The Taste of Night
PAT CADIGAN
You can’t see something until you develop the eyes to see it with, as the unsettling tale that follows demonstrates all too well.…
Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in London with her family. She made her first professional sale in 1980, and has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the best new writers of her generation. Her story “Pretty Boy Crossover” has appeared on several critic’s lists as among the best science fiction stories of the 1980s, and her story “Angel” was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award (one of the few stories ever to earn that rather unusual distinction). Her short fiction—which has appeared in most of the major markets, including Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—has been gathered in the collections Patterns and Dirty Work. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her second novel, Synners, released in 1991, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the year’s best science fiction novel, as did her third novel, Fools, making her the only writer ever to win the Clarke Award twice. Her other books include the novels Dervish Is Digital, Tea from an Empty Cup, and Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine, and, as editor, the anthology The Ultimate Cyberpunk, as well as two making-of movie books and four media tie-in novels. Her most recent book was a novel, Cellular.
The taste of night rather than the falling temperature woke her. Nell curled up a little more and continued to doze. It would be a while before the damp chill coming up from the ground could get through the layers of heavy cardboard to penetrate the sleeping bag and blanket cocooning her. She was fully dressed and her spare clothes were in the sleeping bag, too—not much but enough to make good insulation. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, though, she would have to visit a laundromat because phew.
Phew was one of those things that didn’t change; well, not so far, anyway. She hoped it would stay that way. By contrast, the taste of night was one of her secret great pleasures although she still had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Now and then something almost came to her, almost. But when she reached for it either in her mind or by actually touching something, there was nothing at all.
Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.
Memory sprang up in her mind with the feel of pale blue stretched long and tight between her hands.
The blind discover that their other senses, particularly hearing, intensify to compensate for the lack. The deaf can be sharp-eyed but also extra sensitive to vibration, which is what sound is to the rest of us.
However, those who lose their sense of smell find they have lost their sense of taste as well because the two are so close. To lose feeling is usually a symptom of a greater problem. A small number of people feel no pain but this puts them at risk for serious injury and life-threatening illnesses.
That doctor had been such a patient woman. Better yet, she had had no deep well of stored-up suspicion like every other doctor Marcus had taken her to. Nell had been able to examine what the doctor was telling her, touching it all over, feeling the texture. Even with Marcus’s impatience splashing her like an incoming tide, she had been able to ask a question.
A sixth sense? Like telepathy or clairvoyance?
The doctor’s question had been as honest as her own and Nell did her best to make herself clear.
If there were some kind of extra sense, even a person who had it would have a hard time explaining it. Like you or me trying to explain sight to someone born blind.
Nell had agreed and asked the doctor to consider how the other five senses might try to compensate for the lack.
That was where the memory ended, leaving an aftertaste similar to night, only colder and with a bit of sour.
* * *
Nell sighed, feeling comfortable and irrationally safe. Feeling safe was irrational if you slept rough. Go around feeling safe and you wouldn’t last too long. It was just that the indented area she had found at the back of this building—cinema? auditorium?—turned out to be as cozy as it had looked. It seemed to have no purpose except as a place where someone could sleep unnoticed for a night or two. More than two would have been pushing it, but that meant nothing to some rough sleepers. They’d camp in a place like this till they wore off all the hidden. Then they’d get seen and kicked out. Next thing you knew, the spot would be fenced off or filled in so no one could ever use it again. One less place to go when there was nowhere to stay.
Nell hated loss, hated the taste: dried-out bitter crossed with salty that could hang on for days, weeks, even longer. Worse, it could come back without warning and for no reason except that, perhaps like rough sleepers, it had nowhere else to go. There were other things that tasted just as bad to her but nothing worse, and nothing that lingered for anywhere nearly as long, not even the moldy-metal tang of disappointment.
* * *
After a bit, she realized the pools of colour she’d been watching behind her closed eyes weren’t the remnants of a slow-to-fade dream but real voices of real humans, not too far away, made out of the same stuff she was; either they hadn’t noticed her or they didn’t care.
Nell uncurled slowly—never make any sudden moves was another good rule for rough sleepers—and opened her eyes. An intense blue-white light blinded her with the sound of a cool voice in her right ear:
Blue-white stars don’t last long enough for any planets orbiting them to develop intelligent life. Maybe not any life, even the most rudimentary. Unless there is a civilization advanced enough to seed those worlds with organisms modified to evolve at a faster rate. That might beg the question of why an advanced civilization would do that. But the motives of a civilization that advanced would/could/might seem illogical if not incomprehensible to any not equally developed.
Blue-white memory stretched farther this time: a serious-faced young woman in a coffee shop, watching a film clip on a notebook screen. Nell had sneaked a look at it on her way to wash up in the women’s restroom. It took her a little while to realize that she had had a glimpse of something to do with what had been happening to her, or more precisely, why it was happening, what it was supposed to mean. On the heels of that realization had come a new one, probably the most important: they were communicating with her.
Understanding always came to her at oblique angles. The concept of that missing sixth sense, for instance—when she finally became aware of it, she realized that it had been lurking somewhere in the back of her mind for a very, very long time, years and years, a passing notion or a ragged fragment of a mostly forgotten dream. It had developed so slowly that she might have lived her whole life without noticing it, instead burying it under more mundane concerns and worries and fears.
Somehow it had snagged her attention—a mental pop-up window. Marcus had said everyone had an occasional stray thought about something odd. Unless she was going to write a weird story or draw a weird picture, there was no point in obsessing about it.
Was it the next doctor who had suggested she do exactly that—write a weird story or draw a weird picture, or both? Even if she had really wanted to, she couldn’t. She knew for certain by then that she was short a sense, just as if she were blind or deaf.
Marcus had said he didn’t understand why that meant she had to leave home and sleep on the street. She didn’t either, at the time. But even if she had understood enough to tell him that the motives of a civilization that advanced would/could/might seem illogical if not incomprehensible to any not equally developed, all it would have meant to him was that she was, indeed, crazy as a bedbug, unquote.
The social worker he had sent after her hadn’t tried to talk her into a hospital or a shelter right away but the intent was deafening. Every time she found Nell it drowned everything else out. Nell finally had to make her say it just to get some peace. For a few days after that, everything was extra scrambled. She was too disoriented to understand anything. All she knew was that they were bombarding her with their communication and her senses were working overtime, trying to make up for her inadequacy.
The blinding blue-white light dissolved and her vision cleared. Twenty feet away was an opening in the back of the building the size of a double-garage door. Seven or eight men were hanging around just outside, some of them sitting on wooden crates, smoking cigarettes, drinking from bottles or large soft-drink cups. The pools of colour from their voices changed to widening circular ripples, like those spreading out from raindrops falling into still water. The colours crossed each other to make new colours, some she had never seen anywhere but in her mind.
The ripples kept expanding until they reached the backs of her eyes and swept through them with a sensation of a wind ruffling feathery flowers. She saw twinkling lights and then a red-hot spike went through her right temple. There was just enough time for her to inhale before an ice-pick went through her eye to cross the spike at right angles.
Something can be a million light-years away and in your eye at the same time.
* * *
“Are you all right?”
The man bent over her, hands just above his knees. Most of his long hair was tied back except for a few long strands that hung forward in a way that suggested punctuation to Nell. Round face, round eyes with hard lines under them.
See. Hear. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.
Hand over her right eye, she blinked up at him. He repeated the question and the words were little green balls falling from his mouth to bounce away into the night. Nell caught her lower lip between her teeth to keep herself from laughing. He reached down and pulled the hand over her eye to one side. Then he straightened up and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. “I need an ambulance,” he said to it.
She opened her mouth to protest but her voice wouldn’t work. Another man was coming over, saying something in thin, tight silver wires.
And then it was all thin, tight silver wires everywhere. Some of the wires turned to needles and they seemed to fight each other for dominance. The pain in her eye flared more intensely and a voice from somewhere far in the past tried to ask a question without morphing into something else but it just wasn’t loud enough for her to hear.
Nell rolled over onto her back. Something that was equal parts anxiety and anticipation shuddered through her. Music, she realized; very loud, played live, blaring out of the opening where the men were hanging around. Chords rattled her blood, pulled at her arms and legs. The pain flared again but so did the taste of night. She let herself fall into it. The sense of falling became the desire to sleep but just as she was about to give in, she would slip back to wakefulness, back and forth like a pendulum. Or like she was swooping from the peak of one giant wave, down into the trough and up to the peak of another.
Her right eye was forced open with a sound like a gunshot and bright light filled her mouth with the taste of icicles.
* * *
“Welcome back. Don’t take this the wrong way but I’m very sorry to see you here.”
Nell discovered only her left eye would open but one eye was enough. Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, the social worker. Not the original social worker Marcus had sent after her. That had been Ms. Petersen, Call-Me-Joan, who had been replaced after a while by Mr. Carney, Call-Me-Dwayne. Nell had seen him only twice and the second time he had been one big white knuckle, as if he were holding something back—tears? hysteria? Whatever it was leaked from him in twisted shapes of shifting colours that left bad tastes in her mouth. Looking away from him didn’t help—the tastes were there whether she saw the colours or not.
It was the best they could do for her, lacking as she was in that sense. At the time, she hadn’t understood. All she had known was that the tastes turned her stomach and the colours gave her headaches. Eventually, she had thrown up on the social worker’s shoes and he had fled without apology or even so much as a surprised curse, let alone a good-bye. Nell hadn’t minded.
Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, was his replacement and she had managed to find Nell more quickly than she had expected. Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, had none of the same kind of tension in her but once in a while she exuded a musty, stale odor of resignation that was very close to total surrender.
Surrender. It took root in Nell’s mind but she was slow to understand because she only associated it with Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne’s unspoken (even to herself) desire to give up. If she’d just had that missing sense, it would have been so obvious right away.
Of course, if she’d had that extra sense, she’d have understood the whole thing right away and everything would be different. Maybe not a whole lot easier, since she would still have had a hard time explaining sight to all the blind people, so to speak, but at least she wouldn’t have been floundering around in confusion.
“Nell?” Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, was leaning forward, peering anxiously into her face. “I said, do you know why you’re here?”
Nell hesitated. “Here, as in…” Her voice failed in her dry throat. The social worker poured her a glass of water from a pitcher on the bedside table and held it up, slipping the straw between her dry lips so she could drink. Nell finished three glasses and Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, made a business of adjusting her pillows before she lay back against the raised mattress.
“Better?” she asked Nell brightly.
Nell made a slight, non-committal dip with her head. “What was the question?” she asked, her voice still faint.
“Do you know where you are?” Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, said.
Nell smiled inwardly at the change and resisted the temptation to say, Same place you are—here. There were deep lines under the social worker’s eyes, her clothes were wrinkled, and lots of little hairs had escaped from her tied-back hair. No doubt she’d had less rest in the last twenty-four hours than Nell. She looked around with her one good eye at the curtains surrounding them and at the bed. “Hospital. Tri-County General.”
She could see that her specifying which hospital had reassured the social worker. That was hardly a major feat of cognition, though; Tri-County General was where all the homeless as well as the uninsured ended up.
“You had a convulsion,” Call-Me-Anne told her, speaking slowly and carefully now as if to a child. “A man found you behind the concert hall and called an ambulance.”
Nell lifted her right hand and pointed at her face.
Call-Me-Anne hesitated, looking uncertain. “You seem to have hurt your eye.”
She remembered the sensation of the spike and the needle so vividly that she winced.
“Does it hurt?” Call-Me-Anne asked, full of concern. “Should I see if they can give you something for the pain?”
Nell shook her head no; a twinge from somewhere deep in her right eye socket warned her not to do that again or to make any sudden movements, period.
“Is there anyone you’d like me to call for you?” the social worker asked.
Frowning a little, Nell crossed her hands and uncrossed them in an absolutely-not gesture. Call-Me-Anne pressed her lips together but it didn’t stop a long pink ribbon from floating weightless out from her mouth. Too late—she had already called Marcus, believing that by the time he got here, Nell actually would want to see him. And if not, she would claim that Marcus had insisted on seeing her, regardless of Nell’s wishes, because he was her husband and loyalty and blah-blah-blah-social-worker-blather.
All at once there was a picture in her mind of a younger and not-so-tired Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, and just as suddenly, it came to life.
I feel that if we can re-unite families, then we’ve done the best job we can. Sometimes that isn’t possible, of course, so the next best thing we can do is provide families for those who need them.
Call-Me-Anne’s employment interview, she realized. What they were trying to tell her with that wasn’t at all clear. That missing sense. Or maybe because they had the sense, they were misinterpreting the situation.
“Nell? Nell?”
She tried to pull her arm out of the social worker’s grip and couldn’t. The pressure was a mouthful of walnut shells, tasteless and sharp. “What do you want?”
“I said, are you sure?”
Nell sighed. “There’s a story that the first people in the New World to see Columbus’s ships couldn’t actually see them because such things were too far outside their experience. You think that’s true?”
Call-Me-Anne, her expression a mix of confusion and anxiety. Nell knew what that look meant—she was afraid the situation was starting to get away from her. “Are you groggy? Or just tired?”
“I don’t,” she went on, a bit wistful. “I think they didn’t know what they were seeing and maybe had a hard time with the perspective but I’m sure they saw them. After all, they were made by other humans. But something coming from another world, all bets are off.”
Call-Me-Anne’s face was very sad now.
“I sound crazy to you?” Nell gave a short laugh. “Scientists talk about this stuff.”
“You’re not a scientist, Nell. You were a librarian. With proper treatment and medication, you could—”
Nell laughed again. “If a librarian starts thinking about the possibility of life somewhere else in the universe, it’s a sign she’s going crazy?” She turned her head away and closed her eyes. Correction, eye. She couldn’t feel very much behind the bandage, just enough to know that her right eyelid wasn’t opening or closing. When she heard the social worker walk away, she opened her eye to see the silver wires had come back. They bloomed like flowers, opening and then flying apart where they met others and connected, making new blooms that flew apart and found new connections. The world in front of Nell began to look like a cage, although she had no idea which side she was on.
Abruptly, she felt one of the wires go through her temple with that same white-hot pain. A moment later, a second one went through the bandage over her right eye as easily as if it wasn’t there, going all the way through her head and out, pinning her to the pillow.
Her left eye was watering badly but she could see Call-Me-Anne rushing back with a nurse. Their mouths opened and closed as they called her name. She saw them reaching for her but she was much too far away.
And that was how it would be. No, that was how it was always, but the five senses worked so hard to compensate for the one missing that people took the illusion of contact for the real thing. The power of suggestion—where would the human race be without it?
Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.
Contact.
The word was a poor approximation but the concept was becoming clearer in her mind now. Clearer than the sight in her left eye, which was dimming. But still good enough to let her see Call-Me-Anne was on the verge of panic.
A man in a white uniform pushed her aside and she became vaguely aware of him touching her. But there was still no contact.
* * *
Nell labored toward wakefulness as if she were climbing a rock wall with half a dozen sandbags dangling on long ropes tied around her waist. Her mouth was full of steel wool and sand. She knew that taste—medication. It would probably take most of a day to spit that out.
She had tried medication in the beginning because Marcus had begged her to. Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety capsules, and finally anti-psychotics—they had all tasted the same because she hadn’t been depressed, anxious, or psychotic. Meanwhile, Marcus had gotten farther and farther away, which, unlike the dry mouth, the weight gain, or the tremors in her hands, was not reversible.
Call-Me-Anne had no idea about that. She kept trying to get Nell to see Marcus, unaware they could barely perceive each other anymore. Marcus didn’t realize it either, not the way she did. Marcus thought that was reversible, too.
Pools of colour began to appear behind her heavy eyelids, strange colours that shifted and changed, green to gold, purple to red, blue to aqua, and somewhere between one colour and another was a hue she had never found anywhere else and never would.
Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.
C-c-c-contact …
The word was a boulder trying to fit a space made for a pebble smoothed over the course of eons and a distance of light-years into a precise and elegant thing.
Something can be a million light-years away and in your eye at the same time.
Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.
C-c-c-con … nect.
C-c-c-commmmune.
C-c-c-c-c-communnnnnnnnicate.
She had a sudden image of herself running around the base of a pyramid, searching for a way to get to the top. While she watched, it was replaced by a new image, of herself running around an elephant and several blind men; she was still looking for a way to get to the top of the pyramid.
The image dissolved and she became aware of how heavy the overhead lights were on her closed eyes. Eye. She sighed; even if she did finally reach understanding—or it reached her—how would she ever be able to explain what blind men, an elephant, and a pyramid combined with Columbus’s ships meant?
The musty smell of surrender broke in on her thoughts. It was very strong; Call-Me-Anne was still there. After a bit, she heard the sound of a wooden spoon banging on the bottom of a pot. Frustration, but not just any frustration: Marcus’s.
She had never felt him so clearly without actually seeing him. Perhaps Call-Me-Anne’s surrender worked as an amplifier.
The shifting colours resolved themselves into a new female voice. “… much do either of you know about the brain?”
“Not much,” Call-Me-Anne said. Marcus grunted, a stone rolling along a dirt path.
“Generally, synesthesia can be a side effect of medication or a symptom.”
“What about mental illness?” Marcus asked sharply, the spoon banging louder on the pot.
“Sometimes mentally ill people experience it but it’s not a specific symptom of mental illness. In your wife’s case, it was a symptom of the tumours.”
“Tumours?” Call-Me-Anne was genuinely upset. Guilt was a soft scratching noise, little mouse claws on a hard surface.
“Two, although there could be three. We’re not sure about the larger one. The smaller one is an acoustic neuroma, which—”
“Is that why she hears things?” Marcus interrupted.
The doctor hesitated. “Probably not, although some people complain of tinnitus. It’s non-cancerous, doesn’t spread, and normally very slow-growing. Your wife’s seems to be growing faster than normal. But then there’s the other one.” Pause. “I’ve only been a neurosurgeon for ten years so I can’t say I’ve seen everything but this really is quite, uh … unusual. She must have complained of headaches.”
A silence, then Call-Me-Anne cleared her throat. “They seemed to be cluster headaches. Painful but not exactly rare. I have them myself. I gave her some of my medication but I don’t know if she took it.”
Another small pause. “Sometimes she said she had a headache but that’s all,” Marcus said finally. “We’ve been legally separated for a little over two years, so I’m not exactly up-to-date. She sleeps on the street.”
“Well, there’s no telling when it started until we can do some detailed scans.”
“How much do those cost?” Marcus asked. Then after a long moment: “Hey, she left me to sleep on the street after I’d already spent a fortune on shrinks and prescriptions and hospitalizations. Then they tell me you can’t force a person to get treated for anything unless they’re a danger to the community, blah, blah, blah. Now she’s got brain tumours and I’m gonna get hit for the bill. Dammit, I shoulda divorced her but it felt too—” The spoon scraped against the iron pot. “Cruel.”
“You were hoping she’d snap out of it?” said the doctor. “Plenty of people feel that way. It’s normal to hope for a miracle.” Call-Me-Anne added some comforting noises, and said something about benefits and being in the system.
“Yeah, okay,” Marcus said. “But you still didn’t answer my question. How much do these scans cost?”
“Sorry, I couldn’t tell you, I don’t have anything to do with billing,” the doctor said smoothly. “But we can’t do any surgery without them.”
“I thought you already did some,” Marcus said.
“We were going to. Until I saw what was behind her eye.”
“It’s that big?” asked Marcus.
“It’s not just that. It’s—not your average tumour.”
Marcus gave a humourless laugh. “Tumours are standardized, are they?”
“To a certain extent, just like the human body. This one, however, isn’t behaving quite the way tumours usually do.” Pause. “There seems to be some grey matter incorporated into it.”
“What do you mean, like it’s tangled up in her brain? Isn’t that what a tumour does, get all tangled up in a person’s brain? That’s why it’s hard to take out, right?”
“This is different,” the doctor said. “Look, I’ve been debating with myself whether I should tell you about this—”
“If you’re gonna bill me, you goddam better tell me,” Marcus growled. “What’s going on with her?”
“Just from what I could see, the tumour has either co-opted part of your wife’s brain—stolen it, complete with blood supply—or there’s a second brain growing in your wife’s skull.”
There was a long pause. Then Marcus said, “You know how crazy that sounds? You got any pictures of this?”
“No. Even if I did, you’re not a neurosurgeon, you wouldn’t know what you were looking at.”
“No? I can’t help thinking I’d know if I were looking at two brains in one head or not.”
“The most likely explanation for this would be a parasitic twin,” the doctor went on. “It happens more often than you’d think. The only thing is, parasitic twins don’t suddenly take to growing. And if it had always been so large, you’d have seen signs of it long before now.
“Unfortunately, I couldn’t even take a sample to biopsy. Your wife’s vitals took a nosedive and we had to withdraw immediately. She’s fine now—under the circumstances. But we need to do those scans as soon as possible. Her right eye was so damaged by this tumour that we couldn’t save it. If we don’t move quickly enough, it’s going to cause additional damage to her face.”
Nell took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. She hadn’t thought they would hear her but they had; all three stopped talking and Call-Me-Anne and Marcus scurried over to the side of her bed, saying her name in soft, careful whispers, as if they thought it might break. She kept her eyes closed and her body limp, even when Call-Me-Anne took her hand in both of hers and squeezed it tight. After a while, she heard them go.
How had they done that, she marveled. How had they done it from so far away?
Something can be a million light-years away and in your eye at the same time.
Her mind’s eye showed her a picture of two vines entangled with each other. Columbus’s ships, just coming into view. The sense she had been missing was not yet fully developed, not enough to reconcile the vine and the ships. But judging from what the doctor said, it wouldn’t be long now.