Quibble, 57. Glyph

Quibble leads the helpless Alnasl through the Waste.

57. Glyph @Quibble

Not only memory had gone. The vision was all but sightless.

I discovered this when, steering us north along the east side of the dunes as he had told me to do, I gave Alnasl a landmark.

“We’re heading for that clump of pinyon pines,” I said, pointing.

Then I strode ahead. I glanced back a minute or so later to be sure he was keeping up. He’d strayed off our path and was now wandering downhill, east, towards the salt pan. I hurried after him. When I caught him up and told him to stop, he turned little more than half towards me and stared off into the distance to my left. I pictured Nemo in the Vale of Teeth, half-turned on the path, listening for the steps of my horse.

I wished then that I had paid closer attention to Nemo. While I parsed out the boy’s history and played psychological games with him, I should have been watching him and learning something about blindness.

I laid my hand on Alnasl’s chest. He turned fully to face me. I held the yinman up between us. “What is this?” I asked.

No answer.

“What shape is it? What color?”

“Blue,” he said, but he didn’t guess at the shape.

“Light blue or dark blue?”

Again, no answer. It was still early in the day and the sun was far from noon, so I said, “Look up, straight up. Now what do you see? Light or dark blue?”

“It’s blue.”

The vision could see only primary colors. With more experimentation, I learned that, without his amber glass, his visual acuity at distance was now no better than it had always been within arm’s reach. Nothing would resolve into a distinct shape.

Over the next day and more, I led him by the hand up and down the flanks of the long dunes along the western rim of the Sen-an-dah. Anytime we stopped to gather food, dig for water, build a fire, or eat, he wanted to walk on. I had difficulty stopping him. Sometimes he understood my commands, sometimes not. After he tried twice to walk off without me, I knotted together the two lengths of Nemo’s cord – I was grateful I’d somehow kept them – and tethered Alnasl to me, wrist to wrist. He never tried to free himself. With patience, I taught him to stop when I did, to sit still while I worked.

Between his amnesia and figure-blindness, the Zero was every bit as helpless as One in the Small Spiral. Now I understood Zubana’s shortness with me. At least Alnasl posed no esoteric questions about the necessity of physical bodies!