Velocity

Blind Eyes

Tamara knew the giant would kill her if he caught up. He chased her on the dark beach, each heavy step leaving a crater in the wet sand. He was wired on a handful of blur, synthetic blue crystals that looked a little like drain-cleaner. The side effect that gave the drug its name made his eyes water profusely, which was the only reason Tamara still lived.

Overhead the clouds hid the moon and most of the stars. Far away across the ocean lights gleamed along the coast marking the outskirts of New Havana, Cuba’s largest city. The waves coming up over the reefs and splashing the sand had a phosphorescent glow to them, the ghostly nimbus from plankton blooms that touches the waters of the Caribbean during certain times of the year.

As her feet slapped against the dark sand and popped the bulbs of marooned clumps of seaweed, small crabs scuttled about hoping for food. Tamara was blind, even more blind than the wired-up nine-foot tall giant that murderously hunted her. Her closed eyelids looked normal, there was even the semblance of long dark lashes, but beneath these lids she had no eyes at all. The genes for her optical organs and the brain sections that processed the input from the optical nerves had been deleted, as that left more room in her skull for other things.

She sensed the crabs at her feet, moving objects of a particular shape and size, at a certain location and depth. They had no color or shading, and except for their heat signature, they looked the same to her at midnight or high noon. Tamara perceived the crabs, rather than saw them, just as she perceived the giant.

He was behind her, over a hundred yards away in the dark. She sensed the foaming seawater that rushed over his heavy boots. She watched his huge heart pound with deliberate liquid motions in his vast chest.

Doctor Sato had been right, of course. He had bought her as an embryo from Tyro Labs, and he was the closest thing to a father that she had. He had told her to leave matters at the schools alone. She had not listened, she had used her job as an instructor to find the kids who needed help, to reach into their minds and tug here, to pluck there. She had removed the need they had for blur and other drugs, or at least neutralized it.

Things might not have gone so badly if she had stopped there. If sales had just gone down, the pushers would have been baffled, but not enraged. At least, they would not have had a direction for their anger, and would have been likely to turn it on themselves.

Yes, if she had stopped there, things might have worked out. But she hadn’t.

She was getting tired. She knew that just running was not going to work. The giant was half-blind and in the dark, but he carefully used what little myopic vision he had left, tracking her footsteps in the sand. He lost her now and again, as he had back in the village and the jungle, but always regained her trail. His stamina was boundless, he had the muscle density of a gorilla and had sunken deeply into the berserk rage that engulfed all the giants so easily, especially when they indulged in blur crystals.

It was this last genetic flaw, that when discovered, had finally moved the Office of Social Blending to enact strict regulations. They had essentially outlawed private gene-programming. Gene-shops had long profited from anxious couples. They promised prospective parents the tailor-made child of their dreams. Many sports fans had desired a big beefy son for football or boxing. Once the competition for the best growth programming got started, the free-market and the one-upsmanship tendencies of people everywhere took care of the rest. The modern giants were the result, a highly-publicized and frightening racial subgroup all their own. Every sports team had to have them, every celebrity had to have a bodyguard big enough to match his ego. They did airline and beer commercials, had a high rate of suicide and tended to extremes of violence when intoxicated.

To this day, despite the laws, in the dark corners of the globe more zygotes were poked and prodded, more poverty-stricken women moaned through emergency C-sections, and more giants were born. Tamara reached the place where the hammock and the lantern hung together on a nail sunk into the bark of a tall palm and turned into the forest.

As she had tried to tell Doctor Sato, she had done it for the children. It was not enough to stop the pushers in just her little town, in just the school where she taught. She wanted to strike directly at the people who had harmed the children. She wanted to do more than interrupt their cash-flow and sour their profits.

What had been wonderful was that she had succeeded, for a time. Suddenly the pushers hadn’t wanted to push anymore. Some of them had even turned in their colleagues, all that they knew of, to the DEA. But it had been the others, the secret ones, the ones that hid and watched, who had discovered her. Tamara hadn’t known about them, hadn’t been suspicious enough to spy every mind behind every pair of eyes that watched her.

She shuddered just to think of their minds. To touch their squirming thoughts left her disgusted, as if she had touched a sea-reptile steeped in slippery bottom-muck.

She had not suspected them, because the secret ones had been children.

Only fifty yards behind now, the giant turned after her, ripping loose the hammock from its moorings as he strode beneath the palms. He pulled it away from his chest like a cobweb and fumbled through the trees in the dark, his eyes watering and blinking.

Tamara, panting with panic and fatigue now, rushed through the humid bug-filled darkness. She crashed in the undergrowth that grew in density as she left the beach behind. Ahead, she thought to make out the tingling heat-radiance of artificial light.

Then her feet found a trail winding into the interior, and she began to run, haltingly, hands stretched out before her in case her perception failed to pick up a hanging vine or branch. Big soft leaves from jungle plants struck at her, soft as pillows. Cord-like roots sought to loop around her ankles. She stepped on some squishy, unwholesome thing in the dark and gave a small breathless shriek.

After the secret ones had discovered her identity, the assassins had come. They had been easy to spot and divert at first, until the third one, the giant that trailed her now. His mind was unreachable, a blank gray wall of impregnable brick, hidden behind a dense fog of blur dust. She had no idea who he was or where he had come from and as a natural empath, this was a concept that terrified her. For her he had no more humanity than a machine. A killing machine.

Ahead the shape of the hut was unmistakable. Inside she perceived movement, although it was muffled and vague through the adobe walls. She stumbled over the half-step in front of the door and tried the latch. It was locked, so she hammered on the ancient mahogany door.

“Doctor Sato, let me in,” she hissed up close to the door, reluctant to give the giant any sounds to follow. She could hear the giant in the jungle behind her, some ways off, crashing through the vegetation like a power shovel.

The door swung inward and she stumbled inside, the bright radiance of a lantern and the dim glow of a computer terminal flaring up like new radar contacts in her mind. Doctor Sato was there too, his mind surprised, concerned and fearful. “Tamara, what have you got yourself into now, girl?” he asked, reaching out with his hairy knuckled hands and guiding her gently into the shelter of the hut. He was a short brown man with a wide soft belly and a balding scalp. His dimensions reminded Tamara of a life-sized toy bear.

“We’ve got to run,” Tamara whispered hoarsely, her breath burning in her lungs. “Another assassin has found me, and it’s a giant this time,” here she shook her head, her long dark hair falling into her face and sticking to her sweaty skin. “We’ve got to run.”

“A giant?” he said in disbelief. Tamara sensed Sato’s heart quickening in his chest, but could not see his eyes widen with fear nor the way his mouth sagged with dismay. She felt the fear in his mind though, and she felt vaguely sick at having brought all this back to him, at having burdened him with her plight, but she had nowhere else to turn.

“Let’s go then,” he said, his grip closing around her wrist. He led her through the room, slamming the mahogany door shut behind them and throwing the bolt. He paused only to snatch up some data-capsules and turn off the bio-processor, a reflex. He fumbled with the latch on the backdoor for a moment and the stupid little hook that held the screen door shut stopped them for precious seconds. For some reason, he didn’t think immediately of forcing it. He was sixty-two, and running for his life was something new.

Behind them, something huge and ponderous pushed through the overgrown walk way and up to the mahogany door. The latch rattled, then there was a heavy thud. The hinges groaned and splinters sprayed away from the doorjamb. Together, Tamara and Sato hit the backdoor with their bodies and it popped open easily, swinging wide and smacking into the wall.

Tamara saw a startled iguana scuttle away into the jungle. Her mind automatically tracked the reptile’s movement even though it was hidden in the underbrush.

Visible on the driveway was the cool metallic form of Sato’s ATV. Hope blossomed in Tamara’s heart at its image appeared in her mind. They scrambled to the car and released the hatches, climbing inside. For a few tense seconds Sato fumbled through his clothes pockets for the keys while back in the hut the giant wreaked great destruction, smashing everything in reach of his huge hands.

“Come on!” cried Tamara, feeling hot tears welling from her empty eye sockets. She could feel the raw burning terror in Sato’s mind as well as experiencing her own.

Finally, he tugged the clattering bundle of codekeys from his breast pocket where they had been all along and slammed one of the coded cylinders into the ignition. The engine flared into life, Sato threw it into gear and slammed down the power rod. With a tortured growl, the ATV leapt forward on the unpaved road, big balloon tires churning up wet dirt. Tamara sensed the giant had made his way out the backdoor of the hut, following them. His arms swung like a catapult heaving a boulder. An object zoomed out of the dark at them and she screamed. She sensed it as it overtook them from behind.

“What-” began Sato, then the object struck the back window and caromed off, crashing into the jungle. The object had been Sato’s bio-processor.

The back window shattered. A spray of glass shards hit them both and Sato almost drove into a mangrove tree. Tamara was so relieved she almost laughed aloud.

“I thought maybe it was a grenade,” she said.

Sato nodded while he fought the wheel and got them back on the road. They bounced along at a demonic pace, both of them laughing with relieved tension. There was no way the giant would catch them now.

The jungle plants slashed at the ATV as they passed, lashing inward and depositing shreds of cool leaves through the hole in the back window.

After a moment Sato laughed too. Behind them, if she reached out with her mind, she could sense the giant, running after them down the jungle lane. His arms and legs pumped in rhythm with his huge galloping heart. They were rapidly outdistancing him, but he didn’t slow, he wasn’t giving up. She watched the pistons churn and flare with heat under the ATV’s hood. The two of them didn’t talk much on the way back to the city.

The next day they sat together in Sato’s office at the university. Around them were the usual accouterments of the college science professor, including an antique desk, lost beneath a blizzard of flimsy plastic scrolls. Resting atop the scrolls was a dusty Mars-rock, gathered on a summer school expedition fifteen years back. The ubiquitous bio-processor sat in the midst of it all, hooked to a venerable old Steinbach CPU that sat in its chest under the desk with a tangle of optical-gel tubing poking out of the top.

“You’ll have to leave the island, Tamara,” Sato told her, raising a hand to her expected denials. “Please don’t argue. You don’t have any choice now, you can’t handle things like this monster they have trailing you. I pulled a few strings and Tyro Labs has chipped in some cash and a ticket to Berlin. From there you can easily start a new life.”

Tamara shook her head, wearily. “It would not be enough to just leave Cuba. I’ve gained the vengeful attention of international lords. I’ve thwarted people who are accustomed to bribing or crushing all opposition. There can’t be any stopping now.”

“A person can always hide, Tamara. You will have to be careful, lay low, take precautions. You must act like a normal blind person for awhile.”

“No,” she smiled, shaking her head sadly. “They know you helped me. They will come after you now as well.”

This last struck through to Sato. Tamara felt the fear blossom in him anew, a black flower planted over a shallow grave. She felt a bit sick, he was acting so brave, pretending not to be afraid. He must have known that she could read him, that he could never hide a strong emotion from her. Still though, he went on pretending, playing the brave fatherly role. She pretended too, she pretended that he could give her useful advice, that he could really help her, but he couldn’t. She was in a game beyond his experience now.

“You don’t know these people, but I do.”

“You aren’t one of them.”

“I’ve touched their minds, poppa,” she said, slipping a bit.

“You haven’t called me poppa since you were a little girl,” said Sato. For a moment he smiled.

“Listen, poppa. They don’t think like we do, they don’t feel the pain of others. They kill men the off-handed way that farmboys kill gophers.”

For once, Sato had nothing to say. Tamara reached out and closed her soft fingers over the rough skin of his hand. “They will try to kill you now, too. I know it.”

Sato was silent for a long time. Tamara, sharing his feelings intensely now that they were in physical contact, felt like weeping for him. She felt his sense of loss, of failure to her. She followed his thoughts for a time while he remembered her as his daughter. Had he not programmed much of her genetic structure? Had he not raised her, taught her his values? To not be able to help and protect her, much less himself, was difficult for him to accept. He felt old and useless.

“So, what do we do?” he asked her.

“I’m through running,” she said. Anger had begun to burn in her again, the way it had when she had felt the children in pain. Their bodies had burned on drugs, hearts beating unnaturally fast, breath hitching from their lungs. Nervous uncontrollable energy, flushed cheeks, small bright eyes surrounded by gray skin. She remembered the children.

“I will protect you, father. I can use my mind in the horrible ways that I did before. I will reach inside them and twist,” Tamara said, thinking of the things she had done to the first pushers, the ones that gladly sold blur crystals and other synthetic drugs to her second-graders. Used just the right way, her thoughts had snapped their minds like dry twigs, the way an arm or finger could be snapped by a professional.

“Before the assassins come again, I must go after them.”

Like Saint Bernard dogs that are over-bred and turn mean, the giants were genetic extremes. They had been developed for size, strength and speed only, with no regard to their mental tendencies. Quick reflexes and stamina had been lifted to their maximums, while reasoning and emotional elements had been left up to the idle whim of chance. As a result, most of them were mentally unbalanced to some degree, and nearly all of them had the capacity for a killer rage buried down deep in their genes somewhere.

When Tamara finally found the giant that had stalked her relentlessly the night before, evening had fallen once again. She found him in a nightclub downtown, a club where men and women with carefully trimmed pubic hair pranced in G-strings on a dirty stage. The glaring words LIVE SEX SHOW blinked and spun in holographic splendor over the street outside the place, switching from English to Spanish, then back again. A bum in a torn sweater and ancient blue jeans sat near the entrance, begging patrons for money or a drink. He alternately received gifts, showers of alcoholic saliva and swift kicks to the legs and chest. Whichever, he muttered gracias to everyone, even those who ignored him completely.

Inside, she found the giant at the bar, covering two stools with one leg thrown out in a leisurely fashion. Although the place was packed, he also had the immediate stools to either side free, as people tended to give giants plenty of space, even more than they needed. He hunched over a two-liter mug of draft beer, favoring his drink over the slightly overweight hooker who was doing her best to attract his attentions.

Drawing in a breath and swallowing her fear like a sharp object, Tamara walked up to the giant and touched the back of his massive hand. He turned to look down at her, and she watched with her perceptions in fascination. It was as if a statue had come to life at her touch. He looked down at her and recognition flickered across his mind. She was counting on surprise and hesitation here, and also on his supreme self-confidence. With his quick reflexes and incredible strength, he could have crushed her instantly, killing her on the spot and then fleeing the scene. But she had known a few giants, and knew that many of them were convinced of their own invulnerability.

So, when he faced her, she maintained physical contacted and mentally she gave him a shove. A very hard shove, which ran a hot bolt of pain through her head. Instead of turning into a zombie as she had expected however, she felt that his mind had merely become more suggestible, as if she had just given him a very persuasive argument when he was in a receptive mood. For a flash she almost panicked. She had given him her best shot, figuring that the difficulty she had experienced with his mind earlier had been due to the drug blur, but apparently it also had to do with his mental abilities as a giant. She had planned to simply order him outside like a robot, but instead she had to come up with something more clever. And quickly, before the effect wore off.

She did the only thing she could think of. She made him think that she was someone else. Not Tamara at all, not the girl he had been paid to kill. She dredged up the image of another girl, one she had picked up from the minds of the eighth grade boys she had taught algebra to. It was the face of a popular anchorwoman on television. Suddenly, she had blue eyes that opened, blonde hair and soft red lips.

“Would you like some company?” she heard herself ask.

His reaction for a moment convinced her that her mental shove had failed utterly. He opened her coat, brushing her breasts with fingers thick as flashlights. She shrank back reflexively while he frankly examined her body beneath. She wore a cotton jumper that did nothing to accentuate her charms, but neither did it hide the fact that she had an attractive figure.

“Sure,” he said, closing her coat again with a gentleness that belied his size. He pulled his leg off the stool to his right and ordered her a drink. Tamara climbed up on the stool, wondering what to do next. She barely noticed the hooker who thumbed her large nose at her back. After a few more drinks, Tamara suggested that they leave together, and the giant, whose name was James Billings, agreed.

They walked out into the cooling, but still humid, night air. James had to stoop down and turn sideways to get out of the door. No one had questioned his picking up a blind girl. No one had dared.

Outside it had rained. The streets were black and reflected the city lights like wavery mirrors. Storm drains gurgled and beads of water reflected like thousands of eyes off the windshields of the cars they passed. Tamara saw this through James’ eyes, she was holding his hand and understood how to move through the giant’s mind better now.

Somehow, Tamara started feeling sorry for James. He had been a victim of the same experiments that had left her sightless and- different. She felt the loneliness and alienation in him, a man but not a man. Alternately feared, hated and idolized, he was an outcast in the midst of human society. She knew that these feelings were partly due to her natural empathy with anyone she was around. She always started seeing things their way, understanding their point of view. Despite that, she still sensed that he was like her, a monster that no one really knew what to do with. Tolerated, but with poor grace.

When they reached his hotel room, she knew that she had to gain some control over him. His elemental force of personality matched his physical prowess, and he was by no means subtle. He was also becoming increasingly drunk.

“You know, Sarah,” he said, pouring her yet another drink which she would have to pour away into the bathroom sink or the planter.

“There is something different about you, something familiar.”

She knew he had seen her on the holo-net channels. She had picked a poor disguise. He thumped over to her and handed her the drink. Then he leered down at her, his warm alcoholic breath washing over her. Something in his manner, something that his mind was hiding brought her a sudden jolt of fear.

“You look just like the witch-girl I was supposed to kill last night.”

Tamara spilled her drink. Bourbon soaked quickly into her pants, spreading coolness over her thighs. He smiled at her, and took her tiny hand in his.

“You’re tricks don’t work on me, Tammy. I damned near caught you last night, but this way was much easier.”

“How…?” she gasped, fear choking her words.

“Here,” he said, grabbing her small hand up in his.

“I know all about you. Come on and read me.”

Tamara knew it was a challenge. James liked challenges, he had an ego as big as his hat-size and wanted to pit himself against her. Besides, he was half-drunk, and for a giant that meant he was close to the berserker state. Then he opened his mind to her, and she knew everything.

She knew that the giant got a thrill out of the idea of “doing her” before he killed her. He was intrigued by the idea that she might want it that way, that she would like it that way. He also had had special government training to resist empaths. In his official career he had killed nearly a hundred men, and now that he was free-lancing he would go on killing.

She did something then that she had never done in the presence of any man except for Sato. She opened her eyes. She opened her eyelids, that is, but behind them there weren’t any eyes. Instead James Billings found himself looking directly at her exposed brain cells, protected only by a milky membrane. Beyond the membrane floated living pink tissue, blood pumping through the thin squiggly lines that were arteries and veins.

James Billings opened his mouth, perhaps to laugh or perhaps to scream, but what he also did was lose his concentration. It was all the opportunity that Tamara had and she took it. She shoved as she had never shoved before. She had learned her way through his mind a bit by now, he was drunk and he was off-guard. Up close like this, she could even perceive his brain inside his thick skull. She could feel the workings of his neural network, the chemical stimuli and responses.

First, she turned him on his bosses. She sparked a tiny flame of hate, then built it up, blaming all the tragedies of James Billings’ life on them. She dredged up memories of a scared father, beating a screaming two hundred pound eight-year-old son with a shovel. She conjured his first experience with a girl, her screams, his hands squeezing the life from her afterward. Finally, she made him relive the first time he got wired on blur, the fanatical rage, the fury of the berserker. When she had turned his heart into a pounding steam-press, when his nostrils were flaring wider than a dying bull’s, she let go of him and closed her eyes. He ignored her. He pulled the closet door off the wall, reached inside and brought out a heavy combat rifle. Normal men would have to mount it on a tripod to use it, but he carried it easily in one hand. He walked through the door into the hotel hallway, not bothering to open it first. He headed for the elevators, for the penthouses fifty stories up, where the bosses were.

Lying in the wreckage behind him, Tamara wept a few tears for James Billings. Although she had no eyes, her tear ducts were in place. After a time she got up and slipped out of the hotel, before the riot police and the Special Forces teams could arrive.