Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  “On Ree’hdworld?”

  “To begin with, yes. And later—everywhere. I’ve just come back. I’ve been away a long time.”

  “But you already seem to know what’s going on here.”

  Maguire shook his head. “That’s not true; I’m not properly tuned into the place yet.” He smiled. “You’ll see what I mean.”

  He climbed to his feet and Kristina stood up beside him and watched him as he looked all about him. A few adolescent Ree’hd stared at them from their burrows. Kristina saw a great troup of Ree’hd moving inland—to hunt, she presumed.

  Maguire said, “When did the Ree’hd establish this community? It’s a little close to the burrowlands over there, isn’t it?” He pointed towards Terming. It seemed to Kristina that he was becoming aware of a fact that he had not previously known.

  She said, “The terran city of Terming now stands over the old burrows. The Ree’hd moved here centuries ago, unless they wanted to integrate.”

  Maguire was shocked. He stared towards where the city could just be seen as a glittering of high atmosphere antennae and the extremely flexible pylons that held the wind harnesses. “You mean… you mean there are Ree’hd actually living in the city? What a stupid thing to do… what a stupid…”

  Kristina stood beside him, confused. “Stupid? Why?”

  “No wonder they came back.” He began to stumble along the river bank, heading to the land where he had first lived. Kristina watched him go until he was just a brown figure moving across the nearest hill; then she walked back to her burrow to find Urak.

  Chapter Three

  The city of Terming, named for its first Governor, was a hundred and three square miles of angularity, built around a river, and covering with its skirts the ancient burrows of the Ree’hd who had once lived in this area. Nowhere in the city was there a building higher than seventy yards. Even with the baffles the city dwellers had erected, the dawn wind was too strong to make it comfortable to go higher.

  Zeitman was accommodated in the military barracks, and he had no vantage viewpoint at all from his room. From the east window a sheer wall of green styrocon bricks was his to regard at leisure. From the north a long, unwinding road, filled with wind debris and wandering Ree’hd was his to contemplate. Seeing the city Ree’hd for the first time in four years, Zeitman felt a certain compassion. The Ree’hd all appeared drunk, but this was a symptom of their illness. Living under the wing of the human race the Ree’hd always became ill; their “blood” thinned, they lost weight and coordination, and their thinking processes faded. They were good, at this stage, for many routine jobs and not surprisingly were mercilessly exploited. Since, however, their illness did not register as more than drunkenness and fatigue, and since the drug and social perks of living in Terming were attractive and seducing, the Ree’hd population in the city was enormous. And many of them had risen to positions of power and were able to exploit humans mercilessly in return.

  Zeitman thought it was all quite disgusting but there was nothing he could do about it.

  Towards midday he unpacked his kit slowly and thoughtfully, filled two of six wall repositories and found a complete wardrobe of travelling and military-style clothes waiting for him in the closet. The uniforms were the wide-trousered, long-jacketed regalia of a Major in the Liaison Corps, according to a note he found pinned to one of them. Zeitman smiled, partly at Erlam’s humour (or was there such a thing as a Liaison Corps?) and partly at the necessary tradition of every member of the permanent personnel of Terming having an arbitrary military rank. He felt, however, a certain hypocritical pride. The last time he had been here he had been credited with a mere Captain’s rank.

  Promotion.

  He stripped off his grey ship-suit and cataphrak and spent a few minutes squeezing the white-heads that invariably covered him after any length of time in space. Their cause was a bafflement to him, and he was fairly rare in showing the cosmetically unattractive feature.

  He showered with the bitter water that Ree’hdworld offered and wondered what Susanna would make of that. The city did not bother to extract the excess of iron and potassium salts that were present in its water supply since every human on a colonial world had a biostasis unit built into his or her body, and these were efficient monitors of what came into the body, and equally efficient at getting rid of unwelcomed excesses—with exceptions such as alcohol and one or two other organic molecules, for which many citizens were highly grateful. Susanna, being a ninth-generation settler, probably had no such protection and would have the pleasure of unit installation to go through.

  Having showered, he pulled on the most colourful of the uniforms and checked his appearance in the narcissistic mirror that glowed into being at the touch of a button.

  Beyond the mirror? Zeitman would have bet a year’s pay that robot eyes stared without interest at him. He didn’t really mind.

  Apart from his white spots he was presentable, and not prone to private bad behaviour.

  On the wall, just beside the mirror, a panel slid open with a noisy rasp and a message screen lit up. Zeitman read the words with interest and a certain excitement. Then he smiled and signalled the screen to fade. He didn’t need a copy of what he had read.

  So she was coming to see him. Did that mean (could it possibly mean) that her failure to meet him had been a mistake on her part?

  A woman’s voice spoke from nowhere. “Please connect your vone… please connect your vone…”

  “I’m sorry? Oh… yes…” Zeitman found the vone and sealed the contact strip to the contact plate by his narrow bunk. Immediately the minute screen raced with static and then a man’s face gazed out at him. Zeitman might have expected a beaming smile, but the man was solemn and it made him feel cold.

  “Welcome back, Robert. We have lots to talk about, and we have to talk now. Did your wife meet you?”

  Direct, impersonal, unconcerned about feelings—my God, thought Zeitman. He hasn’t changed. Daniel Erlam, a City Father and the Director of the Department of Culture and Environment. An overblown, overweight man, pushing his century, but with the sexual drives of a forty-year-old man, the success rate of a college student, and the enviable position of being the only man Zeitman knew who commanded total fear and total respect from ninety-nine percent of the people with whom he came into contact.

  Zeitman loved him.

  “Hi, Dan. You look about three hundred pounds heavier than when I went away.”

  Now Erlam smiled, slightly and without much feeling.

  “I’ve put it on in the last few weeks, Robert. Worry, and you can guess over what, and while we’re on the subject, it’s classified, okay? There’s only you, I and one or two selected top men in Terming who have any idea of the situation, so keep your mouth shut, right? And incidentally, what the hell happened to that blind man you illegally brought down with you?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”

  “You sure will, Robert. You know better than to airlift unauthorized persons down to Ree’hdworld, and that man had no authority.”

  “He worked on me when we were in orbit.”

  “And he doesn’t know?”

  Zeitman felt disturbed at Erlam’s abruptness. He had never been like this with him before. “I don’t believe he does, though the shuttle pilot had some sort of rumour that he spread on to us. So the information has leaked.”

  “Leaking in orbit doesn’t matter a bit… not to Ree’hdworld. It’s the installation I’m worried about. So we have stopped all landings and will be shipping people offworld as fast as their stay here is finished. Have you made immediate plans?”

  Zeitman decided not to mention the message from Kristina. “Immediate like in the next hour?”

  “Or two or three hours.”

  Zeitman shook his head. The image of Erlam smiled sourly. “When do you intend seeing Kristina again?”

  “None of your business. How’s your sex life?”

  “Failing. I intercept
ed that message, Robert—you’re meeting her at dusk at the burrows. I’d advise you to think twice. The burrows are closed at night for reasons that will become apparent. Listen, get on to Kristina… I can give you the skimmer contact she fired from. Tell her to meet you somewhere else.”

  Zeitman declined, feeling annoyed at Erlam’s confessed eavesdropping. “The burrows have a special significance, Dan.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I can’t. Not yet. Personal.”

  Erlam swore under his breath. “I’m surprised at the damn woman. She knows the trouble we’ve been having at the burrows. What does she think she’s at?” He shook his head.

  Zeitman smiled as he watched the expressions race across Erlam’s full-moon face. “You want me to come over right away?”

  “That’s what I intended,” said Erlam. “But I think you’d better have a word with Harry Kawashima first—he’s the man who took over when you left; he works in the same place. He’ll fill you in on the Rundii trouble. Things are changing real fast around here, Robert. I’ll see you later.” And he cut the circuit, leaving Zeitman shaken and puzzled. Erlam was rarely so abrupt… at least, he hadn’t been when Zeitman had known him before.

  He had hoped for transport to fetch him. Erlam had offered none. And so it was a question of footing it through the streets of Terming until a skipcab darted past.

  Zeitman left the barracks and faced the Ree’hdworld atmosphere. He felt fresh and clean and fractionally more human than he had felt during the long journey in space.

  The air was sharp. Trace elements in the atmosphere had different effects on different humans—Susanna, as they had walked in the open air for the first time, had stated positively that the air smelled sweet. To Zeitman… the tang of sulphur, the choke of chlorine, present just as a hint, no more. Not distracting, not uncomfortable. Neither element was present It was psychological. It was the scent of home.

  The barracks, Zeitman noticed as he made for the city centre, were larger and neater than they had been last time he had been here. They comprised, now, what appeared to be twenty parallel rows of bunk-houses, interspersed with smaller blocks of individual rooms such as that which Zeitman now inhabited. The admin, and mess blocks were further to the edge of the barrack block, and the flag of Ree’hdworld, an orange and red striped flag, with the code number of the world embossed in large, gothic silver letters, flew above this complex of buildings, fluttering below the larger, more pronounced standard of the Sector Federation. This was a plain white flag with the symbol of the Federation—a cluster of six stars arranged in a triangle—drawn in red in the upper left corner.

  A skipcab cushioned up to him and an old and dishevelled Ree’hd stared out. His song lips stretched in a wholly unnatural smile. “Need transport?” he asked in imperfect interLing.

  Zeitman was delighted to accept. “I want to get to the Department of Behavioural Sciences; it’s over on East side.”

  “I know it,” said the Ree’hd, his smile never leaving his lips all the while he looked at Zeitman. “Ten minutes round the edge, or half an hour through the centre which is a good ride.”

  “Round the edge. I’ve seen all I want to see of tourists for a while.”

  The skipcab darted off along the roadways; it was a small and uncomfortable vehicle, lent an almost tangible lethality by the atrocious handling of the Ree’hd driver. Zeitman felt tense and unhappy for the ten-minute journey, and was delighted to wave the cab away for the loss of a ten-credit bill (ten times the fare).

  He checked at reception in the two-storey, white-bricked building that was his old place of work, but when he learned that Kawashima was up town at a sensudome he left to find the Japanese without visiting his old lab and the technicians and staff whom he had known before.

  It was, he supposed, one more symptom of the insecurity he was feeling more and more these days. A feeling of sadness to think he had missed four years of scientific activity in the well furnished, comfortable laboratories. It would have depressed him to go deeper into the building.

  His second cab ride was almost as bad as the first. The Ree’hd driver, a young, alert specimen, not yet irreversibly affected by the rigours and alienness of human living, was a better driver than the first cabby, but less responsible. He took Zeitman on a hair-raising ride through some of the dirtier of the East sector streets, and then into the brighter and busier centre.

  Passing the skimmer-hire station Zeitman broke his journey to put in an application for one of the leaf-shaped vehicles that was as important a part of living on Ree’hdworld as was tolerance of wind. It would take two days for approval to come through (Erlam had slipped up again in not having approval through prior to Zeitman’s arrival) and until then Zeitman would have to use a military issue skimmer, which was noisy and armed, something Zeitman did not approve of. Certainly he was armed personally (a B-type Kiljarold Vaze) but more as protection against other humans than as protection against the local Ree’hd population. The reverse was the philosophy behind the arming of the military skimmers.

  By the time the skipcab was a mile from Kawashima’s visiting place the traffic had been forced to a crawl by the pressure of tourists in the streets. It was all human traffic, of course; the only Ree’hd faces that Zeitman saw were those that peered out at him from acquisition booths or guide centres.

  Everyone was well wrapped against the chill of the day, now half way through its twenty-eight hours, but the feeling Zeitman got was of excitement and pleasure. Terming was obviously as popular as ever.

  The sensudome was one of only two that dished up a mixed diet of human and Ree’hd eroticism. As such it was something outside Zeitman’s experience; in his previous years on Ree’hdworld he had spent a vast amount of time in the purely human establishments, from dining clubs that included striptease on the menu, to the drug and neuro-stim rooms where “any and all delights” were available.

  He had never felt any inclination to witness the necessary degrading of the city Ree’hd in those establishments that supposedly catered for both races.

  It cost him a hundred credits to gain entrance to the complex of rooms and studios, but once inside he was his own boss; if it was available it was his, for an hour—or two hours if he paid an extra fifty credits.

  He lingered for a while in the media entertainment section of the building, watching elaborate displays of human perversion, all quite aesthetic and arousing. He moved on and watched a mixed copulation display, a dynamic montage of male humans and female Ree’hd, a slowly performed sequence of actions that seemed almost comical to Zeitman… and yet the audience was large, and raptly attentive! It’s the nude-on-horseback phenomenon, Zeitman thought to himself with a mental smile. But no grey dappled mare ever looked as uninterested as the participating Ree’hd. The male Ree’hd who were pseudo-raping busty, human females had their attention on anything and everything save the task at hand.

  And the audience, Zeitman noticed, was almost totally human, about evenly mixed as regards sex. Such carnal displays were very far from the Ree’hd sense of the erotic—an interesting wind display might be a Ree’hd’s idea of pleasure, but sexual motivation was lost before adulthood.

  Zeitman followed a few human males into the brothel that spread out, a series of cubicles, around the strip studios. Some doors were open and males and females of both species watched him as he wandered by; only the humans made any effort to solicit.

  He found Kawashima, then, and sat in the dimness waiting for the man’s neuro-stim trip to end.

  Kawashima was a small, fat Japanese—in fact a mixture of Japanese and North Continental Centauran, the eyes being testimony to the first; the wide, ugly hands evidence of the second.

  He was seated cross-legged upon a mat, fully-clothed, eyes open but unseeing; a small circular metal disc was stuck to his forehead, feeding him the details of the experience he was undergoing. Every so often his eyes closed and he moaned, a sound of intense pleasure.

  After a few minu
tes he seemed to relax and shiver. He came to full consciousness and reached up for the disc, and as he reached he saw Zeitman, hesitated in the action, then peeled the metal slither from his skin.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name’s Robert Zeitman. I used to—”

  “Yeah, I know about you. Don’t you know anything about privacy? I should beat into you for busting in on me.”

  “I apologize, but I’m in a hurry.”

  Kawashima climbed to his feet and sat down again on the small bed, picking up a towel and wiping moisture from his neck. Zeitman also stood up and moved round the room to stand in front of the scowling Japanese.

  “Being in a hurry no excuse. I paid a damn lot of money for peace and… and what I got?” He spoke with an unmistakable accent, but it seemed to contain elements of both parental cultures: the nasal vowels of his North Continental Centauran dialect slightly overpowering the buccal predominance of the Japanese accentuation. Kawashima had almost certainly spent much time in each parental homeland.

  “If you wanted peace you should have locked the door,” said Zeitman, unsympathetically. “Which trip were you on? Human or Ree’hd?”

  Kawashima was furious. “Hey, you, Zeitman!” he shouted. “What’s your game? You bust in here, interrupt me, spoil the effect! And then you pry! Hurry or no, I think you’d better bust out until you can find some manners.”

  Zeitman didn’t move. “Erlam said we should talk and I intend to talk. Cool down, mister. You’ve had your fun, now let’s get back to work shall we?”

  If Kawashima had been about to argue further, Zeitman’s last statement stopped him dead. He stared at the other man for a moment, a mixture of emotions in his face; then he stood, flung the towel away and advanced on Zeitman. “Work? Did you say work? Listen, mister-when you left four years ago or whenever you may not have left the planet for good, but you sure as hell left your job for good. And they appointed me in your place and I don’t intend to let you snatch it away again, you got that clear?”