Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  It was a Terming air-bus, packed with leering tourists, and making its way to the ocean-edge commune that Zeitman was currently visiting.

  Furious, he shot a burst of his vaze at the air-bus and felt no satisfaction as the charge blasted out a great chunk of rock, sending a deep booming explosion echoing through the humid atmosphere.

  Erlam had promised that he would reroute any tourist venture away from Zeitman’s planned visit route. Erlam had let him down.

  Zeitman began the long trek back to the burrows. It rained again for a few minutes, and this time he found his saturated situation a very great irritation.

  When he arrived at the burrows, he found several Ree’hd lined up along the cliff-edge, staring down to where a shelf of rock formed a natural promenade, wide enough for an air-bus to land upon. Zeitman, without acknowledging Grai or Susanna, found the wide-cut pathway to the sea. He stumbled twice and sent cascades of loose rock and earth, fallen from above, pouring into the air and on to the ground below. His approach was so noisy and his shouts so venomous that eventually the milling crowd of bio-stat-suited visitors turned to see him. Some waved, some brought out their holospans and blatantly photographed him, and took the opportunity to turn their sights on the Ree’hd as well.

  A large gathering of Ree’hd adolescents was the main source of attraction for the humans. These young natives were on the rock-shelf to swim and fish, and Zeitman could see several dark shapes a few hundred yards offshore, and every so often a Ree’hd head poked above the water’s surface and regarded the scene on the promenade. A few older Ree’hd were crouched in the shadow of the cliffs, watching impassively as they were subjected to the scrutiny of a hundred human nonentities. There was little attempt made to communicate; obviously so, since tourists never bothered to learn the language of the natives, and the natives here were content not to learn interLing. The exchange of food items (permissible trade) occurred as usual, the adolescent Ree’hd supervising the trade, and this was in progress as Zeitman arrived angrily at the air-bus.

  The Ree’hd adults all raised an arm in salute, and Zeitman waved back. He could see from the pursing of their food lips that they were fed up, and probably thinking it was up to him to get rid of these irritations.

  Zeitman swung himself into the air-bus where the driver sat, bored and half-asleep. “Get these bastards out of here!”

  The driver came fully awake and stared up at Zeitman. “Who the hell are you? This is a scheduled stop.”

  “It’s just been unscheduled, driver. Now get these… get them back in the bus and lift off. You had your orders from Dan Erlam…”

  The driver seemed quite upset now. He cast anxious glances at the crowd of humans who, sensing that something unexpected was happening (were they all as bored as the driver?), began to approach the air-bus.

  “Patrician Erlam? He said nothing to me…”

  Damn you, Erlam, thought Zeitman. Aloud he said, “There is a scientific study being undertaken in this group and I don’t want any dumb visitors spoiling the atmosphere of the place. Now get the hell out of here.”

  “Look, I can’t just pull these people back in the bus and fly off…”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one, I’m tired. It’s a long haul to the next stop and I’ve been flying this thing for the last three hours without break.”

  “I’ll shed a tear for you just as soon as you’ve gone. Now I’m telling you again, get these creatures on the bus and lift off! Those aliens there are waiting for one word from me and they’ll pitch every last one of you into the sea… and, mister, I’m not joking!”

  The driver hesitated for a moment, then rose from his seat and went outside. Zeitman followed, glancing up the cliff to where the whole cliff-top was alive with Ree’hd faces peering down. Were they enjoying the spectacle, wondered Zeitman? Could they hear his raised voice?

  “Back on the bus,” said the driver, and the tourists, objecting loudly, began to file back into the enormous vehicle.

  They were mostly middle-aged, and in their eyes Zeitman could see all the intelligence of people visiting a zoo. They were all angry, not surprisingly, and several demanded who the hell was Zeitman to stop their paid-for, promised tour?

  Oh God, thought Zeitman. To be able to tell them that their precious Earth is probably a pile of radioactive ash by now… that their relatives and friends are at each other’s throats and jumping from high places… just to see their faces, to hear their own fears coming out… just to see their destruction! But he said nothing except that he was acting on the city father’s instructions to keep tourists away from this burrow community.

  The air-bus lifted and swung out to sea, skating across the high waves, and then finding height and vanishing across the broken shoreline a few miles away.

  “Very nicely done,” said a familiar voice behind him, and Zeitman turned in surprise.

  Chapter Eight

  “Where have you been?” asked Zeitman.

  “I’ve been here,” said Maguire. “All the time.” He stood staring out to sea, his face far dirtier than Zeitman had ever seen it, his hair unwashed and hanging lank across his forehead. He was still dressed in the casual clothes that Zeitman had last seen him wearing. Now they were torn and filthy. Maguire was scratched, and dried blood added the final touch of raggedness to his disorderly appearance.

  “I’ve been going dizzy with the things you’ve been up to…”

  “Such as?”

  Zeitman said, “Such as living to the age of seven hundred years. Such as the feat of parascience you performed, that I suppose you’re going to explain as just that. Such as leaving the planet without anyone knowing. How did you manage that?”

  Maguire chuckled, and turned his head to look at Zeitman with the same blind expression he always wore. “Try metaphysics.”

  “Would I be close?”

  “Ah, Zeitman. So many questions, so much intensity. Relax. I’ll tell you something—remember how depressed I was when we came down? How I said there was a terrible atmosphere about the place? Perhaps you still don’t feel it, but it’s there, and it worried me for a long time. Within two hours of landing I was sick to my stomach with what I was ‘seeing’ on this planet. It’s taken me four days to come to my senses. Right now I feel like strangling every human in Terming—”

  “Me too.”

  “But no; I’m accepting what I see and feel, and now I want some help to put things right. But that’s okay. The Ree’hd, and the Rundii… even the Pianhmar… they’ve waited seven hundred years, they’ll wait a while longer now that they realize what truly rotten beings we humans are.”

  Zeitman shook his head. “You’re losing me, Maguire.”

  Maguire reached out for Zeitman’s shoulder, turned as he turned, and together they began to walk up the cliff-path. “I can’t say a lot, Zeitman. I’m not sure myself, yet, about everything. You’ll find out in your own time, and that way you’ll come to love this place like I do. Like Kristina does. You’ll want to stay. And don’t worry.”

  “About what?”

  “About anything. Anything that’s worrying you. Stop it. Things will work out.”

  Did he mean Kristina? He had obviously seen her in the last few days. Had he talked to her and found out that she was beginning to miss him at last? Or did he mean Earth? Or the tourist blight? Or…

  All Maguire said was “leave it alone. Just don’t worry.”

  “What about the vanishing trick? Why did you draw attention to yourself in that way?”

  Maguire shrugged. “I didn’t think, to be honest. I was so happy to be home that I couldn’t wait to get back among the Ree’hd. I suppose it was a bit indiscreet.”

  “Teleportation?”

  Maguire laughed. “Couch it in any semantic disguise you like. I used my mind and my body is attached to my mind. Okay? Where one goes, the other is sure to follow.”

  “Teleportation,” said Zeitman flatly.

  “What’s so ghastly
about that?”

  What indeed? If the so-called paranormal phenomena were as rare now as they had been a thousand years ago, and as little understood, there was no denying their actuality. There had always been the Malsenn effects, and the Roanscott effects, and the Geller effects, and they were all still classified as paranormal, when they were, in fact, quite normal, just very rare—and occasionally liable to cause some observer shock!

  They reached the top of the cliff and Zeitman was breathless. Maguire seemed quite at ease. The wind, at this exposed locale, was strong and Zeitman found himself gripping Maguire as much for his own support as for the blind man’s.

  Susanna and the burrow One were waiting for them. The girl seemed wary of Maguire but said, as he reached out and touched her face by way of greeting, “Hello, mister mystery.”

  “Hello Susanna. How do you like Ree’hdworld?”

  “Cold,” she said. “And sickly smelling.”

  Maguire laughed and looked at Grai. He became solemn as he exchanged a silent gaze with the Ree’hd. Grai said nothing but the lustre of her eyes faded for a moment, an indication that she had responded to something in Maguire’s manner.

  Grai said suddenly, “Some of the young have caught a good harvest of tucc’f— come and eat some with us.”

  They followed her towards the wide burrow entrance (this community had a single entrance to the complex). Maguire took Zeitman’s arm again, this time more for personal contact than support. As they walked Maguire whispered to Zeitman, “You two getting it together?” It was a loud whisper and his head inclined almost imperceptibly towards Susanna.

  “Between times,” said Zeitman flatly, slightly perturbed by Maguire’s tactlessness. Susanna had heard and looked embarrassed. “I didn’t do too well with Kristina, as you probably know.”

  Maguire looked sad. “The Ree’hd, Urak, yes. I didn’t find out about him for a while. I talked with Kristina the day we arrived, but that was at the time I was building to my first big heartbreak and I wasn’t too sensitive to her, though I could tell she was anxious, even upset. But I was impressed by her, really impressed—a sensitive and frightening woman.”

  “Frightening?”

  Maguire nodded. “I find the sort of personal courage that she possesses very frightening. Don’t you? How many other people do you know who will risk their very humanity to explore a facet of an alien way of life?”

  “She told you that?”

  “Not exactly told…”

  Zeitman was about to say it was more than a temporary exploration that Kristina had planned, and that he didn’t think it frightening, when Susanna took Maguire’s other arm and said, “You mentioned heartbreak—a girl of your own?”

  “No—no girl,” laughed Maguire. “There have been a few, mind you. But no, this time my heartbreak was from memories of a people a little more innocent than I find them now.”

  They were in the burrows then, and they found their way to Grai’s small chamber. Zeitman turned on his belt-light so that he and Susanna would not have to sit in near-darkness. Grai did not object to the light in her chamber, and nor did her kin, Sakk’ree, who sat beside her. Maguire, as he sat down in the circle, said, “I always enjoy a small feast with some good friends.”

  Feast? thought Zeitman grimly. He had managed to avoid sharing the Ree’hd food the day before, but now he would have no choice. The “fish,” tucc’f, was far more analogous to terran fish than the staple winter diet of the near-city Ree’hd, but it was more eel-like, and very nasty tasting. Zeitman, as he picked at the raw flesh, imagined he could feel his biostasis unit working hard to convert any reasonable semblances of human amino acids to their human form. In this way, he guessed, the tucc’f was supplying him with three such digestion products, and from his subcutaneous store he was making up for the others.

  More worrying than taste or lack of nutrient value were the possible parasitic life-forms that might be chewing their way through his gut wall. They wouldn’t last long, certainly, but they could be damaging while they did. When he commented (on being asked why he ate so slowly) that—even after so many years on Ree’hdworld—he was still used to cooked food, and when he elaborated as to the possibility of infection from semi-raw food, the Ree’hd One gave a demonstration of thought-killing that Zeitman had not seen before, and which reminded him that paranormal powers were somewhat less rare on Ree’hdworld than on Earth. The One killed a living, squirming eel-form, slit it along its midline and opened the ingestion sac. Parasitic jelly forms wriggled and flattened in the sudden light, but died instantly when willed to do so. “Why cook?” said the One, “If infection is all that worries you?”

  “But what about the bugs you can’t see?” asked Susanna. The Ree’hd looked at her, raised her arms in query. “Which are they?”

  “Bacteria, viruses, single-celled animals… you have similar forms here…”

  “That’s not strictly true,” said Zeitman. “There are no virus analogs, and bacterioforms have never specialized beyond saprophagous and symbiotic modes of behaviour.”

  “No bad bacteria?”

  “Not to the Ree’hd, at least. To us, certainly. Why do you think you had your Overload?” Susanna touched her arm delicately. It was several days since she had been immunized but the enormous reaction she had produced to the tiny scratch was still sore and red. Zeitman said, “That was anti-a-thousand-and-one things.”

  “Including anti-me,” said Susanna.

  Maguire grinned, and said loudly, “When I was here before, properly here, that is, I knew a Ree’hd called Hans-ree who could mind-kill across miles. He was the only Ree’hd I ever met who wondered about mind-killing, and also the only one who ever tried it on another Ree’hd.”

  Zeitman shivered as he remembered that awful sensation of slipping into submission and feeling his heart stopping. What sensation, he wondered, would a Ree’hd feel? “What happened?”

  “Nothing. The Ree’hd was old, had decided to die but couldn’t find the strength. Hans-ree helped him, tried mind-killing him and failed. To his knowledge no Ree’hd had ever tried that before. How about you, Grai?”

  Grai, and indeed, Sakk’ree, had been becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Zeitman gained the impression that mind-killing was a very personal subject, but that was illogical since it was merely a tool of food supply. Perhaps, then, Grai felt the talk of murder to be personal. She said merely, “It isn’t something I ever think about; I can’t understand the use of mind-killing for taking Ree’hd life when there are so many easier ways for a Ree’hd to die.”

  “Enough said,” said Maguire. He waited for Zeitman to finish translating for Susanna, then asked, “Have you got an evolutionary reason for the development of that ability? Can you rationalize such a weapon?”

  Zeitman said that he couldn’t. He was puzzled by such power existing in a culture otherwise devoid of mind-power. There was no apparent mind-linkage between Ree’hd, no ability to tele-port…

  Or… was that true? He settled into silence, rejecting the remainder of his food and hoping that he would not be considered rude. Grai and Sakk’ree talked about the burrows and the fishing life, and the plague of the human tourists; Susanna talked about her homeworld, and how like Ree’hdworld it was in many ways; and Maguire sat silently and smiled, and his blind eyes seemed turned on Zeitman all the time.

  Zeitman remembered a few years back being amused at a low-intelligence Ree’hd called Wor-F’kar who said he had talked with one of his kin-ancestors of two hundred years before. The praying by talking to one’s dead kin was well established as a semi-religious manifestation on Ree’hdworld (as on Earth—was this an example of a Universal axiom?) and Zeitman had laughed at Wor because Wor, in Zeitman’s presence, had sent Zeitman greetings from the one he prayed to. Had Wor-F’kar, in his innocence, broken some code of non-revelation practised by the Ree’hd? A few days after the encounter Wor-F’kar had left the community and had not returned.

  If the Ree’hd never exhibited
their mind talents, excepting mind-killing, how would an alien know what they were capable of? For seven hundred years the contact between cultures had been a fact, and in seven hundred years an indifference had grown up between those two cultures, and it was only the tourists (for their reasons) and a few other humans, Zeitman and Kristina included, who took an active interest in the Ree’hd.

  Scientific study on Ree’hdworld, it had to be admitted, was minimal and poorly supported. And yet, to Zeitman, it was all there was of importance. Being minimally and poorly supported, however, had resulted in knowledge of the Ree’hd, and their cohort-brethren, being severely limited, a limitation not helped by what Zeitman was convinced was the Ree’hd being very unforthcoming about themselves.

  In all probability the existence of Terming was an expression of the human ego, a stronghold on a world where they knew, deep inside, they should not have set foot.

  The day moved on and Zeitman, Susanna and Maguire found their way down the cliffs to the rocky ledges at the exit of the river. Maguire seemed remarkably at ease, and it was unnerving to see him moving with such facility down rocky precipices which Zeitman and Susanna traversed more with adrenalin and breaking nails than skill. When challenged with his versatility, Maguire laughed. “Who needs eyes to feel? I can feel every crack, every nook, every loose stone. I feel them with my toes, which you also have and could use to the same extent, were you not so dependent on your vision. Climbing is easy. Look, Zeitman, stop trying to invent abnormalities in me.”

  On the ledges, ankles awash with the stingingly cold water, they poked fingers into the life-holes, tried to imagine a younger Grai leaping from the cliffs high overhead and plummeting into the deep waters mid-channel.

  “How about the Pianhmar?” asked Zeitman after a while. It had been on his mind for hours. Maguire was the only man who claimed to have seen them, and it was apparent that he had survived. And knowing that, Zeitman felt almost afraid of asking. It was the same feeling he had felt on meeting Kristina a few days earlier. An unbearable anticipation preventing him from reacting normally. Now he had brought the subject up and Maguire had not responded badly. He laughed, splashed through the water up on to a drier part of the ledge, and stared blindly at the younger man.