Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  “I didn’t realize how destructive such a thing could be, but poor Reems’gaa—she was totally lost, totally dependent upon Urak who wouldn’t pay any attention to her at all. As Burrow One for this year he had a responsibility only to his nearest kin.”

  “Did no other Ree’hd help her?”

  “There was a lot of reaction against me, mostly from the males, mostly from the younger males. Reems’gaa wasn’t starving, but I don’t think she was being helped by any other burrow. She spent nights inside the outer corridors of the city, and her days by the river bank, watching whatever Urak did. Finally she turned her attention to me, just this morning begging me to leave and let her live normally.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  Kristina turned on Zeitman, snapped, “I have my own life, Robert! What was I supposed to do? Sacrifice my own happiness to give one female her own? It was her or me, and I regret that that was the way of things…”

  She fell silent, perhaps aware of the very humanness of the things she said, perhaps ashamed, perhaps thinking that it was Zeitman who had brought this reversal upon her. They stood in the darkness, a small circle of light, two humans regarding the sprawled body of a murdered Ree’hd. After a while Kristina grew very tense and switched off her belt light; the action drew Zeitman’s attention to her and she said, “Turn off your belt.”

  Zeitman obeyed. He had noticed her gaze, directed into the distance, towards the beginnings of the forested lowlands behind Terming. Directing his attention in the same direction he felt a sudden chill, a quickening of his heart.

  Four shapes stood there, in the absolute darkness, discernible only by the slight glow of the sexual skin areas on their torsos. They made no sound. They watched.

  “Rundii,” whispered Kristina. It was an unnecessary observation since Zeitman had noted their nature immediately, but when she said the word he felt that chill again. In the darkened plain an accurately thrown rock was far more lethal than a blindly discharged vaze.

  Human and Rundii stood motionless and silent, watching each other. This was only the second time that Zeitman had come close to one of the forest-living primitives, but the first time he had been secure in hiding, unobserved, unbothered. This time he had been caught unawares, and the Rundii were unpredictable creatures, increasingly unpredictable as their violent outbursts declined, not quite to negligibility, but sufficiently to inspire a false sense of security in new human arrivals on Ree’hdworld.

  “Let them move first,” Zeitman whispered. It had occurred to him that if four faced from the front, there could be a larger band approaching from behind, possibly just curious. And if curiosity in the dead native was all that motivated them, he saw no sense in giving them reason to attack.

  The shapes faded away with a gentle padding sound until there was no sensory indication of them at all. Zeitman whirled round, fast, vaze in hand, searching the darkness for any other Rundii prowlers. He noticed, as he did so, that Kristina was doing the same.

  “Let’s follow them,” she said, and it was as if there were no distance in time between them. They were Rob and Kristina Zeitman, and you wouldn’t find a better biological team this side of Earth.

  They followed, stealthily, carefully, picking up the trail in a very short time, and depending on keeping the quiet walking of the Rundii just in earshot. With their unrefined infrared senses the Rundii might not notice their pursuers, unlike a Ree’hd who would not have failed to notice them.

  Dollar Moon began to rise, away to the west, above the mountains. Kristina registered some alarm, but Zeitman urged her to be silent and pulled her to the ground. Ahead of them the Rundii had stopped, and were staring at the leading edge of the moon’s disc as it appeared, outlining the peaks of the Hell-gate mountains.

  For some minutes the four creatures stood and stared at the moon; then, as more than half the disc came into view, they turned back to their original route and vanished into shadows.

  Zeitman remained where he was, watching the moon, then staring after the Rundii and thinking hard. He had never ever heard of the Rundii being fascinated by the lunar rising. No account of them, however detailed, had ever referred to such curiosity. Was that an omission of observation? Were these Rundii unusual? He discussed the phenomenon with Kristina.

  “To my knowledge,” she said, “the Rundii are primitive, closer to the common ancestors of Ree’hd and Rundii than are the Ree’hd. We have never found artifacts, though they use stones and will use knives that they steal; they have no organized community life outside the natural racial patterns. They have no self-awareness…” she stopped; her eyes bright in the new light on the plain, were wide. “What are we witnessing, Robert? Two scientific minds, frustrated by inactivity, reading significance into nothing at all? Or a change?”

  “I have no idea,” was all Zeitman said, thinking of what he had learned from Kawashima, but impatient to follow the Rundii group. “We’re losing them.”

  They followed on. By the time they were passing through the sparse bush and twisted tree-forms that marked the first ten miles or so of the impermanent forest, Dollar Moon was riding high, speeding through the heavens towards its setting point out across the ocean.

  They came to the Rundii community suddenly and without warning. Community. Zeitman could use no other word.

  They were grouped in a clearing, squatting in a wide semicircle about the body of one of their kin. The corpse lay prone, and facing the sky, its limbs broken and bent across its body in a fashion that neither Zeitman nor Kristina had ever seen. The Rundii gathering just sat, and stared at the body. They seemed to be contemplating what they observed. They seemed to be thinking about death.

  After a while Kristina slipped away from Zeitman. He followed her, not wanting to remain so close to the animals on his own, and found her seated in the full light of Dollar Moon, back against a tree-form, arms around her legs, her frail body shivering in the cold night. Zeitman sat beside her, debating whether to put his arm around her shoulder and warm her, or leave well alone. While he was still thinking about such trivial matters, Kristina said, “Did you feel it?”

  “The confusion?”

  She nodded. “Terrible confusion. They have faced death for generations, but now they fear it. They’re aware, Robert. They’re fully aware. In less than a heartbeat they’ve crossed the barrier. They’re really alive now.”

  “That’s an enormous assumption…”

  “But you said you felt it! That was no animal empathy. That was the confusion of an intelligent, emotional being, facing life objectively for the first time in its life.”

  Zeitman agreed. “I did feel it, and if they had been old apes of Earth sitting there, I’d agree. But they are Rundii, and this is not Earth. There have been guns jumped for centuries—the so called speech of the Rundii for one thing…”

  “I know. Just defensive repetition of sound. I know. But this is different. We’re sensitives, you and I. Don’t you have faith in that ability any more?”

  What could he say? All his life his capacity for empathy and sensitivity had been his major laboratory instrument, allowing him into the minds of animals and men. Six years ago he had failed to understand human beings, the ability had gone and it had helped destroy him and Kristina. How could he fully trust what his senses told him about an alien? His feelings might be as distorted now as they became those several years ago.

  “We could… we could work together on this Kristina… as we were…”

  “No way,” she said coldly.

  “Not as man and wife, just as a biological team—”

  Kristina struggled to her feet, saying, “I told you Robert. I don’t want to know.”

  “Kristina—just for a while. Don’t you sense the change that’s going on? I honestly don’t know if I can trust my sixth sense any more, but if I can, then it tells me that something big is happening, and we could explore it together.”

  Kristina stopped. She didn’t look at Zeitman who stood behind her,
but she softened. “There is something happening, I agree. I’ve been feeling it for a long time. I’ve felt it in the Ree’hd, though Urak seems oblivious of anything happening to him. I’ve felt it in the ecology, in the air. I’ve even felt it in the humans I know, especially Dan Erlam.” She turned and faced Zeitman, and there was something confused about her expression. “It’s a change I don’t think any human could cope with, and it is probably the reason I’m so desperate to become a Ree’hd.”

  The thought of it! To become totally intimate with an alien culture—to become an alien! To die an alien. For a moment he forgot that he was Robert Zeitman, that he wanted a relationship with a human female that he had had once before. For that same moment he thought how absolutely right it was to shake off the human guise and to become immersed in Ree’hdworld. It was what he had always wanted, but perhaps never realized. And Kristina was suggesting that she knew how to do it; and if she knew…

  He said as much to Kristina, but she remained apparently unimpressed. He said, “Kristina—help me to find the way into Ree’hdworld. I can’t do it alone…”

  She was quiet for a moment, thinking. “I could help you, I suppose…”

  “Christ, Kristina—we could be really great together—”

  “Togetherness I don’t want. Don’t get carried away, Robert. I’ll help you now, this instant, for a few weeks if you need it… but that’s all.”

  “That’s all I ask, Kristina, a few weeks, the security of your presence. Hell, I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I mean it. I’m lost without you, Kristina—I’m in a vacuum… I’ll be unable to do anything meaningful unless I have your strength.”

  “I’ve told you I’ll help.”

  “Not right away, though. Not just yet. We must find out what is happening here…”

  Kristina’s laugh was almost insulting. “You’ll never make it, Robert. You have no sense of urgency, and if any human feature is required to lose humanness it’s a sense of urgency. Forget I ever offered. I want no further part of you.”

  She was gone, consumed by darkness and her hatred for Zeitman, a silent animal, making her escape through the night.

  Behind Zeitman came the sound of animal voices, crooning, singing, perhaps, the first death song.

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  In a dream of Earth Zeitman became encased in fire, and ran screaming and blistering through rows of gutted buildings. He cried out in his sleep and Susanna reached across and shook him awake.

  Shocked by the abruptness with which his nightmare fled, Zeitman sat bolt upright and stared into the darkness of the chamber. He could hear the shuffling approach of a Ree’hd and Susanna’s voice was an urgent droning that slowly began to assume coherence.

  It had been a nightmare and nothing more, and after a moment he relaxed. When Grai, the burrow One, peered into the chamber and expressed concern for her guests’ well-being Zeitman apologized for the disturbance. When Grai hesitated before withdrawing, Susanna switched on their small lamp and the Ree’hd took a long and hard look at her guests from the thou-sand-mile-distant city, and satisfied herself that all was in order. She backed out of the chamber quietly and Zeitman heard a low exchange outside between several Ree’hd.

  Susanna felt his brow. “You’re soaking.”

  Zeitman wiped his face on the thin sheet that covered them. “I’m fine—I’m just very tense, that’s all.”

  “What about? Here, He back.”

  Zeitman shook her off and climbed to his feet. He dried the sweat from his body and dressed slowly and with shaking hands. He had difficulty with the magnetic fasteners of his ’phrak and finally left it open. “I need a walk.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Susanna, throwing the sheet off and reaching for her clothes.

  “Alone.” He smiled at her, but he could see that she was upset. “I haven’t been relaxing at all well…”

  “Is what happened on Earth still on your mind?”

  “Of course it’s still on my mind!”

  She fell back on the mattress and said no more. Zeitman almost apologized for shouting but decided against it. He walked from the burrow and out into the end of the night.

  Earth. He looked for Sol and saw where it lay in the heavens. As a star it was nowhere near sufficiently bright for its light to be seen from Ree’hdworld, and anyway lay far round the rim of the galaxy so that a veil of light frustrated his search. But it seemed to Zeitman as he gazed into the night sky that where Sol lay there was a black hole in the star spread, and he tried to reach through this to Earth. He stared at that gap and imagined the solar system with its myriad comets, its gas giants—and the radio-wave-filled aether, the noisy babble of thousands of solar stations greeting the approaching voyager. He had been back to Earth several times in his life and one of the great excitements of return was the thought of that rich human greeting as the ship coasted through solar space, seeking its specific beacon.

  His last trip home was likely, he reflected now, to have been literally his last. He had wasted his time there, spending the few days he was on-world exploring his childhood haunts, looking up his colleagues from training days, and paying a short and agonisingly nostalgic visit to his parents—both now looking frighteningly old and haunted. Neither of them had ever forgiven him for leaving Earth so permanently. With a solar system to play with why, they asked, did he have to go so far away? It made him tired to hear the argument again, so long after he had thought it was resolved; but of course, it was merely a symptom of what was happening to Earth.

  In his last days there he had been told of the spread of Fear across the globe, had seen it for himself, and had been terrified.

  By now, even as he sat on alien cliffs, his parents and earth-bound friends had succumbed, and would in all likelihood be dead.

  He would never go there again, the distance being prohibitive if nothing else. Strangely, Zeitman never felt he was far from Earth. It was impossible to conceive of the immensity of space, especially since a trip from star to star was made for the most part locked in one’s cabin, thinking (without comprehension) of the distance being covered. Zeitman could never cope with watching endless star-fields passing, and worst of all was looking back into the blaze of lights behind and thinking “what if we were lost, what if we couldn’t find home again…?”

  All quite normal fears for quite normal men, and Zeitman was normal in every way. He had even found a more normal feeling for Earth—instead of his indifference of a few days earlier. Now, as he went through a phase of depression, he began to realize that if Earth was gone, then man had lost more than he could, in all likelihood, cope with. A complete volte-face had set Zeitman to brooding about the mother-world in every spare moment.

  In the Ree’hdworld night he watched Dollar Moon sinking below the southern horizon, its brilliance setting the sea on fire. There were many Ree’hd squatting on the cliff-tops also watching the descent. Very few were paying attention to the red glow of Other as it cast a diffuse light across the land to the north.

  Zeitman watched Other and thought he could see the winking lights of the check-stations and signal-installations, but only those with perfect eyesight could see such phenomena, and he was probably imagining what he saw.

  What he saw without doubt were the lights in the heavens… so many of them! They passed overhead in regular streams, some flashing, some steady beacons. Ships, hundreds of ships with no possibility of landing since the installation was not prepared to assist, but was only too prepared to use missiles to discourage any landing.

  The necessity of missiles on Ree’hdworld was something that Zeitman was just prepared to acknowledge, but he hated their presence. What, he wondered, would an innocent Rundii circle think if their night sky suddenly erupted into a double explosion, filling the night with magnesium-flare brilliance and a thunder the like of which they might never hear again? Would they read some religious significance into it? (Might it spark the development of a religious a
wareness? That was an intolerable thought!) Or would they think of it as a natural phenomenon and forget about it?

  Quite apart from their obvious danger, thought Zeitman, the missile-installations are potentially the most destructive to the native cultures of all man’s introductions to the planet.

  With the approach of dawn the on-shore wind grew in strength and Zeitman pressed against a rock pillar so that he ran no risk of being blown over. The sea was growing wild and he could hear the sound of its relentless beat against the cliffs and the rock platform that formed a natural promenade at the water’s edge. At this point, on the coastline, the cliffs were sheer and simple. A few miles to the east were the beginnings of the fragmented coastline that Zeitman had observed on his arrival, and he could see the black archways of rock reaching out into the ocean, and the sea dashing itself against these invaders from the land, swirling through the caverns and channels in its attempt to destroy.

  At this time the Ree’hd of this smaller community, nearly a thousand miles from Terming, came out of the ground and spent a few minutes breathing the Sa’am-cri-orog, the past and future spirits of the sea wind. Almost immediately, however, they turned from this precarious dawn position on the top of the cliffs and began to move inland, to where the beginnings of a river cut in between high, sheer cliffs. Some Ree’hd were so bold as to sail inland, manipulating their coarse fibre boats with a great deal of facility. The in-blowing wind assisted their efforts.

  Always wind, thought Zeitman, as he followed at a distance. Susanna had remained behind to record any activity in the burrows at this time of day.

  Zeitman walked the hard way, along the edge of the channel, looking down through nearly three hundred feet of cold air to the turbulent waters below. He could see rocks and ledges below the water’s surface, and he could see them carved and pitted with life-holes, each representing a Ree’hd who had died in the community, his spirit committed to the Sa’am-cri-orog and to the inner land spheres.