Read Online A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey - Free Book Online

unexpected department-store mirrors, shop windows of unusual reflectivity, and her own uncurtained windows at night. She was less aware of herself in the one-way mirrors through which people often watched her work with Blue. She didn’t want to stare at the shadowy ghosts she could see through the mirrors, so could avoid also her own ghostly shadow of self.
    This week the alien was about four. They had passed in only a few weeks the usually-difficult teaching of basic life skills like toilet training and eating with cutlery, basic speech and manners, and the alien was becoming interesting the same way Morgan found human children interesting once they become sapient.
    Four is a nice age. Wisdom is dawning, playfulness is creative, and the willfulness of three is starting to be replaced by cunning and even, occasionally, a mature perception of the outside world as other to self—which meant that Blue, whose language skills at present outstripped its social skills, was now itself interested in the people behind the mirror.
    “You are seeing other people, not like TV,” said Morgan. “They are in another room, and part of the wall is made of this stuff, which is called one-way glass. It’s supposed to look like a mirror to us as long as it’s dark in their room. But some light always comes through from our room and shines on them, and we can see a bit of them.”
    “So they aren’t funny shadows like they look, they are real people like us?”
    “Think about it, Blue. At night when you go by the mirror, with no light but the spill from outside the windows, do you look different, like a funny shadow?”
    “Oh …”
    “And are you different?”
    “Oh. Yes. I am different in the night because I see differently.”
    “I mean in the body. Is your body different?”
    “Oh. No, not in the body.”
    “Well, then, why should they be different?”
    “What are they doing there?”
    “Watching us.”
    “Why?”
    “You are their first alien. They think everything you do is very very interesting.”
    At four people are vain. The alien turned away, smiling smugly.

    On the street, on the way to work, Morgan saw a pregnant woman. All she could think was, what a pity another child was coming into the world, and how appalling the swollen woman looked. Distantly, she noted the danger of such thoughts, but like everything else the awareness of despair’s peril was far away. Closer—and more uncomfortable—was the thought that perhaps her perceptions had been skewed by her circumstances. If she had to question the cold clarity of her self-judgment on the night before her parents’ funeral, she would lose the only benchmark she had, and she would have to leap into the void of loss. So, she watched the heavily gravid woman impassively, noting her lumbering walk, and dutifully tried not to see her as grotesque.
    “He must have been injured on arrival. Whatever the arrival process was must have given him, like, a retrograde amnesia, a functional amnesia.” In the daily-report meeting, Rahim was holding forth again on his opinion of the Alien Question.
    “Him?”
    “Don’t keep harping on that, Connie. We have enough to think about without that.”
    “My name is Morgan, and harping on that is my job. Do you really want to make this alien into a Man?”
    He didn’t hear her. He hadn’t read the old books. He was the new breed of fin-de-siècle specialist, who had grown up language-challenged and idea-poor, believing the political cant of selfishness. He owned a big house and a designer wife and dog, and Morgan found him unbelievably stupid in almost any situation, without imagination and without charm. It amazed her to see that some of the other women found him attractive. I’ve been around queers too long, she thought, to ever look the same way at those hetero Men-with-a-capital- M who have somehow reembraced the Father-Knows-Best ideal their parents rejected midway through the previous century—and who still thought