The Curse
© 2002
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One day the entire world went blind at the same time.
No, not exactly blind. Sight wasn’t absent, but it had changed drastically. Suddenly, the people were seeing in ways they didn’t understand, and for most of them it was worse than having no sight at all. “The Curse,” as it was called, has a long and strange history, and looking at its effects on mankind tells us a lot about human nature. Sometimes it takes a life-shattering blow to show what a life is made of in the first place.
At one moment in time, every person on the face of the Earth experienced a complete and total change in his or her visual perception. Some people had been sleeping when the change came, and awoke to a world apparently gone awry. Others were just going about their business when suddenly nothing made sense anymore, and no amount of blinking, crying, or screaming fixed the problem. Still others, most notably the mystics, occultists, and theologians of the world, nodded calmly to themselves that this was a “sign” of something or another that their faith or belief system had been predicting for years. “It” had begun, whatever “it” was.
All in all, something had happened, and the people of the world no longer had the sight they’d always taken for granted. The world stopped turning.
Not literally, of course, but does it ever? People always think of events as having “stopped the world,” so to speak, but no event had ever stopped the world the way this did. No global event had ever affected every single person intimately and immediately.
When bombs were dropped, when disasters hit, when leaders were assassinated . . . the public was disturbed, the news spread through the public like wildfire, the public responded in a thousand different ways. But with this, news couldn’t even be properly spread, and no one knew at first what was going on or who it was affecting. Always before, there had been newspapers, radio broadcasts, television newscasts. With this crisis, the newspapers and signs would have been useless even if anyone had been able to see to write them, and people who normally would have been making radio broadcasts about it were having strange difficulties getting to work. News wasn’t being distributed because its distributors were also affected.
So, families huddled together, people wandered blindly in the streets trying to find something familiar, the human race collectively wondered what had happened to it. Pandemonium failed to break out for a while in some places, because people were too scared to leave their houses. Some thought it was just affecting them and the people they were with, while others were rather vocal in their limited capacity, screeching about a terrible sickness come to ravage all of mankind. No one could go about their business until someone started picking up the pieces, and most people were afraid to start.
His parents had named him Balthazar, for some reason. He didn’t know much about the origins of his name or why it was attached to him; he just knew he didn’t much like it. His elders called him by his given name, giving it a majestic sound he didn’t feel he deserved; his friends called him Zarry, which he liked because it was shorter; his parents didn’t call him at all because of their stupid vows of silence. That last bit bothered him the most, that his parents had given him his name and now they didn’t even have to say it. Despite the fact that he’d made up his mind never to become like his overly pious, superstitious parents, he was followed everywhere he went by his reputation of being a holy child, a messiah, a savior of the people. He tried to ignore it as much as possible, but deep down he did believe that he was destined for great things, and he did find a certain amount of satisfaction in some of the teachings of the elders. He just didn’t see what vows of silence, strange robes, or psychedelic mushrooms had to do with spiritual fulfillment.
Zarry was one of a small tribe of mountain-dwelling agrarians. He generally spent his mornings watching the goats, his afternoons milking the goats and churning butter, and his evenings studying with the priests. It was a more or less satisfying existence; he got his exercise, he got his fill of food, and his mind was regularly filled with knowledge. Through the books of the priests, he explored other lands and other people, and though he found them interesting and exciting, he was happy to be able to put a book down and snuggle into his hammock at night, leaving the adventures tucked safely in the pages.
Zarry loved to read about other cultures. He remembered being surprised as a child to find that his life was a very unusual one compared to the rest of the world. Much of the western world was “civilized” and urban, which was something he couldn’t imagine very well. It was thought among their own that the outsiders generally didn’t know the tribe existed. Their ways and rituals and beliefs were all unknown to the world at large. But that was all right, because the tribe was the keeper of secrets the world couldn’t handle. They were the only ones who had knowledge about the Sight.
The Sight was one of Zarry’s favorite subjects. There was a story that the world used to see a different way, a way the modern folk couldn’t currently comprehend. He personally thought it must be a legend; he didn’t think there was ever a time in history when bang, poof, suddenly everyone’s sight had changed to the “new” way. It would have been documented somewhere, unless it was so far back that no one could remember it. But it didn’t matter whether the Curse, as the tribe called it, had actually ever been visited upon mankind. Real Curse or not, Zarry knew there really were two ways of seeing. And the other one was better.
Of all the people on the Earth, Zarry’s tribe alone had developed specially-treated glass lenses that allowed them to see the way the scholars claimed humans were designed to see. The rest of humanity had never developed such an invention, partly because they didn’t know the nature of the Curse and partly because they were used to seeing the way they always had; they saw no need to change it. But children in Zarry’s tribe were raised to see both ways, and were actually required to wear the glasses for half of their daily activities. Being that they were trained from day one to see either way, their brains understood both ways instinctively, just as a baby who grows up bilingual can speak either language. A bilingual child also understands the differences between the two languages and can normally speak both flawlessly without accent; similarly, Zarry’s tribe could see both ways, live happily both ways, and even dream through the lens of either Sight.
Zarry liked to wear the glasses. The world seemed richer to him, more ordered, more full of information, more natural, when the glasses revealed the other way of looking at things. He wished that his eyes could switch automatically, and that the rest of the world could experience life in such an enjoyable way. It was hard to believe that his tribe alone, a group of people so small that he had met every one of them, could be the only people who’d seen the world as it was obviously meant to be. If other groups, other countries found out about the glasses, they’d all want them for themselves.
There were all kinds of legends and rules and dogma surrounding the story of the Sight, but the only thing that remained real to Zarry was the Sight itself. The Sight was kept from the masses through the Curse, and although he had many doubts about the stories handed down as religion through the ages, he had to admit one thing was true. In accordance with the prophecy, he was the sixth son of a sixth daughter of a sixth son. And he bore the correct physical description and had been born at the right time of year. He, Balthazar of the Oak Clan, was destined to undo the Curse and restore the Sight to humanity.
For most people, the process of recovery was very gradual. Some of them began to realize they weren’t completely blind or insane; vision still made a bit of sense, even if their brains rebelled against what their eyes were trying to tell them. It made them dizzy and sick to see stationary objects apparently moving in directions they didn’t know existed, but soon enough most people were able to get up and go to the lavatory without making a mess they couldn’t see.
There were two types of people who were largely unaffected. The first, of course, was the blind. Now, at first they had no idea that anything had happened, and the hysteria puzzled them. Many of the blind felt some justice had been served, a punishment dealt to the lucky sighted ones who would now know how essential vision was to living a normal life. Other blind individuals felt empowered by this event, knowing that they were now among the most competent individuals on Earth, having dealt for some time without the benefit of vision. And a lot of the blind were largely uninterested in the phenomenon, thinking it was too bad, but it wouldn’t affect them. They were wrong, of course.
It affected everyone intimately, and the blind came to realize that they weren’t as independent as they thought. They might travel alone, but sighted people drove their buses and taxi cabs. They might be able to shop in a store with a memorized route and layout, but no sighted people were waiting to check out their merchandise or help them make sure that they were getting the right flavor of potato chips. Everyone’s lifestyle was hugely disrupted by the Curse, as they were calling it, but soon enough everyone found their radios and a select few found their way to the broadcast stations, and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief when they found out it wasn’t just them, and therefore no one was wondering why they didn’t show up at work.
The other group of people who were unaffected by the Curse were very young babies. Generally, any baby below a crawling age did not seem to notice a change in the environment. Also, the very young children adapted quickly, able to venture into the kitchen to get the apple juice before their mothers could summon up the courage to stand up. They were braver about navigating in the suddenly kaleidoscopic world, and after a couple of days they played like always, though television was notably removed from their lives.
Talented adults emerged from the population; brave individuals who came to terms with their new reality quicker and managed to make some sense out of their visual input. As a general rule no one could read print with their new eyes, and trying to focus on flat objects was impossible since the world now looked like it had about six dimensions, but people came forward who had become comfortable enough with their surroundings to try and make life better for those who could or would not.
They weren’t seeing less, as one might imagine. They were seeing more aspects of objects than they knew how to deal with, in many different ways. More colors, beyond ultraviolet and infrared, but solidly into previously invisible spectra. More surfaces, as though all the sides of objects could be seen all at once, plus they seemed to have sides no one had noticed before. And apparently they could see past and future motion, as though several different positions in space over time were leaving trails and could be seen all at once. It meant everything moved, everything, and nothing looked like it should. But sounds were still the same, food still tasted the same, a hot shower was still just as relaxing. People remembered they were human, and though a few of them dealt with it by shutting their eyes and buying a white cane, most tried to get on with life.
Two schools of thought developed. One camp attempted techniques for finding the old familiar three-dimensional, regular visual spectrum objects hidden in the new visual input somewhere. All kinds of suggestions were made to find that little sliver of normality and hang onto it, assign it its previous meaning, and try to tune out the extra data. Of course, the more popular and progressive camp insisted on accepting and dealing with all the extra colors, dimensions, and motions. Predictably, the people trying to hold onto the old ways were quickly swallowed up and converted by the rest, or else they gave up and left the world to those more suited to change.
Some people immediately began fashioning new forms of art that played to all the people’s new senses. Old works of art looked very flat and unrealistic, though their colors shone with unearthly tones never intended by the artist. They could never look “real” now that the real world included all of these other visual aspects.
Scientists pondered the problem. They learned fairly quickly what sort of new input the human eye now detected, though some couldn’t figure out how it was happening and others wondered why it hadn’t happened before. Data could soon be shared through 3-D technology created to make text seem to stream out from screens, and through this technology the Internet and electronic communication survived, aided by a great increase in audio technology and the use of the good old radio. Books were not so lucky, being sheets of dead tree printed with unreadable two-dimensional words. Braille was learned by some, but mostly it was the 3-D technology that spread like wildfire. The human thirst for knowledge overcame the visual hurdle within the first year of the Curse.
In the first months there were hundreds of thousands of suicides. People who thought they were mad jumped (or fell) off of bridges. Humans found all kinds of creative ways to kill themselves and there were as many individual reasons for doing so as there were people doing it. As the knowledge of humanity’s predicament dawned on the population, many people just couldn’t go on, most particularly artists of many kinds, emotional types who “just didn’t want to live” if they couldn’t read/dance/paint et cetera, but couldn’t wait for the world’s surprisingly resilient collective mind to make it possible again.
Schools resumed, after being reinforced with new technology. Soon enough children who had lived with the Curse all their lives were learning about it in kindergarten, taught by teachers who remembered the three-dimensional world so well it was still tough for them to get a drink at the water fountain without getting wet. Regular television and movies, adapted for viewing, proved to bother the new kids’ eyes because of how “wrong” they looked, especially the old cartoons; the next generation turned to other entertainments, some of which were electronic. Oral storytelling became so interesting it was almost considered a sport.
Those who refused to adapt totally to the new Sight were able to get by in society nonetheless. Electronic transportation had been greatly increased, and depressed or anxiety-ridden people who refused to leave their homes could obtain hookups to order goods delivered. Corrective optical services went entirely out of business for a time, as it took a while to gather data on what was “normal” vision now. Few and far between attempts were made to “correct” and deflect the extraneous input through glasses and other optical devices, but none ever worked, especially for the motion aspect. But soon enough the attempts got more and more rare; people were getting used to it, and less than a year later, the people would have felt seasick if they’d looked at a stationary object without seeing it wiggle.
Zarry was fourteen years old when his parents kicked him out.
They weren’t kicking him out for good, of course. But he wasn’t allowed to come home until he’d finished his trials. This wouldn’t have normally been such a big deal, but he wasn’t a normal teenager. Any other boy would have had to go to the monastery, be instructed on the object of his quest, meditate for maybe three days while fasting, and then go home a changed man. But no, not for Balthazar of Clan Oak. Everyone knew he was destined for a grand plan, and he’d be expected to uphold his lineage. If he didn’t break the Curse, which was sure to be his assignment, then he wouldn’t get to come home. So he had a choice between attempting this huge mission or dying in the process.
They’d been waiting a long time for him to be born. First there had to be a sixth son. That was hard enough; sometimes the women would bear a couple boys and then apparently run out, supplying the tribe with a dozen lovely ladies before their fertile times ran out. But then, a sixth son had to live to adulthood. In the tribe’s hard life in the mountains, that wasn’t always granted.
The sixth son had to marry; even if he wasn’t inclined, the social pressure for a sixth son to marry usually overcame any reservations if he had any. So Zarry’s grandfather hadn’t had much of a choice in life but to pick out a dame and pump her full of kids for a while.
For the prophecy to work, the woman wasn’t allowed to bear any twins. Twins didn’t count as part of the deal, because there was no way to call one older than the other. It was considered an omen that this wasn’t the correct bloodline. So Zarry’s grandmother had to get through her bearing years without having any multiple births.
Then of course she had to start spitting out daughters. And the sixth girl had to live to grow up and marry, and be able to reproduce. When Zarry’s mother had taken a husband and become pregnant, everyone had been very excited.
But as everyone in the tribe knew, it could come right down to a very promising bloodline and still come up lemons. No matter how much care the parents took to conceive at the right time so the child could be born under the right star, the birth could always come early or late. And it could always end up with the wrong color eyes or the wrong type of hair. One of Oak Clan’s “rivals,” the Fir Clan, had almost produced the “messiah” twice in recent years before Oak Clan had had a possibility in the last century. But when it came down to it, the circumstances of birth were always wrong. A pair of twins were born, or the child had straight hair, or he waited too long to be born and ended up Aquarius instead of Capricorn. In the history books there were even records of the messiah being born only to be taken by wolves in the night or dying in infancy from a congenital heart defect. It seemed the world had been conspiring against the tribe since the beginning of time—or their written records—so that no one could ever lift the Curse.
His parents had known better than to baby him. When the sixth son of a sixth daughter of a sixth son was born, the tribe had had a tendency in the past to try and protect him at all costs—which of course in no way prepared him for the trials he would have to face. “New” dogma had been added to the rules, saying that all possible messiahs were to be given hard work like any son, and allowed the same dangers any other boy would have to face. So Zarry was as strong as any fourteen-year-old boy, just as trained in marksmanship and just as cunning, if not more so, in his games and sports. Though his parents didn’t speak because of their unwavering devotion to an aspect of their Craft that required silence, they still managed to nag him the way any teen would be nagged, and his older brothers and sisters pushed him around like any normal runt got trounced by his siblings. He’d experienced such a normal upbringing that, except for his acute interest in the Sight, he could hardly believe there hadn’t been some mistake.
But Zarry didn’t have much of a choice. The Oak Clan and the whole tribe were counting on him to bring the Sight back to the world. He would go to the wise men like he was supposed to, be given clues to this tremendous task, and execute it the best he could. And if he failed . . . well, if he failed, Rowan Clan’s high priestess had her sixth bun in the oven, and it could very well pop out with a Y chromosome and give this a second shot.
Balthazar of Oak Clan set off to meet his fate, carrying only his walking staff, a change of clothes, and his mom’s care package.
As soon as humans began to get used to their new perception, different aesthetics emerged. The old standards of “pretty” and “ugly” no longer applied; not in art, not in decoration, not in people. There were so many details of a person’s body now that a flaw of the skin was hardly noticeable, and grace of movement became much more important than beauty of face. Scenes that used to be “picturesque” sometimes became unpleasant; for example, a fine green field under a cloudless sky looked as inviting as a stormy seascape, though both had their places in art. A whole different system of fashion developed, as other colors didn’t seem to “go” anymore now that six more obvious primary shades had been discovered. And just as most people enjoy eating sweets and dislike swallowing anything with a bitter taste, there was a general consensus about what was “pretty” or “appealing.”
The new aesthetics attached to different visual perception became fairly universal fairly quickly. But it took a while for industry and technology to catch up to what the people wanted. As soon as a few special (and later famous) people stepped up to the plate to deal with the curveball that fate had thrown the human race, emergency councils started being held. After surprisingly few fights and very little dissension, the human race united in an unprecedented way as they tried to pull each other to their collective feet. The economy didn’t suffer because it was basically driven out of existence; so many industries and products had become obsolete in one instant, and the market was open for so many new and necessary technologies, that everyone basically shrugged their shoulders and started from scratch. They didn’t have much choice, as that was the decision of the intelligent few who’d grabbed control of everything while the government was still crawling around trying to find the floor.
Of course, there were attempts to regain control by the overthrown capitalist giants and the government officials whose power had been usurped. But those who’d grabbed the reins of their own accord were not only better equipped to handle the new world, but quite simply were better at the job, and that was the way the people wanted it. The new “government” supplied all the conveniences necessary by specially picking teams to construct anything necessary. They did it swiftly and without the usual bureaucratic hold-up. The people needed it and they provided it; they decreed, “We need this; you make it, you test it, and you bring it to the people.” When people went back to work in a changed world—some of them to jobs that hadn’t existed before—their taxes were quite a bit higher than most in the west were used to, but no one cared. They were taken care of by people who knew what they were doing. And that was what the people needed in a world shaken like never before: Security.
Though the problems were dealt with in largely unprecedented ways, it wasn’t long before the humans started acting like humans again. Entertainment became very important once more, and predictably, entertainers were paid higher wages than very necessary workers from government to sanitation. News companies and previous television stations began constructing the new versions of documentaries and after-school specials centering on the Curse and how it had affected the world; there were special programs dedicated to it on its anniversaries, just like there always had been for every disaster and victory that made its mark in the history books.
People started inventing and believing in reasons for the Curse. Many stuck to their initial impressions that it had been some kind of sign from the Lord, a gift from the heavens, a punishment for evil, a cover-up by the government, a conspiracy involving aliens. But the world didn’t end, no old gods came back to claim their own, no aliens appeared. One conclusion, postulated by a group of famous television psychics, was somehow given lots of credence, and it began to be believed by most people. According to them, the veil between the worlds had somehow been permanently lifted, and the people were seeing halfway between life and death. No one could find a cause, though, nor could they figure out why the human sense of vision had suddenly taken on so many new characteristics.
New words had to be invented. The new colors were named. The extra dimensions got names, too, and a word for the constant motion of objects was invented and put into use. Children being taught in school sometimes became frustrated at their teachers’ inability to supply the words they needed to describe their world, but slowly, they came into existence and stayed there. The children learned the new vocabulary along with their parents. All of the words made it flawlessly into every electronic dictionary, and encyclopedias detailed as much of the science of the phenomenon as was known. History “books” got new chapters. Math, as always, continued to describe the universe, unchanged.
Zarry had to wonder whether people would even know what hit them once the Curse was lifted, if he managed to do it. It had been so long ago that the Curse was given to humanity. They didn’t even seem to know they suffered from it. That seemed unreal to him, since it was his perception that putting on the glasses restored the world to its proper order. He couldn’t imagine that the human brain had been designed to actually see the world the way his natural eyes did, but if all the books were right, the rest of the world truly was living in ignorance. Blissfully.
He was wearing his glasses now, on his journey to the mountain. He was almost there. He watched the world pass as he walked forward, liking the way the brilliant, well-defined colors bled into his eyes. Taking off the glasses made him feel a bit lost in an amorphous, unfamiliar world, even though he understood and could function either way. He wondered if the wise men would expect him to have a preference. If he was supposed to lift the Curse, he couldn’t imagine that he was supposed to like the old way better.
The wise men’s spooky, austere hut came into view. Zarry swallowed and ventured inside, knocking his walking staff on the wall in accordance with custom. He was invited inside by a man in a black veil, and allowed to leave his shoes in the foyer.
“Who comes to receive his quest assignment?” came the formal voice from the middle of the altar, as Zarry assumed the correct kneeling position.
“I am Balthazar of the Clan of Oak,” he replied, knowing that the silence that followed was merely for show. They knew who he was, and they’d known he was coming. They’d known he’d be coming for fourteen years.
The wise man on the left reached ceremoniously for his hollowed-out gourd, and passed it to the man in the middle. Just as custom dictated, the priests shook the gourd and chanted over it the proper words at the proper rhythms, and passed it hand to hand the right number of times. Finally the center man dumped the gourd’s contents on the floor and the three bent their heads to interpret the pattern of the runes.
Zarry waited in silence, fidgeting. This show wasn’t fooling him, wouldn’t fool anyone. He’d known since he was old enough to know how special he was that his quest would involve a journey to the east, a trip to visit another wise man, with whom he was destined to talk philosophy and play a game to win or lose. If he won, the Curse would be lifted from mankind. If he lost, the Curse would continue as it had since they could remember, and the people would just await the next messiah. He wondered if runes even said anything or if everyone’s quest assignment was ironed out beforehand. In any case most did not go to the wise men’s hut knowing what lay in store.
“There is great adventure for you, boy,” said the priest on the right, pointing at a meaningless clump of runes.
“What do you ask of me, sirs?” he chorused as he’d been trained.
“You must travel far to the east,” began the center priest. “After three days and nights you will come to the castle of the Keeper of the Sight. . . . “
Blah blah blah, thought Zarry. “You will go to this castle and play him at a game of skill or chance,” it’s all in the script.
“When you arrive at the castle, you will present yourself to its lord. He will invite you in and entertain you however he wishes. You will willingly do his bidding, but then, when invited into the inner sanctum, you will have a chance to play him at a game of skill or chance.”
I can choose neither until I arrive, Zarry thought numbly.
“When the Keeper of the Sight gives you this choice, what will you reply, Balthazar of Oak Clan?”
“I can choose neither until I arrive.”
“Very well, my boy.”
Now I get my presents.
“To aid you on your journey, we will give you three magical items to keep you safe and light your way.”
The right priest gave Zarry a lantern for getting around at nighttime. The left priest gave him a small kit including a knife, some fishing line and hooks, a tiny metal cup, and some clean linen napkins. The center priest ceremoniously presented him with a medallion.
Funny, I’ll probably get the most use out of the stuff Mom gave me.
He prayed with the priests and stayed the night in their little guestroom, and in the morning he was off, excited but looking forward to getting his birthright over with.
It wasn’t long before ink-printed books were a rarity and two-dimensional televisions lived only in people’s memories. The children of the Curse grew up and lived normal lives, oblivious of how the world once was. They read about it in their history books, of course—history books that were electronic and adapted for their senses, that is—but they didn’t have any true concept of living in a world where much of the electromagnetic spectrum was invisible, a world where money could be expressed in a coin with only one side visible at a time, a world where 2-D pictures of models wearing clothes could actually display the latest fashions in a satisfactory manner. The kids grew up in a world without individual transportation. A world without walls. A world that was all about movement and color and information.
Scientists continued their work. Their new vision guided them in developing new technology for people in the medical industry, making exploratory surgery and many complicated diagnostic medical procedures things of the past. They discovered that people really did have auras like the spiritualists had always been saying, and that they could be analyzed to determine anything from specific sicknesses to emotional and psychological problems. They discovered that they had no idea why the human eye had never picked up all this input before, as it had apparently always had the ability to do so.
Spiritual leaders continued their work as well. Books—electronic ones—were written about divine revelations through the Curse, and others claimed it was an evil manifestation that humans needed to overcome, to come back to the “natural” senses that God intended. Some claimed they had already done this, through prayer and meditation, and now only saw the spectrum they once saw. Others railed against them, saying they were rejecting God’s gifts. The issues drifted farther and farther out of the mainstream as the bulk of the population became those who didn’t remember life any other way.
The Curse sparked a new type of New Age mentalist: A group who claimed they’d been given access to even more visual stimuli than the rest of the population, and could regularly see departed spirits, underground water, or cloaked alien presences. Now that any untrained mind could spot and interpret an aura, the claims had to escalate in nature to be interesting, but they weren’t too tough to believe at first. When people had no idea what they were seeing, it wasn’t such a giant leap to believe it might be a spirit they saw moving over there rather than the electromagnetic and temporal waves coming off of a tree. But these claims began to take a back seat to the reality that everyone could see the previously unseen, and if anyone had extra visual powers it wasn’t being recognized by science.
Strangely enough, the Curse forced people to recognize the power of rocks and crystals. Previously, drawing on the supposed powers of colored stones was considered New Age hogwash by most people, but now no one could deny that most rocks radiated on some sort of wavelength, and any fool could see how each was beneficial. It became instinctive, like a sense of smell, to tell which radiations were good and which were harmful or inconsequential.
People found that their pets had been affected. Most of the animal kingdom was, in fact. It wasn’t immediately common knowledge, since at the beginning people were so worried about themselves, and besides that, the animals were mostly a lot like the young children in that they could adapt quickly, except if they were very old or they were high enough on the evolutionary ladder that they had highly developed brains. When science got around to it, they studied the primates closest to humans, and found that they weren’t exempt from the Curse. A lot of the underwater creatures seemed to have been left alone, and some animals that were pretty close to blind anyway weren’t affected. This supported the scientists’ suspicion that something cataclysmic had happened to the physics of life itself, rather than many others’ belief that it was some sort of sign from God or the devil. After all, why would a force like that bother to alter the vision of sloths and wild pigs? But try as they might, scientists couldn’t find the cause of the Curse; they could only learn more about how it affected humanity.
Some philosophers claimed that the Curse probably would have had less effect if it had blinded humanity altogether. It might not have been so mind-blowing then; people understood the concept of not being able to see, and they experienced darkness all the time when the lights went off. If the world were suddenly blinded in one fell swoop, the same sorts of adjustments might have been made for transportation and ease of ordering products, but humanity would have just walked more heavily on the feet of its other four senses. It wouldn’t have had its perceptions restructured in such a profound way. So, once the hysteria had passed and people who couldn’t take the change had either holed up in insane asylums or chosen their deaths, the Curse was generally recognized as a good thing. A nice slap on mankind’s left cheek. A much-needed wake-up call. It is curious, then, that even into the next generation and beyond, it was still referred to everywhere as “the Curse.”
He’d halfway expected to be attacked by dragons on his way to the castle, what with the way everyone played up the dangerousness of the mission and his need for protective amulets and this and that. As it happened, the worst thing he endured was a scrape from the hook when he had trouble dislodging his still-living freshwater breakfast from the line. He was a little hungrier and more exhausted than usual, and he certainly smelled worse, but other than that he arrived at his destination mostly unscathed, ready to step into his savior shoes.
Zarry hadn’t been told any particular rituals he had to use to greet this great master. He could have lapsed into the old respectful standbys, but he decided to just be himself. After all, he’d been a long time coming; just being himself was apparently being something pretty special. He rapped on the door with his staff, no special rhythm or number of knocks. And it must have been okay, because an old man answered the door.
Zarry half-expected to be invited in for goat milk and cookies. His host received him warmly, let him take off his shoes, and parked him by the fire. He asked about the journey like he was chatting with his grandson. Zarry started feeling a bit antsy. They hadn’t made any introductions, or discussed the real business at hand, and even though he’d just gotten there he wanted to go home already. The man was ignoring most of the usual customs, which bothered Zarry. But far be it for him of all people to insist on the traditional way of doing things! He kept silent and only spoke when asked.
Finally he was given a small room with a cot, and told that the trials would begin the next day, so he’d better rest up. He thought he hadn’t heard such a good idea in a long time, and threw himself headfirst into dreamland, where he conjured up visions of looking about him without the glasses and seeing the natural world anyway.
He woke up at his leisure, ate a breakfast that had been mysteriously left for him, and for lack of anything better to do, gave some attention to a dog that had wandered into his room. He wondered if the Curse had affected animals when it came; if they still saw the world as it should be, or if they had been handicapped as well. He couldn’t tell by the way the dog acted. Whatever it could see, it did so very well.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that the wise man showed himself again. Unlike the night before, he was dressed severely in a black robe with gold stitching, the most formal of priestly attire. He wore a stern expression and carried the staff of the most revered wise men, as if Zarry needed to be reminded that this was a man of great importance. Why had this man taken such care to make him relax if he was just going to wind everything up again? Maybe that was part of his tricks.
The old man handed him a black velvet robe, with the blue stitching that signified his lowliness in comparison. After he’d gotten changed, he followed the Keeper along murky halls and dusty pathways until they arrived in the most dismal storybook dungeon he’d ever imagined. It was lit with candles in pronged holders, but the light revealed things that made Zarry wish the whole place was dark.
It seemed almost like a rehearsal of a theater production, the way the next few minutes played out. Zarry knew where to sit, but he waited until he was given the indication to do so. He knew how he was to sit, and he knew what words they would exchange. He got more and more frustrated as the predictable dialogue flowed between them like a script.
Why all the mucking about in traditions? he wondered. Isn’t this whole thing about breaking the mold to which we’ve become accustomed? He wouldn’t stand for much more of this. If he was truly going to be a bringer of change, he was going to do it right here and now.
“I will now ask you to choose,” the Keeper was droning on, about to come to what was supposed to be the climax.
“What if I choose neither?”
Silence.
“Come on, what if I won’t choose one? What if I don’t like my only choices being games of chance or games of logic?”
“Then you have no business being the savior of the people.”
“I thought my family line made me into a ‘savior.’ I’ll decide what one acts like from now on.”
After a long silence, the man spoke again. “You have become full of yourself because of your birthright. I’ll have you know that anyone, absolutely anyone can break the Curse under the right circumstances. That whole business of sixth sons, it’s all guano. It was all designed to keep the lot of you from traipsing up to this place every other weekend to undo the Curse when you’re not ready yet; it was orchestrated to make you take a little more care.” The old man smiled wryly. “And to get your numbers up, of course.”
Zarry grinned. His suspicions were confirmed. There was nothing to any of this.
“So is the Curse also false, like everything built up around it?”
“No. The Curse is real.”
“And I can really undo it?”
“You can.”
“How?”
The only answer was another sly grin.
“How can I get you to tell me?”
“You must choose between chance and logic.”
“What if I take a chance and choose logic?”
He smiled. “Logic it is, my boy.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s what you said. Close enough for my purposes.” Now he looked stern again. “Let’s begin.”
“Begin what?”
“Why do you want to undo the Curse? Tell me, Balthazar of Oak Clan.”
Zarry thought hard about that. Mostly he’d come on this journey because he’d been told all his life he could and should undo the Curse. But that wasn’t really the reason he was here. He was here because he wanted the gift of vision to be restored to humanity; for people to see the way they were made to.
“Because I want to give back to the people the sight they lost long ago.”
“Why do you want to do that?”
“Because being without it means living in partial darkness, in partial obstruction of the truth.” He was proud of himself for such precise language.
“What makes you think everyone else wants this?”
“They probably won’t at first. But they deserve it. And the time for change is here.”
“Who says so?”
“Me.”
Zarry got up and looked down on the old man.
This provoked a lot of angry snuffling from under the gray mustache. Looking upon the head of a priest from above was considered sinful and very “against the rules.”
“Have some respect!” the old man said finally.
“No,” Zarry said. “I don’t even know who you are, we never made introductions like we were supposed to according to all those stupid rules. So why do you get to pick which rules I should follow and which we just throw out? Why do you deserve my respect?”
“All you need to know right now is that I am your elder and knower of sacred secrets.”
“Also known as a bunch of guano, like you said before.” Zarry crossed his arms. “How about you tell me which three or four secrets actually mean anything, and then I’ll be satisfied and respectfully go back to my home.”
“First, sit down.”
“I prefer standing.”
The priest smiled. “You are intelligent, and headstrong. You may be a messiah yet.”
“Keep going, then,” said Zarry.
“You know to look beyond appearances and judge by what you learn, not what you see,” the priest went on. “That is a good sign.”
“Just what I was thinking. You may be dressed like a priest, but you haven’t shown me anything yet that I didn’t already know.”
“Exactly.” He raised a finger. “Yes, the outside doesn’t always portray the inside, especially when the inside has nothing to do with the outside. You’ve learned—and you’re on your way to earning the right for others to learn the same.” The priest leaned forward. “To undo the Curse, you’re going to have to logically annihilate everything holding it in place.” A sinister smile played about the old man’s face. “Think you can get past me?”
One amazing feature of humanity is its ability to commemorate without remembering. Humans have always been very ritualistic creatures, but often, the events and people they celebrate and build memorials to are not portrayed correctly in the global memory. Heroes’ flaws are buried under shining robes of glory; villains’ smart moves and compassionate behaviors are swallowed up in a ruthless image. People commemorate, but don’t actually remember. They pay homage to a statue; they recite a pledge; they mindlessly wave a flag that now means something other than the purpose for which it was created.
People knew there was a time before the Curse. For a long time, people walked the earth who actually had memories recorded in their brains of what it was like to read printed words, to enjoy all the colors in the rainbow but nothing else, to flip a coin and see only the side that landed facing upward. But those memories were secondary in their children, and soon the idea of a different kind of vision was an abstract concept. The art from the before-time remained a mystery to the contemporaries, just as new generations always questioned earlier decades’ fashion sense. The children of the Curse’s generation truly couldn’t imagine being able to focus on anything two-dimensional, and thought having to depend so heavily on such things must have been the real curse. They couldn’t imagine crayon boxes coming without an ultraviolet crayon. They couldn’t imagine getting meaning from a still photograph.
Eventually, there was not a soul who remembered the day the Curse took the world, though for a scant few years some bragged of having been alive when it happened. The people could puzzle out old descriptions by writers and poets of what the change had been like, and either found their depictions of a world with the Curse undisturbing—too abstract—or completely inaccurate. Where the accounts described insane movement of objects, modern readers could not see how vision would make sense without the movement. They could look at the history books and see the catastrophic changes in humanity’s way of life, but they could not for their lives figure out how their vision could be strange to anyone.
On down the road, people could only guess what it had been like. Some historical fiction writers attempted to write from pre-Curse points of view, but even though their words were hollow trying to carry a concept they couldn’t wrap their minds around, none of their audience noticed, for the same reason. It began to be regarded almost as a myth, though it seemed to be a historical fact. And after quite a time, its validity as an actual event was called into question. It was much like the idea of “sin” descending upon mankind after the events in the Garden of Eden; many “logical” people didn’t believe it, and joked about some magical day when everything changed for humanity and their descendants.
The public never suspected that there was a cause, and since after a time the effects were also no longer apparent in day-to-day life, the Curse hid itself in legend. Believers pointed to the evidence, citing the history books and using ancient books themselves, full of printed words, as proof. But the great majority could no more trust that books could once be read than most of them could accept that a voice ever came from a burning bush. Urban legends have always had a tendency to become stretched out of proportion and turned into religions with the right propaganda.
So, the Curse joined the collective of speculation and myths, along with its new friends Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle. Humanity recognized that every legend starts with a grain of truth and therefore kept the Curse alive in their stories, reinventing tales to tell in new contexts. Mysterious happenings tend to go that way when handled by humans. First they are feared, then they are investigated, then they are dealt with and finally disbelieved. No reason was ever found for why Atlantis sank. No one knew where the people who disappeared in the Triangle ended up. And no one knew why or how the Curse happened.
But if there was an Atlantis, someone knew why it was sinking, and was there as it sank. The people who “disappeared” in that mysterious section of the globe knew where they were, until they died that is, and they knew exactly what had happened to them. And the Curse had a cause too, though no one can say whether the guilty party had given a curse or lifted one.
Zarry was exhausted, but some corner of his mind was bored. He had fought the priest to an obvious draw or beaten him on every logical problem presented, simply by pointing out what didn’t make sense about their way of life. He’d started by proving that appearances could be deceiving, and then moved on to the problem of faith. For that he’d explained to the old man that he didn’t blindly believe in his quest for no reason; he believed because he knew there was more than one way of seeing, and he was determined to do whatever he could to reveal that truth to everyone on Earth.
They fought about God. That was a draw. They argued about love. That was a draw too. They squabbled over death. Zarry won that one.
“So how much longer do I have to do this before I break the Curse?” he asked finally, not feeling embarrassed of being impertinent. He’d fought for his right to be so.
“We keep talking until I learn something.”
Zarry absorbed that. “But I’ve won some of these arguments. Doesn’t that mean I’ve beaten you at those?”
“In a way. But it only means you made the correct points. It doesn’t mean I didn’t know they could come. You’ve come up with no revolutionary information.”
“Then how could I win an argument?”
He smiled. “You win if you prove your point. I can argue convincingly from either side. So you state your position, and I oppose it. If you are able to defend your position all the way to a point that I cannot oppose it, you have won. But that does not mean you’ve taught me anything. Had you picked the other side of the issue on any of those you won, I would have bested you.”
“What happens if we run out of issues to talk about?”
“Then you go home defeated, and the world stays Cursed.”
“So you automatically win if you won’t admit I taught you anything?”
That smile came out again. “It would happen automatically if you were to teach me something. The Curse would be lifted, for I would disappear, and be replaced by another version of myself.”
Zarry couldn’t quite find his way out of that word puzzle. “How . . . how could you disappear?”
“That I don’t know. It’s never been done, not in forty thousand years.”
What? Zarry thought. “So you’ve been here for forty thousand years?”
“Give or take a few thousand.” The man was smiling again.
“You’re a liar. You’re an elder, but you’re not that old.”
The smile dropped off the man’s face. “Did we not begin this discussion by proving that appearances can be deceiving?” Zarry swore he heard some completely inhuman growl under the man’s voice. “Are you going to force this into an endless circle of meaningless chatter, in which the two of us must rehash points already made?” Now some sort of flame was flickering in the priest’s eyes, Zarry knew he wasn’t imagining it. “You forget that your life will be cut short by time, while mine has no such limitation.”
“So you’re trying to tell me you’re immortal.”
“I began to believe so after the first ten thousand years.” He was joking again, but that flame was still in his eyes. It was unnatural. Unnatural, rather, for a human being. Zarry felt his head swimming. Was this man even really a man?
“Okay, so if you’re not a liar,” Zarry began, “then that means you’ve been around since, I don’t know, the dawn of mankind.”
“Roughly that,” he agreed. Zarry took that in, digesting what his brain would let him.
“So you’ve done a lot of learning in all that time, huh?”
“In a way, yes. But in another way, no.”
“Can you explain that?”
“Do you think you can handle my explanation?”
Zarry crossed his arms. “Don’t patronize me.”
“Such a large word for a small mouth. Does your small brain even know what it means?”
“Enough to know you’re still patronizing me.”
There was that unearthly chuckle again. “Fair enough, boy.” Zarry found himself looking into those flame-filled eyes again, meeting a gaze that looked for all the world like a forest fire gone out of control. Those eyes did not belong to a human. He knew for sure that this was not just another posturing priest; this was the real thing. As much as that made him want to flee in terror, he also was relieved to find that there was more to life than what he knew, and it also boosted his will to prove he was also something beyond what he seemed. He was not just another mindless child following traditional mythological quests. He was the one who was going to conquer the need for quests as well as the quest itself.
“It’s my turn to ask a question,” Zarry said, “and don’t give me any of your roundabout answers, either.”
“I’ll give a roundabout answer if that’s what your question leads to,” said the priest sensibly.
“Here’s my question. What exactly are you?”
“I am many things. What makes you ask that, my boy? And which answer are you seeking?”
“I’m asking because I know you’re not a regular person, not even an extraordinary person. You’re something else.”
“What brings you to that conclusion?”
“Well, you say you’re immortal,” he began, but the old man interrupted.
“But I could be lying, as you’ve said.”
“I don’t think you are, I changed my mind. And no human has eyes like that.”
The priest blinked and his eyes somehow looked normal again, as normal as they could while still being so piercingly intelligent. “Are you sure you aren’t just seeing the reflection of the candles in my eyes?”
“No. I know I can’t be sure of much. But I believe it.”
“I see.” His face melted into an expression Zarry didn’t recognize.
“So, answer me, if you can. What are you?”
“What do you think I am?”
Zarry thought. “If I have to teach you something in order to—make you disappear, you must be . . . a concept.”
“Yes,” said the old man, setting Zarry’s heart racing, “but real all the same. Tell me more, boy, this is fascinating; what sort of concept do you think I am?”
“You’re . . . if you disappear when I teach you something, you must be knowledge itself. Because I can’t know something if it’s not part of you.”
“Ahh, yes. Specifically, I am the current form of the sum total of all the world’s knowledge.”
“Then why are you alive?”
Another smile. “After you people get set in your ways as to how the world works, you just add energy to your beliefs. It’s enough to give anything a consciousness. If you all believed rocks were alive, and treated them as though they were, they would become so. But there would have to be enough truth in the idea to begin with, to even have that level of belief.” The priest chuckled. “Belief is a powerful thing. So do you believe me?”
“I don’t know about that. You could be an old psycho.”
“An old psycho that everyone has dubbed the Keeper of the Sight, then.”
“Right. And I know they believe it.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Ideas are pretty powerful too,” said Zarry, coming to the conclusion pretty much as he said it. “So how does this all hook up to the Curse, anyway?”
“If you can truly add something to me that’s never been thought before, you can make the world see what they were previously blind to.”
Over and over, Zarry went over the words in his mind. And finally he met the old man’s eyes. The flame was there again, as he expected. Candles were on either side of him, but not in front of him. That was no reflection. He was what he said he was.
“So all I have to do is kill you.”
“Excuse me?”
“I kill you, and destroy what humanity thinks it knows. Then they’ll have to start at the beginning again, and find their way through their own sight for the first time.”
“Perhaps you have not understood me correctly. I am not a human, as I look. I cannot be killed as a human could be.”
“That’s what you think. That’s even what I think. But if you’re the truth of what everyone believes, I have to go against what I think, even if I think it’s true.”
“Quite a maze of logic. Are you sure you’re navigating correctly? I believe you’ve found yourself in a dead end.”
“All these legends, all these proper rituals and all the dogma we’re slaving to . . . none of it means anything. It’s you who’s hit a dead end.”
“Murder is not the answer to any problem.”
“It is now.”
And with that, Zarry took his staff, cracked it across the old man’s forehead, and then calmly got a candle and lit his clothes on fire.
It was true, the old man couldn’t have been a person. He didn’t scream or writhe or really do much but lie there. He didn’t bleed and he didn’t attempt to put out the flames. But he was just as stunned as a human would have been, and he was indeed consumed by the flames the same as he would have been otherwise.
The old man learned, as he died, that he could be killed. And that, paradoxically, is what finished him off.
Logic told Zarry that it shouldn’t have worked. So he looked it in the face and turned it on its ear, and promptly won that little game.
Balthazar of Oak Clan had denied the very laws of existence and lived to tell the tale. It had a couple of side effects, one of which being that suddenly, every creature on the planet had to deal with the fact that the planet was now made differently. Space had a different shape, time blended into itself, Keepers of Sight could be killed, and the very fabric of space-time shifted so that wavelengths were interpreted differently by the eye. And once everyone got over the shock, humanity started to redefine its own reality.
It wasn’t so strange for Zarry. He was used to seeing things that way because of growing up with the glasses, but now everything was more vibrant, more real, and more exact—it seemed in a couple ways they’d gotten the colors wrong when they’d tried to simulate the alternate vision. But now the world around him had adjusted to his eyes rather than the other way around.
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