Blindsight

by Robert Silverberg

That’s my mark, Juanito told himself. That one, there. That one for sure.

He stared at the new dudes coming off the midday shuttle from Earth. The one he meant to go for was the one with no eyes at all, blank from brow to bridge of nose, just the merest suggestions of shadowy pits below the smooth skin of the forehead. As if the eyes had been erased, Juanito thought. But in fact they had probably never been there in the first place. It didn’t look like a retrofit gene job, more like a prenatal splice.

He knew he had to move fast. There was plenty of competition. Fifteen, twenty couriers here in the waiting room, gathering like vultures, and they were some of the best: Ricky, Lola, Kluge. Nattathaniel. Delilah. Everybody looked hungry today. Juanito couldn’t afford to get shut out. He hadn’t worked in six weeks, and it was time. His last job had been a fast-talking fancy-dancing Hungarian, wanted on Commonplace and maybe two or three other satellite worlds for dealing in plutonium. Juanito had milked that one for all it was worth, but you can milk only so long. The newcomers learn the system, they melt in and become invisible, and there’s no reason for them to go on paying. So then you have to find a new client.

“Okay,” Juanito said, looking around challengingly. “There’s mine. The weird one. The one with half a face. Anybody else want him?”

Kluge laughed and said, “He’s all yours, man.”

“Yeah,” Delilah said, with a little shudder. “All yours.” That saddened him, her chiming in like that. It had always disappointed Juanito that Delilah didn’t have his kind of imagination. “Christ,” she said. “I bet he’ll be plenty trouble.”

“Trouble’s what pays best,” Juanito said. “You want to go for the easy ones, that’s fine with me.” He grinned at her and waved at the others. “If we’re all agreed, I think I’ll head downstairs now. See you later, people.”

He started to move inward and downward along the shuttle-hub wall. Dazzling sunlight glinted off the docking module’s silvery rim, and off the Earth shuttle’s thick columnar docking shaft, wedged into the center of the module like a spear through a doughnut. On the far side of the wall the new dinkos were making their wobbly way past the glowing ten-meter-high portrait of El Supremo and on into the red fiberglass tent that was the fumigation chamber. As usual, they were having a hard time with the low gravity. Here at the hub it was one-sixteenth G, max.

Juanito always wondered about the newcomers, why they were here, what they were fleeing. Only two kinds of people ever came to Valparaiso, those who wanted to hide and those who wanted to seek. The place was nothing but an enormous spacegoing safe house. You wanted to be left alone, you came to Valparaiso and bought yourself some privacy. But that implied that you had done something that made other people not want to let you alone. There was always some of both going on here, some hiding, some seeking, El Supremo looking down benignly on it all, raking in his cut. And not just El Supremo.

Down below, the new dinkos were trying to walk jaunty, to walk mean. But that was hard to do when you were keeping your body all clenched up as if you were afraid of drifting into mid-air if you put your foot down too hard. Juanito loved it, the way they were crunching along, that constipated shuffle of theirs.

Gravity stuff didn’t ever bother Juanito. He had spent all his life out here in the satellite worlds and he took it for granted that the pull was going to fluctuate according to your distance from the hub. You automatically made compensating adjustments, that was all. Juanito found it hard to understand a place where the gravity would be the same everywhere all the time. He had never set foot on Earth or any of the other natural planets, didn’t care to, didn’t expect to.

The guard on duty at the quarantine gate was an android. His name, his label, whatever it was, was something like Velcro Exxon. Juanito had seen him at this gate before. As he came up close the android glanced at him and said, “Working again so soon, Juanito?”

“Man has to eat, no?”

The android shrugged. Eating wasn’t all that important to him, most likely. “Weren’t you working that plutonium peddler out of Commonplace?”

Juanito said, smiling, “What plutonium peddler?”

“Sure,” said the android. “I hear you.”

He held out his waxy-skinned hand and Juanito put a 50 callaghano currency plaque in it. The usual fee for illicit entry to the customs tank was only 35 callies, but Juanito believed in spreading the wealth, especially where the authorities were concerned. They didn’t have to let you in here, after all. Some days more couriers showed up than there were dinkos, and then the gate guards had to allocate. Overpaying the guards was simply a smart investment.

“Thank you kindly,” the android said. “Thank you very much.” He hit the scanner override. Juanito stepped through the security shield into the customs tank and looked around for his mark.

The new dinkos were being herded into the fumigation chamber now. They were annoyed about that—they always were—but the guards kept them moving right along through the puffy bursts of pink and green and yellow sprays that came from the ceiling nozzles. Nobody got out of customs quarantine without passing through that chamber. El Supremo was paranoid about the entry of exotic microorganisms into Valparaiso’s closed-cycle ecology. El Supremo was paranoid about a lot of things. You didn’t get to be sole and absolute ruler of your own little satellite world, and stay that way for 37 years, without a heavy component of paranoia in your makeup.

Juanito leaned up against the great curving glass wall of the customs tank and peered through the mists of sterilizer fog. The rest of the couriers were starting to come in now. Juanito watched them singling out potential clients. Most of the dinkos were signing up as soon as the deal was explained, but as always a few were shaking off help and setting out by themselves. Cheapskates, Juanito thought. Assholes and wimps, Juanito thought. But they’d find out. It wasn’t possible to get started on Valparaiso without a courier, no matter how sharp you thought you were. Valparaiso was a free enterprise zone, after all. If you knew the rules, you were pretty much safe from all harm here forever. If not, not.

Time to make the approach, Juanito figured.

It was easy enough finding the blind man. He was much taller than the other dinkos, a big burly man some thirty-odd years old, heavy bones, powerful muscles. In the bright glaring light his blank forehead gleamed like a reflecting beacon. The low gravity didn’t seem to trouble him much, nor his blindness. His movements along the customs track were easy, confident, almost graceful.

Juanito sauntered over and said, “I’ll be your courier, sir. Juanito Holt.” He barely came up to the blind man’s elbow.

“Courier?”

“New arrival assistance service. Facilitate your entry arrangements. Customs clearance, currency exchange, hotel accomodations, permanent settlement papers if that’s what you intend. Also special services by arrangement.”

Juanito stared up expectantly at the blank face. The eyeless man looked back at him in a blunt straight-on way, what would have been strong eye contact if the dinko had had eyes. That was eerie. What was even eerier was the sense Juanito had that the eyeless man was seeing him clearly. For just a moment he wondered who was going to be controlling whom in this deal.

“What kind of special services?”

“Anything else you need,” Juanito said.

“Anything?”

“Anything. This is Valparaiso, sir.”

“Mmm. What’s your fee?”

“Two thousand callaghanos a week for the basic. Specials are extra, according.”

“How much is that in Capbloc dollars, your basic?”

Juanito told him.

“That’s not so bad,” the blind man said.

“Two weeks minimum, payable in advance.”

“Mmm,” said the blind man again. Again that intense eyeless gaze, seeing right through him. “How old are you?” he asked suddenly.

“Seventeen,” Juanito blurted, caught off guard.

“And you’re good, are you?”

“I’m the best. I was born here. I know everybody.”

“I’m going to be needing the best. You take electronic handshake?”

“Sure,” Juanito said. This was too easy. He wondered if he should have asked three kilocallies a week, but it was too late now. He pulled his flex terminal from his tunic pocket and slipped his fingers into it. “Unity Callaghan Bank of Valparaiso. That’s code 22-44-66, and you might as well give it a default key, because it’s the only bank here. Account 1133, that’s mine.”

The blind man donned his own terminal and deftly tapped the number pad on his wrist. Then he grasped Juanito’s hand firmly in his until the sensors overlapped, and made the transfer of funds. Juanito touched for confirm and a bright green +cl. 4000 lit up on the screen in his palm. The payee’s name was Victor Farkas, out of an account in the Royal Amalgamated Bank of Liechtenstein.

“Liechtenstein,” Juanito said. “That’s an Earth country?”

“Very small one. Between Austria and Switzerland.”

“I’ve heard of Switzerland. You live on Liechtenstein?”

“No,” Farkas said. “I bank there. In Liechtenstein, is what Earth people say. Except for islands. Liechtenstein isn’t an island. Can we get out of this place now?”

“One more transfer,” Juanito said. “Pump your entry software across to me. Baggage claim, passport, visa. Make things much easier for us both, getting out of here.”

“Make it easier for you to disappear with my suitcase, yes. And I’d never find you again, would I?”

“Do you think I’d do that?”

“I’m more profitable to you if you don’t.”

“You’ve got to trust your courier, Mr. Farkas. If you can’t trust your courier, you can’t trust anybody at all on Valparaiso.”

“I know that,” Farkas said.

Collecting Farkas’ baggage and getting him clear of the customs tank took another half an hour and cost about 200 callies in miscellaneous bribes, which was about standard. Everyone from the baggage-handling androids to the cute snotty teller at the currency-exchange booth had to be bought. Juanito understood that things didn’t work that way on most worlds; but Valparaiso, he knew, was different from most worlds. In a place where the chief industry was the protection of fugitives, it made sense that the basis of the economy would be the recycling of bribes.

Farkas didn’t seem to be any sort of fugitive, though. While he was waiting for the baggage Juanito pulled a readout on the software that the blind man had pumped over to him and saw that Farkas was here on a visitor’s visa, six week limit. So he was a seeker, not a hider. Well, that was okay. It was possible to turn a profit working either side of the deal. Running traces wasn’t Juanito’s usual number, but he figured he could adapt.

The other thing that Farkas didn’t seem to be was blind. As they emerged from the customs tank he turned and pointed back at the huge portrait of El Supremo and said, “Who’s that? Your President?”

“The Defender, that’s his title. The Generalissimo. El Supremo, Don Eduardo Callaghan.” Then it sank in and Juanito said, blinking, “Pardon me. You can see that picture, Mr. Farkas?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I don’t follow. Can you see or can’t you?”

“Yes and no.”

“Thanks a lot, Mr. Farkas.”

“We can talk more about it later,” Farkas said.

Juanito always put new dinkos in the same hotel, the San Bernardito, four kilometers out from the hub in the rim community of Cajamarca. “This way,” he told Farkas. “We have to take the elevator at C Spoke.”

Farkas didn’t seem to have any trouble following him. Every now and then Juanito glanced back, and there was the big man three or four paces behind him, marching along steadily down the corridor. No eyes, Juanito thought, but somehow he can see. He definitely can see.

The four-kilometer elevator ride down C Spoke to the rim was spectacular all the way. The elevator was a glass-walled chamber inside a glass-walled tube that ran along the outside of the spoke, and it let you see everything: the whole great complex of wheels within wheels that was the Earth-orbit artificial world of Valparaiso, the seven great structural spokes radiating from the hub to the distant wheel of the rim, each spoke bearing its seven glass-and-aluminum globes that contained the residential zones and business sectors and farmlands and recreational zones and forest reserves. As the elevator descended—the gravity rising as you went down, climbing toward an Earth-one pull in the rim towns—you had a view of the sun’s dazzling glint on the adjacent spokes, and an occasional glimpse of the great blue belly of Earth filling up the sky a hundred fifty thousand kilometers away, and the twinkling hordes of other satellite worlds in their nearby orbits, like a swarm of jellyfish dancing in a vast black ocean. That was what everybody who came up from Earth said, “Like jellyfish in the ocean.” Juanito didn’t understand how a fish could be made out of jelly, or how a satellite world with seven spokes looked anything like a fish of any kind, but that was what they all said.

Farkas didn’t say anything about jellyfish. But in some fashion or other he did indeed seem to be taking in the view. He stood close to the elevator’s glass wall in deep concentration, gripping the rail, not saying a thing. Now and then he made a little hissing sound as something particularly awesome went by outside. Juanito studied him with sidelong glances. What could he possibly see? Nothing seemed to be moving beneath those shadowy places where his eyes should have been. Yet somehow he was seeing out of that broad blank stretch of gleaming skin above his nose. It was damned disconcerting. It was downright weird.

The San Bernardito gave Farkas a rim-side room, facing the stars. Juanito paid the hotel clerks to treat his clients right. That was something his father had taught him when he was just a kid who wasn’t old enough to know a Schwarzchild singularity from an ace in the hole. “Pay for what you’re going to need,” his father kept saying. “Buy it and at least there’s a chance it’ll be there when you have to have it.” His father had been a revolutionary in Central America during the time of the Empire. He would have been Prime Minister if the revolution had come out the right way. But it hadn’t.

“You want me to help you unpack?” Juanito said.

“I can manage.”

“Sure,” Juanito said.

He stood by the window, looking at the sky. Like all the other satellite worlds, Valparaiso was shielded from cosmic ray damage and stray meteoroids by a double shell filled with a three-meter-thick layer of lunar slag. Rows of V-shaped apertures ran down the outer skin of the shield, mirror-faced to admit sunlight but not hard radiation; and the hotel had lined its rooms up so each one on this side had a view of space through the V’s. The whole town of Cajamarca was facing darkwise now, and the stars were glittering fiercely.

When Juanito turned from the window he saw that Farkas had hung his clothes neatly in the closet and was shaving—methodically, precisely—with a little hand-held laser.

“Can I ask you something personal?” Juanito said.

“You want to know how I see.”

“It’s pretty amazing, I have to say.”

“I don’t see. Not really. I’m just as blind as you think I am.”

“Then how—”

“It’s called blindsight,” Farkas said. “Proprioceptive vision.”

“What?”

Farkas chuckled. “There’s all sorts of data bouncing around that doesn’t have the form of reflected light, which is what your eyes see. A million vibrations besides those that happen to be in the visual part of the electromagnetic spectrum are shimmering in this room. Air currents pass around things and are deformed by what they encounter. And it isn’t only the air currents. Objects have mass, they have heat, they have—the term won’t make any sense to you—shapeweight. A quality having to do with the interaction of mass and form. Does that mean anything to you? No, I guess not. Look, there’s a lot of information available beyond what you can see with eyes, if you want it. I want it.”

“You use some kind of machine to pick it up?” Juanito asked.

Farkas tapped his forehead. “It’s in here. I was born with it.”

“Some kind of sensing organ instead of eyes?”

“That’s pretty close.”

“What do you see, then? What do things look like to you?”

“What do they look like to you?” Farkas said. “What does a chair look like to you?”

“Well, it’s got four legs, and a back—”

“What does a leg look like?”

“It’s longer than it is wide.”

“Right.” Farkas knelt and ran his hands along the black tubular legs of the ugly little chair beside the bed. “I touch the chair, I feel the shape of the legs. But I don’t see leg-shaped shapes.”

“What then?”

“Silver globes that roll away into fat curves. The back part of the chair bends double and folds into itself. The bed’s a bright pool of mercury with long green spikes coming up. You’re six blue spheres stacked one on top of another, with a thick orange cable running through them. And so on.”

“Blue?” Juanito said. “Orange? How do you know anything about colors?”

“The same way you do. I call one color blue, another one orange. I don’t know if they’re anything like your blue or orange, but so what? My blue is always blue for me. It’s different from the color I see as red and the one I see as green. Orange is always orange. It’s a matter of relationships. You follow?”

“No,” Juanito said. “How can you possibly make sense out of anything? What you see doesn’t have anything to do with the real color or shape or position of anything.”

Farkas shook his head. “Wrong, Juanito. For me, what I see is the real shape and color and position. It’s all I’ve ever known. If they were able to retrofit me with normal eyes now, which I’m told would be less than fifty-fifty likely to succeed and tremendously risky besides, I’d be lost trying to find my way around in your world. It would take me years to learn how. Or maybe forever. But I do all right, in mine. I understand, by touching things, that what I see by blindsight isn’t the ‘actual’ shape. But I see in consistent equivalents. Do you follow? A chair always looks like what I think of as a chair, even though I know that chairs aren’t really shaped anything like that. If you could see things the way I do it would all look like something out of another dimension. It is something out of another dimension, really. The information I operate by is different from what you use, that’s all. And the world I move through looks completely different from the world that normal people see. But I do see, in my own way. I perceive objects and establish relationships between them, I make spatial perceptions, just as you do. Do you follow, Juanito? Do you follow?”

Juanito considered that. How very weird it sounded. To see the world in funhouse distortions, blobs and spheres and orange cables and glimmering pools of mercury. Weird, very weird. After a moment he said, “And you were born like this?”

“That’s right.”

“Some kind of genetic accident?”

“Not an accident,” Farkas said quietly. “I was an experiment. A master gene-splicer worked me over in my mother’s womb.”

“Right,” Juanito said. “You know, that’s actually the first thing I guessed when I saw you come off the shuttle. This has to be some kind of splice effect, I said. But why—why—” He faltered. “Does it bother you to talk about this stuff?”

“Not really.”

“Why would your parents have allowed—”

“They didn’t have any choice, Juanito.”

“Isn’t that illegal? Involuntary splicing?”

“Of course,” Farkas said. “So what?”

“But who would do that to—”

“This was in the Free State of Kazakhstan, which you’ve never heard of. It was one of the new countries formed out of the Soviet Union, which you’ve also probably never heard of, after the Breakup. My father was Hungarian consul at Tashkent. He was killed in the Breakup and my mother, who was pregnant, was volunteered for the experiments in prenatal genetic surgery then being carried out in that city under Chinese auspices. A lot of remarkable work was done there in those years. They were trying to breed new and useful kinds of human beings to serve the new republic. I was one of the experiments in extending the human perceptual range. I was supposed to have normal sight plus blindsight, but I didn’t quite work out that way.”

“You sound very calm about it,” Juanito said.

“What good is getting angry?”

“My father used to say that too,” Juanito said. “Don’t get angry, get even. He was in politics, the Central American Empire. When the revolution failed he took sanctuary here.”

“So did the surgeon who did my prenatal splice,” Farkas said. “Fifteen years ago. He’s still living here.”

“Of course,” Juanito said, as everything fell into place.

“The man’s name is Wu Fang-shui,” Juanito said. “He’d be about 75 years old, Chinese, and that’s all I know, except there’ll be a lot of money in finding him. There can’t be that many Chinese on Valparaiso, right?”

“He won’t still be Chinese,” Kluge said.

Delilah said, “He might not even still be a he.”

“I’ve thought of that,” said Juanito. “All the same, it ought to be possible to trace him.”

“Who you going to use for the trace?” Kluge asked.

Juanito gave him a steady stare. “Going to do it myself.”

“You?”

“Me, myself. Why the hell not?”

“You never did a trace, did you?”

“There’s always a first,” Juanito said, still staring.

He thought he knew why Kluge was poking at him. A certain quantity of the business done on Valparaiso involved finding people who had hidden themselves here and selling them to their pursuers, but up till now Juanito had stayed away from that side of the profession. He earned his money by helping dinkos go underground on Valparaiso, not by selling people out. One reason for that was that nobody yet had happened to offer him a really profitable trace deal; but another was that he was the son of a former fugitive himself. Someone had been hired to do a trace on his own father seven years back, which was how his father had come to be assassinated. Juanito preferred to work the sanctuary side of things.

He was also a professional, though. He was in the business of providing service, period. If he didn’t find the runaway gene surgeon for Farkas, somebody else would. And Farkas was his client. Juanito felt it was important to do things in a professional way.

“If I run into problems,” he said, “I might subcontract. In the meanwhile I just thought I’d let you know, in case you happened to stumble on a lead. I’ll pay finders’ fees. And you know it’ll be good money.”

“Wu Fang-shui,” Kluge said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Me too,” said Delilah.

“Hell,” Juanito said. “How many people are there on Valparaiso all together? Maybe nine hundred thousand? I can think of fifty right away who can’t possibly be the guy I’m looking for. That narrows the odds some. What I have to do is just go on narrowing, right? Right?”

In fact he didn’t feel very optimistic. He was going to do his best; but the whole system on Valparaiso was heavily weighted in favor of helping those who wanted to hide stay hidden.

Even Farkas realized that. “The privacy laws here are very strict, aren’t they?”

With a smile Juanito said, “They’re just about the only laws we have, you know? The sacredness of sanctuary. It is the compassion of El Supremo that has turned Valparaiso into a place of refuge for fugitives of all sorts, and we are not supposed to interfere with the compassion of El Supremo.”

“Which is very expensive compassion, I understand.”

“Very. Sanctuary fees are renewable annually. Anyone who harms a permanent resident who is living here under the compassion of El Supremo is bringing about a reduction in El Supremo’s annual income, you see? Which doesn’t sit well with the Generalissimo.”

They were in the Villanueva Cafe, E Spoke. They had been touring Valparaiso all day long, back and forth from rim to hub, going up one spoke and down the other. Farkas said he wanted to experience as much of Valparaiso as he could. Not to see; to experience. He was insatiable, prowling around everywhere, gobbling it all up, soaking it in. Farkas had never been to one of the satellite worlds before. It amazed him, he said, that there were forests and lakes here, broad fields of wheat and rice, fruit orchards, herds of goats and cattle. Apparently he had expected the place to be nothing more than a bunch of aluminum struts and grim concrete boxes with everybody living on food pills, or something. People from Earth never seemed to comprehend that the larger satellite worlds were comfortable places with blue skies, fleecy clouds, lovely gardens, handsome buildings of steel and brick and glass.

Farkas said, “How do you go about tracing a fugitive, then?”

“There are always ways. Everybody knows somebody who knows something about someone. Information is bought here the same way compassion is.”

“From the Generalissimo?” Farkas said, startled.

“From his officials, sometimes. If done with great care. Care is important, because lives are at risk. There are also couriers who have information to sell. We all know a great deal that we are not supposed to know.”

“I suppose you know a great many fugitives by sight, yourself?”

“Some,” Juanito said. “You see that man, sitting by the window?” He frowned. “I don’t know, can you see him? To me he looks around 60, bald head, thick lips, no chin?”

“I see him, yes. He looks a little different to me.”

“I bet he does. He ran a swindle at one of the Luna domes, sold phony stock in an offshore monopoly fund that didn’t exist, fifty million Capbloc dollars. He pays plenty to live here. This one here—you see? With the blonde woman?—an embezzler, that one, very good with computers, reamed a bank in Singapore for almost its entire capital. Him over there, he pretended to be Pope. Can you believe that? Everybody in Rio de Janeiro did.”

“Wait a minute,” Farkas said. “How do I know you’re not making all this up?”

“You don’t,” Juanito said amiably. “But I’m not.”

“So we just sit here like this and you expose the identities of three fugitives to me free of charge?”

“It wouldn’t be free,” Juanito said, “if they were people you were looking for.”

“What if they were? And my claiming to be looking for a Wu Fang-shui just a cover?”

“You aren’t looking for any of them,” Juanito said.

“No,” said Farkas. “I’m not.” He sipped his drink, something green and cloudy. “How come these men haven’t done a better job of concealing their identities?” he asked.

“They think they have,” said Juanito.

Getting leads was a slow business, and expensive. Juanito left Farkas to wander the spokes of Valparaiso on his own, and headed off to the usual sources of information: his father’s friends, other couriers, and even the headquarters of the Unity Party, El Supremo’s grass-roots organization, where it wasn’t hard to find someone who knew something and had a price for it. Juanito was cautious. Middle-aged Chinese gentleman I’m trying to locate, he said. Why? Nobody asked. Could be any reason, anything from wanting to blow him away on contract to handing him a million Capbloc-dollar lottery prize that he had won last year on New Yucatan. Nobody asked for reasons on Valparaiso.

There was a man named Federigo who had been with Juanito’s father in the Costa Rica days who knew a woman who knew a man who had a freemartin neuter companion who had formerly belonged to someone high up in the Census Department. There were fees to pay at every step of the way, but it was Farkas’ money, what the hell, and by the end of the week Juanito had access to the immigration data stored on golden megachips somewhere in the depths of the hub. The data down there wasn’t going to provide anybody with Wu Fang-shui’s phone number. But what it could tell Juanito, and did, eight hundred callaghanos later, was how many ethnic Chinese were living on Valparaiso and how long ago they had arrived.

“There are nineteen of them altogether,” he reported to Farkas. “Eleven of them are women.”

“So? Changing sex is no big deal,” Farkas said.

“Agreed. The women are all under 50, though. The oldest of the men is 62. The longest that any of them has been on Valparaiso is nine years.”

“Would you say that rules them all out? Age can be altered just as easily as sex.”

“But date of arrival can’t be, so far as I know. And you say that your Wu Fang-shui came here fifteen years back. Unless you’re wrong about that, he can’t be any of those Chinese. Your Wu Fang-shui, if he isn’t dead by now, has signed up for some other racial mix, I’d say.”

“He isn’t dead,” Farkas said.

“You sure of that?”

“He was still alive three months ago, and in touch with his family on Earth. He’s got a brother in Tashkent.”

“Shit,” Juanito said. “Ask the brother what name he’s going under up here, then.”

“We did. We couldn’t get it.”

“Ask him harder.”

“We asked him too hard,” said Farkas. “Now the information isn’t available any more. Not from him, anyway.”

Juanito checked out the nineteen Chinese, just to be certain. It didn’t cost much and it didn’t take much time, and there was always the chance that Dr. Wu had cooked his immigration data somehow. But the quest led nowhere. Juanito found six of them all in one shot, playing some Chinese game in a social club in the town of Havana de Cuba on Spoke B, and they went right on laughing and pushing the little porcelain counters around while he stood there kibitzing. They didn’t act like sanctuarios. They were all shorter than Juanito, too, which meant either that they weren’t Dr. Wu, who was tall for a Chinese, or that Dr. Wu had been willing to have his legs chopped down by fifteen centimeters for the sake of a more efficient disguise. It was possible but it wasn’t too likely.

The other thirteen were all much too young or too convincingly female or too this or too that. Juanito crossed them all off his list. From the outset he hadn’t thought Wu would still be Chinese, anyway.

He kept on looking. One trail went cold, and then another, and then another. By now he was starting to think Dr. Wu must have heard that a man with no eyes was looking for him, and had gone even deeper underground, or off Valparaiso entirely. Juanito paid a friend at the hub spaceport to keep watch on departure manifests for him. Nothing came of that. Then someone reminded him that there was a colony of old-time hard-core sanctuary types living in and around the town of El Mirador on Spoke D, people who had a genuine aversion to being bothered. He went there. Because he was known to be the son of a murdered fugitive himself, nobody hassled him: he of all people wouldn’t be likely to be running a trace, would he?

The visit yielded no directly useful result. He couldn’t risk asking questions and nothing was showing on the surface. But he came away with the strong feeling that El Mirador was the answer.

“Take me there,” Farkas said.

“I can’t do that. It’s a low-profile town. Strangers aren’t welcome. You’ll stick out like a dinosaur.”

“Take me,” Farkas repeated.

“If Wu’s there and he gets even a glimpse of you, he’ll know right away that there’s a contract out for him and he’ll vanish so fast you won’t believe it.”

“Take me to El Mirador,” said Farkas. “It’s my money, isn’t it?”

“Right,” Juanito said. “Let’s go to El Mirador.”

El Mirador was midway between hub and rim on its spoke. There were great glass windows punched in its shield that provided a colossal view of all the rest of Valparaiso and the stars and the sun and the moon and the Earth and everything. A solar eclipse was going on when Juanito and Farkas arrived: the Earth was plastered right over the sun with nothing but one squidge of hot light showing down below like a diamond blazing on a golden ring. Purple shadows engulfed the town, deep and thick, a heavy velvet curtain falling over everything.

Juanito tried to describe what he saw. Farkas made an impatient brushing gesture.

“I know, I know. I feel it in my teeth.” They stood on a big peoplemover escalator leading down into the town plaza. “The sun is long and thin right now, like the blade of an axe. The Earth has six sides, each one glowing a different color.”

Juanito gaped at the eyeless man in amazement.

“Wu is here,” Farkas said. “Down there, in the plaza. I feel his presence.”

“From five hundred meters away?”

“Come with me.”

“What do we do if he really is?”

“Are you armed?”

“I have a spike, yes.”

“Good. Tune it to shock, and don’t use it at all if you can help it. I don’t want you to hurt him in any way.”

“I understand. You want to kill him yourself, in your own sweet time.”

“Just be careful not to hurt him,” Farkas said. “Come on.”

It was an old-fashioned-looking town, cobblestone plaza, little cafes around its perimeter and a fountain in the middle. About ten thousand people lived there and it seemed as if they were all out in the plaza sipping drinks and watching the eclipse. Juanito was grateful for the eclipse. No one paid any attention to them as they came floating down the peoplemover and strode into the plaza. Hell of a thing, he thought. You walk into town with a man with no eyes walking right behind you and nobody even notices. But when the sunshine comes back on it may be different.

“There he is,” Farkas whispered. “To the left, maybe fifty meters, sixty.”

Juanito peered through the purple gloom at the plazafront cafe beyond the next one. A dozen or so people were sitting in small groups at curbside tables under iridescent fiberglass awnings, drinking, chatting, taking it easy. Just another casual afternoon in good old cozy El Mirador on sleepy old Valparaiso.

Farkas stood sideways to keep his strange face partly concealed. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “Wu is the one sitting by himself at the front table.”

“The only one sitting alone is a woman, maybe 50, 55 years old, long reddish hair, big nose, dowdy clothes ten years out of fashion.”

“That’s Wu.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“It’s possible to retrofit your body to make it look entirely different on the outside. You can’t change the non-visual information, the stuff I pick up by blindsight. What Dr. Wu looked like to me, the last time I saw him, was a cubical block of black metal polished bright as a mirror, sitting on top of a pyramid-shaped copper-colored pedestal. I was nine years old then, but I promised myself I wouldn’t ever forget what he looked like, and I haven’t. That’s what the person sitting over there by herself looks like.”

Juanito stared. He still saw a plain-looking woman in a rumpled old-fashioned suit. They did wonders with retrofitting these days, he knew: they could make almost any sort of body grow on you, like clothing on a clothesrack, by fiddling with your DNA. But still Juanito had trouble thinking of that woman over there as a sinister Chinese gene-splicer in disguise, and he had even more trouble seeing her as a polished cube sitting on top of a coppery pyramid.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked.

“Let’s go over and sit down alongside her. Keep that spike of yours ready. But I hope you don’t use it.”

“If we put the arm on her and she’s not Wu,” Juanito said, “it’s going to get me in a hell of a lot of trouble, particularly if she’s paying El Supremo for sanctuary. Sanctuary people get very stuffy when their privacy is violated. You’ll be expelled and I’ll be fined a fortune and a half and I might wind up getting expelled too, and then what?”

“That’s Dr. Wu,” Farkas said. “Watch him react when he sees me, and then you’ll believe it.”

“We’ll still be violating sanctuary. All he has to do is yell for the police.”

“We need to make it clear to him right away,” said Farkas, “that that would be a foolish move. You follow?”

“But I don’t hurt him,” Juanito said.

“No. Not in any fashion. You simply demonstrate a willingness to hurt him if it should become necessary. Let’s go, now. You sit down first, ask politely if it’s okay for you to share the table, make some comment about the eclipse. I’ll come over maybe thirty seconds after you. All clear? Good. Go ahead, now.”

“You have to be insane,” the red-haired woman said. But she was sweating in an astonishing way and her fingers were knotting together like anguished snakes. “I’m not any kind of doctor and my name isn’t Wu or Fu or whatever you said, and you have exactly two seconds to get away from me.” She seemed unable to take her eyes from Farkas’ smooth blank forehead. Farkas didn’t move. After a moment she said in a different tone of voice, “What kind of thing are you, anyway?”

She isn’t Wu, Juanito decided.

The real Wu wouldn’t have asked a question like that. Besides, this was definitely a woman. She was absolutely convincing around the jaws, along the hairline, the soft flesh behind her chin. Women were different from men in all those places. Something about her wrists. The way she sat. A lot of other things. There weren’t any genetic surgeons good enough to do a retrofit this convincing. Juanito peered at her eyes, trying to see the place where the Chinese fold had been, but there wasn’t a trace of it. Her eyes were blue-gray. All Chinese had brown eyes, didn’t they?

Farkas said, leaning in close and hard, “My name is Victor Farkas, Doctor. I was born in Tashkent during the Breakup. My mother was the wife of the Hungarian consul, and you did a genesplice job on the fetus she was carrying. That was your specialty, tectogenetic reconstruction. You don’t remember that? You deleted my eyes and gave me blindsight instead, Doctor.”

The woman looked down and away. Color came to her cheeks. Something heavy seemed to be stirring within her. Juanito began to change his mind. Maybe there really were some gene surgeons who could do a retrofit this good, he thought.

“None of this is true,” she said. “You’re simply a lunatic. I can show you who I am. I have papers. You have no right to harass me like this.”

“I don’t want to hurt you in any way, Doctor.”

“I am not a doctor.”

“Could you be a doctor again? For a price?”

Juanito swung around, astounded, to look at Farkas.

“I will not listen to this,” the woman said. “You will go away from me this instant or I summon the patrol.”

Farkas said, “We have a project, Dr. Wu. My engineering group, a division of a corporation whose name I’m sure you know. An experimental spacedrive, the first interstellar voyage, faster-than-light travel. We’re three years away from a launch.”

The woman rose. “This madness does not interest me.”

“The faster-than-light field distorts vision,” Farkas went on. He didn’t appear to notice that she was standing and looked about ready to bolt. “It disrupts vision entirely, in fact. Perception becomes totally abnormal. A crew with normal vision wouldn’t be able to function in any way. But it turns out that someone with blindsight can adapt fairly easily to the peculiar changes that the field induces.”

“I have no interest in hearing about—”

“It’s been tested, actually. With me as the subject. But I can’t make the voyage alone. We have a crew of five and they’ve volunteered for tectogenetic retrofits to give them what I have. We don’t know anyone else who has your experience in that area. We’d like you to come out of retirement, Dr. Wu. We’ll set up a complete lab for you on a nearby satellite world, whatever equipment you need. And pay you very well. And insure your safety all the time you’re gone from Valparaiso. What do you say?”

The red-haired woman was trembling and slowly backing away.

“No,” she said. “It was such a long time ago. Whatever skills I had, I have forgotten, I have buried.”

So Farkas was right all along, Juanito thought.

“You can give yourself a refresher course. I don’t think it’s possible really to forget a gift like yours, do you?” Farkas said.

“No. Please. Let me be.”

Juanito was amazed at how cockeyed his whole handle on the situation had been from the start.

Farkas didn’t seem at all angry with the gene surgeon. He hadn’t come here for vengeance, Juanito realized. Just to cut a deal.

“Where’s he going?” Farkas said suddenly. “Don’t let him get away, Juanito.”

The woman—Wu—was moving faster now, not quite running but sidling away at a steady pace, back into the enclosed part of the cafe. Farkas gestured sharply and Juanito began to follow. The spike he was carrying could deliver a stun-level jolt at fifteen paces. But he couldn’t just spike her down in this crowd, not if she had sanctuary protection, not in El Mirador of all places.

There’d be fifty sanctuarios on top of him in a minute. They’d grab him and club him and sell his foreskin to the Generalissimo’s men for two and a half callies.

The cafe was crowded and dark. Juanito caught sight of her somewhere near the back, near the restrooms. Go on, he thought. Go into the ladies’ room. I’ll follow you right in there. I don’t give a damn about that.

But she went past the restrooms and ducked into an alcove near the kitchen instead. Two waiters laden with trays came by, scowling at Juanito to get out of the way. It took him a moment to pass around them, and by then he could no longer see the red-haired woman. He knew he was going to have big trouble with Farkas if he lost her in here. Farkas was going to have a fit. Farkas would try to stiff him on this week’s pay, most likely. Two thousand callies down the drain, not even counting the extra charges.

Then a hand reached out of the shadows and seized his wrist with surprising ferocity. He was dragged a little way into a claustrophobic games room dense with crackling green haze coming from some bizarre machine on the far wall. The red-haired woman glared at him, wild-eyed. “He wants to kill me, doesn’t he? That’s all bullshit about having me do retrofit operations, right?”

“I think he means it,” Juanito said.

“Nobody would volunteer to have his eyes replaced with blindsight.”

“How would I know? People do all sorts of crazy things. But if he wanted to kill you I think he’d have operated differently when we tracked you down.”

“He’ll get me off Valparaiso and kill me somewhere else.”

“I don’t know,” Juanito said. “I was just doing a job.”

“How much did he pay you to do the trace?” Savagely. “How much? I know you’ve got a spike in your pocket. Just leave it there and answer me. How much?”

“Three thousand callies a week,” Juanito muttered, padding things a little.

“I’ll give you five to help me get rid of him.”

Juanito hesitated. Sell Farkas out? He didn’t know if he could turn himself around that fast. Was it the professional thing to do, to take a higher bid?

“Eight,” he said, after a moment.

Why the hell not? He didn’t owe Farkas any loyalty. This was a sanctuary world; the compassion of El Supremo entitled Wu to protection here. It was every citizen’s duty. And eight thousand callies was a big bundle.

“Six five,” Wu said.

“Eight. Handshake right now. You have your glove?”

The woman who was Wu made a muttering sound and pulled out her flex terminal. “Account 1133,” Juanito said, and they made the transfer of funds. “How do you want to do this?” Juanito asked.

“There is a passageway into the outer shell just behind this cafe. You will catch sight of me slipping in there and the two of you will follow me. When we are all inside and he is coming toward me, you get behind him and take him down with your spike. And we leave him buried in there.” There was a frightening gleam in Wu’s eyes. It was almost as if the cunning retrofit body was melting away and the real Wu beneath was emerging, moment by moment. “You understand?” Wu said. A fierce, blazing look. “I have bought you, boy. I expect you to stay bought when we are in the shell. Do you understand me? Do you? Good.”

It was like a huge crawlspace entirely surrounding the globe that was El Mirador. Around the periphery of the double shell was a deep layer of lunar slag held in place by centrifugal forces, the tailings left over after the extraction of the gases and minerals that the satellite world had needed in its construction. On top of that was a low open area for the use of maintenance workers, lit by a trickle of light from a faint line of incandescent bulbs; and overhead was the inner skin of El Mirador itself, shielded by the slagpile from any surprises that might come ricocheting in from the void. Juanito was able to move almost upright within the shell, but Farkas, following along behind, had to bend double, scuttling like a crab.

“Can you see him yet?” Farkas asked.

“Somewhere up ahead, I think. It’s pretty dark in here.”

“Is it?”

Juanito saw Wu edging sideways, moving slowly around behind Farkas now. In the dimness Wu was barely visible, the shadow of a shadow. He had scooped up two handfuls of tailings. Evidently he was going to fling them at Farkas to attract his attention, and when Farkas turned toward Wu it would be Juanito’s moment to nail him with the spike.

Juanito stepped back to a position near Farkas’ left elbow. He slipped his hand into his pocket and touched the cool sleek little weapon. The intensity stud was down at the lower end, shock level, and without taking the spike from his pocket he moved the setting up to lethal. Wu nodded. Juanito began to draw the spike.

Suddenly Farkas roared like a wild creature. Juanito grunted in shock, stupefied by that terrible sound. This is all going to go wrong, he realized. A moment later Farkas whirled and seized him around the waist and swung him as if he was a throwing-hammer, hurling him through the air and sending him crashing with tremendous impact into Wu’s midsection. Wu crumpled, gagging and puking, with Juanito sprawled stunned on top of him. Then the lights went out—Farkas must have reached up and yanked the conduit loose—and then Juanito found himself lying with his face jammed down into the rough floor of tailings. Farkas was holding him down with a hand clamped around the back of his neck and a knee pressing hard against his spine. Wu lay alongside him, pinned the same way.

“Did you think I couldn’t see him sneaking up on me?” Farkas asked. “Or you, going for your spike? It’s 360 degrees, the blindsight. Something that Dr. Wu must have forgotten. All these years on the run, I guess you start to forget things.”

Jesus, Juanito thought. Couldn’t even get the drop on a blind man from behind him. And now he’s going to kill me. What a stupid way to die this is.

He imagined what Kluge might say about this, if he knew. Or Delilah. Nattathaniel. Decked by a blind man.

But he isn’t blind. He isn’t blind. He isn’t blind at all.

Farkas said, “How much did you sell me to him for, Juanito?”

The only sound Juanito could make was a muffled moan. His mouth was choked with sharp bits of slag.

“How much? Five thousand? Six?”

“It was eight,” said Wu quietly.

“At least I didn’t go cheaply,” Farkas murmured. He reached into Juanito’s pocket and withdrew the spike. “Get up,” he said. “Both of you. Stay close together. If either of you makes a funny move I’ll kill you both. Remember that I can see you very clearly. I can also see the door through which we entered the shell. That starfish-looking thing over there, with streamers of purple light pulsing from it. We’re going back into El Mirador now, and there won’t be any surprises, will there? Will there?”

Juanito spit out a mouthful of slag. He didn’t say anything.

“Dr. Wu? The offer still stands,” Farkas continued. “You come with me, you do the job we need you for. That isn’t so bad, considering what I could do to you for what you did to me. But all I want from you is your skills, and that’s the truth. You are going to need that refresher course, aren’t you, though?”

Wu muttered something indistinct.

Farkas said, “You can practice on this boy, if you like. Try retrofitting him for blindsight first, and if it works, you can do our crew people, all right? He won’t mind. He’s terribly curious about the way I see things, anyway. Aren’t you, Juanito? Eh? Eh?” Farkas laughed. To Juanito he said, “If everything works out the right way, maybe we’ll let you go on the voyage with us, boy.” Juanito felt the cold nudge of the spike in his back. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? The first trip to the stars? What do you say to that, Juanito?”

Juanito didn’t answer. His tongue was still rough with slag. With Farkas prodding him from behind, he shambled slowly along next to Dr. Wu toward the door that Farkas said looked like a starfish. It didn’t look at all like a fish to him, or a star, or like a fish that looked like a star. It looked like a door to him, as far as he could tell by the feeble light of the distant bulbs. That was all it looked like, a door that looked like a door. Not a star. Not a fish. But there was no use thinking about it, or anything else, not now, not with Farkas nudging him between the shoulderblades with his own spike. He let his mind go blank and kept on walking.

Content

Blindsight
by Robert Silverberg