Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  “Oh come on, Kristina…”

  “Shut up and listen. I’m not staying here, Robert, and I’m certainly not getting together with you again. You have nothing but the original Robert Zeitman below that juvenile flesh and bone exterior… There’s no book that lists the lessons learned from this, or that, or him or her… There’s no file headed ‘how I get up Kristina’s nose, and ways and means and self-denials necessary to negate this contrast of personalities.’ You never grew up, Robert. Orgone didn’t touch you—it had nothing to touch. You have grown up a little now, but at the time you lived your little dream relationship and killed me, and I will not run the risk of being hurt again. Not that you could hurt me any more. I have no inclination to know you, to talk to you, to lay with you or do anything with you. I want you to forget me, and when you’ve forgotten me and what I mean to you, then maybe we can set up together in a purely scientific way, studying the Ree’hd as we used to. Understand?”

  Zeitman understood and it hurt him very much. She was trying to send him away with a half-promise that she, and he, knew would never be fulfilled.

  He let his head hang limp and for a long time there was just the sound of Kristina’s breathing. What went through Zeitman’s mind was a confused and illogical sequence of fears and feelings, and when he looked up he said the worst thing he could have said, and this was so predictable to Kristina that she laughed.

  “Why must it always come down to suspicion? Hell, Robert. You’re a cliché unto yourself.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I already told you I had lovers.”

  “That’s past. I mean now”

  “Very well. Yes, Robert. There is someone else in my life right now. He is my lover and I love him.”

  “Dan bloody Erlam…it has to be him!”

  Kristina laughed, the bitter laugh that was all Zeitman could remember of her expressions of amusement. “Dan is a very fine man, and he makes his feelings for me well known. But he knows the score and he accepts it, even if he does rally his forces every so often and come courting. No Robert,” she seemed to be almost goading him, baiting him. “My lover is someone much more interesting than any human…”

  Zeitman shook his head, an expression of utter disbelief in his eyes. “Not… not Urak… surely not a bloody Ree’hd!”

  “Right on, Robert Zeitman. My lay has four eyes and an erotic zone beneath his para-arms. What do you think of that?”

  Zeitman’s response was a cry of anguish. He struck Kristina and, climbing to his feet, reached a vantage point from which he could strike her again.

  “Leave me alone, you bastard,” she screamed, rolling away from his first vicious kick.

  “A bloody Ree’hd… I heard you were living with him, but I never realized… You bloody stupid bitch! How could you, Kristina. How could you!”

  She climbed to her feet and held the side of her face where blood seeped from a two-inch graze. “Easy… easy. Come and watch us sometime. It’ll make your hair curl.”

  “You bitch…I-oh my God!”

  “Hit me again and I’ll kill you!”

  He pulled the blow as he saw the pin gun in her hand. She walked sideways round the chamber and came to the entrance. He was conscious of tears streaming down his face, but he stood still, watching her, fists clenched by his sides.

  She said, “You may well have destroyed everything I ever wanted, Robert—a chance to become a part of an alien world… a chance to become an alien myself. I was nearly there, Robert, and you may have destroyed that. If you have, I hope you rot in hell. If not, then I don’t intend to let you have a second chance.”

  “A Ree’hd, Kristina! They’re not human. Kristina, you can’t love a damn animal.”

  Her smile was almost triumphant. “I loved you, didn’t I? And that’s enough said. Leave me alone. Just leave me alone!”

  “NO!” He shouted, anger making an irrational animal of him. As he reached for her she shot and he felt the sting of a needle and the sickening sensation of paralysis.

  Chapter Six

  From the position he had adopted upon falling, Zeitman could see his wrist chronometer. He watched, paralysed, as the seconds passed. Each second seemed to take an hour to tick into non-existence, and in the time taken for the seconds hand to register a full minute Zeitman had several times lived and relived and regretted the incidents of a few minutes before. His mind lingered on Kristina’s words, rephrased them, re-expressed them: had he really seemed as an animal to her? Or was that just spite, bitterness on her part, causing her to invent past hatred she had never felt? Was she really without any feeling for him? Could she love a Ree’hd… could she really become a Ree’hd? And if she could, was it possible that he, Zeitman, could follow her… into the culture of the Ree’hd, into the world, into a peaceful, non-competitive existence?

  Two minutes.

  He felt the sensation of anaesthesia wearing off. First his fingers and toes, then, quickly (five, six seconds) his arms, legs. He staggered, stumbled, stood up straight and leaned against the wall of the burrow, staring at his knees, at the ceiling, at his knees again, as he tried to shake full consciousness back into his head.

  Two minutes thirty seconds. He listened carefully, applying his whole awareness to the task of searching for Kristina’s departure.

  Three minutes and he felt in full enough control of his muscles to give chase to the woman. He crossed to the narrow entrance of the chamber and leaned against the wall again, peering into the corridor outside, the light from his belt giving him a view for twenty feet in either direction.

  He didn’t notice the Rundii at first. It was standing more or less where the corridor twisted out of sight and the light was weak. When he saw the shape standing there watching him, he froze.

  It was the same creature that had so recently attacked him, of that he was almost sure. There was a difference in the native’s attitude, however. It seemed hesitant, unsure.

  Zeitman realized, as he acted, that the time between becoming aware of the Rundii, and drawing his vaze to shoot it down as it leapt at him, was less than a heart’s beat. He shot, and the Rundii screeched loud and long as it lay on the floor, and pumped its body fluid on to the hard rock.

  When it screeched it identified itself not as a Rundii, but as a Ree’hd. Zeitman, confused, approached cautiously and stared down at the dying creature. Sure enough, there was something very artificial about the characteristic yellow sexual skin of the Rundii below each arm. Yellow paint, already smudged and smeared.

  Checking the wound Zeitman realized that it was not, for a Ree’hd, as serious as it would have been for a human; in all probability the native would survive. Zeitman left him lying there, and began his pursuit of Kristina, knowing neither where she had gone, nor what else she might have arranged to be waiting for him—for he was almost sure that she had laid on this attack—in the complex of passages that led to the surface.

  He climbed, and ran, covering several miles of winding, crumbling burrows. Every minute he stopped and listened. He heard nothing.

  At last he came to the first exit corridor to the surface of the planet: a steep, ridged slope, with a circular entrance, three feet across and just accessible to a fit human being. Through the hole in the roof he could see clouds, lit by the weak reflected light of Other Moon.

  He was well outside the city, probably more than two miles under the natural plain across the river from Terming. He climbed to the surface and took great care as he made his exit from the burrows. There was nothing waiting to attack him, or to greet him, or watch him, and he felt mildly grateful. There was, less fortunately, no sign of Kristina.

  The plain was a black, featureless area. In the very distance he could see, against the horizon, the beginnings of a small “forest” (an accumulation of the moving tree forms that roamed during winter, and rooted during spring) restricted in dimension by the shallowing of the top soil as the bed-rock waved close to the surface in this particular area. He im
agined he saw the flickering light of a fire, but there was nothing, or no-one, that would want—or have been mad enough to light-such a fire in this area.

  Behind him, as he crouched facing the darkness of the plain, Terming was a wall of bright light, promising security. Between Zeitman and that security there flowed the wide, uninviting river, and to cross it would mean re-entering the burrows and negotiating their complexity with only a vague idea of the route he should take, now he had been rash enough to leave his mentally encoded route some distance behind.

  Unsure of what he should do next, he spent some moments in indecision. Should he make an approach to the woods? Or go back below the surface and find another of the back exits from the complex and hope for better luck? Or should he give up altogether and return to the barracks?

  His mind was made up a moment later when Kristina screamed from a distance of at least half a mile. For a moment Zeitman’s heart stopped, then he was off and running, forgetting the scattered ground holes that could have claimed a limb if not his life.

  In the darkness he became aware of an area of light, the light from Kristina’s belt. He could see, as he approached, the stooped shape of a Ree’hd bending over the prone form of a human… Kristina!

  With a cry (designed to inspire fright—as if the Ree’hd would respond to such a thing!) he closed the distance with speed and determination. At the last moment before he would have fired his vaze, the Ree’hd turned and stared at him.

  He recognized her immediately. A middle-years Ree’hd called Reems’gaa, now demonstrating great distress, great anger, great frustration—such a mixture of emotion that Zeitman knew one thing only—she was about to kill.

  A Ree’hd never killed another Ree’hd except in times of great (truly great!) stress, or if that Ree’hd were mad. On Ree’hdworld humans were regarded if not as Ree’hd, then certainly as equivalent beings, and were never attacked with murder in mind, although he had once seen such a thing happen by accident. Humans were affected by the Ree’hd mind-killing ability, and this, it seemed to Zeitman, was what Reems’gaa was doing to Kristina. Kristina was quite obviously unconscious, and the Ree’hd had been slowly killing her by closing down the human’s body systems. It took time, obviously—or was there such a conflict of ideals within the Ree’hd that she was unable to bring her powers to full fury?

  When Ree’hd and human met each other’s gaze there was a moment’s tenseness, an instant recognition, and on Zeitman’s part a deeply situated fear that gripped him from the inside and said, “kill her, she’s going to kill you!” The Ree’hd obviously remembered Zeitman. Strangely, when Zeitman had encountered her before he had been alone, and not with Kristina—so why was she attacking Kristina?

  Had she been harbouring a hatred for him all these years? It had been… six years, a whole six years since they had met last! It came back to Zeitman as if it had happened just the day before—a clarity of image, frightening in its intensity. It was day, the time of day (apart from dusk) when the wind was at its least intolerable, perhaps midday, a little after—the cloud covering, as deep and dark as any winter cloud-covering ever was, prevented accurate time telling, and Zeitman, in those days, did not wear a chronometer…

  He had come out of his burrow (not really his, merely hired for the period of study with the Nimyr Ree’hd, his main source of study these days since the wind had become so strong as to make distant travelling dangerous and uncomfortable). A female Ree’hd was moving slowly away from the area, almost staggering as she walked up the slopes behind the main burrows, legs splayed a little more than was usual.

  The Ree’hd was in the later moments of gestation, and the phenomenon of parturition among the Ree’hd was something Zeitman had never witnessed (although it had been witnessed on many occasions in the past). There were many reasons for this omission—the main one being that it was virtually impossible to tell that a Ree’hd female was with offspring until the last seven local days of gestation. At this time the developing foetus grew almost visibly fast, and the female took her leave, without consulting even burrow-kin, and delivered the young in an open place, where the full force of the wind could carry its soul from the place where souls waited!

  With scientific callousness, and childish excitement, he set out after the Ree’hd.

  Reems’gaa walked for an hour, oblivious of her shadow; she finally came to a stop in the middle of an exposed rock face on the side of a hill, and turned to face the biting wind. Zeitman dropped to a crouch, fifty yards away, using the naturally rising and falling terrain as cover. He began to speak into his belt recorder, reporting every motion, every gesture, every sound that Reems’gaa made as she began to produce her offspring.

  Squatting on the rock she began to croon softly, and as the tenor of her voice grew in volume, so a sparkling liquid oozed from the sexual crevasse at the base of her torso. The liquid, thick and translucent, began to blow into a huge bubble that completely covered the lower part of her body, and formed a tent against the wind. In seconds the shining dome had lost its lustre as the material hardened.

  A moment later the birth began, Reems’gaa’s belly opening wide between mid-torso and crotch, and the arms of a tiny Ree’hd pushing through and grasping thin air inside the cocoon. At the same time Reems’gaa began to scream.

  It was a perfectly human scream of terror, a sound so filled with meaning and emotion for a human that Zeitman reacted almost by reflex.

  He ran towards her. To help.

  He had run perhaps ten paces when he realized his mistake and stopped. In the same instant Reems’gaa’s scream ceased, and she turned her huge eyes upon him, and there was just the whine of the wind, the distant roar of a water cascade, and a sense of stillness…

  The unborn Ree’hd fell from Reems’gaa’s belly, its head crushed to a red and black pulp by the plate-like bones of the womb cavity that had pressed irresistably together at the moment of the mother’s shock. The tiny form lay in the protection of the cocoon, limbs twitching slightly, spreading the freely flowing blood about the bare rock.

  Reems’gaa began to keen, her arms extending, fingers tense and splayed in a gesture of distress. Her forward eyes never left Zeitman. The human was shattered; he looked at the dead Ree’hd child, and at Reems’gaa and he saw a symbol of what he hated most—human interference. He ran down the hillside, and fled the burrows for a while, and as over the days he pieced together what he had really done, so his crime, and his anxiety, became greater—not just a single abortion, but the loss of fertility of a female Ree’hd. When he had surprised and frightened Reems’gaa she had reflexly aborted the lining of cells within her cavernous womb that were the part-formed bodies of all her offspring of the next fifty Ree’hd years. The Ree’hd way of birth was insemination when just sexually mature, by all those male Ree’hd in the community who would, through life, become year-kin; thereafter offspring were produced where and when required, selecting for characteristics, according to the feeling of the community, from the range of types the mother carried.

  Zeitman had destroyed her as a natural Ree’hd, and she had obviously never forgotten or forgiven. He came back to the present, losing the image of the younger, panic stricken Reems’gaa, and facing her furious form as she stood before him, and prepared to attack.

  “Reems’gaa! Wait… please!”

  In the half-light from his belt his perspectives were confused; he had thought the Ree’hd was still motionless, but she was approaching, fast, heavy. In an instant Zeitman felt the wind driven from his body, found himself driven to the ground beneath the weight of the native. Reems’gaa stared down at him, her eyes hugely dilated, her squat form pinioning him securely and irresistably.

  Zeitman struggled with his vaze, but a strange paralysis affected him. He found he was unwilling to defend himself. The energy seemed to drain from his arms and legs, from his whole body…

  There was a whispering sensation in his head; not words, not even coherent sound. A noise like the distant his
s of static on a primitive radio receiver, and it spread to fill his conscious mind. His heart stopped.

  His last thought was, interesting, this is how it affects a human being. Fascinating. Fascinating. Fascinating…

  Something hit him in the face.

  Cold wind chilled his flesh, and a human voice was shouting “Robert Robert Robert…”

  There was a smell of decay. A pain on his left cheek, then on his right. Something was pulling his shoulders.

  His first visual awareness was of the gaping food mouth of a Ree’hd, from which the revolting smell was issuing; his second was of being pinioned beneath the bulk of a dead Ree’hd, He used all his strength to shift the inert form, and eased himself into a sitting position. Kristina was crouched by him, her face pale, her eyes wet.

  “I had to do it. Oh God, I had to… but…” she began to cry.

  Reems’gaa was dead, the burn hole in her back being ample evidence to the fatality of Kristina’s rescue operation. “I didn’t want to kill her… I never stopped to think, I just… reacted.”

  There was a certain irony in the situation—Kristina had just killed to save his life, whereas a few minutes before she had left him to die at the hands of her hired assassin. Could it have been that she had no stomach to witness his death? Or might there be some deeper, more selfish reason for her sudden preservation instinct?

  Kristina was still shivering and staring at the dead Ree’hd. Zeitman tried to comfort her. He could imagine how she might be feeling—she had reacted as a human being when she saw one of her own race being slowly killed; and this was contrary to the way she thought of herself, as only half human. She had killed her racial half-sister.

  “Urak had turned her away. She is—was—Urak’s natural year-kin, but he refused to acknowledge her at the changing ceremony.”

  “And took you instead,” said Zeitman, immediately understanding the deeper source of Kristina’s distress. She was feeling guilty.