Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  The burrow One, who was Zeitman’s host, saw him staring into the canyon and approached him, walking against the raging wind with seemingly little trouble. Zeitman held on for his life to one of the rock pillars that had been driven into the ground, a long line of life supports—the Ree’hd population advanced inland from post to post and it was rare for one of the community to be swept away by the wind.

  Grai made no effort, Zeitman was thankful, to adopt human mannerisms; the attitude at which she held her arms told Zeitman of the Ree’hd’s pleasure. It was always a pleasure to have a sensitive human to stay under one’s burrow roof. There was a difference, of course, between humans like Zeitman, who were scientifically interested in the natives, and the tourists who came to stare and were more frightened than intrigued by the strange creatures they pretended they were not holospanning. (Zeitman was guilty of such breaches of trust himself, and had an extensive collection of pictures of Ree’hd. The Ree’hd did not care to have their pictures taken and Zeitman was always disappointed that their apparently primitive culture should manifest itself so blatantly.)

  “Are humans not afraid of these distances?”

  Zeitman shook his head. “You mean the height? Most of us would be petrified. That’s a very long drop.”

  Grai followed his gaze downwards. Zeitman, feeling instability affecting his legs, turned to regard the Ree’hd. Grai was a small female, and quite old. She had been burrow One several times, and her offspring numbered over twenty. It was rare for a Ree’hd to grow so old (Grai was close to one hundred Earth years old) since in all that time the loss of a brother- or sister-year-kin was inevitable. In fact, twice Grai had lost such kin and had wandered for several seasons in the inner lands; but both times she had returned. From his understanding of the burrow records, and from listening to accounts of kin movements, Zeitman knew from long experience that to return twice was very unusual.

  Grai had said simply that she had felt it was right to return, right that she should remain alive. She had wandered and become a part of nature, but there had been only negative responses to all her thoughts. Not understanding further, she had returned. The next time she might well discover what she had been denied on two occasions.

  “A long drop,” echoed the Ree’hd, raising her voice above the wind. “I have dropped it twice. The water is deep in the middle of the channel and when the wind dies it is possible to guide your fall clear of the rocks.”

  “That’s interesting. There is a burrow community living near the human city that has no such water-embracing habit.”

  “Do they live by the cliffs?”

  “No, but they live along the shores of a very wide river, and they share the dawn and dusk meditation with this community. But they never touch water except to catch fish or die.”

  Grai made a strange noise with her song lips. Amusement? “If there are no cliffs they cannot jump. Are you wondering what special significance there is in such an activity?”

  Zeitman nodded, thoughtfully. Below him the sea heaved and crashed against the rocks, and the wind brought a fine icy spray up through the enormous chasm to where the two figures stood in such precarious defiance of the forces of nature. The embracing of water could be a part of the Ree’hd desire to embrace all of nature. But there had to be an easier way of doing it than jumping three hundred feet. He said as much to Grai.

  “Easier, yes. But not as much fun.” She “laughed” again, and walked along the cliff-top with Zeitman watching in annoyance. So why shouldn’t the Ree’hd have fun as well?

  He caught up with the burrow One and apologized for his naivety. They walked in silence, braced against the driving force of the wind, and eventually the cliff-top dropped nearer to the river, and they came to the place of communication where there were several hundred Ree’hd already squatting along the water’s edge, among the tree-forms and sheltered among the rocks.

  Zeitman and Grai walked down-wind, picking their way carefully, in the half-light, between the motionless shapes of the Ree’hd. They stopped at a place where the full volume of the dawn song reached them, and Zeitman fell soul-silent as the shifting monotone penetrated his awareness and he became a part of the dawn. Grai sang beside him and gradually the sun peered above the horizon, and as full light was shed upon the community the song died away.

  “What did you think about?” asked Zeitman, breaking with manners. Grai was not angry. She picked up a small stone, a glittering red crystal shard, and turned it over and over in her sensitive fingers.

  “Today my thoughts were of humans, and that overground burrow system you have, and of my third son’s kin, Woork-Ree, who has decided to live with the humans.”

  “And he needs your prayers because of that?”

  Grai stared at Zeitman with an unblinking lateral eye. She was detecting Zeitman as an infra-red emission and she must have seen the flush upon his cheeks, and possibly she realized that Zeitman was uneasy in his probing into the private thoughts of the burrow One.

  Grai said, “There was another Earthman who was interested in our thoughts, and in our relationships with the wind. A few years ago. He had a female with him, as you have.”

  Zeitman remembered his previous visit here. The burrow One at that time had stated quite clearly that there were things no Ree’hd would ever let a stranger know, but that Zeitman was welcome to study them if he was prepared to accept that limitation. It had quite unnerved Zeitman at the time, since he felt he was becoming close to the Ree’hd psychology.

  He said, “That was me too. I looked different then, and the woman was my… breeding-kin?” He couldn’t bring himself to say “wife.”

  “I didn’t remember you. I was wandering for most of your previous stay. I came back as the humans—yourself and your kin—were leaving. Is it correct to say ‘breeding-kin?’ Do you have young by her?”

  “No.”

  Difficult. He explained that they were married in the sense that they had bound to stay together for five years. For what purpose? Love, companionship. No, not at the expense of love and companionship with others…

  Zeitman had a feeling inside that Grai was quite aware of the situation regarding human relationships, but it was hard to tell. This community was sparsely visited, even by students. Tourists viewed from a distance; there might be mutual exchange, especially of food, and then the air-bus whisked the visitors away, leaving very little mark upon the community. In all the years of human visitation the Ree’hd here had never learned interLing. Zeitman, however, had rediscovered his earlier fluency in the Ree’hd language and now struggled only with the deeper throat presentation of emotional concepts. To Zeitman it seemed that the group were almost shy to express their inner feelings. The sound volume dropped and the words were forced out between narrowed “lips.” It was a variant he could not cope with himself.

  If Grai was more aware than she was pretending, she never let on to Zeitman. It was not that alien a concept to the Ree’hd that there should be a long-term bonding between two individuals for the purpose of physical love, and occasionally for procreation. Among the Ree’hd physical love was an unimportant and occasional indulgence, and did not involve intercourse in the human sense. All but the burrow One were a part of a complex grouping of kin-pairs within which pleasure and emotional communication were shared freely. The burrow One was restricted to a single kin (of the opposite sex) but for the year was the focus of the dusk meditation and the kin was important only as a replacement should the burrow One die.

  Gradually Zeitman came back to his original question. “Does your son’s kin need your thoughts?”

  “I hope not. But the balance is upset, Zeitman.” Her pronunciation of his name was so strange that for a moment he wondered what it was she had said.

  “Which balance is that?”

  Grai did not answer immediately. When she did, it was the answer he had been given so many times before. “The development balance. The balance of nature.”

  “Upset by human interf
erence? We try and steer well clear of the Ree’hd communities in all our various enterprises. And we’ve not despoiled more than a tiny corner of the ecosphere. Is it fair to say we’ve upset the whole balance?”

  “Is it fair to allow the imposition of your way of life upon ours?”

  “I think you mean the Ree’hd in the city… well, as you say, we allow it, but we don’t force it.”

  Grai turned her forward eyes upon him, seemed to find a cause for anger in his words. “Then you should disallow it, Zeitman. I have a small conception of your world, Earth,” she said the name in interLing, this time a more successful use of the human name. “Am I right in believing that it is a world where nature is in very small pieces?”

  Zeitman thought of the national park he had visited in Kenya-green, when he had been a child (the park was gone now). So many miles of continually recycling, sun-baked but rich, green bush, so vast an area that at the time he had felt terrified and would not leave the security of the coach. He had been thirteen years old and he could remember the thought that went through his head, screaming at him. If I step out there an animal could get me. There’s no protection, no force-field, no fence, no inbuilt command to turn and run as they got to within ten feet of a human. Naked animals!

  Thirteen and afraid of what little nature Earth could offer. By his mid-thirties he had landed on worlds where there was no artificiality at all and, after the predictable panic and depression at knowing there was not a metropolis over the next hill, he had come to love open spaces.

  Again an easy adaptation. Now he could revisit earth (until recently, at least) and lose himself in the shadows of buildings higher than the clouds, and feel no sense of loss, because he could step off-world to the exact opposite. He had access to everything he could want. There was only the voyage between them that was fearsome.

  “I suppose it was.”

  “Was? Past tense?”

  “Past tense.” He decided to say no more about the fate of Earth; instead he went on, “There’s very little left to study. Well, that’s not strictly true. Everything that ever lived on Earth is somewhere in one of the Federations, still being studied or preserved. All the questions are being answered about Earth’s natural history, but Earth itself grew a little too small for everyone who wanted to stay there. So they took the natural history somewhere safe.”

  “So: at least there is something left.” Grai seemed very depressed. “And that which is left, can it function on its own? In parts?”

  Did she mean monoculture? “I think so,” he said. “We used to grow just one species of a plant in an area, or keep animals of the same kind in confined spaces. For consumption. If a weed grew up to threaten the monoculture we could eliminate it with no difficulty.”

  Grai seemed very perturbed. She picked up another crystal shard and flung it into the river; a flattened stone, it skipped across the water’s breaking surface for a few feet. “Then the balance of nature was not very delicate.”

  “Oh it was.” Wasn’t it? He should know the answers to these things. Perhaps the delicacy of the balance was not as pronounced as had once been thought, but throughout his history man had been aware that to take too many liberties with his environment had meant to destroy. There had been, Zeitman remembered, a time of ecological conservation, of resources consciousness, but whatever the men of old Earth had done the natural flora and fauna had survived because it lasted, until it was deliberately destroyed, for thousands of years. He said, “It was delicate in that to eliminate one particular parasite, for example, might allow another parasite to grow up simply because it had once been the victim of the eliminated species and now was free to breed. So it was possible to… rearrange things.”

  “But a new balance was found very shortly?”

  “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  Most of the Ree’hd had returned to their burrows on the cliff-tops. It was developing into an overcast day, very cold, very damp, and the flora of the river-bank, the great sprawling brown and blue tree-forms, were unnaturally quiet and closed up.

  “On this world,” said Grai, very slowly, “everything counts. Everything is important. And not only that, but the individual is important—though perhaps not at the mat level,” she dug her scratch-pads, the horny extremities midway down her arms, into the tight vegetation mat they sat upon. Pulling up a piece she shook the yellow top-soil from it and held it up. It was tinged blue, as was everything on Ree’hdworld, and Zeitman, without effort, remembered why—copper ions, important in the surface temperature energy generation process that the flora used to complement its inefficient photocoupling processes. Blue, yes, but when the light was right the land could seem as naturally green as any pasture on Dominion.

  “I don’t suppose I have insulted the balance of nature by doing that,” Grai said. “But Ree’hd, and Rundii are not species of the ground. There are so many Ree’hd in your city that we cannot but feel uneasy. The individual is important. So, in a way, the human city is causing distress to the ecology.”

  Grai threw the piece of sod into the river and rose to return to the burrows. Zeitman declined to return with her. Instead he walked away from the river, deeper into the land around this particular Ree’hd sphere.

  In the several days since he had met Kristina he had seen and travelled much. Susanna, his constant companion, was nothing more than a distraction. She shared his days, and for the last two nights had shared those too. They found each other mutually exciting, and sexually fulfilling, and had developed their relationship to nicely distanced intimacy. During the days, however, Susanna let her youth become obtrusive, sulking continually when Zeitman was rude to her (which was often); when she wasn’t sulking she talked of the most trivial things, talking Dominion out of her system, perhaps talking her previous domestic repression out of the same system. She showed no inclination at all to accept and sympathize with Zeitman’s newfound feelings for Earth.

  What was increasingly bothering Zeitman was a sensation of pointlessness.

  Why bother to continue on Ree’hdworld, or on any world, in an investigatory capacity? Liaison officer, yes, with its defined functions, but these meant nothing simply because Zeitman was a scientist, and an observer, and was inclined to do nothing but observe and interpret. Kristina was very similar; as an object-empath she may well have been psychic to a considerable degree, but her preferred pursuits were as academic as Zeitman’s. Zeitman and Kristina had been a good team, and in Zeitman’s mind they would always be so; they were on Ree’hdworld not to throw fits at each other, not to fall in love with the natives, not to get unnecessarily irritated with little Dominion females, but to understand the planet, and its people, and its history, and why it was suffering so much from what was possibly the gentlest, most unobtrusive presence the Federation had ever demonstrated.

  But why try and understand now? Who would they report back to with Earth virtually gone? What was the point? Wouldn’t it be better to take Susanna, and maybe another couple, and stake out a nice piece of land, somewhere miles from the nearest Ree’hd sphere (perhaps on Wooburren) and just survive?

  But there was a scientist in Zeitman and the scientist was emotionless, without personality. It was dominant and it was interested in Ree’hdworld; it was interested in mind-killing, and the sudden evolutionary development of that most useful of powers. It was interested in why only non-Ree’hd animals could be killed in this way. It was interested in the “silver fish” and their totally atypical winter behaviour, shirking the deep waters of the oceans where many closely related species vanished to. Zeitman, the scientist, had the obvious answer to it all, but Zeitman the man would not accept what his common sense told him!

  The scientist inside him would keep him functioning in the way he wanted, even though his humanity was dying. All around him he could witness panic, suicide, the drive to destruction of humans suddenly realizing that they were not, as they had thought, immune from the spreading disease they so feared and had named Fear—he could w
itness all this and still concern himself with questions about the wind and the animals, and the minds of the Ree’hd, and why they seemed so unconcerned about the Pianhmar, neither denying their existence, nor asserting it, and pretending (it seemed to Zeitman) that such things were unimportant.

  Zeitman felt a tremendous calm. As he walked, thinking over his presence on Ree’hdworld and his dead relationship with Kristina, so he unwound, and the tension that had built up during the night fully dissipated. It was very cold and wherever he walked he could see the tree-forms in frantic motion. They were gathering into temporary forests in places, where perhaps, they might harness any rain or wind to the best advantage.

  A stinging rain fell for a few minutes, driving across the country and down. Zeitman made no effort to shelter, but he turned his respiration over to the small face-mask he carried on his belt. For a moment the more terrestrial oxygen-nitrogen balance, adjusted by the mask, was uncomfortable. He breathed deeply a few times and continued to walk.

  With the passing of the rain the land became alive with the sleek blue-skinned animals that filled one of the herbivorous niches on this world. They drank water from the saturated turf, and played in the dampness with a great deal of exuberance. From a distance they seemed almost otter-like, though they were difficult to observe properly, they blended so cryptically with the background. From a closer vantage point their six-legged forms were disquieting. All fauna on Ree’hdworld were six-legged, even if only during embryonic development. The Ree’hd and Rundii were no exceptions, but the middle pair of limbs (in the Ree’hd at least) appeared to have been modified into the plate-like endo-skeleton around the midquarters of both sexes (in the females becoming associated with the womb). In the absence of a fossil record the theory was not universally accepted.

  For a while Zeitman crouched on his haunches watching the frivolity of the life around him, and conscious that that life was watching him back. He was about to continue his walk when a distant droning caught his attention and he stood, adjusting the binocular lenses of his mask’s eyepieces until he could detect the cause of the noise, about a mile away, skimming low over the steep hills.