed of data herself. “Have you read about meditation?” she said. Blue’s gaze unfocused for a disconcerting second, then, “Yes,” the alien said brightly.
“We are going to teach you to meditate.”
Blue’s hands spasmed. “I do not
want
empty mind!”
“Empty mind is a metaphor. It means still thoughts, with no traffic jam in there.” Blue knew “traffic jam”, and giggled. “Then, I hope, I will teach you to find something like dreaming in the midst of the peace that a still mind brings.”
Did Blue even
have
a subconscious mind? She guessed they would find out.
It was grey outside the windows, the flat post-sunset miasma which seems to leach the intensity from colors. Morgan remembered walking home from high school in winter in the same kind of half-daylight, twenty-five years before. It struck her as strange that the emotions of our childhood become artifacts for the rest of our lives, so that some events, sensations, or feelings only moments or hours long govern the rest of our experience.
How would Blue’s strange accelerated learning curve replicate human existence?
Blue stayed on the bed, eyes closed, for the rest of the night and some of the morning. Morgan, kipped out on the couch in the next room, slept badly, dreamed of death and data and blue light and terrible confusion, woke often and checked on Blue, and finally, giving up on sleep, sat dozily in the big armchair by the window and watched over Blue.
When Blue decided to rejoin the world, the calm face and smile were restored.
“I understand much more,” said the alien. “Things fit. Their edges meet, like those puzzles you used to make me do. Why don’t we do those any more?”
“For kids, they’re learning disguised as play; for adults, they’re optional recreation.”
“So you think I am an adult now?”
“Well, I’d say a young teenager.”
“Oh, must I misbehave and learn to drive cars too fast? What about recreational drug use and wireheading?”
Morgan laughed. “If you think it will seriously advance your knowledge base of human behavior, I suppose you could try some of those things, but I recommend the non-destructive ones—like driving a car fast, but only on a divided highway!”
“You are too conservative. I should do something importantly dangerous.”
“Why?”
“Because humans do.”
“Some humans. Some, like me, would rather avoid remorse.”
“What does that mean—oh. I see.”
Morgan grinned and hugged Blue with one arm around the waist, and Blue hugged back around her shoulders. Morgan was always surprised at the heat—but today, she was simply grateful. If anything last night had frightened her most, it was the coldness of Blue’s hands, a sign of spasming circulation, or even clinical shock. But now Blue was comfortingly warm again.
“Did that feeling of being overwhelmed ever happen to you before?” Morgan asked.
“Yes, one time, when the man died.”
“What did you do about it?”
“I can’t remember. When can I learn to drive?”
“After you learn what a metaphor is.” This time, it was Blue who laughed first.
Blue takes to the idea of dreaming and suddenly the word is everywhere. For instance, I asked Blue if Blue had any knowledge of the other aliens in the other countries. Blue said,
I see them in my dreams. but they are indistinct. they are in far places, with different cameras and security forces
. this, we all know.
You speak so well, I said.
I have a good speech therapist, Blue said, and grinned. and I read Fowler’s
English Usage
, and Strunk and White’s
Elements of Style
, and
Modern English Grammar.
And, though I stopped Blue’s listing there, linguistics textbooks and speech therapy textbooks and all the ancient and modern novels we could find, on microfiche or paper or disc, or on audiotape to play in the background, with rich trained voices like Orson Welles and Dame Edith Evans and Jessica Tandy and Richard Burton reading the books and plays; and films and video recordings of everything from Shakespeare to Albee, Brecht to Tallis, Antonioni to Hitchcock, Kubrick to Shyamalan, Smythe to Mollel, mostly in English after experts assured us that it was better for Blue to learn one language deeply than several in brief. Despite my doubts, for I knew and know that a language defines the concepts it can express, and the concepts of a people limit its language, the most obvious example being the sexism of English with its he and she and no word for a person who is neither or for whom it doesn’t matter, like Blue or the letter carrier.
But because I know that around the world, some in known places and some not, other empty aliens are soaking up humanity, the minority view as well as next door to the imperium (the imperium gloats: they have two, so the media report), I feel no lingering guilt about teaching Blue only English with its inbuilt prejudices, its inherent bias. There are many different paradigms by which our world can be ordered and expressed, all of them equal and valid, though some contradict others.
In the dream Morgan is swimming in a blue fog that becomes a blue ocean. For the first time in her life, she is swimming in comfort. That’s all.
When she woke up, Morgan remembered only the sense of power in knowing how to swim.
There’s a staff pool in the Atrium,
she thought.
Wonder if Blue and I can have swimming lessons?
They began two days later, taught by, of all people, Flora, who in the water was square-bodied and blocky: Morgan realized suddenly that Flora was likely a trans.
In the real world, Morgan found that the dream has improved her bare ability to float not at all. She is still afraid to put her face in the water. Blue picked up on her nervousness. Flora began slowly, gently, and quickly the alien began to play in the water. Morgan, too, unbent a bit, but she could see it would take time.
On the brink of despair is tranquillity. Or, more precisely, over the brink, in the void. That’s okay with the dreaming Morgan: she needs a rest. She has been walking a long time in this unfamiliar landscape.
In the country she knew, where her parents were an immutable part of familiar scenery, she had mapped out all the pitfalls. Now she has gone away from there in every way, and nothing is the same.
They are not going back the way they came, and nothing will ever be the same again.
She has changed her name, her job, her location, her membership status in human concerns (member: inactive).
Across the plain to meet her walks a blue being who came from a country separated by a real, not metaphorical, void from even the most extravagant locale of Morgan’s imagination.
The dining table conversation was a sprightly exchange of editing terms that Morgan could barely follow, but even Delany was keeping up with John and Russ.
“I’m interested in putting dimension into flatware,” she said. “I deliberately work in paint, but it doesn’t always dance like I want it to.”
“You can delaminate it easy,” said John. “It comes apart any way you want. Fractal division, color layers, density contour maps—depends on what you want to develop. What mood.”
“All very well with something that begins as static, something you create and then animate,” said Jakob, “but what about taking something that already exists—like my dance—and doing more than documentary? Half the stuff on the web harks back to before I was born—psychedelia as rank as any on vintage TV. The most modern stuff does MuchMusic or MTV nostalgia. There’s no space for innovation. I end up settling for documentation, hoping that there is a shadow of the liveware there.”
“The nature of the video experience has always been different. That’s stale news now. What do you expect? The only frontier is fucking with the paradigm.”
“And how exactly do you go about that?” Russ put in. “When all the available models have been modeled?”
“Cellular transformation,” said John.
Morgan thought that none of them was splitting out of their paradigm. Each one was instead trying to get further inside, burrowing like a worm into the heart of the classical knowledge of their field. There was a lesson in it somewhere for her. What she was doing in the Atrium was not groundbreaking either. The gestalt portrait of humanity was taking shape in the alien: Blue was becoming a human being. No human was being forced to think outside the frame. No alien knowledge had been leaked to Earth. And the same skills were being used that would be used to “civilize” a feral child or, perhaps a better analogy since few feral children respond to the efforts to teach them humanity, to rehabilitate an amnesiac. No new skills for her to write a textbook about when the project got declassified.
“Classification,” said John, startling her, but then he went on, “classifying the pixel density into families to make the most of the bandwidth—of course, that’s completely misleading; the terminology is so old.”
“I see what you mean,” said Russ. “But you aren’t using it to convey information. It’s entropic in nature. Isn’t that contradicted by the very fact that you create it?”
“Yes,” said Delany, “because art cannot by its nature be entropic.”
“That’s a very traditional viewpoint,” said John witheringly.
“Look who’s talking,” Jakob mocked. “You still make full motion for the net. Isn’t that traditional, compared to virtuality?”
Morgan was a bit surprised to see John take this not lightly, in the spirit of Jakob’s chaffing, but sullenly. “You don’t understand the statement,” he said. “That’s not surprising, given the kind of effete vocabulary of motion you use. At least,
I
wasn’t surprised.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Delany sharply.
“Nothing,” said John. “Just that a non-expert can’t be expected to be on the cutting edge. Especially when you use the medium for
documentary.”
He said the last word with his voice dripping with scorn.