Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  But how did Homo sapiens, and the trouble that he was undergoing, fit into the scheme?

  What if man had such a trigger within him? Not in the individual form that he assumed, but in the single entity that was the human race. What if, for the past years, a new process of evolution had been gearing into operation, unrecognized except by its tragic side effect—the neurotic disability that had come to be known as Fear?

  The Pianhmar had evolved and devolved, they had lived and died, to make way for a second race. Was man at the beginning of his devolution? Was his ensuing death just part of the natural process of life and not the result of a freak disease?

  And if the two sequences of change were not coincidental in their timing, was there perhaps a trigger, a plan of events coded in the whole Galaxy? Triggers in the human race and the alien race being squeezed together… evolution and devolution on a cosmic scale…

  His thoughts were interrupted by Kawashima’s loud and despairing voice. “We’ve killed this world, Zeitman. There’s no way we can undo what we’ve done, and there’s no way we can reduce the continuing effect. We’ve split the race of the Ree’hd and for some reason they can’t be split. There’s something about them that requires they all live the same, that they all develop the same.”

  “I know,” said Zeitman.

  “We’ve been punished. There’s nothing left now.”

  “There’s still understanding…”

  “Oh shit, Zeitman! I’m so tired of that word!”

  “Tired? Or afraid? Look, Kawashima, you’ve got the first ever definite Pianhmar remains. The Pianhmar are no longer myth, they’re fact. In the last few days we’ve learned as much about Ree’hdworld as in the previous two hundred years! That’s a lot of understanding, Kawashima, and a large stride towards becoming a part of the world. Think of that!”

  Kawashima shook his head. He wiped the rain from his eyes. “No. No, we’re human beings and we wouldn’t fit in a world manufactured for the Ree’hd.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Zeitman flatly. “You’re so wrong. With understanding comes belonging. Kristina is already a Ree’hd. She is human in form, but she exists in the Ree’hd sphere, and she is part of the world. That’s all that is important to her, and to the Ree’hd who have accepted her. We can do the same, all of us who care. But we have to throw off all our human needs, such as human company.”

  “And there are too many humans on Ree’hdworld to make that possible.”

  That much was true. There were far too many.

  “For a few of us,” he said, “there is an end more worthwhile than any terrestrial death…”

  Zeitman looked inwards for a moment and wondered if he was being too patronizing. Where was the cynical streak Kristina had always accused him of having? And why had he not noticed its passing?

  “Don’t give up,” he went on. Kawashima was silent. “Don’t give up. Keep fighting, keep understanding.”

  “Why?” Kawashima shouted suddenly. “For God’s sake why? Who’s going to know? Who’s going to applaud?” Angry, now, Kawashima began to reflect his true nature. “This would have made my name, Zeitman. It would have put me on the map. I needed that fame—we all need it, and I was close to getting it! Christ! What a thing to happen…”

  “In the face of death all you can think of is yourself? I can hardly-”

  “Shove off, Zeitman! Bust out! Leave me alone!”

  From anger to melancholy again—a heavy silence, the monotonous sound of rain washing across the earth.

  Zeitman hesitated. He could detect, in Kawashima’s depression and anger, a stronger death-wish than Ballantyne’s. He reached out a hand to touch the Japanese, and Kawashima looked up at him. It was a terribly empty gaze, and Zeitman felt instantly afraid…

  Susanna screamed.

  Zeitman ran through the rain, only half aware that Kawashima had remained seated. When he arrived at the canopy he found the three adolescent Ree’hd lying dead before the statue, and Susanna, on her knees, hands over her mouth, staring at the statue with an expression on her face that was unmistakably terror.

  Zeitman turned to look at the statue, and as he did so he took an involuntary step backwards.

  The statue’s forward eyes were open and watching him. Clay was falling from the creature’s joints as its arms straightened fractionally.

  Reaching out, Zeitman pulled Susanna to her feet and without letting his eyes leave those of the Pianhmar, he pulled her away from the creature. A hand touched his shoulder and he struck out, panicking, and sent Kevin Maguire sprawling to the turf.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” Zeitman shouted.

  “Take it easy,” cried Maguire, and Zeitman stopped. Maguire stood up and Zeitman saw he was trembling. “I didn’t understand, Zeitman, I didn’t understand…” He began to cry, the tears lost in the rain that covered his face. “… I just hadn’t realized fully… I’m sorry, Zeitman.”

  “What? What is it? What hadn’t you realized?”

  “Kristina… she…1 didn’t understand!”

  He turned and ran, and before he reached the beginning of the bush he vanished. Zeitman screamed his name twice but the sound was lost in the downpour and Maguire did not reappear.

  Susanna was sobbing. “It’s alive, Robert. It’s alive. It killed those three Ree’hd. It thought them dead, and then it started to kill me. It was horrible. I was completely paralysed for a moment, and then it stopped…”

  Kristina—the Pianhmar—Zeitman turned from valley to canopy, his mind in total turmoil. Was Kristina in danger? Was the Pianhmar really alive?—What should he do first?—What was more important?—Kristina—Pianhmar…

  Susanna trembled in his arms.

  Beneath the canopy the Pianhmar closed its eyes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At the burrows, near dawn. Zeitman was haggard and drenched with sweat. Susanna was little better. They had flown all day and through most of the night to reach this place from the Hell-gate mountains.

  They had hardly spoken a word to each other during the long hours fighting against time. Zeitman had deliberately put al thought of the Pianhmar statue from his mind; he was terrified of feeling regret at having left the site. But if the Pianhmar, assuming it to be a living creature and not an animated representation, had allowed itself to be contacted once, it would allow it again. Kristina’s unknown danger seemed, to Zeitman, to be of more immediate importance.

  He ran into Kristina’s burrow, but it was empty. He stood for a moment and listened to his heart, urging himself to calm, but there was no calm within him. On the walls he saw the graffiti of ages, and forced himself not to look at the pin-woman sign he had seen a few days ago, the first time he had fruitlessly driven to these burrows.

  Walking outside again he stood in the darkness and watched a group of Ree’hd making their way towards the river. It was too early for them to be gathering for their dawn ritual. He walked after them and stopped them. “Where’s Kristina?”

  One of them made a sound indicating anger. “That tells me nothing!” shouted Zeitman. “Where has she gone?”

  “With Urak,” said the Ree’hd, and again the sound of anger.

  They tried to walk on, around Zeitman, but he reached out and stopped them, looked at each of them in turn. “I need her. Where has she gone?”

  “That is theirs to know,” said a young female. “We are without a One. We are even without the One’s kin. They have both deserted. This community will decay. Humans!”

  They walked past Zeitman who stood quite motionless and felt anger rise within him. Susanna stood twenty yards away and watched.

  The Ree’hd has taken her, then, run off with her!

  He felt a fury he had never known, and decided, without conscious effort, that he would kill Urak… he would have to kill the Ree’hd.

  By the water’s edge the group of Ree’hd were squatting and mind-killing “silver fish.” That was strange; it was not the season for catching those anima
ls for food. There was plenty of game to be had on the lowlands around the burrows.

  One of the Ree’hd was half immersed in the icy water, picking the dead animals from the river-bed and placing them on the bank. The whole group seemed despondent. They paid Zeitman not the slightest attention.

  He followed them down and watched them for a while, able to make out the slightly phosphorescent bodies of the fish, and the dull grey shapes of the Ree’hd. The sun was an hour from rising.

  “Why did they go?” he asked. “For God’s sake tell me.”

  “To die,” said the female Ree’hd. His cry of anguish was so sudden that it frightened the Ree’hd in the river and he lost his balance and had to swim rapidly against the current.

  Zeitman cried her name over and over and the sound carried away through the night. “Where have they gone?” he shouted. The city, to the burrows there, to the deep place. Would she be so foolish as to go there, knowing that Zeitman would be sure to look? He thought she might. The place had an individual meaning to them both and she may well have thought that Urak should share that meaning with her.

  He ran for his skimmer, determined to hunt them down and kill the Ree’hd. Susanna stopped him as he ran towards his machine, and she pointed towards Terming. Following her gaze Zeitman saw what she had noticed and he had not. The horizon was glowing.

  The city was burning. Zeitman, running through the streets towards where he would find Erlam, found himself suddenly moving against a tide of panicked human beings, for the most part screaming their anguish.

  He was nearly at the central sector of the city and he could see flames licking high into the sky ahead of him. He could see the tall building that contained Erlam’s office. It was not yet extensively on fire, but the building next to it was burning furiously and fingers of grey-red flame were reaching across the gap. Without Erlam to authorize it he doubted if he could get into the burrows from the only direction he could cope with, the museum entrance. It was an uncomfortable thought that Erlam might have been among the running crowds.

  Zeitman stumbled over a body, a young man, his face burned away by a vaze. For a moment he was stunned, then he found himself surrounded by screaming people again, some falling, some clutching burns, some dying before his eyes.

  He ran to the side of the road and tried to see where the blasts were coming from. There seemed to be two assassins on every roof-top he looked at, and in several windows and doorways too he could see the blue flashes of vaze beams, taking a terrible toll of life.

  Not understanding, not wanting to understand, Zeitman crouched low and ran away from them, doubled back and came into the same street some yards behind the area of carnage. Without more than a second’s glance at the killers he raced towards Erlam’s office.

  The streets were filled with dead, and in only a few places were the automatic fire-fighters putting out anything like a combative gush of foam. In those streets bodies seemed to float on a river of white as it rolled slowly between the deserted, burning buildings. It was a sight unpleasant in the extreme and Zeitman kept running, wading, thrashing through the foam, never wanting to stop.

  A firebrand floated towards him, touched to a building and spread its fire across the wall. For a second or two Zeitman failed to comprehend that there was anything strange about it; then he stopped.

  When he looked again he saw the shape behind the brand, Ree’hd-like, yet not a Ree’hd. He recognized it immediately. All around him was the crackle of flame and the shrieking of humans, sounds that were carried and distorted by the rising wind, yet this noise seemed to fade as he looked at the shimmering grey figure. Through its form he could see the city beyond it, and in that city he could see more of the ghostly grey shapes, setting fire to each and every building in the sector. The wind fanned the flames and the fire jumped swiftly between blocks carrying its destruction in a rapidly widening circle.

  The Pianhmar waved its firebrand again and vanished from Zeitman’s sight. Where it had been it left a burning block.

  Zeitman left the area and continued inwards, hardly daring to think of what he had seen—a ghost—an avenging angel, setting fire to the cancer that was not yet too deeply rooted in its world.

  The building where Erlam lived was beginning to burn when he reached it. Finding his way through flames into the foyer he discovered that the fire-fighting jets were weeping mere dribbles and he smashed through the nozzles so that a great belch of foam covered the floor and the flame. Satisfied that this room at least would remain fire-free for a few minutes, he began the long run up the stairwell.

  Erlam’s office and extensive living apartment were both deserted, but did not give the impression of having been hastily evacuated. From the window of the office Zeitman had a clear view of the city and could see the extent of the fire. It was extensive. The fiercest flames were to the north where by now most of the buildings were gutted and ruined, and there was a circle of darkness in the spreading inferno. Within that circle there was a shape that was familiar to Zeitman. A large freighter, buckled and burned, lying across nearly a quarter of a mile of city. A large ship with an enormous fuel capacity. Had her Master tried to land in the city? Or had he been trying to land just outside and been hit by one of the installation’s ill-aimed missiles? Whatever the reason, it seemed quite obvious to Zeitman that, however much the Pianhmar were assisting the spread of the fire, Terming had been effectively destroyed by that particular refugee, and was now belching her own refugees into the surrounding lands where the damage they might cause would be irretrievable. Already he could see the flash and scatter of air-sleds taking off across the roof-tops. How far would they get, he wondered? How far…?

  Behind him the door opened and Zeitman turned. Erlam stood there, face black with smoke, clothes filthy. He held a vaze in his hand pointed at Zeitman, but when he saw who the intruder was he let his arm fall and came into the room, taking a deep breath and wiping a hand across his eyes.

  “Zeitman… you turn up at the most inconvenient of moments.”

  Zeitman stared at his friend, and at the vaze he still clutched. “You were among them, Dan? You were out there killing those people?”

  Erlam tossed the weapon on to his desk. “Why the hell not? Someone’s got to stop them.”

  Cold-blooded murder against the survival of the Ree’hd— there was really no question as to where Zeitman’s sympathies should lie, but because it was not an expedient to which he himself would have resorted he found it difficult to accept the casual slaughter of his own kind.

  He turned away from Erlam and looked down at the wrecked ship. “What happened Dan? That freighter?”

  “That damn freighter. I don’t know if it was a missile or bad navigation. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that most people crammed inside it survived. The ship blew out within minutes of crashing down, but by that time Terming had received its first and last consignment of hysterical, angry refugees from Alcayd, a very unpleasant world crawling with crabs where they had no inclination to remain. It took precisely one hour for the news they carried to spread from ship to the edges of Terming. By that time the fire had spread phenomenally fast, and there was no one willing to fight it. They were all too busy running. They reacted in every way I hoped they wouldn’t. They completely panicked. A lot of them wanted to get to the landing-site and get a ship home—those that came from nice worlds in this sector, who had least reason to feel they needed to move to safer lodgings in the Galaxy. A few of them may have made it off-world. I doubt it. They evacuated Terming like gas into a vacuum. Christ only knows how many are out there in the surrounding lands now.

  “It seemed the right thing to do, Robert. Can you believe that? It seemed the right thing to do, to go out there and kill them. And I wasn’t the only one.”

  “If you were so convinced of your extermination rights, why stop? Why leave off?”

  “Too many of them. Anyway, it’s all pointless now. We’ve not only destroyed ourselves, we’ve destroyed t
he Ree’hd, the whole bit.”

  “You can’t know that for a fact, Dan,” said Zeitman. He was thinking of a circle of dead humans up in the highlands. He was thinking of a Pianhmar “statue” that had thought-killed three city Ree’hd. The creature might still be sitting there, beneath its canopy. Complacent, eyes closed, wondering, perhaps, why Robert Zeitman had run from it when it had allowed him to live.

  He felt angry at himself, and perhaps there was bitterness too, but he shook the feeling off and told Erlam about the humans that he and Susanna had come across in the Pianhmar sphere, and he told him, too, about the humans he had seen as he had flown into Terming, an hour or so before. It had been difficult to see in the darkness, even with the reddish glow cast across everything by the brighter flames, but he had seen, he was sure, hundreds of human shapes, squatting on the ground, motionless. “If I were you Dan, I’d take a look outside the city walls before you start jumping to too many conclusions.”

  “Conclusions!” snapped Erlam. He sat down behind his desk and picked up the vaze. “Conclusions,” he repeated. Looking up at Zeitman he said, “This is the conclusion, Robert. And what a lousy end. I had hoped… I really had hoped that we could have had orderly withdrawal from Ree’hdworld over the span of several years. I would have really pushed for that.”

  “I know,” said Zeitman.

  “Times change,” said Erlam, sinking deeper into melancholy. “I hated every damn human in the city this morning. I hated with my heart, with my guts, a real gut hate. When I went out there, in the darkness with those others, shooting with total indiscrimination into those panicking imbeciles, I had only one thought. Get as many as possible now so we have fewer to hunt down later. Robert, I don’t care about the people on this world. There are too many of us. I do care about me, and I care about the planet. Since I myself have no future I’m directing my talent for orderliness towards the total elimination of human life from Ree’hdworld.”