And to that Bordi has no response. But Bruno fancies he can see the man rethinking his opinions about this ancient beggar, Ako’i.
Says Natan, “The idea here is to bypass the conscious parts of your brain. There’s enough intelligence in the limbic to conduct a fight, and it’s fast, so that’s where we’re going this morning. Deep inside. And in the brain stem there’s more than just reflexes. It’s your bird brain, and it’s capable of behavior as complex as any bird, and as fast. That’s where your vision is going: to the birds. Take five berries—five, mind you!—and chew them thoroughly. When you got a good paste in your mouth, swallow it down.”
The berries are smaller than Bruno’s pinkie nail, and the same bright yellow as the Dolceti’s traveling cloaks, but other than that they look like blackberries, or little bunches of grapes. Their taste is overpoweringly sweet, so much so that like the drug, it’s probably a defense mechanism to keep animals from wanting to eat them. Their texture is surprisingly dry and leathery. The paste they form in Bruno’s mouth is like syrup cut with vinegar: dense and sticky, sweetly acrid and vaguely corrosive.
“How often have you done this?” Bruno asks Zuq when he’s choked them down per instruction.
“This’ll be my tenth time. It takes five before the Order will even admit you, and two more harder ones before they’ll give you rank and let you out on assignment. Dolceti are usually older than I am, because most of them can’t handle the berry more than a couple of times a year. Me, I’ve been trying to go every month.”
“So you’re tougher even than the average Dolceti?”
“Aw, it’s not my place to say that. But I’m definitely tougher than when I started.”
“Cut the chatter,” Natan instructs. “Take the yellow pill, and wash it down with a bit of water.”
The yellow pill is tasteless and perfectly spherical. Also very small, but its texture is gritty enough that it doesn’t go down easily.
“Now the white.”
Another sphere, larger and smoother.
“You’ll begin to lose your eyesight in about two minutes. After that, the fear will set in, and Ako’i, I want you to promise not to run off on me when it does. If you can’t handle it—and there’s no shame in it; most people can’t—then just curl up on the ground and we’ll look after you. Believe it or not, you’ll still get something out of the experience.
“The idea is to turn on your amygdala, your fear. We’ll create a behavior loop that bypasses the frontal lobe. Fear’s a tool; the more threatened your limbic feels, the more your behavior follows a preset routine, like a dance step. We’re just giving it a better routine than to run around screaming, see? A higher class of irrationality. There’s a time for being rational, but it’s not when a bullet’s flying at your head.”
“You people can dodge bullets?” Bruno asks, already feeling short of breath.
“That’s what blindsight training is,” Zuq answers, sounding surprised. “Didn’t you know? Sticks, rocks, arrows… The training bullets are a special round, oversized and not that fast, but yeah, they’ll be flying right at you. You’ll swat them aside or suffer the consequences.”
This idea fills Bruno with a gnawing dread, or perhaps the drugs are doing that, but either way he finds himself wishing, suddenly and fervently, that he had never pressed Bordi to allow this. What was he thinking? Even if these bullets can’t kill him—and it’s likely that they can’t, at least by ones and twos—he could be maimed. It might be weeks before he grows back all his missing parts!
“What does the blindness do?” he asks, for in spite of everything his curiosity is unimpaired.
“It isn’t blindness,” says Natan, “it’s blindsight. The berries are shutting down your visual cortex, but your optic nerve continues on down to the brain stem. Your inner bird can see just fine, and it’s his reflexes we want. He’s the one we’re training; the conscious ‘you’ is just a passenger.”
“A blind passenger. A terrified passenger.”
“Right. Mentally tied up, to keep you out of the bird’s way.”
Bruno’s vision is turning gray and fuzzy around the edges, which terrifies him. What if something goes wrong? What if it never comes back? To be immorbid and blind…
“People experience the training differently,” says Natan. “Some feel divided, like there are several distinct… things, entities, living inside their skulls. Some people just remember it as a panic. A blind panic, literally, where they can’t control theirselves. Some remember the whole thing as a set of conscious choices, even when they know it isn’t so. Some remember nothing at all, like their frontal lobe just goes to sleep.”
“Which am I?” Bruno asks, inanely, for how could Natan possibly know that?
Then, with alarming swiftness, his vision shrinks to a tunnel, then a drinking straw. He sees a burst of swirling patterns: lace, spirals, Cartesian grids mapped onto heaving topological surfaces. His life is far too long to flash before his eyes in a moment, but he gets pieces of it: a month of mathematical insights in a Girona tower, a decade as philander in Tamra’s court, an hour in battle armor under the red-hot surface of Mercury. Then nothing at all.
Nothing at all.
Bruno de Towaji, the one-time King of Sol, is blind.
“So fast! I wasn’t… ready…”
“I’m here with you,” Zuq says, from very nearby.
“Ah!” Bruno replies, fighting not to run. “Ah, God! Can you see anything?”
“No.”
“Try and relax,” says Natan, in a voice much calmer than Zuq’s. “Fear is a tool. Just a state of your brain, which we happen to find convenient. It’s nothing to do with you, the person. Just ride it.”
“In a moment… of weakness,” Bruno tries. “I’ve never… Rarely has such a moment of weakness been… I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I can’t… compose—”
“Enough talk, old man. Defend yourself!”
Bruno swats Natan’s hand aside. “Leave me. Alone.” He swats again, and again. Natan is trying to slap him! “Stop it. Stop! Leave me alone!”
And suddenly Bruno realizes what he’s doing: blocking slaps he cannot see. His arms aren’t moving of their own volition—he’s doing it himself, or feels that he is—but the sense, the feeling, the certainty that drives them… How does he know? How does he sense the blow coming?
Block. Block. Block block.
“Good,” Natan says. “Take hold of this.”
Bruno reaches out and accepts a wooden staff from Natan. There’s no fumbling in the motion, no guesswork. He even knows the shape before he has it in his hands. He’s aware, dimly, of movement all around him, the jiggling fire, the men rolling over in their sleep, the wind gusting straight down. But he cannot see them. This “blindsight” it isn’t like seeing at all. It isn’t like feeling or hearing. He simply knows.
How terrifying.
“Defend!” Natan commands, and Bruno is raising his staff. Crack! Crack! He blocks a pair of telegraphed blows, and then a shorter, swifter one delivered like a punch. CRACK!
“Attack!” says Natan, and Bruno is too afraid to disobey. Pulling left to avoid Zuq’s fragile human skull, he whirls the staff around and Strikes! Strikes! Strikes!
“Good,” says Natan, falling back to deliver fresh blows of his own.
“What about me?” Zuq asks, from a position Bruno doesn’t have to guess at. “This was supposed to be my—”