A Paradigm of Earth Read Online Free Page B

up the three stairs to the wide veranda, and unlocked the heavy wood door with the leaded-glass central oval.
    The house was still entirely empty but for the jumble of her belongings, stacked haphazardly in the living room by the moving company. She left her suitcase and Marbl’s carrier in the sundrenched hall where the stained glass and prisms of the door panel cast rosy blocks and rainbow patterns over the scratched wood paneling and chipped plaster.
    The huge living room was on the left of the door. A dining room mirrored it on the other side. Both were separated from the hall by leaded-glass doors. Behind the living room, a smaller room, completely wood-paneled up to a picture rail, and with piano windows of stained leaded glass, had been converted to an office with telephone and data lines. Morgan nodded. This would be hers, a kind of household command center.
    The dining room was separated from a huge kitchen and pantry by pocket doors. Behind the kitchen was a mud porch, a utility room, and a small bedraggled greenhouse with broken panes. Two other doors led toward the center of the house. Hearing Marbl’s howls begin again and echo in the empty hall, Morgan left these rooms unexplored, returned to her annoyed pet.
    “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said soothingly, “we’ll find a place to sleep.” She made sure the door was latched.
    In the back of the hall there was an ancient brass-fitted elevator with a telescoping metal door. She walked up the stairs behind it.
    One of the rooms had long windows looking out onto a small balcony littered with fallen leaves. Hanging against one of the windows on a leather thong was a small dusty metal ring filled with a colored glass mosaic. At the wind of the opening door, it bumped gently against the window like a moth trying to get out. Small, inside it, was the image of the prairie, with its warm clear light sky, rendered in epoxied shards with an artistry not slavish to detail but for that even more exact. Morgan, seeing it for the first time, was momentarily paralyzed. Then her eyes blurred with tears.
    She didn’t know she had tears any more. She went to the hall and got her suitcase. The hollow bang as she set it down in the prairie room was a punctuation mark. This would be her place. She brought the cat carrier up, closed the door behind her, and opened the carrier. Marbl came out wondering into the empty room and, seeing refuge, dived for the closet where she crouched, her complaining miaouw echoing.
    The stained glass was like a raindrop caught in the curve of metal, a lens making the landscape tiny. Or a teardrop? She laughed shortly at her own conceit.

    The best house computer she could afford was old and clunky, with no virch and no smart-chip capability, upgrading the hundred-year-old house to the minimum standard of smart, but it was adequate. After a few days, Morgan found herself in a habit of late-night game playing: always the repetitive, patterning games to put her in trance.
    The night she found herself playing the game and weeping, she took all the games off her partition and the common area. She might not have been good at grieving, but she was damned if she was going to let the machine do it for her.
    Instead, she decided, she would revive and keep her journal, write in it every night. A journal on paper, not in the machine. She had enjoyed, or at least found release in, journal writing before; now it was a survival device and she approached it as a discipline, the same way she had the requirement of her previous profession to write daily report: doggedly, and with a cool documentary flavor.
    She wrote about the renovations, the recurring real estate administrivia, the way the cats were eliminating the mouse problem, the motion of light on the surface of the river, or the sweep of an advertising spotlight across the sky. She didn’t include in the diary her frustration at how the constant low-level business torment that remained as the final detritus