A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Wait! I don’t want to usurp your own involvement. What will the Magistrate think if you and Lord Pors don’t present your credentials?”

  “Master Abel informed his people by radio that you—an Ommundi Company representative empowered by Lady Turshebsel to act as her agent—would be our sole intermediary in this matter.”

  “Why would Abel do such a thing?” Seth whispered urgently.

  “He told the Tropish deputy magistrate that it’s the custom of Ommundi Company negotiators to deal with government representatives on a one-to-one basis. With our blessing, Master Abel also said that Lord Pors and I were merely your onworld seconds.”

  “Neither of those things is true!”

  “They are indeed,” Pors contradicted Seth. “Here on Trope—as little as I care to acknowledge it—you command as well as speak for us. This has been our intention from the beginning.”

  “You never said I was to meet with the Magistrate alone!”

  “What difference does that make?” Douin asked. “You knew you were to be our envoy, that you were to do the speaking.”

  “But not that you’d abandon me on the Magistrate’s doorstep!”

  “Give him the dairauddes,” Lord Pors said, ignoring Seth’s accusation. “Begin with that.”

  “Yes,” Douin interjected. “That may calm you down.”

  “If I command as well as speak for you,” Seth reasoned desperately, “then I command you to accompany me to this audience.”

  “Your command authority doesn’t extend so far as that,” Pors countered. “Do well, Master Seth. I think they’re ready for you.”

  At the top of the helical stairway, the cloaked escort gestured to Seth. Then he disappeared into the room again.

  “What’s this about?” Seth demanded. “What are you doing?”

  “You know your mission already,” Douin replied, purposely misunderstanding his first question, ignoring the second. “You have our prayers.”

  “The dairauddes,” Pors added. “Don’t forget it.”

  When the Gla Tausians withdrew from Seth, he went hesitantly forward because there was nothing else to do. Why had Abel isolated him with Lord Pors and Master Douin? And why, now that they had all set foot on Trope, were the Kieri—both experienced administrators and envoys—isolating him still further by prodding him into this important meeting alone? Seth’s heart thudded, his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides, and a sense of inadequacy climbed his constricted throat like an ill-digested meal, its taste at once brackish and insipid.

  At the base of the stairway waited the Tropiard who had not unhooded. As Seth passed him, he noticed the alien’s impersonal stare—an impersonality heightened by his slitted goggles—and his impossibly smooth, coffee-colored flesh. Also, he was tall, taller by a head than Seth, as perfect and as unreal as a mannequin.

  “The Magistrate expects you,” the Tropiard said in Vox. His mouth—a thin, smile-shaped scar—scarcely parted to speak these words.

  Neither acknowledging this greeting nor looking back to determine the whereabouts of his companions, Seth climbed to the Magistrate’s chamber. At the top of the stairs he pivoted and entered the sanctuary of the highest official of the most advanced nation on all of Trope. Günter Latimer dead and Abel inaccessible in the Dharmakaya, Seth crossed the threshold and faced a being of stunning appearance and power. . . .

  FIVE

  On the wall behind the Magistrate of Trope, a white banner. In the banner’s center, a large blue circle. Separating Seth and the Magistrate, a wine-colored table made of stone and featuring on its surface a number of inset panels. Sheets of bronze plastic, these panels rippled in the light like tiny lakes. A similar substance capped the elevated chamber, concealing it from the eyes of any in the J’beij employed on still higher platforms.

  Neither Seth nor the Magistrate spoke. As they faced each other, the alien by the doorway silently departed.

  The Magistrate wore an immaculate white jumpsuit. About his neck was a silver chain from which hung a soft brown amulet. Beholding it, Seth put his hand to the dairauddes he’d brought from Gla Taus. The Magistrate duplicated this gesture, tenderly caressing the leather amulet. Immediately, Seth felt that the man—a gosfi—was trying to put him at his ease, settle his nerves, establish a bond.

  But like all the other Tropiards Seth had seen, the Magistrate wore a pair of slitted eye coverings that interposed a disconcerting barrier. They concealed and excluded, giving him the spooky aura of a thief or an executioner. Seth was forced to concentrate on the features he could clearly see: dark skin, smiling lips, a head with the softly polished look of worn stone. Also, considering the height of the Tropiards who had guided them in from the landing terrace, Seth was surprised to find that the Magistrate was not quite as tall as he. Although not a small man, neither was the Magistrate a primeval giant.

  “I am Ulgraji Vrai,” he said in perfect Vox.

  Seth dropped to one knee before the Magistrate, as Latimer had taught him to do before an important head of state on a planet in the Menkent system, and obediently recited his brief genealogy.

  “Isoget of Günter Latimer,” the Magistrate repeated. “And younger isohet of a pair separated by fourteen E-years. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, Magistrate.”

  “Please rise, Seth Latimer.” Seth stood. “Now, explain for me the significance of such terms as isohet and isosire.”

  Seth concisely explained them.

  “Then you have but a single birth-parent, and that birth-parent in your case was perpetually j’gosfi?”

  “I don’t understand,” Seth replied.

  “J’gosfi. You would say male. I think. A more precise translation might be sapient male: j’gosfi.”

  “Yes, then. My isosire—my birth-parent, as you would have it—was perpetually male. He was perpetually sapient, too. At least until he permitted the priests in Feln to—” Seth stopped.

  “To what, Seth Latimer?”

  “His death might have been prevented, I meant to say.”

  Seth glanced nervously behind him, his thoughts turning to the Kieri ministers who had just deserted him.

  “A difficulty, Kahl Latimer?”

  The Tropish honorific sounded strange to Seth. “My—” He could scarcely get the word out. “My seconds await me below, Magistrate, and I fear—”

  “You fear they’re uncomfortable. Very well. I’m now dispatching the men who guided you here to see to their comfort. One of them speaks exemplary Vox. He’ll show your seconds about Huru J’beij before escorting them to a dormitory for visitors. You and I, meanwhile, are alone to conduct our business, Kahl Latimer.”

  Seth waited for Magistrate Vrai to call aloud, to push buttons, to clap his hands, to do anything that would indicate he was “dispatching” a guide to Pors and Douin. But nothing like that happened.

  —Shall we get on with that business, then?

  The Magistrate studied Seth with the expression of a praying mantis. He hadn’t spoken aloud. His lips had not moved. Instead, the words that Seth had just “heard” had opened inside his brain like tiny fire roses.

  “You registered my message?” the Magistrate said aloud. Seth neither moved nor spoke. Something wonderful and terrifying had occurred.

  “As the guardian of the Mwezahbe Legacy, Kahl Latimer, I’m a rational being. But even before you set foot in the J’beij, I’d had the irrational certainty that I would find you a creature after my own mind. Isn’t that a presumptuous clairvoyance? After all, we’re quite literally from two different worlds.” Magistrate Vrai began rapidly snapping the long middle finger of his left hand against his palm, a reflexive mechanism that Seth supposed was the gosfi equivalent of human laughter. “And yet . . . and yet I believe I’ve just established the complete reliability of that clairvoyance, no matter how irrational it may strike you.”

  “What did you do?” Seth asked.

  —What did I do?

  There it was again, a kind of lovel
y violation. A windfall of microscopic seeds penetrating Seth’s gray matter and instantly germinating. His own startled consciousness briefly evaporated in order to let this other burst through.

  “Please,” Seth said. “What are you doing?”

  “Testing a hypothesis,” the Magistrate said aloud. “You’re an offworlder, but one descended from a solitary male birth-parent. We have this last in common, Kahl Latimer. Also, despite your otherworldly origins, you’re able to receive my . . . cerebrations, let’s call them. That further testifies to the bond between us. Somehow I don’t believe your Gla Tausian friends will experience a like receptiveness.”

  Seth wobbled in the knees. The air in his lungs was thin and metallic tasting. This capacity of the Magistrate to plant messages in his brain frightened him. It implied other capabilities: insight, knowledge, power. Guilt welled up in Seth, but why? What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?

  —Being men of one mind, we shouldn’t have to deprive the Kieri too long of your company.

  This was torture. Although the phenomenon did not in the least hurt, it bewildered and disorientated.

  —Being men of one mind, we should obtain agreement quickly.

  “You flatter me,” Seth managed, his voice raw in the otherwise silent chamber: raw and intrusive.

  Taking pity, the Magistrate told Seth aloud, “Kahl Latimer, it’s exactly as I’ve said. I believe we have many things in common. Despite our physical differences, despite the differences in our backgrounds, I believe we’re creatures of like motive. Don’t you feel this, too?”

  “No,” Seth said.

  The Magistrate’s long middle finger began to snap against his palm. “Am I too esoteric for you? Have I embarrassed you?”

  “No. Neither.”

  “What, then? You’re exceedingly nervous.”

  “I’m exceedingly nervous,” Seth agreed.

  “Why?”

  “You were thinking with my mind. Can you see into it? Do you know my thoughts, the range of my fears?”

  “No,” Magistrate Vrai said. “I’ve spoken in a manner you would call telepathic, yes, but I don’t blithely pull information from your head, if that’s your fear.”

  “Momentarily it was.”

  “Then put it aside. I’ve thought a good deal about a telepathic community, Kahl Latimer, and my belief is that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I don’t care too much for either alternative.”

  There it was: Seth’s excuse to broach something of his purpose in coming to Trope.

  “But isn’t it true,” he began, “that you have a telepathic group of the second type here in the very nation you rule? A body of people in total concord?”

  “You mean the Sh’gaidu, do you not?”

  “Yes, Magistrate.”

  Magistrate Vrai lowered himself into a chair of a pale-gray, glassy substance and then swiveled about to face the banner hanging on his wall. “With regard to their state government, Kahl Latimer, the Sh’gaidu have adopted the first attitude, that of suspicion and hostility. Perhaps, in the past, we’ve given them cause.” Face averted from Seth, he tilted his elegant head back. “You come quickly to the point.”

  “Not so soon as I might have, Magistrate.” These words, spoken, sounded like a rebuke, but Seth had intended them . . . innocently.

  His thoughts flew back to Gla Taus. On the morning that he’d entered the laulset pool with Lady Turshebsel, Lord Pors had explained a little of the complicated case of Trope and its troublesome Sh’gaidu subculture. Later, aboard the Dharmakaya, Seth had tried to learn still more about the Sh’gaidu from both the Point Marcher and the various library tapes. The truth, however, was that information about Trope was scant, and information about the Sh’gaidu dissidents almost nonexistent.

  Basically, the Sh’gaidu were an embarrassment because their entire orientation as a culture was shamanistic and mystical, not rational and technophilic. For innumerable revolutions of Trope they had stymied their government’s best efforts to bring them to heel, drawing upon formidable spiritual resources to resist state domination. As a consequence, small as the sect apparently was, its vitality was an affront to Tropish ideals and a dangerous beacon to young or disillusioned Tropiards who had failed to lay to heart the statutes of the Mwezahbe Legacy, the rational code by which the Tropish state professed to operate and into whose rigorous teachings it scrupulously initiated its children. The Sh’gaidu, as Seth understood the matter, represented an unacceptable challenge to this code. Moreover, the state feared the Sh’gaidu because in their insistence on the mystical unity of all gosfi they had developed full interencephalic communication among their own number: an exclusive sort of telepathy.

  Magistrate Vrai swiveled about in his chair—it resembled a glass tulip, a truncated corona for a seat—and beckoned Seth toward him. “Here,” he said, rising and moving along the other edge of the table. “Please sit. Ordinarily my own advisors stand, but you’ve traversed many lights and I want you to be comfortable.”

  Seth assumed the Magistrate’s chair, easing himself down.

  “I’ll walk about, Kahl Latimer, as you outline your proposal.”

  Still uncertain, Seth scrutinized his gloved hands. The proposal he intended to make was already known in part to the Magistrate because of earlier sublimission exchanges between Trope and various taussanaur officials aboard the Dharmakaya. How he acquitted himself in the voicing of this proposal, however, would determine whether the Magistrate accepted or rejected its terms. Prospects for success seemed good, else the Tropiards would never have permitted them to come. Although little comforted by this fact, Seth decided to speak bluntly.

  “We wish to remove the telepathic Sh’gaidu from your planet to Gla Taus in order to—”

  “No, wait a moment!” The Magistrate, who had been strolling toward the banks of white communication consoles at the other end of the room, turned and let his hands play distractedly with his amulet. “The Sh’gaidu, Kahl Latimer, are no more telepathic than any of us here in the J’beij. What they have is a shared intuitive ability. Because they follow the spurious Path of Duagahvi Gaidu, they’re like so many interwired robots. They share one another’s preprogrammed world view. That, not telepathy, is the secret of their community. Sometimes, in fact, I think them a peculiar clan of spiritually leveled individuals.”

  This phrasing recalled to Seth the attitude of Lord Pors toward the pilot of their light-tripper. Caranicas, the Kieri had implied, was little more than a robot interwired with the astrogational components of its ship.

  Seth shook off the incongruous recollection. “How many Sh’gaidu exist on your planet, Magistrate?”

  “Perhaps a few more than three hundred.”

  So few! Seth was astonished to think that a tribe no bigger than that could so disastrously tie up the machinery of the state. Was it Pure Reason that had prohibited the Tropiards from annihilating the Sh’gaidu?

  “I think I understand your surprise,” the Magistrate told Seth. “In the past, the Sh’gaidu numbered considerably more, perhaps into the modest thousands, and the state instituted both vicious and subtle pogroms against them. I’m the first of five magistrates since Seitaba Mwezahbe to resist a policy of harassment against dissenters. In the case of the Sh’gaidu, who arose fairly recently in our history, I have actively sought a kinder solution to the problem, often against the bellicose counsel of my administrative deputy and the leaders of Trope’s Thirty-three Cities. It’s my duty, Kahl Latimer, to find a humane solution.”

  The Magistrate strolled away from Seth again, trailing his fingers along the edge of the wine-colored table. “We Tropiards—we gosfi, to be more accurate—are not a prolific species. We live long lives, bear few young, and evolve only by preserving individuals—even individuals who would thwart the evolutionary goals of the Mwe
zahbe Legacy and the Tropish state. Three hundred lives have real meaning here, Kahl Latimer. And now it’s my understanding that you wish to take our exasperating three hundred Sh’gaidu back to Gla Taus with you. Why? How can this profit you?”

  Seth picked up a thread he had dropped earlier. “The government of Kier wants to open up an uninhabited territory called the Ilvaudsettan, or the Obsidian Wastes, in the northern polar region of their world. The pioneers and technicians in this territory require supplies that Kier itself seems incapable of yielding. Outside of Feln and Sket, its two major cities, life is often at the subsistence level. This need has caused the Kieri government to look to Trope, Magistrate. Isn’t it true that the Sh’gaidu economy is based on a self-contained agricultural system?”

  “Quite true. They eat only what they grow.”

  “Well, then, Lady Turshebsel, Liege Mistress of Kier, wishes to deed to the Sh’gaidu—forever—a large area of land in a subtropical region along the southernmost margin of Kier. This territory is called the Feht Evashsted. The land here, generously manured with volcanic ash, is very fertile. The volcanism, however, is a thing of the past and poses no current danger.”

  “Why does she wish to give the Sh’gaidu such desirable holdings? Why don’t the Gla Tausians open up this area—rather than the inhospitable polar region where supplies are scarce?”

  As Seth explained the Kieri susceptibility to heat and the fanatical ai-sautseb prejudice against colonizing any area south of the Feht Evashsted, Magistrate Vrai came back to his chair, pushed a console key, and summoned a bronze plastic panel in front of Seth out of its inset well.

  This panel rose from the surface of the table and opened like a book before the two men, revealing what appeared to be an animated satellite image of Gla Taus. The Magistrate pushed another key and the planet grew larger in the dim bronze screen. Light illuminated the image from behind, and the entire northern hemisphere was revealed, almost as if in three dimensions.

  After the Magistrate had frozen this image, Seth pointed out the Feht Evashsted, the Obsidian Wastes, and the waterways by which Ommundi shipping could transport agricultural products from the proposed Sh’gaidu commune to the pioneers working their way northward from Old Ilvaudset.