Eye Among the Blind Read online

  Robert Holdstock

  Eye Among the Blind

  Pan Books

  London and Sydney

  For Sheila

  First published in Great Britain in 1976 by

  Faber and Faber Ltd

  This edition published by Pan Books Ltd

  Cavay Place, London SW10 9PG

  Copyright © 1976 by Robert Holdstock

  ISBN 0 330 25178 3

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd., Aylesbury, Bucks

  Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

  Thy Soul’s immensity;

  Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep,

  Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

  That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

  Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,—

  from “Intimations of Immortality”

  by William Wordsworth

  Prologue

  He was brought among them and left for a while with his thoughts. He took the opportunity to make a recording of what had happened to him, an account of his journey which might one day be found by his own kind and used to enrich their understanding of this strange world.

  He was in a valley of statues, a burial ground of the race, and he eased his way down the gentle slopes and felt the shapes of the creatures that had been carved in stone. His senses told him that he had been brought high, deep into the mountains, to a valley where vegetation was rich and animals solitary. His blind eyes looked out across the mountains and he felt the shapes of the wind, the towering bulk of the rock crags and sheer cliff faces.

  They came back and clustered around him and he felt their sadness at his lack of sight, and by the time the cool of evening was bringing discomfort to his badly clad body, he was aware of what was going to happen to him.

  In the darkness of the night there was the agony of waiting for the first true light of dawn…

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Moving faster than the dawn, the shuttle from the orbiting cruiser Realta might have been seen, by the sharpest of those eyes that watched from the landing station, as a flash of light, preceding, by just a few seconds, the first brilliance of Sigma-G53 as it began to rise above the eastern horizon. With the new day came the wind; an unobtrusive breeze at first, it rose, as the sun climbed higher, into a biting gale that flung the countryside into a frenzy of unwelcomed activity. It shook the tiny landing station with its human and native occupants, until both man and alien looked to each other for moral comfort and a reassurance that they would not at any moment be flung across the hills—with concrete base, wind-proofed towers and docked ships following in a turmoil of destructive energy.

  As yet unaffected by the wind, the shuttle from the Realta continued its approach, unaware that it was not for the moment being monitored. With its three passengers it had dropped from orbit over the open sea and had approached the south-eastern shore of the larger of the two continents along a flight path with which Robert Zeitman was well familiar. It was this route, coming in from the south east and turning west across the land mass, that he had taken when he had first come to Ree’hdworld, an almost forgotten number of years in the past. Now he sat in the co-pilot’s seat and watched the familiar ocean, the distant shoreline of Duchas, the swirling clouds that were evidence of a wind they hardly felt in the well protected shuttle. In a few minutes, Zeitman knew, they would pass across the city-installation of Terming itself; and then beyond, into the night, to where the reception party would be waiting for them. Perhaps Dan Erlam, with all his bluster and tactless humour, would be there himself, though Zeitman doubted it. It would be before dawn in Terming when they landed at the arrival port, which was much too early for the portly city father to have roused himself. Dawn, however, was not too early for Zeitman’s wife, Kristina, and since he had overspaced a request that she meet him on his arrival he was confident that she would be there to greet him.

  As the shuttle passed across the land-sea divide Zeitman was reminded of why this approach to Terming was the standard tourist in-flight. Although Ree’hdworld was similar in many respects to other Earth-type planets, there was nothing remotely Earthlike about the towering rock megaliths that reared up from the ocean, forty or fifty miles from the main shore, each reaching thin and seemingly fragile bridges of rock to the main land mass of Duchas. Within the vast area of fragmented shoreline below there lay concealed a whole world of animal life and hidden beauty; miles and miles of winding channels and rock ledges that had only ever been cursorily surveyed by the humans who lived across the hills. The sea and the wind, working with inexorable persistence, had failed—as Zeitman understood it—to make any major impression on the natural arches and pinnacles for many thousands of years.

  The pilot of the shuttle, an ageing spaceman with a lifetime’s fatigue etched into his face, seemed pleased that his three passengers were so awestruck.

  “I’ve made this run a hundred times,” he said, glancing at Zeitman, “and I still get that feeling. You know…?”

  “I know,” said Zeitman. A timeless feeling, a feeling of past and future, intermingled and indistinguishable. The ocean had beaten against those towers of granite before man had been conceived; the battle would go on after a great many things had died. And because the megaliths were a part of an alien world, and had seen an alien past, they inspired a thoughtful silence in those who regarded them.

  The shuttle sped on across the mainland, taking them through gorges and canyons that seemed alive with movement. The movement was merely the wind that accompanied the terminator on its clockwork journey around the globe, and they were already heading towards the darkness of night and the relative calm before the early morning gale.

  The coastal highlands dropped away after a few minutes and the eastern plain of Duchas stretched before the shuttle as it nosed lower. The concept of a plain, to Zeitman, was of a flat and barren land. Thus the eastern plain was merely a figurative description since there was nothing flat and nothing barren about the rolling hills and the untidy combination of forest, bush and jungle that covered them. Here, where the Ree’hd had spent their evolutionary history, the great dawn wind was split, divided into lesser gales, each of which followed a branch of the spreading rivers as they wound in through steep banks and deep channels in the land. The mass of purple-green vegetation that swept in belts across the plain moved and writhed with the dawn, seeming sentient in its own right, but hiding the only real sentience on Ree’hdworld from aerial view.

  The pilot, used perhaps to answering a never-ending stream of tourist questions, seemed to Zeitman to be quite surprised at the persisting silence of his passengers. Zeitman saw him mentally summing each of them up. A nameless blind man, white hair curling over his shoulders, body clad in weather-beaten blue and brown rags. He sat in the back of the shuttle and played with the tarnished metal rings that covered his fingers, and smiled persistently as if nothing was wrong with his world; and he stared out of the window as if he could see the land below.

  A girl, Susanna Neves—archetypal low-grav female—brunette, slim, smartly dressed and unhappy about something. She seemed very self-possessed so was probably rich, or younger than she looked, or both. And this Robert Zeitman. He looked important but carried no hand brief, bore no air of administrative authority or scientific abstractedness. He was dressed in the fashion of a European-Earthman, a one-piece suit, with a jacket, shapeless and gaudy, worn casually over the top. So the man had been on Earth; but he seemed, nevertheless, familiar with the world below.

  “First time on Ree’hdworld?” the pilot asked at length. Zeitman had been waiting for the question and he smiled, shifted his gaze from the side to th
e forward port where he could see an approaching range of hills, and darkness.

  “Second,” he said. “I was here a long time ago.”

  “Why’d you leave?” The man seemed oblivious to personal feelings. Zeitman glanced at him, and turned away.

  “Private reasons.”

  The pilot nodded slowly, as if everything had been made crystal-clear. After a moment: “But you’re back. For good?”

  “I’m back. Hopefully for good, yes.”

  “Are you all coming back from somewhere?”

  The pilot’s relentless interest was becoming an irritation. He had obviously spotted that they were not tourists; equally obviously he had seen the great clusters of ships in orbit around Ree’hdworld and had sensed that something was wrong. He was adding things up and concluding that his three passengers were something to do with the chaos outside the atmosphere.

  The girl, Susanna, said, “No. I’m new here. These two are the old timers.”

  The blind man laughed at that. “So old time that I can see changes even from this height.”

  The pilot made a sound of amusement, not quite a laugh. “I’d hardly have thought so,” he said loudly, then—immediately sorry—he expressed apology. “Space drains a man’s manners,” he added by way of explanation.

  “No need to apologize,” said the blind man brightly. Zeitman looked back at him, met the white-eyed stare, the penetrating gaze that defied Zeitman’s whole experience. It was unnerving to know—and to have had demonstrated—the blind man’s uncanny ability to see despite his absolute blindness. He had never explained it, and since Zeitman had been working on him for nearly all of the three-month flight from Regan-M22, the last step of his journey home, he had concluded that whatever secrets the blind man bore in his heart would remain there.

  The strength of the wind outside the shuttle was beginning to make itself felt. The pilot controlled the buffeting well, but was now distracted by his temporary interest in his three passengers. In particular the tall, quiet man who sat beside him.

  “This is quite a world,” he said, as the first elements of darkness encompassed them. “If you don’t mind low grav. I already put in a request to be land-based here. A nice place to spend your dying days.”

  “Don’t you have a home base already?” asked Susanna. The pilot glanced at her in his rear observation mirror. “My home base was on Sabbath. Three decades ago it was the second colonized world to get hit by the Fear. I was off-world at the time, but I lost a lot of good friends. The whole planet is deserted now, except for a few foolhardies who won’t accept that Fear is an organic disease and think they can battle it with will power. They fail, of course; if they don’t chop themselves to pieces they come running screaming back to saner stations.”

  “Dominion has escaped so far,” said Susanna thoughtfully.

  “Your home world? Yes, I thought it might have done. There’s no reason why Dominion should ever be hit since it’s a luxury world, and that—by definition—means Earthlike. There’s no reason why the humans on Ree’hdworld shouldn’t escape too. It’s only holes like Sabbath that are falling prey to whatever is spreading the Fear.” He fell silent, almost sad. Zeitman thought he detected a sense of loss—even after thirty years.

  Susanna said, “I’m sorry that you lost your home. That must have been terrible.”

  “Long time ago, now. Since then a hundred other worlds have gone the same way and I’ve been employed on more rescue missions than I can remember. Never does any good, mind you. Fear strikes, Fear kills. If you take a person with the Fear and whip them across the Galaxy to Earth they still die. All will to live goes—after the period of persecution, that is.”

  The blind man had been listening quietly, intently. He seemed very puzzled, very distressed by what he was hearing. “This is a disease you say?”

  “Where have you been?” said the pilot with a smile. “You’ve never heard of the Fear? The greatest decimator of humankind since the Solar War?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said the blind man, not totally convincingly. “I hadn’t realized it occurred on Earth too…”

  “I didn’t say that. Mind you,” he turned towards Zeitman, “They say—you know, the Universal They—that Earth has been hit by the Fear. You, er… you know anything about that?”

  My God, thought Zeitman. Can no secret ever be contained? He said, “I never take any notice of rumours. Hard fact is my discipline.”

  The pilot did not seem convinced.

  “You ought to know, I suppose. Myself, I’m inclined to doubt rumours too. But Earth is nearly as much of a hell hole as Sabbath was. And these days nothing would surprise me.”

  The shuttle never reached total darkness. The land below became shadowy and achieved an atmosphere of mystery, but within a few moments the speeding vessel had risen over a low range of hills and the sprawling city of Terming was below them. It appeared, in the last of the night, as an area of grey and white, spread across the countryside of Duchas for as far as the eye could see in the dimness. In actual fact there was a very sharp and well defined border to the city, and the whole installation only covered a little over one hundred square miles.

  The lights of the roadways and the centre were still alive. The centre, an area of ten square miles or so, blazed its greeting to the shuttle passing overhead, and the three passengers found they could discern individual buildings and vehicles quite clearly. As the city centre dropped behind they followed the twisting roadways that wound, snakes of glowing white light, towards the sudden darkness of the plains.

  As abruptly as it had come upon them Terming was gone, and below were the dark shrouded ancestral grounds of the Ree’hd, the native race that lived across two thirds of the continent.

  Zeitman relaxed back in his seat and anticipated the landing. He couldn’t see behind, but imagined that the upper rim of the sun would be rising above the Terming horizon, and by the time the shuttle had landed (later than Zeitman had expected) the dawn would be breaking across those lands too, and Susanna, on her first trip to Ree’hdworld, would know the full fury of the sam-hat-rhine, the wind that came from the earth.

  The pilot, now fairly busy with landing procedure, nevertheless seemed determined to avoid thoughtful silence. “I don’t know why the landing base has to be so far from the colony,” he said, shaking his head. “Makes no sense.”

  “Terming is not a colony,” said Zeitman patiently. He’d had this argument with Susanna, but in her case there was a good reason why he should make the effort to explain why the city was not a colony but an installation. He found no enthusiasm for pursuing the point with the pilot, beyond the correcting of his statement.

  “Installation, then,” said the pilot, less amenably. “An installation of two hundred thousand men, women and children sounds suspiciously like a colony to me, though.”

  Terming, however, was not open to settlement and that was the whole point. The rationale behind a colony was that it was a base from which man the conqueror would spread his influence, eventually encompassing the planetary globe. Ree’hdworld was a world inhabited by an intelligent species, and a colony was not permitted. The Federation had permitted, however, the establishment on the planet of a single centre of learning, cultural exchange and industry, a city-installation financed by InterSystems Biochemicals who had discovered a considerable amount of the local flora to be of interest. The Ree’hd had given permission for that early base to be erected. The whole growing, processing and exporting business was undertaken within the confines of that hundred square miles of diplomatically owned land on Ree’hdworld. The borders were never extended, except to establish a landing station outside the city, and had not been added to, in fact, for three hundred years.

  And the entire industrial process resulted only in organic waste which the environment devoured. Power was the least of Terming’s problems. The dawn winds were harnessed every day.

  Something detached itself from the surface of the world below, and rose
rapidly to meet the shuttle. It was an invisible movement even to “blind” eyes, but both Zeitman and the pilot knew that the probe was on its way. A few seconds later the tiny camera eye peered through the front port with unblinking concentration, then moved out of sight and attached itself to the hull of the ship, there to count sources of body heat. If there were more bodies than expected in the warmth of the shuttle, no landing was permitted.

  A moment later: “Hello shuttle, hello shuttle.”

  “Shuttle Realta Nix Five. Ready to land,” the pilot signalled back.

  “Go ahead Realta Nix Five.”

  The signal was clear and free of static, and Zeitman searched the gloom for the lights of the landing base.

  “Braces,” snapped the pilot. Zeitman pressed the switch on his couch and the whole couch changed shape to encompass him securely. The shuttle banked a little and the first sound of engine power crept into the otherwise still cabin. As the vehicle slowed into the hover mode Zeitman saw the landing base. It was a wide area of featureless concrete, with a small huddle of buildings and towers at one end. The towers reached very high into the Ree’hdworld atmosphere and near the top of one Zeitman could see a lighted window and three or four non-human faces staring out at the arriving vessel.

  They sank towards a cradle that opened its arms like a giant anemone, enfolding them and securing them with much creaking and noisy clamping of supports. When the uncomfortable landing had been accomplished Zeitman found himself staring towards the highlands in the west where the trailing edge of Dollar Moon, the larger of Ree’hdworld’s two satellites, could just be seen between the highest pinnacles of the mountains. To the east, over the hilly lands they had just traversed, the first edge of the sun was clearly defined, huge, red, sharp in the clear dawn air.