Eye Among the Blind

by Robert Holdstock

  “What does Maguire think?”

  “He thinks theirs is to be the final expression of what the two preceding races have learned. The Rundii may well be greater than the Pianhmar seem to have been. But that will not be for an age and a half, and in the meantime there will be a steady accumulation of completed life-forms—they have to mean something to the process of evolution.” She looked round at Zeitman. “I’m going to stay around and find out exactly what. From the inside.”

  Fascinating, thought Robert Zeitman the scientist. An intelligent being with three physical forms, spread through time, and through which it must pass to evolve fully. There would be those that had been Pianhmar at the height of the civilization, and which then became Ree’hd at the beginning of their self-awareness. Others, perhaps, that were Pianhmar in their early stages and which, still waiting, might come to the Ree’hd when the Ree’hd were preparing to make way for the Rundii.

  He remembered the gathering place of souls in the old burrows; perhaps it was just a symbol, but it had had more meaning than either he or Kristina had realized. And on the wind, perhaps, came the forms or voices of the waiting lives, and in a sense the past and the present were physically interlocked. And every individual was important because the whole Ree’hd race had to advance together, and achieve its particular understanding together, and devolve together.

  Zeitman looked at the ash ingrained in his hands, and thought of Erlam, perhaps a cinder on a cracking street—and the loss was not too great. Not by any means.

  He said to Kristina, “Where do you fit into this developmental pattern? How can you say you’re a Ree’hd?”

  “I don’t know, Robert. I only know that I can. I shall not remember being human, and perhaps I’ll make a very poor Rundii. Perhaps we all would if we went together. But it’s a wonderful progression, isn’t it?”

  In his heart Zeitman thought that it was.

  Zeitman felt a great emptiness and was conscious of a feeling of loss. It was the feeling he had always feared, that aching loneliness when the mind can picture clearly what it would be like if things had worked out better. Zeitman left Kristina and tried not to imagine her slumped form, short black hair glistening with dampness, body moulded to the ruddy turf. He walked for a long time, thinking about Ree’hdworld, about Earth, about mechanisms of control that spanned millenia.

  He began to climb the steep hill and edged around until he was on a narrow ledge leading across the sheer drop that he had seen from the river-side. Here there was a good silence, save for the wind and the clatter of falling stones.

  He was only half aware of the increasing height, and the way the land stretched out below him, the distant mountains coming more into view, white-capped and magical.

  Tiny cliff-dwelling animals raced vertically up the sedimentary rock-face, and vanished into holes and cracks in the crumbling surface. Others peered at him from their own vantage points. Occasionally a shrill cry split the silence and a bigger creature withdrew its body as Zeitman edged past, holding hard against the cliff and picking his steps with care.

  Stopping, he looked back and down and saw the meandering shape of the river with its even width suddenly widening out. He could see Kristina, a small huddle at the edge of the bush.

  Sitting tightly against the cliff-face, the tips of his toes just an inch or two away from the drop-away of the ledge, Zeitman closed his eyes and let his whole body soak in the mournful wailing of the wind. It was a good sound because it complemented Zeitman’s mood.

  He was, there was no denying, a shameful example of a rational thinking man. He had asked the right questions, but in the end he had turned to others for the answers. Although that wasn’t completely true; he had figured out the engineered nature of Ree’hdworld—a vestige of what he had once been had allowed him that last insight. He was grateful for that.

  So much had happened in so short a time, and the extremes were staggering. He had arrived on Ree’hdworld hoping to spend the rest of his days in the scientific establishment at Terming, and in less than a week he had seen that city burned to the ground. He had come back hoping to find a new relationship with his wife, and he had found a woman shrugging off the last vestiges of her humanity. He had come back to a world of legend and found the legend to be fact with the Pianhmar, now participating so actively in the reassertion of Ree’hdworlder control of the planet, spreading fire in the city and terminating the lives of those humans they could see were likely to be detrimental to the Ree’hd.

  The Pianhmar had assisted the Ree’hd before. They were— truly—guardian angels. Zeitman wondered if, by engineering the environment as they probably had done, they might have negated much of the point of the Ree’hd phase of their existence. He ran the question over and over in his head, wondering if he was missing a point somewhere…

  He sank into a semi-doze—his body’s reaction to its own chill. The wind was very cold and blew in his face. He felt his hair moving, followed the ripples of sensation across his face, sank deeper into sleep…

  Water filled his lungs!

  He came up choking and screaming, and then a more ferocious sensation hit him—pain, deep in his chest, spreading through his whole body, numbing his legs and arms.

  “Kristina!” he screamed, coming to his feet and staring down into the river-valley as the killing pain ebbed his strength away.

  He saw her in the water, a slim shape vanishing beneath the surface, and in that moment he went completely limp and felt the cliff leave him, was vaguely aware of his fall, and the painless impact that drove his senses from him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  There was no sensation of time passing. Still shocked at the death of his wife, Zeitman returned to awareness, but the lingering emotion of that instant on the cliff passed rapidly from his system.

  “I can’t move.”

  “Don’t try.” Maguire’s voice.

  “And it’s dark. Are my eyes open? Is it night? I’m in bandages, is that it?”

  “Keep calm, Robert. You’re in good hands.”

  He fought against the darkness. It was a terrifying sensation and he fought it with all his will. He knew, without knowing, that his eyes were open, that the sun was trying to shine, that there were no bandages hiding his eyes.

  He was blind. Totally. And he could not move.

  “The fall…”

  “It was a long fall and you were lucky to survive. But you have me and I’m not going to leave you.”

  “Maguire.” Zeitman reached out and felt for Maguire and realized that he had not moved. He couldn’t move; his limbs refused to twitch. He felt confined, as if he were bound in some metal strait-jacket and could not even blink his eyes.

  Maguire told him they were nearly a hundred miles from where he had fallen. Zeitman tried to monitor the sensation coming from his touch receptors and gradually became aware of some girding restraint. When he asked about it Maguire explained that he was strapped and secured to a stretcher.

  “Are you taking me somewhere?”

  “Into a Pianhmar sphere. I would have jumped with you in short jumps, but I found I couldn’t manage it. We have to do it the hard way.”

  “And you’re pulling me all the way to the Hellgate mountains?”

  “No. I enlisted the aid of four Rundii.”

  Now Zeitman heard the laboured breathing all around of creatures of Ree’hdworld. “But, how…?”

  “Communication,” said Maguire. “Communication of my need. They understand more than your human friends gave them credit for…”

  He lay calm in the darkness and tried to imagine it as night, or in a darkened room. When panic began to creep into the pit of his stomach he fought it back. He felt a lurching movement and realized that he had regained consciousness during a brief respite. Now the group wound on through the river-valley, climbing, Maguire said, to come over the hills at their lowest point. Beyond the hills was another river where there was much for Maguire to remember.

  They reached
this place within a day and Zeitman listened to the water and the winds, and he heard the Rundii murmuring in their guttural language, and he heard Maguire murmuring his thoughts.

  At length Maguire reached out a hand and touched Zeitman’s face. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” said Zeitman. In the last few hours he had realized that not even his lips could move. When he spoke, then, he was speaking without sound, although all the cranial sensations of vocalization were there. Maguire had affirmed that they were not talking aloud. “But don’t worry,” he said. “You are already mending and the Pianhmar will finish mending you completely.”

  “Thank God. I couldn’t bear this darkness for very long.”

  Maguire was conspicuous by his silence. Zeitman said, “What is it? What about my blindness? They can fix me, can’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” said Maguire. “They may choose not to. I can’t tell.”

  Oh God, thought Zeitman. Oh sweet Saviour, I’m blind for life. I’ll stare into blackness until I die. “Why?” he demanded. “Why should they choose not to mend my sight?”

  Maguire said, “Don’t think about it, Robert. You’ll only distress yourself. Listen, do you know what this place is? This is the place that my old friend Hans-ree left his physical life. He was attacked by a K!room and it dismembered him and scattered him in front of me. Horrifying moment. In those days I was as blind as you, sightwise. But I looked across the river and saw a mountain, and felt that mountain move, and felt it by sensing the pattern of the winds, and the movements of sound from its slopes and crags. Can you see that mountain Robert? Can you feel it? It’s there, a beautiful mountain, all purple plants and blue and silver rocks. I feel very at home with that mountain.”

  Zeitman said nothing. He tried to imagine what Maguire was looking at with every sense… with every sense except sight itself. He tried to imagine what it was going to be like never seeing again, never experiencing a sunrise… except by feeling how it affected the wind!

  It distressed him and he withdrew for a long time.

  They moved on. Days. Long days and Maguire talked very little. He poured water and liquid food between Zeitman’s lips and massaged his body vigorously every day. After a while Zeitman felt sensation of movement returning to his limbs. He felt the satisfying twitch of muscle as he exerted his willpower. Maguire said, “Good. Good. You’re twitching like it’s all there is to live for. Keep trying.”

  One day, after Zeitman had slept long and soundly, they came to the Hellgate mountains and found the remains of the excavation that had brought Kawashima to his own sought-after heights.

  By now Zeitman could move his hands, and he could appreciate touch and temperature on most of his body surface. But he was still substantially paralysed. He could blink, and when he blinked he imagined he could see lights, but they were meaningless. He could move his lips and make swallowing motions.

  “Is it still there?” he asked Maguire.

  “The Pianhmar? Yes, he’s still here. You’ll see him again. Soon, I hope. And you’ll see more.”

  “How much more?”

  “You’ll see the valley. You’ll see a sight that may frighten you, but I doubt that it will.”

  Impatient to see again, but not daring to ask how Maguire could be so sure now that he would, he said, “What’s in the valley? Describe it.”

  “Pianhmar. Millions of them. The ghost forms, of course— they’ve all left their bodies behind a long time ago. They are the Pianhmar who have not yet passed into the Ree’hd form, and they fill this valley, and all the valleys behind.”

  Zeitman lay in silence, trying to imagine what Maguire was seeing, a forest-filled valley seething with life-forms from another age. “I was here. I looked down that valley with Kawashima, and we saw nothing.”

  “That doesn’t surprise you, does it?” asked Maguire. “They’re not going to let themselves be seen.”

  Zeitman listened hard for some sound that would tell of the gathering Pianhmar, but there were only natural sounds.

  Maguire said, “When I first came to this valley it was filled with what I thought were statues. I sat on them, scraped them, leaned against them, and you can imagine how startled I was when I was told that these ‘burial’ statues were in fact the Pianhmar themselves.”

  “Not just animated statues, then, but living creatures…”

  “Almost right… they are Pianhmar in stasis, and whether or not that constitutes living… well, you’re the biologist. They adopt the static form before they die, living in a sort of suspended animation for hundreds and hundreds of years, gradually becoming buried. They can come out of stasis since mentally they are still active and aware. The few that I met when I first came up here had done so and they stayed with me for a long time. They helped me to understand what was going on, and all the time they were eaten up with grief at my blindness. They hated to be looked at directly, which is why I had been sent in the first place, but meeting an intelligent creature with no visual sense hit a heart chord somewhere in them and they took me under their wing.”

  “And stayed with you for seven hundred years.”

  “Sort of. I suppose their physical forms returned to the soil. The whole race was devolving, as you put it. Fading out. In those last few hundred years there was a sense of conservation of life force, and fife force was draining into the world, or could be taken by seeing creatures—strange, Robert, isn’t it? A race as advanced as the Pianhmar adopting such a primitive trait at the end. But they weren’t primitive by any means. They took me across the Galaxy. A first look for a blind man. A last look for the Pianhmar themselves. You know what? I still don’t know what form or shape or size I was. We visited places that had been important to them, worlds where they had once lived in great numbers. On some there were humans, but they never seemed to see us.

  “Then they became agitated. I didn’t understand why until I got back and found that the Rundii were rising fast, and that a bloody great alien city was set in the middle of the continent and acting as a very efficient thorn, worrying away at the Ree’hd.”

  Zeitman interrupted him. “Something I don’t understand-why did they take you like that? What did they hope to gain…?”

  Maguire shook his head. “It’s difficult to say, even now. Perhaps compassion for a blind man who had worked so hard to find them… but also, I think, there was a moment of panic— a long moment of panic when the realization of their dying clashed with… what can one say?… the fact of their achievements. Pride, perhaps, an unwillingness to become totally eclipsed without just one outside intelligence having seen a fragment of their work.”

  “The pride before the fall,” said Zeitman.

  “Yes.” Maguire was sad. “Yes, I suppose so.” After a silence lasting several seconds he went on, “The Pianhmar left me, on a world where there was a human city set—though they didn’t know it—upon a Pianhmar city of twenty thousand years before. I shipped back to Ree’hdworld as soon as I could—I couldn’t use my special talent to travel that far, not without their help. Soon after that I made the acquaintance of Robert Zeitman, and Kristina Schriock, and Harry Kawashima.”

  “Kawashima. Where is he?”

  Maguire was silent, but on Zeitman’s insistence he finally said, “He could have become a part of things, but he was too much the glory-hunter. He couldn’t overcome his depression. A great loss.”

  “And Erlam?”

  Maguire laughed. “I think he saw reason. The last I saw of him he was busy organizing the reduction of Terming to a rubble. They’ve erected a tent-city, just like the one that I came to for the first time.”

  For a moment Zeitman felt a great cheerfulness; he had thought Erlam dead for sure, and he was relieved to know that the man had survived his fit of melancholy.

  It began to rain, hard and cold; Zeitman felt it on his body and loved it. The rain was driving down the valley, from the direction of the gorge he had navigated with Susanna not so long ago.

  He h
eard the shuffling and complaining of the Rundii, running for the shelter of Kawashima’s canopy, still in place. He felt his stretcher being pulled and Maguire’s laboured breathing told of the struggle the blind man was having.

  “No. Don’t move me…1 like it.”

  The motion stopped and Zeitman heard Maguire come to squat beside him, and the rain drenched them, soaked them to the skin.

  There was a strange sensation behind Zeitman’s eyes, not of colour but of movement. As he stared blindly across the valley, so form and definition came to the movement and he saw them then—thousands, perhaps millions as Maguire had said. They covered the hills and the boulder and forest-strewn valley bottom, and there were many who sat quite close to Zeitman and watched him.

  “You’ve seen before,” said Maguire. “Imagine what it was like for me, experiencing sight for the first time.”

  “Whose eyes am I seeing through?”

  “Theirs. There is a Pianhmar with you now, and he will remain with you until you die. There’s one with me, always has been. Unconscious, unintrusive. You’ll see better than any human because you see an object in whatever way you want to. Infra-red, it’s there at a thought; ultra-violet, the same thing. The Pianhmar have a very expansive visual sense—even in the ghost-form. They won’t return your own sight, but you’ll find that’s no loss. They need you, and they need you with as much sensory perfection as is possible.”

  Zeitman continued to stare at the gathered masses of the Pianhmar. There were so many… and they needed him…

  Then Maguire’s words registered and he asked what he had meant. How could they need a man who was crippled? What could he do?

  “You won’t be crippled long,” said Maguire. “And what can you do? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a lot. During the next few years there has got to be much change on Ree’hdworld. What’s left of the Federation must be fully acquainted with the situation here and the final decision to isolate the planet must be based on knowledge and reason, not on fear. You may become a very active contact man.”