Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  “Major Zeitman?”

  Zeitman jumped as the voice spoke from just behind him. He turned to see a serviceman staring at him. “Major Zeitman?”

  “Yes. Sorry, I was engrossed in this beast.”

  The serviceman nodded, looked the wax Pianhmar up and down. “I guess we’ll have to change the display soon,” he said, then looked at Zeitman. “You have heard about the, er…”

  “Ghosts? Yes, I’ve heard. I was just thinking that the spine ridge on the model is too small. Imagine being able to say a thing like that with authority! The spine ridge is too small… the eyes too Ree’hdlike.”

  “The model was made from Ree’hd description as handed down in their legends. Details were bound to be wrong.”

  They stared at the three species for a moment, comparing and contrasting, and it was so clear that the three local breeds were from a common stock, somewhere in the distant past.

  “Any time you want to go down, Major…”

  “I’d like to see the Maguire display first.”

  “Sure; it’s across the far side.” The serviceman led Zeitman across the museum and stopped him in front of a small cabinet. Zeitman stared at the incredibly fragmentary display of one man’s life—wallet contents, a photoblok showing a young Maguire on Earth (a photo that Zeitman must have looked at many times in his own youth, but had failed to remember). Prize item was the recorder that Maguire had taken with him on his journey into the hills, seven centuries previously. The machine was broken and incomplete. At the touch of a button a copy of the fragmentary recording that he had made could be heard. Zeitman was tempted to take time out to listen, but memory returned to him and he could hear, as he had heard years ago, the soft voice, speaking so urgently, so finally.

  The serviceman said, “A blind man. You’d think it a crazy thing to do, wouldn’t you? Send a blind man into those mountains. But there was a legend that the Pianhmar would only contact a man without sight—a superstition on their part—they feared being seen.” He laughed. “Like the Ree’hd hate being photographed. Primitive, isn’t it?”

  Zeitman declined to comment. He knew the legend about the eyeless being the only ones who could contact the Pianhmar and live, a legend that had been dashed when Maguire had failed to return, like so many sighted humans before him. Now the serviceman had struck an interesting chord, since Maguire had returned, and under unusual circumstances to say the least!

  If the Pianhmar did still exist in the mountains, Maguire might be needed again.

  The barrier to the burrows was unlocked and Zeitman was at liberty to enter. The serviceman said, “I’m going to remain here all night, Major. When you come up it will be necessary for me to let you out. Precautionary, you understand.”

  “The Rundii, right. I understand.”

  “A small group of them came into the museum one night-after that we got a lot more security-conscious. It could have been nasty—you know how they react when they’re panicked.”

  “How about the entrances out on the savannah. They blocked off?”

  “No, and it’s very easy to get access to the burrows. There must be hundreds of entrances and miles of tunnelling. Most of the passages we take people around are blocked off, but you can take this key which will get you through them. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  Zeitman hoped the serviceman was right. Kristina would know the way in from the plain, south of the city, and where they would meet would be a place no tourist was ever taken to, or serviceman ever inspected; a place that, to Zeitman’s uncertain knowledge, did not appear on any chart of the labyrinths.

  He passed through the barrier and walked down the tunnel into the cool air of the Ree’hd burrows.

  At first, of course, the burrows were well lit. Unobtrusive strip lighting illuminated every crack in the hard paste walls of the tunnels and Zeitman walked along them without hesitation. At each branch, each tunnel that led down or off, he took an alternative with hardly a thought. He knew where he was, and where he was going, and he was only vaguely aware of the uncomfortable pressure of his vaze, tucked in his belt.

  Thousands of feet pacing these tunnels every day, thousands of hands touching the walls, thousands of voices chattering in the restless air, had led long ago to the secretion concrete of the walls cracking and flaking. The Ree’hd, in the centuries before man had arrived on their world, had burrowed this tunnel-city with the shovel-like forearms of the adolescent males in the community… and they had compacted the walls and made them safe, with clay and sand, and a female body secretion that hardened to a very tough, transparent film. This, in nature, was used to coat the female’s body during the long, metabolically static time of parturition. The film was protection against the cold (the act of birth was performed upon the open plain, alone) and dehydration.

  The use of the secretion in the walls was one of the few innovations that the Ree’hd culture demonstrated, and it had become fundamental to their way of life.

  The walls of the tourist burrows were now replaced with man-made products, indistinguishable in sight and touch from the original, but far stronger and far safer. Since the atmosphere in the authentic burrows was different from that here, Zeitman had no misconceptions as to the cultural worthlessness of the tours that filled this place by day.

  There were, certainly, many artifacts, standing now as they had stood for centuries. Zeitman recognized various “prayer” forms, for want of a better expression—hand-carved blocks of stone and what he chose to call “dried wood” cemented into the walls and floors of the burrows at the time of building, and carefully replaced at the time of rebuilding. There were other objects that had been left in the burrows when the Ree’hd population had moved site and retunnelled, away from the human city. To protect the memories that would linger in the old site, grotesque statues, squat idols, distorted caricatures of the Ree’hd, were left in many places. Some were as large as two feet high. The heads were bowed, the arms wrapped round the body, and always one lateral eye was open and one closed. The eyes (went the story for the tourists) were the eyes of stillborn Ree’hd infants, preserved and used in the sculpting.

  Zeitman walked through living chambers that were now souvenir shops. The Ree’hd had lived in communal groups, up to thirty or forty in each chamber, and within that thirty or forty were formed the complex year-kin relationships. But intercourse between chambers was common, and at sunset and sunup, all Ree’hd were as one family, moving to the river to “pray.”

  Tired of walking fast and breathing badly, Zeitman squatted in one of the more natural-looking chambers. It was a cave some fifty feet in diameter, the floor being piled with a terran mock-up of the vegetable matting that the Ree’hd used. In the centre of the floor the matting was several feet thick. It was firm but spongy. Ramps had been placed across it because, strong though the pseudo-matting was, it would not support the shuffling crowds that passed across it. All around, the walls were carved with the strange figures that were Ree’hd symbols. Each carving was a complex of names and lines and told the story of the year-kin relationships, the dying and the birth within that burrow. There were accounts of the losings and the wanderings that had once fascinated Zeitman, but he had seen those records so many times before that they occupied his interest only briefly. He had read and reread the translations from so many burrows, and when it came down to it, the repetitive nature of the content was very boring.

  In the absolute stillness Zeitman’s breathing was loud and he held his breath for a moment and listened. No ghosts or invading Rundii. But he had a long way to go.

  He pressed on, deeper into the burrow complex, and after some minutes he arrived at the edge of the tour section. He unlocked the screen and went on through. For a few yards the burrows continued to be lit, but as soon as he was out of sight of the screen, the lighting ceased. He switched on his belt light and felt the change immediately. Here the walls were the original burrow walls, and in many places their condition was obviously deteriorating.
There was a peculiar odour associated with this type of burrow, caused by the breakdown of the female secretion on the walls. It was not decay, not staleness, rather a slightly alcoholic smell, a heady odour that could make minds spin.

  Now navigation became more difficult. Zeitman held a string of seventy-three numbers in his head, all of them remembered mnemonically. They were his guide and without them he was lost.

  Increasingly he had to drop down the vertical shafts to reach deeper layers. In many places the burrows were bare, no artifacts, no floor traces, in places the carvings cut from the walls for study in laboratories in Terming. But as he walked deeper, so a more natural order descended upon things. Here were statuettes and wall-embedded blocks, literally as they had been for over a thousand years. Here a section of the wall had crumbled and the corridor was heavily blocked by rubble. Occasionally a cross-breeze drew his attention into the gloom of a side passage and he logged the position against his mnemonic scales, for that passage led to the plain above. It was a way out.

  And in.

  He was being followed; of that he was sure. He had known of the follower almost as soon as he had left the tour section. A footfall, a caught breath in the sudden silence. At first he had thought that it might have been Kristina following at a distance, but after a while he came to realize that it was no human who trailed him so steadily.

  He walked faster, passing through empty-floored chambers, the mattress long since rotted and vapourized. He saw, on the floors, embedded in the substance of the cavern lining, the bones of Ree’hd, many years old. Below each vegetation floor was the burial ground for those of the community who had died in the burrows themselves. It was like this across the entire continent—whenever he had sat and talked with a Ree’hd in his natural environment, he literally squatted upon the remains of the dead.

  He checked off number sixty, visualized the route ahead and realized he did not have far to go. He could not recollect having drawn his vaze from its pouch, but he held it now in readiness for anything. When he stopped and held his breath he could hear the approach behind him.

  The Rundii surprised him from a totally unexpected position -from the front. It was gruesome to look at, being lit by the yellow glow from his belt. Its four eyes were turned towards him, fully dark-adapted, swollen and black.

  Before Zeitman could lift his vaze it had spread-eagled him on the burrow floor and hit both his shoulders, numbing his arms and making him feel sick. He stared up at its oversized head, straining against the thick tissue that disguised any neck it might have had. It was naked and its sexual orifice was a dry slit running down its belly, pulled tight by contractile tissue and giving no clue as to the sex of his attacker.

  It shrieked in its meaningless tongue, and the sounds remained with Zeitman for a long time.

  It spat then with its song lips while its food lips, the sensory flesh around its ingestion sac, fluttered and moistened. The spit was a wholly human gesture, but it was an increasingly popular gesture among the Ree’hd for it had come to mean what it meant to a human. Where, then, had a Rundii learned the significance of spitting?

  There was no glint of metal, no flash of knife, no lifting of hammer-sized fist to pound Zeitman’s face to a pulp.

  One moment he was trapped beneath three hundred pounds of odoriferous Rundii, the next he was sprawled on the burrow, staring at the ceiling, and still feeling with his nerve endings the weight of the beast upon him.

  He eased himself up and picked up his vaze. I’m getting slow, he thought, and brushed himself down. The Rundii were not automatic killers, and for that he was thankful, but its behaviour had been… wrong. Why would it attack having followed him so deliberately? If he had surprised it, it might have been expected to have reacted even more viciously… but such calculated behaviour! And the strange sounds it had shouted at him—not human echo, not Ree’hd echo, but something new. He wrote the sounds down phonetically and stared at them. Meaningless. Not even a basis in the guttural, simple sounds that the Rundii made between themselves and which, Zeitman was sure, were a developing language—a simple word-object association, nowhere near conceptual communication.

  There was a sound ahead in the passage and he ran to it, this time prepared for shock.

  Kristina stood there, and she smiled. “I thought you might have been hurt,” she said. “I heard the scream from the deep-place.”

  “Hello, Kristina.”

  “Hello, Robert. You look…thin.” “Gaunt? Haunted? I am. You look…plump.” “Enough compliments,” she said. There was a terrible expression in her eyes. Zeitman, still shaken and physically upset, found he could not interpret it. They walked to their special place.

  They alone knew of the chamber. It appeared on no map of the burrows, and in all the years they had used it as their hiding place, as their special place, they had never been disturbed, nor even heard a human or a Ree’hd approach them.

  They found out later, from talking to Ree’hd living in a nearby community, that this had probably been the deepest part of the burrows, and the most revered. It was not a religious centre, not a place to pray, not even a place to leave remains, though the remains of several Ree’hd had been uncovered when the vegetation mattress had decayed and vanished. It was anomalously warm, whereas in most chambers it was chill. Here, they knew, had gathered the spirits of the unborn, floating in the still air and waiting to possess the Ree’hd as they came into the world—a gathering place of souls, and they had made love here a thousand times, and not a breath of wind, or a moaning ghost had objected.

  That had been long ago and they would never make love here again, but to both Zeitman and Kristina the chamber called, welcomed… here, and perhaps only here, they could talk together and reach some level of understanding.

  They stood in the warm place and Zeitman’s belt-light showed them the chamber unchanged from when they had been here before. Bones arranged symbolically formed a belt around the lower part of the cavern. The scrawled figures and texts were faded and could only be seen close up, and for a moment they both walked across the artificial flooring they themselves had installed when they had discovered this place, reading the inscriptions and remembering the fun they had had trying to decipher what they meant. A slight draught was blowing from the tunnels, aerating the chamber and bringing with it the scent of vegetation from the flatlands above.

  “How have you been, Kristina?” Zeitman turned round and sat down cross-legged upon the mats. Kristina sat in front of him and her ringers played nervously with the pressure pads on her boots.

  “Happy,” she said after a moment. “I think I can sum up the past four years in that single word.”

  “Happy,” repeated Zeitman. “Content?”

  She nodded. When she said no more Zeitman pressed. “Lovers?”

  “Are you really interested?”

  “A little. Tell me to mind my own business if you like.”

  She looked at him, thinking hard. He could read her well, now. She was weighing him up, wondering whether it was worth keeping things from him, wondering whether he was worthless enough to be told all about her emotional life of the past few years.

  “Lovers? Yes… several. All very early on. They’re all off-planet now, and none of them lived in my heart much beyond two or three days.”

  “How long did I?”

  “A little longer. Don’t become tedious, Robert. It’s difficult enough for me to be here with you without you building up to an adolescent tantrum.”

  Zeitman felt struck between the eyes, but forced a smile. And he conceded that she was right, albeit a silent concession.

  In the harsh illumination from his belt light she seemed hollow-eyed and fierce. He toned down the emission and a softer light filled the chamber, and she became suddenly a different person to behold—rounder, gentler.

  “I had a hell of a four years,” said Zeitman. “I presume you thought of me some of the time? You must have wondered “I received your madly passionate commu
nications from Orgone and Necroman 3. You sounded like you were having fun.

  From the tone of the letters I assumed they were sent to hurt me, rather than inform me.”

  “I can’t remember. I was pretty bitter in the first few months, and I did have some fun, yes. But it didn’t last. Orgone has a strange effect on male humans—it makes them very juvenile. Some form of micro-flora that upsets the hormones; so they say, anyway.”

  “In other words,” said Kristina with a humourless smile, “I’d better make allowances.”

  “I don’t think the effect has lasted. If I look younger it’s because I’ve lost weight. If I seem emotionally less mature it’s because I aged prematurely in my last few years on Ree’hdworld— and I’ve corrected the fault.”

  “Are you attempting to insult me?”

  “No, not at all,” said Zeitman quickly. “We were different people then, Kristina, and in four years we’ve changed. Right now I only know one thing for sure…”

  Kristina dropped her gaze from his. “Don’t tell me.”

  “I want you back, Kristina. Now. As we were, together, researching, exploring…”

  “Stop it, you fool. Stop it!”

  Her shout died away. Zeitman sat and stared and she couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Fool,” he stated without emotion. “I don’t understand that.”

  “You don’t understand a thing, Robert. You never did. That’s ninety percent of why you’re such a dislikable person.” She was flushed and trembling, an expression of anger, perhaps, or bitterness. Zeitman sensed that she was preparing to leave. “You never understood me,” she said, “which in itself was acceptable—just. But Robert, you just did not listen when I told you things. You always had to believe that our life here was fruitful and uncomplicated, and you became so indifferent… Inside I was dying faster than I thought was possible.”