Eye Among the Blind Read online

  Urak was not in the burrow. Kristina sat up and stretched, and in that simple movement was a luxury that she would never have considered when living her life as the human she still was. The chamber was in darkness, but by moving her head towards the burrow’s entrance she could feel the filtered draught that kept the chamber fresh, and she could also see the shaft of light from the daylit world outside. Now that she looked more carefully the full extent of the damage was evident—the corridor outside was virtually unpassable.

  She called for Urak, at the same time lighting the small power-lamp that the Ree’hd One permitted her to have. When she listened for an answering call all she could hear was the scream of the wind, distant and muffled. For a moment she panicked. Had she overlaid and missed the dawn singing? She grew calm after a few seconds when she realized that Urak, for all his consideration of her humanity, would not have permitted her to sleep on through the most momentous event of the day.

  Muscles were aching in strange places, but mostly around her hips. Although her body was no longer complaining at this habit of rising with the sun, it was definitely complaining about the manner in which she had slept, squatting and upright, modelling herself on her Ree’hd “lover,” who was the most upright Ree’hd she knew. She began to exercise, calling for Urak again with human impatience.

  In the middle of some vigorous toe-touching she heard several Ree’hd pass through the corridor outside, obviously irritated with the muddy slush they waded through. She paused in her toning-up movements and watched the shapes pass by the narrow burrow entrance; they were mostly immature Ree’hd, their spade-like forearms held rigidly before them. They would be set to the task of scooping the mud away before they began work shovelling out the extension to the burrow complex that was necessitated by the small increase in population this year.

  The last Ree’hd to pass the entrance came in, and for a moment Kristina felt unease. The native was mud-spattered and wet, and Kristina did not recognize Urak for several seconds, during which her nakedness became acutely embarrassing. This was an irrational feeling, perhaps, since there was only the basic humanoid characteristic that was similar between human and Ree’hd; but with Kristina’s growing affection for the ageing Ree’hd, Urak, had come the same self-consciousness of exposure that accompanies two humans at the start of an intimate relationship. It was a sensation she enjoyed, even if she did not fully understand it.

  “Aren’t you cold?” asked Urak, speaking his language slowly and carefully so that Kristina—not yet fully fluent with the dialect—would have no problem understanding. He began to groom himself, scraping the mud from his body with intricate strokes of his callus-covered forearm; his sensitive fingers attended, seemingly without conscious control, to cleaning more intimate and sensitive places.

  “No. Surprisingly.” She began to dress. The small chamber, with its thick vegetation flooring, was fairly well insulated against cold, but was not a warm place. Kristina had grown used to the cool, but to face the biting dawn winds was a different matter. A cataphrak was the only protection against them.

  “No pins and needles this morning?” asked Urak with his artificial smile. He used the English words (which had been retained in interLing), pronouncing them perfectly. Kristina shook her head and looked pleased. “I’m getting to grips with my inferior circulation,” she said.

  “Impossible,” said Urak. The Ree’hd found the concept of agony at returning circulation very amusing. His own race never relaxed, in one sense, since the circulation of blood at the body surfaces and extremes of a Ree’hd was highly efficient (surplus heat being lost by transformation into electrical energy that discharged through the earth). With any substantial lowering of a Ree’hd’s body metabolism, or any compression of surfaces, the outer limit of the body became an isolated zone of activity whose behaviour was under conscious control.

  “Is the sun up yet?”

  “Just,” said Urak. “There is a fairly heavy cloud covering moving along the horizon that will stop you seeing it, however.” Again the artificial smile, this time coupled with a boastful rolling of the lateral eyes, eyes which included complex devices for detecting polarized light as well as infra-red.

  “Don’t brag about your superior biology to me,” said Kristina, “or I’ll brag about some of mine to you.” She could hear the wind clearly now; a mournful humming that was, in fact, a full-blooded gale—polarized wind, blowing towards the distant mountains, sweeping as it did so across the thousand miles of forest that cut the plains of the Ree’hd from the mountains of another age. “I don’t want to miss the singing, Urak…”

  “Don’t worry,” said the Ree’hd. “It won’t start yet. There are too many repairs to burrow entrances. A few minutes…”

  They looked at each other, human and alien, exchanging a gaze that each interpreted in his or her own way, but which both interpreted correctly: from Kristina, a look of absolute love; from the Ree’hd, warmth and affection, the alien version of emotions that ought to have led to the cementing of a relationship for life.

  The barrier between them was too obvious to have even needed discussion. They touched, hand to sticky hand, finger on corrugated face, flexible digit on cool, hair-covered flesh, sending unbearably sensuous messages to the human brain, irritating the sensitive sucker discs of the alien as the invisible hair on Kristina’s cheeks and chin played havoc with the nerve endings in Urak’s fingers.

  “Kristina,” said the Ree’hd, speaking interLing with what Kristina found to be a beautifully sexy accent, “from what I learned whilst with you and Robert—”

  Oh Urak! Why remind me!

  “Kristina? You’ve gone cold…“A moment’s query. “Ah… I’ve mentioned the unmentionable.”

  “You have indeed.”

  “Is this a typical human reaction on being reminded of a fragment of the past? Hostility. Anger. Must I never mention Robert Zeitman again, even though he was a good friend to us both?”

  “Never again.” He’s coming, she thought. He’s arriving today, back on Ree’hdworld, back on my home, and he thinks he’ll be with me again… what a rotten, horrible turn of the celestial screw. Aloud she said, “I’ve forgotten him, and I don’t wish to be reminded.”

  Urak made peace by touching her hands with his. “I’m sorry…,” in Ree’hd this time. The native could change language like he changed his chest tattoo. “All I was going to say was that when I was with you… earlier, years back, when you were studying me for whatever reasons you studied me, I learned the difference between our races regarding sex.”

  “Oh?” Kristina was intrigued to know what was coming next.

  “I haven’t mentioned it before,” in interLing now, using word contractions as if he had lived in human society all his life, “but I’ve been worrying about it Your race needs constant sexual communication, a physical need, a sensory need. I know this and see no reason—”

  Kristina felt irritation rising within her, but she forced a smile and cut Urak short. “No reason why I shouldn’t go into ‘town’ for an occasional thrill. You’re very kind, Urak, but don’t let human biology books be your only source of learning. Since a time in my past when my bonding to an unmentionable human became a nightmare I have lost all such desires. End of subject.”

  Urak absorbed her statements with just the slightest tremblings of his song lips, an indication of relief. Relief? thought Kristina. Is he pleased I don’t need sex? Would he have been jealous of that? Beautiful! A sexist Ree’hd, a very rare specimen.

  The conversation ended there, abruptly, with an underlying tension that Kristina had been noticing for two days now. The tension was all on Urak’s side, and Kristina was puzzled as to its cause. It had begun the morning they had first discussed the emotions they each felt, and tried to decide whether or not it was love. Urak’s tension had arisen not from the mutual agreement that they did love each other, but from the reasoning, the discussion, that followed.

  “The human body is not without its
own beauty,” he had said.

  “Thank you,” said Kristina. “Mind you, there are more pronounced sexual differences than between the Ree’hd sexes, so I hope you find my body more attractive than a man’s.”

  Urak continued his pre-dawn grooming. His song mouth was stretched wide in his assumed expression of amusement.

  “I regret, no. The female body of your race is clumsy. It’s not made to merge with nature.”

  “But this is an alien planet to us. You wouldn’t expect—”

  “But the human male body is. It’s fast, lean—except for your friend Daniel—it’s hard. Less susceptible. There is more beauty in the male body, despite its external weaknesses of neck and genitals.”

  Kristina gave Urak an irritated look. “We have a word for human males who think like you, but I’ll spare you from it for the moment. My body is exceptional. Not exceptionally beautiful just exceptionally ordinary. But many female bodies are fast and lean and hard.”

  “In which case they are less female.”

  “No! Femaleness is a state of mind, not body.”

  Urak struggled with the concept. “Do you make love with your minds? I thought you had to have physical desire. Was I wrong?”

  Kristina said that if there was no mind love there was only intercourse. “Intercourse has two meanings to an Earthman, and both are necessary for love. Between bonded pairs, anyway.”

  Urak finished his grooming and beckoned Kristina to him. She stood above his seated form and he reached out and felt her body in a most intimate way. His “fingers” probed her sex and took the measure of her breasts. Kristina stood quite still, but gradually began to tremble. How did the Ree’hd see her, she wondered. To a human male she was a woman of medium height and medium build, with black hair cut unattractively close to her scalp, and teeth stained yellow with her local vegetable diet. Her face was no longer smooth, but covered with the wrinkles of a skin that has been subjected to biting wind for day after day, month after month. She would hardly call herself a handsome woman.

  Her moment of embarrassment faded quickly—what on earth (or Ree’hdworld) did it matter now?

  “Physical attributes,” said Urak, “are irrelevant to a Ree’hd… you know that of course. I can’t conceive of a way of thinking that is dictated by superficial appearance. It seems shallow.”

  Framing her words carefully, Kristina said, “You must distinguish between love and desire. To most humans appearance is a secondary factor in establishing a relationship. Provided a good communicative contact is made first. Mind love above body love, like you said.”

  Urak thought about that for a moment. He said, “Perhaps between humans both physical and mental love are necessary, to the detriment of their understanding of each other.”

  Kristina nodded, smiling. “The body is only a limitation to physical love. True love is greater than the urge to couple, and there is no reason to confine one’s search for love to one’s own species. Our bodily differences are not limiting factors.”

  It was then that Urak began to be ill at ease. Kristina had never seen such agitation in her friend (for months a friend, and now, for a day and longer, her lover). She reached out and touched him, touched his song lips and the sensitive skin beneath his lateral eyes.

  The native stood up and remained motionless, surveying the girl. Beneath his flimsy wrap his sexual skin was dull green; there was no hint of arousal. But it was not in a sexual way that this strangely lovely alien aroused him.

  It was in a way, he explained to Kristina, that frightened him. He was not ready to realize what was so obvious. He had a horrible feeling that once he sat, thought and documented what she was teaching him (him, the village One) his life search would be over.

  He was afraid of achieving a goal. But he loved Kristina, and he could feel that love reciprocated.

  From that time, two days back, to this they had limited discussion of the subject. Now Urak led the way from the small burrow and along the still muddy corridor to the egress on to the river slope.

  The cold air was a shock to Kristina as she straightened up just outside the corridor exit. She shivered violently and stared up into the gradually clouding sky. The sun, still clearly seen from the community, was fully above the horizon. As she looked at the dull red disc she felt a touch on her arm, and heard the brief exhalation of a Ree’hd in great distress.

  She knew who it was even before she looked, but after a moment she met the alien gaze of Reems’gaa, the small female Ree’hd who was (at this moment) a cause of great concern on Kristina’s part.

  Urak was still walking down the muddy slopes towards the river. He stopped briefly and looked back, gave no sign of any emotion, despite Kristina’s obvious trouble, and went on down to the water’s edge.

  Reems’gaa, whose natural racial year-kinship to Urak, her rightful position, had been usurped by the human female, and was now lost and confused. She spent her days seated outside the burrow entrance, imploring Urak to take her into his burrow and not to leave her to die. Urak, since at this time he was the dominant of whatever year coupling he would assume, ignored her with all the callousness of a human adolescent. It hurt Reems’gaa to be treated so; it hurt Kristina to see Urak manifest such untypical contempt; and it hurt her to know that she was—to bring it right home—the other woman!

  Reems’gaa made a strange low-pitched noise and closed her eyes. A gesture of pleading. She murmured words in Ree’hd, words that Kristina had difficulty in understanding and could not, for a second or two, figure out why.

  Then she realized. Reems’gaa was speaking with her food lips.

  “Oh God!” shouted Kristina feeling an overwhelming pity; there were tears in her eyes and she had to restrain herself from throwing her arms around the deserted Ree’hd and hugging her to her body. “Oh Reems’gaa, don’t ask me… don’t make me lose him.”

  All coherence gone, the Ree’hd female began to threaten, with sound, appearance and gesture. Her lateral eyes became swollen as body fluid pumped into the mid-facet vessels. Arms came up, palms spread, tendrils stiff and dry. Terrible, terrible anger!

  Kristina ran after Urak, slipping on the muddy surface, straining a muscle in her leg, leaving her shame and her guilt behind as she tried to think of Urak and Urak alone.

  As she sat down, three feet from the raging waters, feeling the icy splash of spray upon her face, she felt the eyes of several older Ree’hd upon her. Reems’gaa’s plight, the unnatural turn of fate, was not a popular situation by any means.

  The entire community was beginning to croon.

  Kristina sat in the very middle of the gathered population, which had spread itself out along nearly four hundred yards of the river bank, and on both sides of the river. The Ree’hd sat, no more than three deep, all eyes closed, arms folded stiffly down their sides and bodies motionless. Only their song lips moved, almost imperceptible movements as they uttered the wavering notes of the dawn songs.

  It was very cold and the wind was hard and unmerciful; it was building in strength still, though it would never reach the full strength it had once known when it had blown through this river valley. Kristina knew that it was a completely natural (and cyclical) decline. But most of the Ree’hd blamed the city of Terming. Six hundred years ago the newly arrived Earthmen had erected wind barriers to protect their growing installation— the Ree’hd had objected but because it was an irrational objection they had been ignored. There were, naturally, no Ree’hd alive who could remember the feelings that had flooded the continent in those days, but the memory lingered on, seeming to become a greater source of irritation the older a Ree’hd became.

  The argument, six centuries back, had caused the division of the local Ree’hd community. Those that stayed moved into the overground buildings of Terming, abandoning their own burrows completely; those that refused to stay had moved along the river, away from the channelled gorges beyond the lowlands, and further into one of the evolutionary spheres of the Rund-iamha-reach (Rund
ii), “the talking animals from the moving forests.”

  Kristina squatted by Urak and listened to his voice join the swelling volume of voices welcoming the new day.

  It would not have been proper for her to sing, though Urak had said that when she fully understood the significance of the singing, her high-pitched contribution to the sound field would be permissible. Now she contented herself by imagining herself singing, and her brain turned end over end (it seemed) with the ecstasy of the monotone harmony that the wind was picking up and carrying into the Rundii sphere.

  The water rushed by and she found herself watching what some long-forgotten Earthman had termed “silver-fish,” the aquatic animals that filled the rivers during the winter and which, in the absence of any substantial land fauna, prevented the technologically incompetent Ree’hd from starving. During the spring and summer the “fish” were never touched. There was food enough to be had by mindkilling the smaller burrow-dwelling animals, or running down the eight-appendaged game that symbiosed so cryptically with the moving forests.

  The Ree’hd were fast runners. Their leg homologs were long and springy (becoming more so in the warmer seasons) and the tissue that mimicked muscle in function was what every skeletal muscle should be—powerful and capable of sustaining this power for days and days.

  When a Ree’hd chased an animal it was no quick spurt and succeed or give up—he or she chased the animal for days, running virtually all the time, without water or food intake, without conscious functioning of any sort—a total closing down of systems apart from the fact of the hunt and the search for predatory animals.