I’d originally written this tale back in August; it’s something of a temporal companion piece to Anabelle and the Stork. It’s a completely different tale, all together, but I find it amusing that two so wildly-divergent tales were spawned as opposite sides of the same creative impulse. This story has been sitting on my hard drive, just waiting to see the light of day, and so—without further ado—here it is. BLIND MAN (part one) ______________________________ 1: EUCLID AND STROSS “I’ll not pretend that this mission is without its risks,” she said from behind the serene, oblate sweep of her black-lacquered no-wood desk. “Nor will I lie and flatter your wholly-manufactured poet’s modesty by suggesting that there’s someone better suited for it than you.” It was cold in Noriko’s office, as he’d expected: a sign, he thought, of their ongoing duel. She’d risen high in Service ranks, and he’d watched her climb, from the safest distance he could manage. She’d watched him as well; he realized that, chilled—though not from the harsh, dry air. In truth—by Fate and all the gods!—there had been no way for each of them to avoid at least glancing awareness (and contact) with the other. But now? In this way? “My poet’s modesty,” he said, “is legitimate. I’m no hero of the Pan-Human Communities, nor am I a qualified Serviceman.” This endless sparring was their history: the same old story that warped and knotted the narrative course of Peter’s still-unwinding biography. It was—he’d always known—the story that would surface and resurface for as long as he lived (or she lived) on the face of Euclid. He shifted in his seat, impervious after two shots of vodka, to Noriko’s ice-pick demeanor and full-on assault of withering and pragmatic flattery. She knew what to say, and how to spin it for maximum impact. “What about Tella?” he asked. “She’s as good as I am, if not better.” “Tella Moxx?” “Yeah.” “Peter,” Noriko said, and his name sounded like a curse. “She’s a schizophrenic.” He leaned forward. “Yeah,” he said. “And synaesthesia is her medium.” “It’s too imprecise,” Noriko said. “There’s no way to acquire an accurate sense/stimulus map; her condition is tailored and completely under randomized conscious control…or as she puts it, guided by the whims of mood and fancy.” A tight, almost puckered smile erupted from the chiseled set of Noriko’s features and hung suspended in her flesh until she shifted in her seat, leaning: as if to draw Peter forward. “We need someone more stable than that, and with your particular, native stimulus/sense configuration.” Her puckered smile was gone, replaced—quickly and subtly, Peter saw—with a look of bland challenge. “How’s Shin-san?” he asked with as much of a cold and mocking challenge as he could manage. She flinched as he’d hoped she would. “He’s fine.” Clipped tones. Brittle. That nerve, he saw, was still raw: a weakness to exploit, if only he knew how. Peter sat back in the stiff comfort of his chair, and glanced through the window-wall behind Noriko. Kadler, she’d once said, was the perfect city. Now, at a chilled and chilly 172 stories above the traffic of Centertram Street, all of Kadler stretched to the silver-hazed horizon, dotted here, there, and there, with jump shuttles and intra-atmospheric skimmers. It was a cold city in the colors of gunmetal and glass, leavened here and there with laser scrawl and cunning, seductive holograms of sybaritic models hawking dubious consumer goods. Kadler. Peter hated the city, and—for a long moment: two beats of the heart or maybe more—hated Noriko nearly as much as he did more than a decade ago. “Peter,” softly now, as Noriko leaned forward like some sleek and predatory orchid. “Neither one of us has to pretend to like the other; and I’d willingly consider somebody else for the position I’m offering you. I’d prefer to. But I have a problem. A massive problem. There are no other viable candidates. No one even remotely viable. You’re the best we have. You’re all that we have.” “I’m only half of it.” “We’ve already spoken to Jace, and he agrees to this if you do. As he put it: he’s a part of this, but only under your terms and conditions. And, I might add, he was quite adamant on that point.” “You spoke to Jace?” “Earlier today.” “And so now, it’s simply up to me to say yes or no.” “Precisely.” “And if I say yes,” he nodded to the inert data-slate on the desk before him. He felt it, and an echo of it at the base of his spine, coiled like a mad and deadly mass of wild, Kundalini potential. “All listed benefits and payments are yours.” “Subject to my approval, of course.” Noriko nodded. “There’s just one problem.” “Yes?” “I’m not blind anymore, at least not in the way that you need me to be.” Noriko smiled and there was wistful sadness in the expression: proof, Peter saw, that his words struck another nerve and that Shin—in some small way—had just brushed the edges of her thoughts. “You can see,”—she said—“because of the hardware in your brain, but according to the raw, animal meat of your occipital lobe, you’re still as blind as you were at birth.” “And now you’re asking a blind poet and his partner to jump on a Service-registered ship, and go to zipping past Faraway? That’s way more than fifty lights beyond the Frontier Rim, more than one-hundred. What the hell are humans even doing out that far?” “You have the skills necessary for what we need done.” “My gift,” he said…and in his mind, he heard Shin uttering those words. “Peter.” Noriko shifted: evident discomfort knotted her spine and tightened her shoulders. “I don’t say this often. In my position, I don’t need to, but right now, my position doesn’t matter. Not to you, anyway, and so I’m going to say it.” She paused, drew a breath and straightened in the stiff-black austerity of her chair. Peter flinched. He’d seen a turtle, once, a strange terran animal. Shin showed it to him. Ripped from its shell, it lay bloody and dead on some beach he couldn’t name. It was one of the first things he’d experienced after learning how to see; it was important for Shin to share that image, so Shin had said, and Peter accepted that, not knowing what he was in for. He’d screamed, and he wanted to scream now, because Noriko—like that turtle-thing on a planet far, far away—wore no protective shell, and the skin (or its metaphor) beneath was raw and red, gleaming and terrifying in its ugly vulnerability. He clenched his fists. He closed his eyes and drew a deep and shuddering breath. The taste of bile burned at the root of his tongue. He swallowed. He thought, for a moment that Noriko might have programmed that particular subliminal her office environment, but the image—that memory!—was too personal: not a part of his open-access record, not a thing Noriko would have known, unless Shin had—at any point—told her. He was now, however, in the habit of telling her things like that. —Not in the past, at least…and not now. “Please,” Noriko said, softly, snatching Peter from his thoughts. “Please,” she said again, leaning forward, ever so slightly. Peter closed his eyes. *** Kadler was a city of discreet and endless noises; even in silence, there were whispers and clicks, the faint/distant ping of confirmation chimes, or message announcements. There were voices and footsteps, music, laughter, and noises of boredom: the tap of a writing stylus against no-wood, the click of touch-interface keys, or the sound of a little boy bouncing a ball. There was traffic noise. Public Service always had something to announce; but there were ways to escape the sounds as Peter recognized them—the sounds no one else heard—and Peter, given the means by the doctors and therapists he has always known, was aware of such silence (as a blind man would recognize it) now. He sat in his whitewashed room, allowing backchannel sensors to read his biometric signals; even if he slowed his breathing and forced himself to relax, the sensors knew his mood and could extrapolate whole reams of biography by reading the sweat on his palms, or between his toes if he walked barefoot into the room. His mood, as the sensors extrapolated, always shaped the quality of silence to envelop him. The data—as the sensors collected it—shaped the complicated output of white noise generators, and for an instant—always an instant—he heard wind, the sound of the sea, and then a series of overlapping auditory signals so complicated as to render themselves noiseless. (At least, he thought, until his brain figured out how to sort through all of those layers and impose a kind of noisy order to them. It happened on occasion, but rarely. This room was the best that money could buy, and as anyone less than the poetic voice of an entire world, he couldn’t afford it.) The silence, as he’d come to hear it, was little more than a short respite. He left the whitewash room as quietly as he’d entered, and found Jace in the living room, motionless before the viewing wall. He gazed out at night descending over the city, at the lights, at advertisements thrown onto the bellies of clouds. There was tension in his narrow-profile stance, something hard and implacable in his shoulders. Peter, with naked feet, stepped behind him and kneaded a massage into his shoulders. Jace smiled, and with blind-man’s sense, Peter felt the expression in the way Jace’s neck relaxed and in the way he leaned back, ever so slightly, until his back came into slight, whispering contact with Peter’s own pectorals. They’d spent the day, speaking of Noriko and her mission. They’d fallen into silence—sullen on Peter’s part; and pensive as Jace expressed it. They didn’t argue; they never argued in the conventional sense, but Peter felt a strain between them, and that strain was what drove him (for an hour here, a few minutes there) into the whitewash. “I’m sorry,” Peter said. “For what?” Jace spoke in a sonorous, baritone voice; the sound of it, Peter always thought, was like the warmth of a thick, ethnic soup. “For what happened today…with her…with Noriko.” “I should have told you that she’d contacted me.” Silence. “I’ve been reading about the Mission,” Jace said, giving account—Peter realized—of what he’d done during those retreats intowhitewash. Silence, again, from Peter as his toes clenched—involuntarily—into the carpet underfoot. “I’m not telling you what to do, Pete…but I think you should accept the assignment.” “And jump to some alien dangerous alien planet.” “Dangerous to me,” Jace said. “To anyone with sight.” “There are plenty of blind men to send to that place.” “But none who’d perceive it like you can. You’re the poet voice of this world, and you’re famous on every world within the Communities; sensual blindness is your art, and that’s exactly what The Service needs right now. If you say yes or if you say no is completely up to you; nothing changes between us, no matter what you decide, but for my part, I’d say to accept assignment, because for as large as this may be, it’s still about you, and about her, and maybe—in its way—about Shin. The higher ground is yours, if you take it, and in doing this, exactly as Noriko asks, you’ll be putting her in your debt; and after that, you can tell her—in whatever way you please—to simply suck vacuum.” Peter closed his eyes as he slid his hands around Jace’s stomach and pulled him—backwards—into an embrace. “I can’t ask you to do this with me. It’s too dangerous, and I won’t make you take a risk that shouldn’t even be yours.” Peter felt Jace’s soft and rolling laughter. “I’m half of your talent, Pete…you’re half of mine. Whatever you do, I do…and Noriko knows that, which is why she’d approached me in the first place. Any risk you take is my risk as well; I wouldn’t have it any other way.” “And so you’d go…out there to a planet that has a catalog number rather than a name on all of the charts?” “I’d go,” Jace said. “And then seduce you like a madman when we get back.” *** There was a lot to learn, and Peter received it all—as did Jace—through a metered synaptic dump. The Stross, when he and Jace boarded, was a big ship: a nightmare maze of corridors and work-chambers in the creamy, half-metallic colors of some exotic ceramic. It was the common identifier of all interstellar vessels: some strange necessity that Peter scarcely understood, but recognized as important. Ships that made interstellar jumps were all composed of the strangely-resonant ceramic and lacked hard, acute angles. They smelled the same, as well, harsh and chilly, as if differential anesthetics filtered into the air. He’d only ever traveled on passenger carriers, but he recognized that smell…ship smell…the scent of superluminal travel. He’d been right—in Noriko Tamaki’s office—at his judgment of distance. 31: 069-Julia occupied a space of the Orion Glactic Arm, more than fifty light years from the periphery of Human-tinged space. Faraway: little more than a remote outpost was a navigational recalibration point in terms of the current mission. Not a world, not a place; just a knot woven in the fabric of a map—a little course-correction node located between here and way, way over there. Nav recalibrations, Peter learned, marked—at their most extreme—little more than the mid-point of a superluminal jump. Faraway was a hair’s width more than 200 light years from Euclid, and more than 1800 from ancient, ancestral Earth. Faraway was—in reference to its name—far, far away. ”Blindness is your gift,” Shin Tamaki said once. “It will always be yours, even replaced—like now—by sight.” And blindness, Peter thought, was what stood—now—between humanity, and the deadliest of mysteries to ever confront the species. The Stross was not the first ship to approach 31: 069-Julia. Other ships had gone. Two. The Van Kleewyn had been first, and shortly after, the Intreppid: a military vessel, bristling with directed energy weapons and any number of exotic, kenetic-kill armaments. The VanKleewyn and the Intreppid were dead ships: decommissioned and dissected in the dark/mysterious place where all ships went when their crews died of suicidal insanity. Pathogens were not the cause, nor was directed belligerence, as currently understood. Something else had killed those ships and their crew, something no artificial recorders could identify. Something—out there and on a world designated only by a number—drove humans to madness: gorgons as Noriko Tamaki had implied, and only a blind man might safely perceive them. Jace shifted in the bed beside him, and pulled him into a warm and playful embrace. A kiss, Peter felt, landed softly on the back of his neck. “We make jump tomorrow,” Jace said. “I’m ready for it.” “Are you afraid?” “No.” Jace laughed and kissed Peter’s neck again. “Me too,” he said. *** 2: 31: 069-JULIA It might have been Earth or Euclid for the blue skies and fluffy, white clouds: for land the color of sand and ferrous, red soil; it might have been Miraldi for plant-life in the colors of chlorophyll and something opalescent and reflective. It might have been any of the habitable worlds within the Pan-Human Communities, though it lacked the common telltale signs of environmental surgery and an entry in the public-access Terraform Logs. It might have been a friendly world, if two ships hadn’t died in orbit and limped home under AI control and biological quarantine. There were those who’d survived the previous missions, but they lived far from common sight: deep within the secret spaces of mental reconstruction wards in orbit around Hospice. It took a week for the Stross to dump velocity after its in-system dive, and for a week, Peter reviewed probe telemetry beamed at the ship’s signal receptors as it made its slow, parabolic course toward 31: 069-Julia. He ran through mission simulations with Jace, challenging the training computer to throw the direst scenarios at them. It was a way to tackle the problem at hand and to keep his mind off of Noriko Takeshi and what she might truly have wanted from him, what she was truly saying through this strange complication in their sick little game. The simulations were a way, as well, for Peter to forget the sound of the ship: the way the exotic ceramic bulkheads sang with subtle and tooth-jarring resonances, making him afraid to touch the walls or walk with naked feet upon the cold/hard deck. Showers were a holy terror for him, as there were resonances in the water as well: patterns he could feel as it spiraled into the drain and reclamation cisterns deep below-deck. He wondered, if continued exposure to such resonances might throw him slowly and permanently into a phobia of water on his toes. “It’s okay,” Jace always said in the shower with him. “Concentrate on my voice, concentrate on me,” and in ways that were always distracting, he’d touch Peter, often standing close enough for Peter to cover his toes with his own. It was something he liked, anyway, Peter realized, and was thankful that so small a gesture between them was important, even here…two hundred lights past the edge of known space. He sat, now—ignoring the keening whine of structural resynchronization—mining the data-stream spewed from the observation probes in planetary orbit. He could have worked in the cabin he shared with Jace, but it was comforting to make his way to the contact lab and follow the on-shift/off-shift routine that determined every element of life on board the Stross. Jace sat beside him: a solid and comforting presence in ship grays open in a crisp, narrow “v” over a white ribbed undershirt. His skin—like the buffed shell of a pecan—held Peter’s gaze in its contrast to the hull-metal gray of his Serviceman’s undress uniform. He looked good, Peter decided; and he wondered if they’d keep their uniforms upon completion of this mission. They sat amid monitor screens and control boards, on ergonomic work stools. They were alone, as was common. It was easy—and atypical—to receive whole volumes of data and training through synaptic dump. Normal Service crewmen worked in the old fashioned way, reading from screens and relying on instincts built up from months, months, and more months of non-stop training. They attended meetings, and in ways that Peter understood, immensely, received everything in ways that the flesh understood. The cold/hard vacuum of space required a certain animal awareness, and so Service ships, for all of their sophistication, maintained a primitive aspect: keyboards and knobs, data-screens, and mechanical things: there was psychological significance to all of this, as much so, as the hints and whispers of botanical green placed in strategic lines of sight. He and Jace were not normal Service crewmen. They weren’t normal anything, he thought, contemplating the neurological deformities they shared, robbing one of sight and the other of hearing. They were each the single poet so famous and revered among those who appreciated the genre of sensual-kinetic narrative. As two of the most distinct humans in this region of space, they’d taken a carefully-measured battery of synaptic dumps, and as the Stross coasted through deceleration maneuvers, their knowledge of the mission and its specifics increased, as if whole years of Service experience decompressed in their minds. Here, as in their own poet’s life, Jace could hear as well as Peter could see, and so the Service—at least in theory—found them suitable for mission duty. And now, as easily as Peter could switch off his eyes, Jace could deactivate his auditory prosthetic, and ignore anything he didn’t want to listen to. This mission called for blindness, and Peter had reason to re-acquaint himself with it. Jace would maintain his sense of hearing, but through cybernetic link, would descend—with Peter—to the face of a planet he could never visit in person. He’d feel the world and sense it through Peter’s blindness, interpreting his sense-stimulus data and singing it (as was his normal professional habit) into the ship’s computers. 31: 069-Julia, a world so dangerous to normal human beings, would yield its secrets to a blind poet and a deaf singer. Peter smiled at the thought. end of part one There is more, obviously, and I hope you've enjoyed this first little dip into a world way over thataway. As always, thank you for reading, and commenting, and I hope this is a great addition to your weekend (or weekday, as the case may be.)