A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Again?” Seth asked.

  “They were preparing me for the obelisk,” Abel responded. “A rope hung down from its highest grate, and the aisautseb were moving in, moving in to . . . to disrobe me.”

  “They didn’t get you tonight, then?”

  Abel fixed Seth with an outraged, uncomprehending stare. “He was our isosire, Seth, and I’m your brother. How do you remain immune to what happened to him, immune to my suffering of what he suffered?”

  Seth removed his hand from his isohet’s ankle.

  “It happened to you, too!” Abel informed him for the umpteenth time. “You and I went up that tower with Günter Latimer, but the truth of that still escapes you. For you, Seth, it was an external rather than an inward occurrence. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be!”

  “I’m supposed to have nightmares in living, bloody color?”

  “Yes!”

  “And wake up screaming?”

  “Yes!”

  “And go stumbling into the lavalet to heave up my panic and my compassion?” This was a hit, Seth knew, because now that Abel had recovered from the psychic pummeling of his nightmare, his body would begin to react. His face had already blanched, and his breathing was quickening again. Fresh diamonds of sweat were popping out on his already sweat-lacquered jowls and forehead.

  Abel controlled his temper with difficulty. “My self-compassion, you’re trying to imply, aren’t you? Well, that’s all right, that’s fine. The word of Interstel is that we’re all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor.”

  “You don’t even pretend to believe that, Abel.”

  “Compassion begins at home.”

  Seth winced at both the hypocrisy and the banality of this bromide. “That, perhaps, you believe.”

  “You don’t feel anything!” Abel countered. But the trauma of the nightmare was belatedly catching up with him, and he swung his feet to the floor and headed for the lavalet, replete with the sanctity of his suffering and so close to being caught short that the argument was effectively over. Having no desire either to confront or comfort Abel on his return, Seth pulled on a pair of coveralls and let himself into the corridor outside their cabin.

  The Dharmakaya was immense. Its living, sleeping, and study quarters occupied a pair of windowless nacelles positioned below and aft of the triangular conning module. Up there, the pilot—K/R Caranicas, an indentured Ommundi triune—was installed in cybernetic linkage with the astrogational and life-support capacities of the vessel. Caranicas, who possessed a single left cerebral hemisphere interwired with twin right cerebral hemispheres, had remained in cold sleep during the Latimers’ entire stay on Gla Taus, the equivalent of nearly ten Earth-standard months, and so had known nothing of the murder of Seth and Abel’s isosire or of the coopting of shipboard communication systems by the Kieri.

  Not until revived by Seth had the triune understood that the ship’s body had been violated by forcible entry and its voice stolen by agents of Lady Turshebsel’s taussanaur, or orbital guard. Now, as if indifferent to its new masters, Caranicas was transporting five of the Dharmakaya’s captors—Clefrabbes Douin, Porchaddos Pors, two officers of the taussanaur, and a minion of Narthaimnar Chappouib—through subdimensional id-space toward the world called Trope.

  Caranicas was neither male nor female, neither isohet nor natural child, and Seth mentally referred to the triune as “it” because no other pronoun seemed to work. What gender did you consider a being whose body lacked sexual differentiation and whose fundamental raison d’être was conning five hundred tons of vanadium and vitricite through a nonexistent medium that Interstel wags had long ago dubbed The Sublime? Moreover, except through the computer in the conning module, Caranicas couldn’t speak.

  An inability to speak struck Seth as the perfect recommendation for a companion. After composing himself against the shock of standing upright again, he set off through the corridor toward the step-shaft leading to the command unit. On the way he passed the adjacent cabins that Douin and Pors were occupying, and recollected that one of these jauddeb was probably already aloft. Their sleep cycles aboard the Dharmakaya seldom overlapped, and he hoped that if one of the Kieri had chosen to visit their pilot, Douin would be the one.

  Seth’s argument with Abel still rankled inside him. Isohets—just as the members of any tupletry of clones—supposedly shared a heightened empathic sense, a bond of deep dimensionality. No such bond existed between Abel and Seth. Although Abel had raised him—except for Seth’s first eight years at the Ommundi Paedoschol in Lausanne—he had never felt a real psychic communion with his isohet. Gratitude for Abel’s love Seth had often known, and affection, and a terrible fear that without Abel he would never achieve a viable identity. But Abel and he had never shared any of those telepathic insights, swift and accurate, that isohets were supposed to experience. He could read Abel’s feelings only in the usual ways, by direct observation and a merely human sensitivity to nuance and mood. Abel’s mind he could not read at all.

  Never, Seth reflected as he climbed, had he known anyone so prone to vomiting as Abel. Günter Latimer had never quelled his anxiety attacks—if, indeed, he had ever had anxiety attacks—by retching up his guts. And Seth got that shamefully sick only when he had eaten or drunk too much. Most people, he knew, were not so susceptible to nausea and vomiting; and yet if anyone should share Abel’s unenviable combination of body chemistry and hypersensitive mind, why not he? He was a duplicate of Abel, for Abel was a duplicate of Günter, and Günter Latimer was the die from which they had both been struck:

  If A=G, and if S=G, then S=A.

  In which case, of course, it was pretty surprising that their minds seldom strained along the same cable toward a common anxiety, and that Seth was not also a vomiting fool. Must he feel guilty for having escaped the harsh confessional of the lavalet?

  “No,” Seth said aloud, climbing through the step-shaft. But speaking the denial aloud didn’t alter the fact that his guilt was even now pursuing him through the corridors of the Dharmakaya.

  His guilt was Abel’s revenge for his own unfeeling innocence.

  Pors rather than Douin had preceded him to the conning module. It seemed to Seth that every card dealt him bore a black spot.

  At the auxiliary astrogational console, he eased into a lounger next to the one occupied by Pors, then studied the Kieri’s concave profile. The man’s nose, eyes, and mouth all seemed to be set inside a dish of bone—but, in spite of that somewhat apish facial arrangement, he appeared both alert and cunning.

  We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor, Abel had said. A ludicrous declaration. Abel’s belief in deity ascended little higher than had Günter Latimer.

  “Good morning, Master Seth,” Pors said without taking his eyes from the astrogational screen. He spoke in Vox, which all the Kieri but the aisautseb had agreed would be their official tongue for the duration of their mission.

  “Is it morning?” Seth asked, amused.

  “For me it is. Master Douin awakened me only a brief while ago.”

  Douin and Pors took turns babysitting the Dharmakaya’s pilot to ensure that Caranicas didn’t craftily maneuver the vessel off true toward some reasonably obtainable Interstel world. Considering that the triune’s programmed mission kept it course-correcting for the whole of any subdimensional voyage, this was an unlikely possibility. An override required either Abel’s own feed-in or an apprehension of disaster on the part of the triune itself. A passenger would quickly notice any major change of course because of subfield resistance and the resultant shipboard discomfort: heat, oscillation, and noise. A wholesale shift from The Sublime to the more predictable ridiculousness of normal Space-Time would be even more wrenching. But the two Kieri took their self-assigned work seriously and monitored the astrogation consoles round the clock. Seth had taught Douin the basics of this monitoring, and Abel had taught Pors.

  Both were already well versed in the operation of the ship’s commu
nication system: Shortly after the Latimers’ arrival on Gla Taus, Günter had conducted a tour of the Dharmakaya for several high government officials and a contingent of Lady Turshebsel’s taussanaur (literally, “world circlers”). One of the high points of this tour, at least for the Kieri, had been Latimer’s demonstration of the sublimission radio/receiver, with which he had rather showily contacted Ommundi Station on Sabik II and an Interstel facility on a colony world circling Acamar. These brief exchanges with jauddebseb beings hundreds of lights away, along with the vivid sublimission images hovering like ghosts in the radio’s receptor well, had immensely impressed one of the taussanaur—who had asked permission to put through a call to Trope, picking that world because of its relative proximity to Gla Taus.

  Latimer had graciously instructed the jauddeb in the use of the unit, and even though the Tropiards were not full-fledged signatories of the Interstel Charter, the guard had easily raised a response from a tracking outpost in the Tropish hinterland called Chaelu Sro. Latimer had translated the guard’s Kieri into Vox, and the Vox of the anonymous Tropiard back into Kieri; and then, in order not to lose face before the delighted taussanaur, Porchaddos Pors and Master Douin had each politely demanded a turn at the console, speaking Vox to impress the others with their erudition. That this entire exchange had proceeded without any visual input from Trope had dulled the excitement of the touring Kieri scarcely a whit.

  In fact, the episode had seemed such a triumph of public relations that Seth had inwardly approved his isosire’s spontaneous suggestion to Pors that a pair of orbital guards remain aboard the Dharmakaya to monitor the radio and study first-hand the electronic and mechanical intricacies of a bona fide light-tripper. Trust was the order of the day, and no one had then suspected the possibility of an aisautseb uprising, the seizure of the ship, or the need to negotiate with the Tropiards an alternative to the doomed Ommundi trade proposal. Who could have foreseen that the taussanaur aboard at Latimer’s invitation would turn pirate because of the archaic belief system of a priestly order that had exerted little real clout for almost four Gla Tausian decades? Neither Abel nor Seth had advised Latimer of the foolishness of his trust, and K/R Caranicas, who might have had a weird opinion in the matter, had been deep in cold sleep. . . .

  “How long must we share subdimensional nonexistence with that creature who pilots us?” Pors asked, nodding forward.

  Seth glanced at the gyroscopically mounted chair in which Caranicas, blinkered and belted, could move vertically or horizontally past the various astrogational computers and both in and out of the cystlike conning turrets set about the nose of the module. The triune itself was scarcely visible in this chair. Its arms and legs were wired, and at the back of its head was the cranial prosthetic housing the additional right lobe cloned from an embryonic extraction of brain tissue before Caranicas’s “birth.” The housing was pure platinum, and the appearance of this artificial cap always put Seth in mind of an enormous silver goiter that had rotated unaccountably around to the nape. Caranicas was not pretty, not by any means, and Seth could easily understand how Pors could call the triune a “creature.”

  “Can’t you tell from the console display?” he asked the impatient noble.

  “The figures beside the miniature vessel say” —Pors shut his eyes, working to deduce the Kieri equivalent of the Arabic numerals he had painstakingly learned months ago— “twenty-three, I think: twenty-three more days.”

  “If the texture and consistency of the subdimensional field we’re generating doesn’t change in the meanwhile. Then, yes, twenty-three days.”

  “Earth reckoning,” Pors stipulated.

  “That’s nearly thirty of your own,” Seth replied.

  “If conditions in The Sublime don’t alter and so delay us.”

  “They’re just as likely to alter in our favor, Lord Pors. The Sublime is highly mutable. That’s why a light-tripper must have a pilot who reads the subdimensional fields quickly and expertly, and who’s able to compensate almost intuitively for the changes. Interstel and most of the trade companies develop their pilots from birth. In truth, the selection is prenatal, and one such as Caranicas is destined for no other occupation. This triune has spent almost sixty years in the service of Ommundi, although much of that has been in cold sleep.”

  “Of what . . . species . . . is your pilot?” Pors asked.

  “Caranicas is human.” The fact that in Vox the pronoun “it” had three forms—one for animals and plants, one for inanimate objects, and one for abstract concepts—momentarily stymied Seth. After sifting among his choices, he settled almost at sheer random upon the feminine pronoun. “Despite her appearance, she’s human—of the basic stock from which Latimer, Abel, and I derived. The differences are genetic, surgical, and cybernetic.

  “The platinum lobe on the back of her neck augments her ability to create a cognitive map of The Sublime. It gives her a heightened awareness of spatial relationships. She has good depth perception, good orientation in nonlinear environments. She’s capable of rapidly synthesizing all this simultaneous intake for navigational purposes. The third lobe was cloned and developed especially for subdimensional flight, Lord Pors, and Caranicas uses it almost exclusively when she’s jockeying back and forth among the conning turrets. The computers handle many of the analytical functions involved in piloting, but she feeds the information gleaned from her observations to the machines by way of the keyboard at her left hand. Her own right hemisphere—the one she was born with—processes a musical code through the keyboard in order to file the information.”

  “She?” Pors asked.

  “Or he,” Seth admitted. “Caranicas is without sex, although a chromosome study would probably reveal her original in vitro gender.”

  “She doesn’t speak?”

  “Only through the keyboard, to both her consoles and to us—when, that is, she has anything to say. We talk to her through the computer, which converts our speech to her musical code. It’s an eerie, triple-layered twelve-tone system, if you amplify it, with some difficult phonetic correspondences.”

  The triune emerged from an overhead turret, whirled in its chair, and spun along its gyroscope tightrope to a bank of equipment directly in front of the two men. In many ways, Seth suddenly realized, Caranicas seemed even more alien than the Kieri lord whose manner and appearance he had grown to dislike so. Pors was at least a personality, whereas their pilot seemed merely an inarticulate complex of tropisms and linkages that defied anthropomorphic cataloging. Did anything but spatial calculations and solid geometry happen inside Caranicas’s head? Of what value was his/her/its humanity? Latimer had never said, and Seth had never inquired.

  We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor.

  Pors looked at Seth with an expression full of complicated loathing. “I wouldn’t be your triune for all the wealth of Ommundi,” Pors said.

  Seth attempted to change the subject. “Have you been in contact with Magistrate Vrai’s people?”

  “You’ve cut away her spirit,” Pors persisted.

  “No,” said Seth. “This is all Caranicas has ever known. Her existence is piloting. Piloting is therefore her happiness.” He was amazed to find himself on the defensive, particularly since it was the brutish and insensitive Pors who had put him there.

  As Seth understood it, Pors, like the male children of all Kieri nobles, had been raised in a camp in the Orpla Mountains northwest of Sket and trained to a life of aggressive self-reliance. The products of this system were seldom well attuned to the feelings of others, although they did emerge competent and independent. You recognized a courtier on Gla Taus by his swagger and his latent hostility toward the lowborn rather than by his mastery of the social graces, which were largely the province of appointed officials like Clefrabbes Douin. But here was Pors expressing an angry sympathy for Caranicas and holding Seth responsible for the triune’s denatured spirituality.

  “I want to talk to her,” Pors declared.


  “But what for? Talk is a distraction from her piloting. She can handle it, of course, but it imposes a low-level strain she’d probably be better off without.”

  “Doesn’t she eat, eliminate, sleep?”

  “She slept while we were on Gla Taus. She feeds and eliminates through the hookups on her chair. She may also rest by switching back and forth between her original right hemisphere and the cloned one. She shuts completely down, though, only in cold sleep.”

  “Does she pray?” Pors asked.

  Seth’s exasperation mounted—first the argument with Abel and now this inane discussion about Caranicas. “I don’t imagine she has the time,” he said, hiding his impatience. “Nor would I imagine she’s had much opportunity to think about it.”

  “Ask her.”

  “Ask Caranicas if she prays?”

  Pors irritably gestured his assent, and Seth removed the microphone from the astrogation console, switched it on, and said, “K/R Caranicas, a visitor aboard the Dharmakaya wishes to know if you pray.” Nothing more. He felt infinitely silly framing the statement. Even before he had finished speaking, the computer had begun coding his words into the three-layered dodecaphonic language by which the triune communicated with its shipboard colleagues. The weird music of the translation ran through the pilot-house like a bevy of electronic mice.

  “I may have to define that term for her,” Seth told Pors, averting the microphone. “I hope you have a definition ready to hand.”

  But when the triune’s chair whirled away from the equipment bank in front of them, threaded noseward, and dropped into an underslung turret at the module’s apex, Seth began to fear that—in spite of the eerie music from the computer—his message had not coded through at all. He was about to repeat the message when a second series of indecipherable notes began toodling in cryptic response to the first. An instant later the translation sounded from a console speaker: