Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  “Joe…”

  Guttural. The Ree’hd—a retarded creature, a community member of very low intelligence—in human terms, a moron. Zeitman was awake in an instant, sitting up on his rough bed. The Ree’hd crouched by him and looked him straight in the eye. Kristina, his girlfriend, was not beside him and he glanced at his collar-watch and saw it was well past noon. He had had too much to drink in the city, the night before, and presumably Kristina had let him sleep.

  Again the Ree’hd said, “Joe…”

  This time Zeitman caught the full implication. He reacted as if someone had shot him, but for a few moments he kept on living and breathing, reacting normally. Then he blacked out and when he came to he felt himself being dragged towards the exit of the burrow, and the Ree’hd was screeching.

  Zeitman screamed and twisted out of the Ree’hd’s grip, climbed to his feet and ran to the river in panic. Joe wasn’t there, and then he saw him, sitting on the rocks a few hundred yards from the rushing waters.

  Sighing with relief Zeitman walked towards him. He had been so afraid for that moment… The retarded Ree’hd was older than Zeitman, but with its juvenile mentality it found pleasure in the childish playing of the ten-year-old that Zeitman was caring for while the boy’s parents lay ill in a Terming hospital.

  Zeitman and Kristina had brought the boy to these burrows for a few days, and when this particular Ree’hd had become attached to him Zeitman had felt little anxious, but had not disallowed the contact. His fear had been that, being so near the river, the retarded Ree’hd would cause the boy to drown.

  Zeitman came closer to Joe, and called to him. Joe sat on the rocky ledge looking at his feet.

  There was something about the boy’s attitude, the way the head was bowed, the hands, palm flat upon the ground…

  “JOE!”

  Tripping as he ran, Zeitman reached the hunched figure and for a long moment there was only the feel of the boy’s body as he clutched it against his own, and the racing of blood through his head, and the scream that he fought against until he was physically sick and, dropping the body, he vomited across the rocks and the cowed form of the retarded Ree’hd.

  “Accident… accident…” murmured the Ree’hd. And Zeitman had felt the pressure of the creature’s mind, and knew, without thinking, that the backward native had found his ability to mind-kill—so long denied him—and he had not been able to control it. At terrible cost.

  It came back to Zeitman with unexpected suddenness as he looked at the squatting forms of the twenty-one humans. He remembered that the Ree’hd, those long years back, had himself arranged the limbs of the boy into what he regarded as the proper death attitude for a human.

  Now it was occurring to Zeitman that there were no Ree’hd this far inland to have so arranged the human bodies; and the Rundii, though they moved unexpectedly, were not known to inhabit this particular sector of the continent. And if they did… where had they learned the Ree’hd habit of death arrangement?

  There were no marks upon any body, though Zeitman searched hard. Susanna watched him, sensing in his urgency some of the uneasiness that Zeitman was feeling. Zeitman, were he to trouble to document his emotion, might have found that he was not so much afraid of finding a sign of Rundii interference, as he was of finding a sign of the Pianhmar. To his uncertain knowledge the Pianhmar had not been credited with the ability to mind-kill; but what did that mean? Who could say anything about the Pianhmar that was not wholly subjective?

  In the stillness following his final efforts to locate a mark of violence, the flora behind Zeitman parted and a fearsome-looking man appeared.

  Susanna had already stooped behind one of the squatting corpses, and Zeitman rose and glanced at her to make sure that she was relatively safe before he turned to face the stranger: a man of short stature, with clotted blood in his close-cut beard, and his spacer’s uniform in rags. He had wrapped a luxury quilt around himself, and on his head, set uncomfortably upon his uncombed hair, he wore the cap of an officer. He stood for a moment staring at Zeitman, his eyes, behind slightly tinted goggles, wide. He seemed to be shivering.

  Then he walked towards Zeitman and extended his hand. “My name’s Ballantyne. I imagine that I’m dying.”

  “We can probably help you,” said Zeitman, recognizing a certain finality in the man’s attitude. “The city of Terming isn’t far away and you don’t look too bad…”

  Ballantyne shook his head. “I didn’t get my drugs. There was no time.” He looked at the circle of corpses. “They didn’t either, but they didn’t die from what’s killing me. What killed them? Animals? No… they were talking about ghosts…”

  Zeitman was taken by surprise. Ballantyne noticed and said, “Ghosts? Does that mean something?”

  Yes, thought Zeitman, it means something! It means everything. What about that, Susanna? What about the ghostly Pianhmar now?

  He looked over his shoulder and couldn’t help smiling. Susanna seemed very afraid. She said, “Robert, there were ghosts in Terming, weren’t there? Didn’t Erlam say something about ghosts?”

  “Yes,” said Zeitman. He was thinking: why did they kill? And will they kill us?

  To Ballantyne he said, “My guess is these people died of exposure. The nights are bitter at this time of the spring.”

  Ballantyne shivered more obviously and drew the quilt tighter about his shoulder. “I know. I nearly died last night as well. I have no cataphrak.”

  “We have a spare in the skimmer. How long have you been down?”

  “Since yesterday. The ship was struck by a missile. I guess the natives aren’t too friendly. I jumped with the delicate machinery we thought we’d need, just before impact. I underestimated the time to impact and landed a long way from the ship. Most of the equipment was out of service, though not unrescuable, but I made contact over my suit short-wave. They were babbling about ghosts in the jungle, and then after a few hours there was just silence. It took me a day to catch up with the group and by the time I got here Hernandez and the rest were like this. I was frightened and I went back down the valley a way, but when I saw your ship I came back.”

  “Hernandez was the shuttle captain?” asked Zeitman.

  Ballantyne pointed to the only spacer in the group of dead. “He was master of the Grantham, not just the shuttle. I was communications officer. As you can see, the ship was pretty well gutted. There’s an auto-survival unit that should have functioned but obviously didn’t, but worse, the core was exposed. They had to move away. Couldn’t even use the hulk as a shelter.”

  “If the core had been exposed,” said Zeitman, “it would have registered when I scanned the wreck. There was no radiation of any sort.”

  Ballantyne eased off his small pack and withdrew a narrow-angle counter which he held pointed at the distant shuttle. He stared at it for a moment, then shook the gadget, turned it over and back, and stared again. “I don’t understand… there was a burning rad when I looked before. Somebody covered it up…”

  Very powerful ghosts, thought Zeitman, and wondered what Maguire could tell him about it.

  With the bodies sealed back in the shuttle Ballantyne visibly relaxed. He cleaned his skin wounds and shaved the beard from his face, leaving just a thin moustache. Washed, and warm as the cataphrak he had put on started to make efficient use of his own body heat, he became less convinced that he was dying; but Zeitman, without the other’s knowledge, had run a diagnostat across his back and it was a depressing report that Zeitman filed in his mind.

  Ballantyne was harbouring a blood organism known in Terming as Ree’hdworld Scurvy. It was a simple unicell harboured quite safely by the Ree’hd. In humans, however, its toxins were precipitated on the walls of blood vessels and made them weak. Hence easy bruising, and since the favoured site of deposition was, for some reason, the brain, Ballantyne’s ultimate fate was death by massive cerebral haemorrhage. And the installation had no remedy, except prayer.

  Saying nothing of his diagnosis, Ze
itman listened to Ballantyne’s fears and regrets, expressed as they sealed the bodies away for ever.

  Ballantyne stood back from the sealed airlock of the shuttle and watched the red heat fade to dull silver grey. He seemed fatalistic and turned to Zeitman and shrugged. “They were big-headed bastards, but I felt very close to Hernandez. I think he only went along with the notion because he felt empty without Earth and didn’t want to miss the chance to live out his days in comfort.”

  “What notion?” asked Susanna as they walked across the rough ground back to the skimmer.

  “The Saved. Most colonies become intensely God-fearing for the first few decades of their existence and it was only natural, I suppose, that when those colonies got to hear that Earth had been hit by Fear they should imagine themselves to have been saved in some way. God’s chosen few.” Ballantyne chuckled. “There were plenty of them, the chosen few. That’s what I mean—big-headed.”

  Ballantyne and Hernandez had been two of a five man crew who had assisted with the evacuation of colonists from New Villefranche, a high-G. world of Bianco’s Star. With the stellar mother showing a little too much variability for security a massive lift from the three colonized worlds had been organized, and this was part of the first shipment. The news from Earth had reached the colony before the arrival of Hernandez and his ship and by that time any panic had been quelled. Fear, the colony leaders had told them, is a God-given cross to mankind, and he has punished humanity by eliminating the homeworld. Most of the colony were robed in red, smiling, full of their own importance, all convinced that they had been saved, and that now they were to range far and wide and spread the love of the Saviour. Earth—they had rationalized—had been the final resting ground for the evil of the race and God had selected his chosen few to colonise certain worlds where they might escape the effects of his wrath.

  It had, thought Zeitman, the essential beauty that it eliminated depression at the loss of the motherworld.

  Rene Hernandez coming under the influence of one of the younger females among the Saved, had moved slightly to the way of thinking of what Ballantyne regarded as a group of clinically insane. It amused him that their first decision had been to hit an Earth-type world to start their good work of weeding out those few black souls who had escaped God’s wrath. Ballantyne, whose life had been threatened twice by the fanatic who led the group, paradoxically had been the only survivor, and that because he had chuted from the crashing shuttle seconds before impact and in some way had avoided observation by the avenging forces that had struck the rest soon after.

  “Space is filled with nuts at the moment,” he concluded, “all putting a different interpretation on what has happened on Earth. Everyone is rationalizing their panic, but that’s what it is, pure and simple. Thousands of people have left colony worlds where there is no Fear, has been no Fear, and might never be any Fear—but they leave, anyway, to get as far away as possible from the stricken sectors, and what they don’t realize is that they’re probably carrying the disease with them anyway.” Changing the subject abruptly, and pointing to the sealed shuttle, “Shall we pray for them? Do you believe in that sort of thing?”

  Susanna said, “I had you down as an agnostic…”

  “Oh no. I was brought up to believe in the Universal God, He who has no shape and becomes the True God of all shapes and forms, colours and cultural developments. I worshipped Thor, and Vishnu, and the Father of Christ, and Star Brother, and Dru’iss whose atoms are the dust that fills space. I saw them all, with a little prompting from a neuro-jammer. Star Brother was everything a friend should be, only when I grew a little older my Rationalist weeded out a latent homosexual tendency in me and I recognized a certain physical wish-fulfilment in the form of Star Brother…”

  “Which wouldn’t contradict your doctrine,” pointed out Susanna.

  Ballantyne didn’t disagree with her. “It made me feel a little sick, though. I decided gods were for those who had an unconscious realization that their own ideal would never be found. To be completely honest, the only god I found any sort of sense in was Himself, who died on the Cross in one form. You know who I mean, don’t you?”

  Susanna looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Oh well, it doesn’t matter.”

  They stood in silence for a few minutes, Zeitman and Susanna exchanging weary glances, all three of them huddled against the biting wind. After a while Ballantyne turned away from the shuttle and they walked back towards the skimmer.

  “We already had a ship load of evacuees when the news came,” he said as they sat in the cramped cabin of the skimmer, sipping coffee. “Most of them are still in orbit. We felt a responsibility towards them and the decision was taken first to dump them where they wanted to be, and then to decide our individual plans and make sure each crew man got his wish.

  “I was for getting to a cosy world, such as Ree’hdworld, and so was Hernandez. My cabin-mate, a girl I was very fond of, was for running, heading for the deep, getting as far away from planets as she could. If Fear was grabbing for worlds, she said, then space was the safest place to be. She figured on going three or four thousand light years into intergee and closing down bodily systems for a thousand years or so. Then coming back and starting again. I said, what if the Galaxy is gone? A chance she would take. My way, she said, I was giving up because the chances were that the spread of Fear indicated the approaching death of the Universe—the intelligent Universe. And that, she figured, meant the Ree’hd would go too, eventually. And if I was with the Ree’hd, then maybe I’d go to a Ree’hd heaven, by mistake. Or worse, a Ree’hd hell.

  “That struck us as very funny, but deep down Vivienne believed it. She didn’t wait for us to get rid of our cargo—she stole a shuttle and she’s out there now, speeding towards the deep, with a complete seed-bank—including some of me—a veritable ark. If man survives she’ll come back in a thousand years to find herself a relic.”

  Her and how many others, wondered Zeitman. Aloud he said, “When this group decided to come to Ree’hdworld, didn’t anyone stop to consider the intelligence on this world? Didn’t it seem unfair to you to risk this race for your own skin?”

  Ballantyne smiled narrowly and said, “Zeitman, I’m a spacer, not a scientist. To me a planet is plus or minus G., high or low oxygen, classified on a six-point scale for ease of survival. Intelligent creatures are beyond my experience. I didn’t know what to do or say when the suggestion was made that we should come to Ree’hdworld. I thought of what I remembered about the planet from school books, namely that the natives live at the coast and only at the coast—”

  “Wrong.”

  “Well, don’t tell me, tell the education authorities on two hundred and twenty-two fifth-generation worlds. We learn that there are only two intelligent races in the Universe, us and the Ree’hd, and the Ree’hd are at a stage of development about equivalent to stone-age man.”

  “A little inaccurate,” said Susanna. “What do you say, Robert?”

  Zeitman said, “Just a little. The Ree’hd could well be at a very advanced stage of development.”

  Ballantyne looked from one to the other of them, a half-smile on his face. “That’s starshit. They have nothing that could classify them as advanced.”

  “They have no need of it,” said Zeitman softly. “That’s more advanced than us, isn’t it?”

  “Do you really believe that? I don’t think you do. I don’t think anybody does. It’s an axiom, isn’t it? Self-awareness leads to self-expression, and any positive move like that is easier with machinery.”

  “That sounds like school-book philosophy,” said Susanna. She grinned at Zeitman who shrugged and irritated her by saying, “I think he could be right.”

  Ballantyne laughed. “It makes sense doesn’t it? Machines, however simple, are a sign of civilization and the Ree’hd don’t have them.”

  Imbecile, thought Zeitman, suddenly disliking Ballantyne intensely. Aloud he said, “What constitute
s a machine, though? And at what stage of development is it necessary to have them to prove intelligence… or rather, civilization? Early? Late? Is civilization merely the developing of systems that can do without machinery, or vice versa? Just because Earth took one alternative, doesn’t mean to say it’s the only way.”

  “That philosophy,” said Ballantyne dryly, “sounds homegrown. I’ll stick to text books. They’re authoritative.”

  “And think human.” It was almost as tedious as arguing with Susanna, thought Zeitman. But he could expect no different. Spacers were not necessarily without sensitivities, but more often than not they were.

  Susanna, Zeitman noticed, was still annoyed that her attempt to defend him had met with his rebuff. What did she know anyway? She referred to a Ree’hd as “it,” and was far more intent on becoming Zeitman’s constant companion than she was in understanding the planet that she was now effectively exiled upon.

  There was too much of importance to Zeitman (by his own standards) for him to concern himself with Susanna, however. There were lights in the night sky that were a threat to natural processes on Ree’hdworld, and if there was just one spacer on each with an attitude as well trained in ignorance as Ballantyne’s, then the next few weeks could see a constant rain of wreckage and survivors scattered across the two continents.

  More worrying, perhaps, assuming that the fugitives in orbit made it down and claimed rights of survival (and assuming that they survived whatever had killed the first twenty-one) what attitudes might they hold concerning the survival rights of the natives?

  People who wanted to land and then commit an honourable suicide (if there were such) would be welcome, but missionaries, seeing in the Ree’hd some sort of primitive and malleable culture, would have to be removed quietly and permanently from the scene.

  They remained seated in the skimmer in silence, and the hours slipped by. Zeitman was conscious of time going by, but Eye Among the Blind he felt that Ballantyne—for all that he represented to Zeitman— should give the word to leave his dead companion behind; it seemed to Zeitman that the spacer was growing accustomed to having lost the only person (apart from the unknown Vivienne) that he had felt close to. When he had buried Hernandez completely, they could move on towards the Pianhmar sphere and (on Ballantyne’s insistence) to the excavation site.