F. Brejcha: With Other Eyes

“One hundred-fifty meters,” he answered immediately. “Which means that there are another twenty below us. Support infra-structure for the jungle? Or living quarters?”

An abrupt squeal interrupted, and then we heard: “Follow.” Our bowling-pin escorts walked off the metal platform, somehow managing to walk right out of their magnetic shoes as they stepped onto the gently rolling ‘grass’ that covered the ground between massive one to two meter-thick tree trunks. Seen through my eyes, I could see that the trees were highly dense but covered with a rippling bark-like covering that was the consistency of foam rubber.

Kneeling, I inspected the grass, cursing my still variable control of the eyes. But after struggling to focus at this close distance, I saw that the tubular ‘grass’ stalks were crowned with a fine network of fibers that seemed to flex to reach the light as my shadow blocked the powerful, but diffuse illumination from above. My sensitivity to visible light was marginal with my eye set, and it dawned on me that if I was able to see such a difference, the light above us had to be bright ! I started to mention it to Lazz, but he was already stumbling after our guides, almost tripped by the unfamiliar roughness of the terrain and the lower than normal gravity. I hurried after them, almost falling flat on my face myself.

As I caught up with them, I tried to mentally trace our movements, concluding that we were heading for the leading edge of the pyramid—literally an edge given the orientation of the three pods slicing through space. It took several minutes of weaving our way through the dense… forest—down here the growth was much more disciplined than above—but before too long we broke out into a large clearing that took our breath away.

It was obvious from the way the walls were closing in and getting closer to our heads that we were nearing the front of the pyramid, but where we should have faced a sharp corner, we found instead a flat, triangular wall about twenty meters high at its peak, filling in the front corner of this pod. The location of the control room and quarters for other ship’s functions? But what had made me stop and stare was the way the wall was decorated. Seen with my new eyes, the entire wall was a giant work of art combining different textures and shapes. Without any off-set lighting to highlight the subtle bas-relief sculpturing, most people with normal vision would probably not have noticed the beauty of the wall—I instinctively knew that Liza would not even have done more than glance at it. The true nature of the wall was visible only to eyes like the Travelers’, and to the eye sets Lazz and I were wearing.

I suddenly realized Lazz’s hand was clamped around my arm with a vice-like grip and that the sound of his breathing was harsh and strained. I had been so distracted by the wall that I had not noticed.

I took his hand. “What’s wrong?”

He eased his grip and his breathing relaxed.

“Sorry ’bout that, buddy. Just a momentary flashback.”

“To what?”

“Did I ever tell you how I was blinded?” he asked.

“A plane crash, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah… in South America. I was nineteen; a spoiled little rich boy on a treasure-hunting expedition looking for ruins and hidden gold. There were four of us in a small Beech Hover-Jet, and we lost power over the jungle. We were going pretty fast, too fast, and we went ripping through the tops of the rain forest… until we broke out into the open at the edge of a canyon, and we went smashing into the opposite wall. I woke up in the hospital four days later; the only survivor, and blind, courtesy of massive head trauma. A piece of metal went right through my brain. A sixteenth of an inch to one side and I would have been dead on the spot.”

He looked up at the massive wall facing us. “Breaking through this jungle,” he waved around us, “and then coming up on this all at once—”

“Brought it all back,” I finished with a shudder.

“With a vengeance!” He let go of my arm with a weak chuckle. “Like a couple of bad dreams I had after starting to work with you—”

“Gee, thanks a lot.”

“Well, you’ve shaped up okay, finally,” he teased me, and then turned serious. “But like I said, when they first asked me to work with you, it brought back a lot of bad memories of when I lost my sight. Both the accident and the years of denial and self-pitying isolation afterwards where I blamed everybody but myself.”

“What changed your attitude?”

Lazz laughed. “Believe it or not, it got boring. I had always loved to read all sorts of trashy horror and enjoyed writing it for fun, but after the accident I couldn’t do it anymore—”

“But what about—”

“I know: what about all the adaptive systems there are?” I could hear a strong vein of bitterness in his voice. “But to learn how to use those, I had to admit my problem.” He relaxed. “But, once I did that, it was a breeze. I took to computers like the proverbial duck to water when I realized that it was fun. Beat the hell out of the gold-plated pity-palace I was living in. And computers led to other research fields, and eventually to moving out and living on my own. I was never stupid. Just lazy,” he admitted. “I hadn’t thought of those years for a long time, until I started training you.”

“And I brought it all back to mind?” I felt almost guilty as I remembered my own bitching and moaning after the operation, when I had realized that I didn’t have the near approximation of normal sight I had conned myself into believing I would have.

Lazz shook his head. “Just at first, Kimosabi. I was getting over it fine—”

“Until you found yourself face to face with this.” I nodded towards the sculptured wall, mentally seeing a small Hover-jet smashing into it, bits of flaming wreckage sprinkling down to burn the odd grasses at the base of the wall as crumpled metal buckled and spilled battered bodies…

I blinked to clear the vivid image that had overwhelmed me.

“Are you okay?” Lazz’s turn to be concerned. “I thought I was the over-reacting one, here.”

“I’m fine.” I felt my face burn as I moved forward. “Just an over-active imagination.”

The Travelers had moved aside to give us a good view, and I had a feeling that they were observing us very carefully as we approached the wall. The closer we got, the more detail revealed itself and I hoped that the recording circuits built into our suits were working. Everything we saw was also being recorded by the eye-set computers for later review, synchronized with the audio signal from the external suit microphones and my translation system.

We didn’t disappoint our hosts as we stared in fascination.

It was clear now that the wall was actually a collection of triangular picture frames, alternating vertical orientation to fill the large wall. I had focused immediately on the very top picture, which depicted a large number of space ships like the one we were in departing from a planet orbiting an angry looking star. The implications intrigued me and I studied it intently, until Lazz tapped me on the shoulder.

“You’re looking at them wrong. It’s reversed.” He pointed to the bottom right picture. “Bottom to top, right to left.” He shrugged. “Sue me. I always check out the last screen or page of a book, too. That’ll teach me.”

Now that I knew where to start, I appreciated the symmetry of the historical mural. The picture I had been looking at was the final in the series. I wondered if it was the beginning of exploration, or an exodus; a flight from a dying star? I looked back up at the frame. Unlike the highly realistic images in all the other frames, the star in that final picture looked almost abstract. It was menacing to be real.