Free A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey Page B

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