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

themselves harmless as they plowed through the future.
    If they didn’t do such damage, she would be sorry for them. But they and their social Darwinist uncles, dads, and mentors were taking her country step-by-step backward into a dictatorship of meanness, a victory of haves over have-nots, which still had the power to disgust Morgan, even through her fog of personal incapability.
    “They are watching all the time,” said Blue. “Even when I poop.”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t like that.”
    “I can see why. People like to have some privacy. They wouldn’t like it if you watched them poop, I bet.”
    Blue giggled, but after her shift, Morgan was taken back into the office by Rahim and chastised again.
    “I am the only one your precious alien trusts,” she said, “and part of the reason is that I tell the truth. Do you want me to change that? I don’t think so.”
    She stared at the Boy Wonder, and he shook his head. “I was against employing you,” he said. “I was overruled by the Chief Inspector. If he is transferred off this case, you’re out of here tomorrow.”
    “And does he show signs of being transferred?” Morgan said, and gathered her things together.
    “Anything can happen if the right people get to be in charge,” Rahim said as she walked out. Good exit line for him, she thought, but on the bus going home she lapsed into the same glum mental silence as usual.
    A tendril of reality split the grey fog and she thought dimly, I wonder if I’m ill. I should see a doctor . She managed to hold that thought long enough to write herself a note at home, but she didn’t actually make a call. She didn’t know any trustworthy doctors in this town. She would have to ask around, and that seemed an almost overwhelming task.
    She would get to it.

4
     
    An old-fashioned policeman
     
    He was inherently a fair and a just man, though occasionally he trapped himself into taking a stance he didn’t believe. But he had known this about himself for a long time and therefore he was careful not to corner himself in dealing with the alien.
    Or the people hired to take care of the alien.
    He stood in the darkened observation booth watching the lesson take place. Beside him slouched the new technician hired to record it all. The technician muttered a little to himself, but that didn’t matter, the alien knew perfectly well someone was behind the wall, turned occasionally and looked with dark eyes that were mountain tarns of blank indigo beauty. The teacher answered its questions honestly, and the grey man heard the technician swear and the others in the observation room with him murmur their anger. The grey man imagined the mirror had vanished, felt a moment of vertigo, shook his head and looked away. The technician watching him spoke.
    “Hey, you related to Hester McKenzie?”
    Mr. Grey nodded.
    “I know her work. Dynamite!”
    He in his turn looked silently.
    The technician looked back to the viewfinder. “Great work. Her best was Amnesty.”
    “That was a commission. She thought it was too cold.”
    “Cold! No way. Precise, intense, righteous. Moral.”
    Mr. Grey was obscurely angry to hear his daughter’s work encapsulated like that, remembering her irritation with the people she had worked with on the vid event they called Amnesty and she called “torture pornography.” “You wouldn’t believe the letters I get,” she said. “People are sick. They want to see death on film.” As her father he remembered the film as frightening and grim. As a policeman he recognized the mood. As more than either role, he simply wanted to stop talking about it with this youngster barely old enough to know violence existed, and insensate in the face of alien wonder. He turned and walked out of the room.
    The technician watched the alien through the viewfinder, watched the interaction between Blue and the young man hired to teach the ET to play chess and Go. The video recorder kept rolling as he fixed the focus of the