A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

“My piloting is a prayer.”

  Seth felt vindicated. He had not expected this answer, but because it seemed to turn the tables on Pors, he inwardly congratulated the triune on its cleverness. If the life of the Dharmakaya’s pilot was a prayer, how could Caranicas be spiritually bereft? As for Pors, skeptically watching the triune scoot and spin along its gyroscopic tracks, he made no more demands on Seth to have it speak. Its first response had killed rather than piqued Pors’s interest.

  “Have you been in touch with Trope?” Seth asked him again.

  “Master Douin informs me that the Tropiards prefer to wait until our arrival to begin full-blown discussion. They keep their radio contacts brief and send no visuals.”

  Seth had hoped to see a Tropiard by way of a sublimission image. Here on the Dharmakaya he had reviewed all the library tapes devoted to the Anja system and its one inhabited planet. The available information was scant and sometimes self-contradictory. Interstel had never established a secure foothold on Trope, and because its level of technology rivaled or surpassed that of the most advanced members of Interstel, no one could pretend that coercing Trope’s full partnership would lift that world out of the dark ages. Therefore, only an ambiguous partnership—if any—obtained. The result was ignorance about both the planet and its people. That the Tropiards had long ago adopted Vox for their dealings with Interstel ships and agents seemed highly promising of a comprehensive accord, but no one could guess when that accord might come. Seth realized that it would be a rather humbling irony if Porchaddos Pors, Point Marcher of Feln, proved instrumental in bringing Trope into full alliance with Interstel. Gla Taus, after all, was a somewhat backward newcomer to the partnership.

  For now, though, the principal thing Seth knew about the Tropiards was that their eyes were hard and gemlike. The text accompanying a solitary photograph in the library tapes described their eyes as “an organic variety of crystal”; the photograph itself, meticulously enlarged, revealed a more or less human face studded with a pair of water-green jewels where its organs of sight should have been. Seth had a good deal of trouble crediting the legitimacy of the photograph.

  We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor.

  Maybe that was true, each humanoid species either a small or a grotesque distortion of some hidden Platonic Norm of Ideal Humanity. One theory held that aeons ago a common ancestor had seeded as many of the galaxy’s inhabitable planets as it possibly could, before succumbing to extinction on its own dying world. Another hypothesis assumed, against countless subtly or grossly dissimilar planetary backdrops, parallel evolution. A third pointed to the instrumentality of God. The first theory, Seth knew, ran headlong into the unsupportive archaeological records of Earth and other Interstel worlds; the second was statistically unlikely; and the third seemed to ascribe to God a shabby paucity of imagination. You didn’t win with any of them. Nor, apparently, were you supposed to.

  “Where’s the dairauddes Chappouib gave you?” Pors suddenly asked.

  “In my cabin,” Seth said, surprised.

  “You should be wearing it.”

  “Even when I sleep?”

  “It’s your gift to the Magistrate, which once belonged to Lady Turshebsel. You should have it on you until you present it.”

  “A demon killer?”

  Pors studied the display screen, feigning or perhaps actually experiencing deep interest in the movement of the Dharmakaya through The Sublime.

  “I didn’t believe you were a follower of the aisautseb,” Seth challenged Pors. “I thought you a courtier and a progressive.”

  The Point Marcher turned on him angrily. “You should have it on your person,” he said. “When awake, have it on your person!”

  *

  In the corridor outside his cabin, Seth encountered the priest whom Chappouib, with Lady Turshebsel’s grudging executive consent, had assigned to them for the voyage. This man was young but dutiful. He seemed to sleep only for brief periods. Now he was wearing garrison pants rather than robes, and his head was uncovered. He was obviously on his way to the conning module, either to relieve Pors or to engage him in conversation. A true aisautseb, he spoke no Vox, and made no attempt to learn.

  “Good morning,” he said in Kieri: his standard greeting, regardless of the hour.

  “Our triune’s piloting is a prayer,” Seth told him in Vox.

  “Sir?” the priest said.

  Seth repeated his words, knowing them to be unintelligible to the aisautseb but taking a perverse delight in the fact.

  The priest’s expression darkened, and he brushed past Seth with cold dignity, lengthening his stride at every step. Seth suffered a pang of remorse for his pettiness, but couldn’t bring himself to call politely after the jauddeb in Kieri.

  Instead, he went in to Abel, who lay on his bunk again, somewhat recovered from his bout of nausea but still pasty-faced and glassy-eyed in the cabin’s artificial twilight.

  “You’re a bastard to leave me in this shape, Seth. You’re a bastard to escape my nightmares.”

  “Neither one of us quite qualifies as a bastard.” Seth smiled to show his isohet that he was joking, but it didn’t take.

  Abel pulled himself to a sitting position to renew the attack: “They were going to hoist me up that tower! They were—!”

  “If it’ll make you feel any better, Abel, I was on the verge of a nightmare of my own when you woke me up.”

  “But you couldn’t quite get tuned in, could you?”

  Seth gestured at the cabin’s door. “This nacelle has nineteen other cabins. Why don’t I take another one?” He proposed this as means of making peace, not as a threat—but, again, his intended meaning failed to register.

  “No,” Abel said, frankly conciliatory. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed. Give me a moment, just a moment, and I’ll be out of this again.” He pointed to the foot of his bunk. “Sit down, please. Please sit down.”

  Seth lowered himself to Abel’s bunk and stared across its linen into a face that was a bloated and admonitory likeness of his own. That—not Abel’s nightmares—was what he couldn’t escape.

  BOOK TWO

  FOUR

  Twenty-three days later, the hangar doors of the Dharmakaya parted like the lids of a great eye, revealing the green-gold mists of Trope’s atmosphere. A transcraft floated free of the hangar bay, dropped languidly toward those mists, then turned to align itself with its programmed path of entry.

  Seth Latimer was piloting. His passengers were Clefrabbes Douin and Porchaddos Pors, neither of whom spoke as he maneuvered the transcraft out of the cold shadow of the mother ship. Looking up, Seth saw the fanciful bulk of the Dharmakaya retreating against a backdrop of strange stars and wondered if he’d made a mistake letting himself be isolated in this way with the two Gla Tausians. His gut ached, and his hands—even within a pair of lightweight, vented gloves—were clammy with sweat. On the afternoon of his visit to the Winter Palace, Seth recalled, Abel had said, “Monkeys are born. Polecats and ratlings descend through a uterus.” Now, falling from his isohet’s companionship and guidance, he felt he was being thrust from the great Ommundi light-tripper along with two decidedly inhuman litter mates.

  The transcraft plunged, its heat shields already incandescent.

  As Seth monitored the controls and watched the horizon of Trope roll giddily upward, his nervousness abated. At least he was effecting his own delivery. After glancing at his grim Kieri passengers, he realized that for the moment their lives were in his hands, and that they were apprehensively aware of their dependence on him. By their looks, they’d found it far easier to trust K/R Caranicas, whatever the triune’s spiritual state. But in his passengers’ uncertainty Seth found a partial antidote for his own, and he determined to outface them and set them down uncracked.

  Underlying the mists of Trope were wide, yellow-orange plains crimped with ridges of beige and umber. They looked as if they’d been applied to the planet with a palette knife. Greens and blue-green
s were rare; the world had very few seas or inland waters, and its forests, judging from the evidence of an aerial overview, must consist predominantly of flame- or earth-colored foliage.

  Seth banked the transcraft, and Anja, Trope’s faintly blue sun, blinded him with a long stab of light. Abel had advised him to wear tinted goggles on the surface, but in the transcraft Seth let these collapsible plastic eye coverings hang unused inside his collar. Outside his collar, strung horizontally on a thin silver chain, was the ebony dairauddes that Narthaimnar Chappouib had given him, as a gift from Lady Turshebsel to the Magistrate of Trope. It swayed whenever Seth moved. The sooner he could transfer it into the keeping of the Tropish administrator, the happier he’d be.

  Soon the transcraft had an escort. Two remotes swept up beside them on either flank, to accompany them into the southern hemisphere. They looked like delicate metal mosquitoes, spike-nosed and spindly-limbed, but their tensile strength was obviously every bit as staunch as the transcraft’s, for they sailed with plucky, economical grace. Seth momentarily feared that the mosquitoes were near enough to provoke a collision, but an attempt to drop out of their embrace proved that they were locked in formation at precise intervals impossible to close. No danger of either collision or escape. Meanwhile, deserts of yellow-red parchment fled by at speed, rising inexorably. From what he’d seen of Trope so far, Seth would have judged the planet an uninhabited desert. The pilotless mosquitoes seemed its only native life form.

  A voice crackled over the transcraft’s radio in confident Vox:

  “Permit our remotes to lead you in. Don’t attempt to shake or outrun them.”

  “As you say,” Seth replied.

  Then, with the same gap between their wings, the mosquitoes shot forward fifteen or twenty meters, and Seth pursued, adjusting and readjusting to keep from falling farther behind. A clockwork city flashed into view beneath them. It lay in the lee of a tablerock, or plateau, upon which showed a complex pattern of rust-colored edifices and bone-white walkways. The mosquitoes peeled away on either side, and both the clockwork city and the acropolis on the tablerock disappeared behind the transcraft before Seth could adjust to the fact of their existence. At almost three-quarters the speed of sound, the transcraft kept skimming southward.

  “You’ve overflown Ardaja Huru, our capital, and Huru J’beij, the tablerock on which we have our administrative facilities,” said the melodious Tropish voice over the radio. “Make a circuit and land atop the butte, please.”

  “Where, exactly?” Seth asked.

  “Do you require a landing strip?”

  “No,” Seth answered. “Our vehicle’s capable of both hover and vertical descent.”

  “Then put down on the landing terrace in front of the J’beij—the great building running the western length of Huru J’beij.”

  The radio cut off, and Seth banked the transcraft into a stiff southerly wind to return to Ardaja Huru and its sheltering tablerock. Douin and Pors were rubbernecking like tourists—which, indeed, they were. For his own benefit as well as theirs, Seth slowed and swung wide, bringing them in so that they could get a leisurely panoramic vista of both the city and the government complex.

  Ardaja Huru—as much mechanism as living entity—shone in the desert like the intricate, perfect bones of an extinct land leviathan. It was clockwork and skeletal at once, ordered but spare, so pruned of excess and ornament that the wind might have scoured it into this shape. The metals comprising its structures were the color of red-clay bricks. The pedestrian wheels clicking through its heart-hub and the transport cars circumnavigating both its oval perimeter and its many interlocking circular courts might very well have been sophisticatedly wind-driven. The trees lining the city’s thoroughfares and standing like sentinels on its terrace levels burned in the sun like torches. Ardaja Huru seemed to be alive principally by virtue of the movement of its parts rather than by that of its population, for its people were mostly invisible—indoors, underground, somewhere out of sight.

  More than this, Seth and the Kieri envoys had no time to deduce.

  Huru J’beij, the butte behind the city, filled the transcraft’s windscreens, and Seth was suddenly busy shifting into virtual hover and easing the vehicle across a magnificent expanse of blood-red rock toward the government buildings on the plateau. These had more substance than the structures of the city, as if they’d been hewn rather than delicately carved—but even they seemed outgrowths of the land. Unnatural outgrowths of the land. Unnatural outgrowths, like tumors or lepromata, but physical extensions of the planet, nonetheless. The landing terrace, which Seth now saw, was a circle of whitened stone in the midst of all this encompassing red.

  Seth put the transcraft down within that circle, shot the turret back, and unstrapped in the stingingly cold air. A surprise, this coldness—even though, intellectually, he had known that Trope’s desert uplands were chilly and that the atmospheric mix would sustain all three of them. Had he waited to throw the turret back, doubt might have intervened. He knew himself just well enough to understand that hesitation rather than conscience frequently made a coward of him.

  “A prayer for all of us,” said Porchaddos Pors. “I thank God that this place is blessed with a proper coldness.”

  “And I, too,” acknowledged Clefrabbes Douin.

  They descended to the terrace and stood in the canting shadow of the J’beij, a monolith of rust-red stone and metal. Ten fluted columns fronted the great building, buttressing the long winglike awning of rock capping its portico. The J’beij was almost as large as the Dharmakaya, and behind their transcraft, for a distance of perhaps a kilometer, stretched flat tablerock lined with bone-white walkways, intermittent buildings, and an occasional structure resembling a gazebo of stone. Far to the east Seth thought he could see a flotilla of mosquitoes—remotes—glinting in the afternoon sun on the plateau’s landing field.

  A pair of Tropiards stood in the portico of the J’beij. Tall figures in cloaks, they neither approached nor retreated.

  Seth was disappointed to find that he could still tell nothing about their eyes, for their garments hooded them, putting half of each man’s face in shadow. They might call their planet Trope and their humanoid species gosfi—an ugly, ugly word in Seth’s estimation—but at this distance they were more aesthetically pleasing replicas of Earth-born humanity than either Douin or Pors. (This, Seth knew, was an ethnocentric bias, but he was powerless against it, at least after long incarceration in The Sublime with the Kieri.) The clay-colored cloaks of the Tropiards seemed to betoken . . . Seth’s imagination galloped off higgledy-piggledy, and his hands began to sweat again. Above, the sky flowed like thin blue lava.

  One of the Tropiards beckoned to them, after which he and his companion turned and retreated toward a hidden doorway. Wordlessly, exchanging uncertain glances, Seth and the two Kieri envoys followed these monkish figures beneath the portico and between a series of tall metal stelae depicting what Seth supposed to be episodes from the heroic Tropish past.

  There were seven of these stelae on each side of the aisleway, staggered rather than directly opposite one another—but they were not especially informative about the facial features of the gosfi because the figures in each panel almost invariably had their heads averted or their eyes shielded. One figure recurred from panel to panel, but in every case it was depicted without eyes. The engraver had simply—and purposely, no doubt—failed to include its organs of sight.

  A door of buff stone and red-gold metal admitted the three offworlders into the vast interior of the J’beij.

  White predominated here, accented on the walls and vitricite partitions with hanging tapestries. Seth took a deep breath. The ceiling was a good four stories from the floor, and the tapestries—whose designs resembled wiring diagrams, or the convolutions of a human brain, or maybe even the intricate layout of Ardaja Huru—hung at various heights all the way to the ceiling. Individual floors did not exist as such. Instead, arranged at different levels above the main f
loor were transparent scaffolds to which you could ascend by lifts or narrow, helical stairways. The Tropiards employed on these scaffolds seemed to hang dreamily in the air.

  Despite the enormousness of the J’beij, and the number of platforms distributed like pieces of kaleidoscopic glass throughout its interior, its gosfi occupants were few. The cabinets and consoles on the various levels were probably self-sustaining types of equipment, for information storage or arcane telemetric tasks.

  Light flooded the J’beij, emanating from everywhere at once. But when one of the Tropiards turned to urge Seth’s party on, letting his hood fall aside, it was still hard to see what kind of eyes he had. He wore a pair of slitted eye coverings. Tropiards elsewhere in the J’beij were similarly outfitted. Everyone seemed costumed and masked.

  Grabbing Seth’s arm, Pors spoke in his own tongue: “You represent not just you, Master Seth, but Lady Turshebsel and the Kieri state. Have a care about your presentation. Don’t speak until the Magistrate has spoken to you. Remember, too, that—”

  Seth shook off Pors’s hand and glared at him angrily.

  “A reminder,” Douin said placatingly. “Nothing more, Master Seth.”

  The three companions followed their guides to the center rear of the J’beij, where the Tropiards halted beneath a scaffold unlike all the others. Its floor was carpeted with a material of luxuriant plum. Where all the other platforms were open but for safety rails and discontinuous banks of silent equipment, this one had opaque, papery walls. Indeed, Seth realized, it formed the base of a genuine room. One of their guides climbed a set of clear steps and disappeared into the boxlike structure. The other guide, still hooded, faced about and stared at them appraisingly.

  “Lord Pors and I have complete trust in you,” Douin said. “For that reason, we won’t go with you into the Magistrate’s presence. We’ll wait for you here or wherever else our hosts are kind enough to permit us to rest.”

  Seth swung about on Douin in perplexity and terror. No one had said anything about his confronting the Magistrate alone.