Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  “Yes,” said Zeitman. “I know. The fear of a stranger phenomenon. They’ve grown out of that for the last two hundred years.”

  Kawashima shook his head. “Not up here they haven’t. Not completely. I get the feeling that there’s a lot of population movement between the various spheres… you know that there are no Ree’hd-killing animals in the Ree’hd spheres, but in the Rundii spheres and up here, the land is infested with K’room—blood eaters—and fifty other types. Sure, the K’room in the lowlands soon learned that man was edible, and that knowledge has reached some of the population up here. But not all, and that means… unpredictability. They could be fearless migrants and attack, or fearful locals and run. We haven’t had much trouble to be honest. But at night there’s a lot of movement outside.”

  “Yes, I noticed.”

  Foremost in Zeitman’s mind now was whether to tell Kawashima that all the fashioned artifacts in the various Federation museums were likely to have been Pianhmar. Kawashima would certainly find out in time, but Zeitman would have preferred not to have been the imparter of that particular information. He was still unsure as to whether or not the Japanese needed the acclaim at being the first to discover an undeniably Pianhmar object. If that was the case then, since the man’s ego was so formidable, he might find it easy work discrediting any claim that off-Ree’hdworld artifacts belonged to the same race. And that would not do at all.

  “I feel,” said Kawashima as they stood in the rain and soaked in the feeling of the place, “that this valley was once very important to the Pianhmar. I have no evidence for that, of course, but there’s an aura about the place. Don’t you think?”

  Just a valley, wide-bottomed and steep-sloped, with sparkling black and white rocks above the jungle line, and a fairly solid canopy of blue for as far as the eye could see. A sparse area of bush between the dense tangle in the valley and the steeper, exposed slopes of the hills, but a bush layer that was deep and rich. And here, too, were the gentler, soil-covered slopes which Kawashima (with Maguire’s hint to deep-ray in the area) had made his find. The whole area seemed to gleam, too brightly for colour to be anything other than a blur. The rain was a solid veil between camp-site and the farther reaches of the valley. There was, as Zeitman concentrated, something enormously peaceful about the place. The rain was a monotonous beating, and all other sound was dead. A clatter from the camp told of breakfast in preparation, but the sound was muted in the stillness. A strange sensation, the more so for being on a world where it was almost never still.

  “I don’t know,” said Zeitman. “It looks too natural, too undisturbed…”

  “It could be as much as three thousand years since the Pianhmar last lived here. That’s plenty of time for the whole sphere to overgrow.”

  “Have you searched the valley? The caves?”

  “I haven’t searched the valley at all. I’ve been too busy up here, besides which it looks damn difficult getting down there. I looked in a few of the caves, up behind the site, but no, nothing. No concealed stacks of machinery, or give-away chisel marks. They covered their tracks well.”

  Covered their tracks, repeated Zeitman to himself; and therein, he thought, lies a history of a whole Universe for man to unravel. Had they not wanted to be remembered? And how could a race vanish so completely, so utterly? How could the metals and plastics of a high technology just become absorbed? Where had everything gone?

  To Kawashima (the Japanese went on to say) the obvious place to look, it had seemed, was Wooburren, the smaller continent. Zeitman agreed. He had spent over two years on Wooburren himself and had found nothing but plants, high winds, banshee screams (related to certain flora) and the uncanny sensation that he was being watched, which was a human and very natural reaction to being isolated in a deserted world. He said as much to Kawashima who confirmed that he too, within months of arriving on Ree’hdworld, had gone with Kristina to the other continent and systematically searched the place. Zeitman could not imagine why Kristina would have wanted to go again. She, more than Zeitman himself, had found that land mass more frightening than any nightmare. Towards the end of their time there, certainly, she had begun to feel more at ease, almost finding the place exciting. They had left by mutual agreement, and had talked no more of going back.

  Telling this to Kawashima evoked a protective response from the man. “We didn’t go alone. We had a Ree’hd with us. Urak? Yes, Urak.”

  It was too obvious for words! Or was it? It was not for many months after this that Kristina and Urak had become “lovers,” in Kristina’s sense of the word. So Kristina had said, at least. Had she lied? Did their mutual interest go back to a time only months after Zeitman had left?

  Kawashima continued, “She felt close to the world, she said. Closer than any other human. And she said she felt closest when on Wooburren. We spent very little time there, had a difference of opinion which was my fault because I became lonely and searched for some unscientific loving, and was not unnaturally rejected. I hope that doesn’t offend you, Zeitman. ,, Not at all, thought Zeitman. “The two of them,” Kawashima went on, “spent many hours alone and out of contact with me and the tiny installation there. Urak, it seemed to me, grew increasingly uncomfortable being on the continent. He hadn’t really wanted to come in the first place. It wasn’t the eeriness of the place… I think he felt he had no right to be there. They were always talking about ‘understanding.’ Understanding the planet, or the race… I’m not totally sure which. Urak was very disturbed by this because he was understanding too much, with Kristina’s help, and again he thought that was wrong. Very queer. They left without me, quite suddenly. We had a robo-skimmer, so I wasn’t stranded, but I’m afraid a certain antipathy had arisen between myself and Kristina, and after that-all this time—we have hardly been in contact. She’s losing her humanity.”

  “I know,” said Zeitman. Losing?

  Lost!

  Kawashima suddenly shivered. He was wearing only his cataphrak which left his feet uncovered, and he was probably getting a chill. Zeitman, more prudently, had a wetskin over his clothes, but his hair was drenched. As they walked back to the canopy Zeitman spotted movement up on the rocky slopes. Several K’room were up there, moving furtively towards the camp. Kawashima noticed them too, but shrugged. “They’re always there. They haven’t been any trouble for five days, I don’t see why they should start now.”

  Zeitman, nevertheless, felt uneasy about Susanna being alone and out of sight. He was pulling on his headgear, and watching as a Ree’hd checked a vaze for him, when she reappeared, walking slowly and without interest towards the camp. Zeitman relaxed.

  Kawashima, already eating, pointed to her. “You say she wasn’t a good friend of Ballantyne’s?”

  “No. I don’t know why it should have taken her so badly.”

  “Death gets to some people. She’s a nice girl, but how can she be your assistant when she knows so little about the situation here?”

  “A position of convenience. Her family paid a lot of money to send her to Ree’hdworld. I think they wanted to get rid of her, to be honest. They couldn’t…“He had been about to say “they couldn’t stop her landing here.” “They couldn’t refuse her, really. I took her on to get her out of harm’s way.

  She’s shaping up into a valuable companion.” He hoped that was true.

  Susanna walked up to the double tent and looked inside for a moment. She let the flap fall back into place and joined Zeitman and Kawashima under the open canopy, drying her hair with a towel proffered by one of the Ree’hd. She looked at the meat sizzling in the pan and grimaced. Kawashima reached into his suit pouch and found a cheap and nasty nutropak but she declined that too. “I’m not hungry. And you look obscene.”

  Kawashima was still in just his web, which was not very concealing even if it was warm. He pulled his headgear from the pile of clothes beside him and placed it on his lap. “Better?”

  Susanna buried her head in the towel and massaged her scalp vigorou
sly. With a smile at Kawashima, Zeitman reached across to the cooked meat and helped himself liberally. “Dan Erlam gave me the impression that you’ve found out a lot more about Ree’hdworld since I left—apart from the Rundii, I mean.”

  Kawashima was thoughtfully silent for a few seconds. “Yes,” he said. “It was reading your own reports that got me interested. I have no proof for my idea, just intuition…”

  “Right. Same with me. I felt there was something wrong the first time I got here, years ago now.”

  “It’s not… it’s not that it’s wrong—it’s just, well, too convenient.”

  “I agree. What’s your conclusion?”

  A moment’s silence, the fall of rain on the canopy top, and the crackle of fat in the pan. A look between them, an unspoken recognition that each was right. Susanna’s drying action stopped. The world around them seemed to listen.

  “It’s all engineered,” said Kawashima softly. “We’ve been sitting in the biggest alien artifact in the galaxy and we haven’t recognized it.”

  Zeitman could only nod his head. After a while in which no words were passed between them and they did nothing but stare at the slowly cooking meat, Zeitman said, “Everything worked out for the Ree’hd to save them from perishing. Everything. On their own, without help, they couldn’t survive. It’s not obvious, and I wouldn’t formalize the idea, but I think it has to be that way.”

  There was, for example, mind-killing. Kawashima had spent a long time pinning down the generations when mind-killing had first appeared. It had appeared, not slowly, not as a gradually spreading quirk of nature, but suddenly, all at once. It had been a gift—that was the only logical explanation. There was a flaw in that argument, of course, namely that this was Ree’hdworld and not Earth, that evolution here was not towards survival of the fittest, but survival of the most useful. Competition did not work to eliminate the less successfully adapted, but to enhance that which made adaptation for others easier. And that was very different to Earth. Nevertheless, traits did not suddenly appear, and mind-killing as far as Kawashima could determine from yards of burrow records, had. And to corroborate his idea, the Ree’hd themselves had spoken of the first generation that had mind-killed, (and that was something that Zeitman had never heard).

  Like mind-killing, the specialized digging forelimb of the adolescent Ree’hd appeared to have come into Ree’hd biology quite suddenly. At the same time the Ree’hd were beginning their burrow existence, digging shallow chambers out of the softer rocks and soil of their spheres. Did way of life necessitate form? Or form permit way of life?

  And in the environment, too, there was anomaly. “Silver fish” which contained, in their metabolic network, everything a Ree’hd required, even though, as Zeitman had proved to himself five times at least, there was more to a “silver fish” than the fish itself needed. Earth that shifted upwards to preserve the softness and richness of the Pianhmar spheres. It was a function of the lower mobile flora, carrying the earth, and it enabled statues to be buried on mountain slopes, despite a soil of clay-like consistency that would have been more logically found on the lower part of the gradient.

  Zeitman’s personal clincher was the “coding” of the tree-forms, the shuffling, whistling plants that scoured the top-soil with roots that could be retracted in an instant, and which wandered Ree’hdworld as if they owned the place. On both continents an identical tree-form flourished. On the uninhabited one the ten code-cells of each plant showed a single cluster of coding protein. On this continent, however, the cell plasm of each of those ten units contained five clusters of coding proteins, and four were manifestly docile, unused… waiting.

  This, at least, was Zeitman’s interpretation. Waiting for what he didn’t know; but he was convinced that it was an unnatural possession.

  It was engineering!

  When he had finished eating Kawashima began to talk about his future. The first thing to do, he declared, was to take the statue to Earth, hold the biggest exhibition in the history of the Galaxy, and draw so much attention to the great history of Ree’hdworld that the grip of InterSystems Biochemicals would be forced from the planet by popular demand!

  He talked on, but Zeitman ceased to listen. Kawashima would have to be told that no such idea would ever be achieved—he would have to know the truth; but when? And how?

  The Japanese, as Zeitman understood it, had far stronger links with Earth than he himself had. Both Kawashima’s parents had returned to Earth when their son had come to live on Ree’hdworld. When he learned of what had happened he would feel a tremendous loss. Zeitman’s parents were also on Earth, and yet he felt no such grief. Perhaps because, once he had discovered Ree’hdworld and all that it could mean to him, his parents had slipped from his immediate sphere of love. It was as if they had died many years ago and he returned, on occasion, merely to look at a photograph collection, an emotionless and dissatisfying pursuit.

  “You’re not listening, Zeitman,” Kawashima snapped suddenly.

  “No—I’m sorry, I have something on my mind.”

  “Like what?”

  And without thinking any more about it Zeitman told Kawashima that Fear had been carried to Earth and was causing the slow death of the world, and that he could never go back.

  Kawashima listened without a word, staring at Zeitman all the time, and eventually shaking his head as if what he heard was something he could not or would not believe. He stood up suddenly and walked away from the shelter of the canopy, down towards the valley and out of sight.

  Zeitman followed after a few minutes, and found him sitting on the saturated ground, staring through the veil of driving rain towards the gorge that connected this valley with the open jungle beyond.

  “I shouldn’t have told you yet. I’m sorry.”

  “Damn right!” snapped Kawashima miserably. “I could bust into you, Zeitman! You could have waited. You could have let me enjoy my triumph a while longer. You could have let me dream my dream a few days more. But no. You’ve shattered me. I feel shattered, Zeitman. And you’ve done it. Phase out. I need to think.”

  Sitting down beside him Zeitman said, “I’m sorry I had to tell you now, but I couldn’t risk telling you back in Terming where you might have run off and spooked the whole installation. The whole of Ree’hdworld is existing in ignorance, except for one or two people, Susanna and myself, and yourself, and the city fathers. You can understand why the rest of the population is unaware of the facts, can’t you? You can understand why we have to get everyone off-planet who shouldn’t be here, and then stop any further landing at all. It only takes one hysterical Japanese running through the streets and suddenly we have ten thousand applications for survival status. And we certainly don’t want that.”

  “Okay, Zeitman, you’ve made your point. And I agree. Of course I agree. Jesus, what a thing! What a terrible thing!”

  They sat in silence, water pouring down their faces, off their hands. Suddenly Kawashima pointed towards the gorge. “You know what they’re called, these hills? Hellgate mountains. That gorge, the one you came through, that’s hell-gate. It’s a Ree’hd term. I suppose in the past a Ree’hd could have wandered here. The hellgate mountains have been carried in their language for a long time. They said they were the centre of the Pianhmar spheres, and that’s partly what sent me up here looking.” He seemed reluctant to credit Maguire with any help, thought Zeitman. It was easy to understand what a blow to the man’s ego the news had been. “It never occurred to me at the time,” Kawashima continued, “to think what the name implied about the Ree’hd, that they have a conception of a dark place.”

  “Their dark place is the place where the lost go. Limbo would be more appropriate.”

  “Limbogate mountains? Not so impressive. Here we are, Zeitman, in hell. We’ve lost our chance now. We’re out in the cold. Forgotten people. Remnants. You know what? I think there’s a common God and he has grown tired of humans. So he’s ended them. He brings an end to Earth and knows that
every human being who isn’t on Earth will die thereafter. There’s something about Earth that keeps man driving away from it, but if they lose touch with it… they come running back. It’s an adolescent reaction, Zeitman. ‘Look how far we can go’… but always in eyeshot.

  “We invaded this world and have interrupted a process of evolution, and if we go on interrupting it then this planet will never again spawn fully intelligent beings. They’ll never have a chance at getting between worlds, of proving their technology, of benefiting from a Universal knowledge. We’ll never know if the Pianhmar made it into space, but I suspect that they didn’t. And here we all are, frustrating the planet’s second attempt…”

  Zeitman thought of how wrong Kawashima was, and yet how right!

  Here was a world that had given one race to the stars, and was now preparing to give its second. In the same way, perhaps, Earth might one day produce a second civilization, and a third— to match the Rundii?—and a fourth and a fifth. Perhaps that was the way of things in the Galaxy. There were only a few worlds with the potential to produce intelligent beings, and they would try and try again until eventually they would produce the correct formula of intelligence and compassion. Perhaps Earth was too hard, and had ended of its own accord following some genetic blueprint that had been built into many from the beginning.

  And therein lay a thought too staggering to take in all at once. Something came into Zeitman’s mind, a thought, a memory of a conversation with Ballantyne—What they don’t realize (Ballantyne had said) is that they’re probably carrying the disease with them. And if it was some strange virus disease, then yes, the panic-stricken refugees may well have been carrying Fear with them wherever they went. But man carried more than parasites as passengers—he carried his own destiny, the basic elements of his own eventual destruction.

  On Ree’hdworld, in the space of a few months, several things had begun to happen—if Zeitman were to be honest with himself, it would be impossible to deny his feeling that a trigger had been squeezed, and a set of evolutionary mechanisms started up—perhaps the next in a sequence of events that had been triggered one after another since life on Ree’hdworld began.