Free A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey Page A

anymore, I’m going to tell you what you are doing.” By the time Kowalski left the office, Grey had the man assigned to more admin duties and thinking it was a step up. That was easy. Kowalski was a stupid man, and simple carrots worked to move him. The stick part, Grey hated, but he had to admit, he felt good afterward. All those toxins one can get rid of by crying—could you get rid of them as easily playing departmental politics? Worked for him.
    Today, anyway.

    The alien sat in the darkened room, light the color of molten data streaming from the flickering screen. Morgan had become used to the Star Trek cliché of the screens paging past faster than she could read, and she simply put her hand on the tense, hunched shoulder. Blue, startled, made a sound like a spooked cat and turned staring eyes on Morgan as if she too were strobing with floods of data.
    “Anything interesting tonight?” she asked gently, just to say something.
    “My eyes feel very full. How do people see so much and not burst?”
    She was about to smile when she saw the desperation.
    “Are you scared?” She dropped to her knees and took the trembling hands in hers, surprised and shocked at the strength of the fibrillation, as fast as the screen’s had been, which transmitted to her at the contact. She found herself whispering, “Shhh,” as one does when rocking a baby with night terrors.
    “What’s wrong?” she said.
    “My thoughts are zooming like the data tracks, but they won’t sort out. They won’t lie down. All night they are spinning, every day and night they spin more. How do people make the data fit in their minds?”
    How do people do that? Morgan thought, and, keeping Blue anchored with one hand, reached out the other to turn off the display. It was frozen at the moment Blue’s gaze had moved from the screen, and absently she read, “‘ Hypolipidaemic and Anti-atherosclerotic Effects in Kingiber officinale in Cholesterol Red Rabbits , Sharma, I., et al … .’”
    “How long have you been on line?”
    “You were away for two days.”
    “Two days? Non-stop? When did you rest?”
    “I don’t sleep, you know that.”
    “I don’t mean sleep. I mean rest. To let the facts settle.”
    “Do I have to rest?”
    Standing up without letting go of the alien’s hands, Morgan led the docile, exhausted, quivering Blue into the other room, where the bed was. The hands she held were cool, something which, if she had time to process it, Morgan realized would frighten her in a creature so measurably hot-blooded as this one.
    She urged the alien to lie down and, trusting though puzzled, Blue did so. It was true, Blue never used the bed, even for a moment’s quiet. Never stopped doing something. How did humans make space for new data?
    “We sleep,” said Morgan, “and part of our brain that is subconscious sorts information and stores it.”
    “This is not scientific,” said Blue, using the annoying catchphrase with which for the last few days, Morgan had just read in the reports, the alien had been bedeviling the staff. Now she saw its origin in the abstracts Blue had been swotting.
    “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