by Nick Gevers
MarsMom tweets, “I’m going to take a nap, everyone. Call me if you need me!”
The twibes are all abuzz wondering if Mom seems a little peeved. What in the world did we do? Farida’s twibe wonders. Dave, Victor, and Shiro are clueless. We’ll cheer her up, Trella’s twibe cries. Mom’s twibe is mum on the whole subject.
Trella tweets, “Two words! Chicken molé!”
I wonder if I can get away with poisoning them all. I could twitter for them. I could file their reports. Make phone calls with voice-changing software. I could fake a massive camera failure, and when the outside world finally caught on, I could be sick in my bed, cross-eyed, sweating, is that you, Mama? (MarsMom tweets, “What is it @Trella?—not you Dead Carol! I want my Mommy!)” Wait a minute! Why am I not thinking in Spanish? You are thinking in Spanish, Estrella, it is just that when your thoughts go out into the universe they pass through the Universal Translator and come out the other end in the language of whoever is reading your mind. And who would be reading my mind? Hey, maybe everyone in the universe is reading my mind! Oh, I hope not. They will know I want to poison everyone! This is so spicy, Trella! Yeah, right, you macho bozo, I know you’ll keep choking it down, sweat running down your red face, because it would be just too embarrassing to let the other boys think it is too hot for you, and they will be just the same, men are so easy to poison, it won’t be so easy with Farida and Carol who will be nibbling cautiously. Chocolate! Women love chocolate. I love chocolate. Maybe everyone else in the universe can hear our every thought, and we are some kind of handicapped creatures who cannot hear one another but who cannot also shut up. Shut up! The universe wants us to just shut up! We are driving them crazy with our unrestrained thoughts. They have isolated us because it is just too painful to be around us, or maybe we are just too pathetic. We all have Tourette’s syndrome! Maybe my CHARACTERS are savage detectives like in my favorite book, and their POWER is poetry! Maybe the game gimmick will be to see who can read my mind just in the nick of time and put their fork down and escape their fate!
Trella tweets, “Soup’s on!”
RayVuk tweets, “Something is approaching. Can’t you feel it?”
VictorOnMars tweets, “I am as ready as the next guy to play games!”
I do understand that my political anger isn’t really even political. It’s just anger. We are angry creatures. Angry and loud, and we never shut up about it, which is why no one likes us. Silly Shiro, Ookami, the wolf, he is a lamb, I am the real wolf, the thing that goes bump in the night. I don’t actually get to do much bumping in the night. You dogs! I will let the beast out and paint the walls with blood! I will make a 3, 2, 1 pyramid of skulls! Wait, that would mean the top skull would have to be mine. Maybe I’ll use a cantaloupe as the top skull, maybe I’ll paint my face on the melon. Why do we not hear from other creatures in the universe? Why do they never visit? Assuming they don’t, of course. Assuming it’s nonsense that they just like to play games in our fields and probe the anuses of peasants. Maybe we are being punished for something. Maybe humanity is in solitary confinement. Maybe we are just one creature who has been locked away so long its mind has fragmented into all of us. Maybe we are really God, but God who has committed some inconceivable sin and has been condemned to spend all of His days alone. This is a meditation of the unnamable. Of course, that just kicks the can down the road. We are God and we neither see nor hear aliens because we have not yet made them up. I am so gloomy when I am not angry. My CHARACTERS will be political prisoners, and their POWER will be anger. They will revolt and take hostages and kill the hostages by throwing them out of second-story windows! I can hardly hear myself think. The hum is like a crowd just outside the door, muttering, grumbling, talking about me, I wonder if they have torches and pitchforks. It’s nearly time to gather in the dining room for Shiro’s Fermi Game; I wonder if the others will wear costumes. Should I wear a costume? And if so, who should I be? The runaway Russian Ayn Rand maybe. I would need some ugly shoes for that one. Or maybe I should be Gandhi with only a piece of cloth. I could go either way.
VictorOnMars tweets, “Showtime, Comrades!”
Doors everywhere bang open and Alice and Alice and Alice run into every space some growing huge and others squeaking down small like mice or hotfooting cockroaches swarming over the farting rabbits with swords who fence with John Wayne clones wielding axes and screwdrivers while silent children stand by unsmiling but shooting creepy eyebeams at all the gauchos shouting poems at the chain gangs. Something stirs the battle like a long finger in paint, and the hum crowds out everything. It’s not our phones, it’s not our computers, forget about the refrigerator, it’s more than the sounds of animals and waves and cities and machines.
RayVuk tweets, “The noise has pressed me flat, but suddenly I can see you! I don’t know how, but there you are!”
All six of you, billions and billions of us looking at you, looking at us, I’m on the phone with my mother and Facebook chatting with my anime buddies, Skype this, WOW that, SL avatars gather to consider The Fermi Game, and it’s like big hands have grabbed us, the whole world, and squeezed. It’s all happening at once and to everyone, and we are all together, until we are really just one big thing, and once we are one big thing, that big thing can suddenly talk to all the other big things out there and they are all like, hello hello it’s so good to see you finally get it together, we thought you might never do it, yours is such a unique situation. It hardly ever happens like this, in fact, no one can remember it ever happening like this, but now that we know it can happen like this, surely it has happened before and we have just forgotten about it, some of us will be looking into it, it will be fascinating to find out if anyone else has ever done it like this. Yes, yes, those six parts of you who are so much the focus of this merging were mostly right, and you will soon be going to Mars. All of you! No one will be left behind. The tech for that trip is such that pieces like RayVuk, who will be a lot older when this happens, might as well be sitting right there in the captain’s chair, might as well turn to his left and ask Alice, “How are you doing this morning, pumpkin?” He can call the mind of all humanity “pumpkin” because he is one of the billions of grandfathers, and you have certain privileges as a grandfather. Grandmothers will call Alice something quite different—maybe “sweetie.”
Did Trella poison them all? No. Humanity became one big thing just before anyone could taste the molé, before Carol could give the order for Dave to use his axe, before Farida could loose her farting bunnies, before Victor could depress everyone into jumping out a window and off a bridge, but not before Shiro and everyone, absolutely everyone, became Alice.
The Space Caterpillar blows smoke rings, and then says, yes, we did use “wind” to hide evidence of our existence from you and keep you in the dark all these years, and yes, we are not so common in the first place, and yes, the speed of light really does seem to be the ultimate limit which means many creatures go in and never come out, and yes, there is a Very Bad Thing, but it won’t get to you for a long long time, and if you decide to go in, after all, you won’t feel a thing when It gets there, but you were wrong about being God who has done something to get tossed into solitary confinement (unless we are all God—oh, no, let’s not think about that!). Instead you were isolated because of an unfortunate biological condition in which you broadcast your unrestrained, hurtful, lovely but loud, awful, truly shameful, how could you think such things, thought babble all the time without pause, and we blew that away, too, away from most of the rest of us, the ironic part being that you could not even hear yourselves, so chances were small you would ever become Alice and join us, but then you overcame your handicap with mechanical prosthesis!
Who would have thought?
And soon you will all be on your way to Mars!
You are now, at long last, really one big monkey. Yes, you had to wind yourself up, but your cymbal playing is very nice. We like it. Hello, hello, dear Alice.
The Taste of Night
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 fewer 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 color 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 color from their voices changed to widening circular ripples, like those spreading out from raindrops falling into still water. The colors crossed each other to make new colors, 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.