A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  In Vox, the term for coitus between individuals of different sapient beings was paragenation. The prefix in this coinage meant “wrongly, incorrectly, unfavorably, harmfully.”

  All the connotations were bad.

  What if you played a mental trick on yourself and insisted on thinking of this striking person as male? Seth asked himself. Would that remove your horns? If the Tropiards employ our Voxian pronouns arbitrarily, and it looks as if they do, then there’s nothing to prevent you from alternating among pronouns at whim. Think of her as him. The objective reality of the situation won’t be violated, will it?

  Will it?

  Seth glanced at the Sh’gaidu following them. He maintained a predetermined distance and a measured pace. His skin was a deep luminous brown. His skin had the unblemished texture of fine writing paper. His eyes were tiger-eye green. . . . Looking at him, though, Seth found it almost impossible to think of him as anything but her.

  Besides, Seth’s sexual orientation didn’t preclude contact with males. Abel, his own isohet, had been his lover for four or five years. And what disturbed Seth about the carnal aspect of his relationship with Abel was not its homosexuality but its narcissism. Or, more honestly, his suspicion that Abel had introduced him early to their unique variety of autoeroticism because Abel’s self-love was so great that it had to have an object outside itself. Or, then again, perhaps Abel had merely been seeking to possess their common isosire in his, Seth’s, person. Günter Latimer had always held himself aloof from their “love play,” tolerating it as a natural outgrowth of their isolation and their propinquity.

  Seth halted on the pathway. It was dizzying to think about his own and Abel’s possible motives—but, yes, there had been times that he had felt used by Abel, and times that his disgust after servicing his own and Abel’s passion had turned him unaccountably surly and fractious. Where did the anger come from, where the guilt? In the Ommundi Paedoschol he had dallied with boys and girls alike, with seldom a hindrance and never a rebuke, and that had been a happier, more innocent time. . . .

  “Kwa tehdegu!” the Deputy cried. But the children delighted in discomfiting him and didn’t retreat any farther than necessary. The Magistrate, on the other hand, paid them no heed, just strode calmly forward, halting when a child danced into his path and continuing when the way was clear again. Douin followed the Magistrate’s example, but Pors, sweating greasily, mopped his brow with a linen kerchief, which, each time his hand came away from his face, he shook in annoyance at the children. Seth was being left behind.

  “I speak no Tropish,” Seth told the young Sh’gaidu in Vox, amazed not only by the allure she held for him but also by his own foolishness in speaking to her. “I speak no Tropish but—”

  “I speak Vox,” she said. “My name is Lijadu.”

  Several meters still separated them, for she had halted when Seth had halted. Behind her, strange crops waved and heat shimmers danced on the ticking hull of The Albatross. Dumbfounded, Seth gaped.

  “How do—” he began. “How do you happen to speak it?”

  Farther up the pathway, Pors turned and hailed Seth: “Come on, envoy, let’s get out of this sun! You delay us!”

  “There’ll be time to talk in the Sh’vaij,” Lijadu said. “Our assembly place, I mean. What the Tropiards call our crofthouse.”

  “Sh’vaij?”

  “Chapel of The Sisterhood—that’s an approximation.”

  “Sh’gaidu, then, must mean The Sisterhood of Gaidu.” Seth said.

  “Unless, you’re a Tropiard who is rigorously j’gosfi. In which case—almost every case outside Palija Kadi—it means something like The Bitches or The Harlots of Gaidu. Bitches is your word for . . . for a certain kind of female animal, isn’t it? In any event, the terms of Vox are all approximations.”

  “Master Seth,” Douin shouted, “please come on! The Pledgechild has arrived, and you’re to speak with her on our behalf!”

  Seth looked toward the crofthouse—the Sh’vaij—and saw that all the children had disappeared, probably into the fields. Approaching the Magistrate’s group from the circular building, tottering down the path, came the Pledgechild. Slightly behind her, a less ancient adult kept pace. Although both were partially concealed from Seth’s view by the clot of intervening bodies, he easily discerned that unlike Lijadu and the children, these Sh’gaidu were clothed.

  They wore colorful sarilike garments. The old woman carried a staff. Their feet were bare, and their eyes, brilliant in the sunlight, were naked. Had they been dressed in jumpsuits and slit-goggles, however, it would have been impossible to distinguish them by gender from Vrai and Emahpre. In fact, the aged Pledgechild appeared to be the tallest figure on the path. Pronouns, and sexual distinctions, and all that went with them, seemed hopelessly muddled on Trope.

  “I’d better get up there,” Seth told Lijadu, as if the moment demanded a formal leavetaking.

  “Go on,” she said. Her voice was toneless.

  When Seth arrived among the others, the Magistrate was making introductions. He and the Pledgechild knew each other by reputation, surely, and his public relationship with the Sh’gaidu was respectful if not friendly. Both Emahpre and Pors looked put out, the Deputy because of what the Sh’gaidu stood for, the Kieri because of the heat. Douin patiently endured.

  “Welcome, Kahl Latimer,” the Pledgechild said to Seth in excellent Vox. “Let me apologize for the unruliness of the children.” She smiled. “Airships always excite and delight them.”

  Her eyes, Seth noted, were neither emerald, amber, nor topaz, but a deep black, like certain rare varieties of fire opal. Her skull was a faintly brown egg, as if long hours under Anja had leached the melanin from her skin. Her sari seemed to be dyed or printed with frondlike patterns of crimsons and even darker reds. The person behind her was similarly attired, but her skin was browner and her amber eyes were shot through with an unsettling milkiness. Only she of the two wore an amulet.

  “This is Huspre,” the Pledgechild said, indicating the milky-eyed woman with the dascra. “She’s my right hand.”

  Huspre nodded, and Seth returned the nod.

  “Her sojourn outside Palija Kadi occurred many years ago, for which reason she has only a limited command of Vox. Some of the young people taught me, you see, but Huspre is not quick with languages. I don’t press her to learn. Here, in any case, there’s little necessity—unless one must speak for the Sh’gaidu with outsiders who come on mysterious visits. I knew that might happen one day, and so it has.” The Pledgechild’s

  fingers were drumming on her staff: laughter. “Yes, I knew in my heart that one day we would be visited.”

  The Deputy nodded at Huspre. “She speaks the Ardaja dialect, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, of course. But Huspre’s not much of a talker even in our own tongue.”

  “Well, when she does talk,” Emahpre said irritably, “either the Magistrate or I will be able to translate her words for our visitors. You needn’t apologize for her lack of proficiency in Vox.”

  “Oh, I intended no apology,” said the Pledgechild.

  “May we go in?” the Magistrate asked, gesturing toward the Sh’vaij, which still lay eighty or ninety meters above. He was clearly trying to head off an unpleasantness between the Sh’gaidu leader and his own chief lieutenant. Pors looked grateful for the tactic Vrai had chosen.

  “Indeed, indeed,” the old woman said. “I would have waited for you there, but I feared the children were proving troublesome. Airships tickle them, as do the disembarked passengers of airships.” She made a limp-wristed motion at the grain field to her right, and Seth saw several children squatting among the stalks, peering out with weird, mischievous faces. Two or three retreated at the Pledgechild’s feeble gesture, but most held their ground. “They’re oh so fond of airships,” she informed her visitors again, then turned and limped unassisted toward the circular assembly building. Her staff, rather than Huspre, was her support.

  Seth grabbed Do
uin’s elbow and detained him. “That girl back there,” he said, nodding at Lijadu, “speaks Vox.”

  Douin, obviously surprised, glanced at her. She had not moved. Her eyes glittered intimidatingly. “You’re sure?”

  “I spoke with her, Master Douin.”

  “She looks little more than a child.”

  “She told me that Sh’gaidu means The Sisterhood of Gaidu. The dissidents—everyone in Palija Kadi—are females. Girls and women, Master Douin.”

  “Everyone?” Douin was incredulous.

  “So it seems. These are the female sapients Pors was certain existed on this world. Moreover, the Sh’gaidu are the only female sapients in Trope. Everyone else, every citizen of the Thirty-three Cities, is j’gosfi, male.”

  Douin pointed into the waving red-gold foliage of the monarchleaf. “But there are children here, several children. How—?” He broke off. “They’re hermaphroditic,” he declared with sudden insight. “Each gosfi has the reproductive apparatus of both the male and the female.”

  “The bodies of the children suggest as much.”

  “Ah,” said Douin, taken aback by this discovery. “Ah.”

  “What will be the response of Lady Turshebsel and the aisautseb if we take back to Gla Taus three hundred Tropish women? How will they react to a tribe of female settlers in the Feht Evashsted?”

  Douin covered his eyes and considered. “Master Seth?”

  “Sir?”

  “The answer, I think, is that the Tropiards—the gosfi—aren’t properly either male or female. The Sh’gaidu call themselves female, but they’re no different anatomically from the civil servants in the J’beij or the soldiers of the surveillance force. And vice versa, of course. I’m speaking solely of their physical makeup.” He uncovered his eyes and peeked familiarly at Seth. “Do you see?”

  Seth looked at Lijadu, who still had not moved. She was regarding Douin and him with such intense concentration that he felt uneasy. If reports about the telepathic abilities of the Sh’gaidu were true, perhaps she was actively tapping their minds or at least psychically amplifying their whispered conversation. No matter. She was lovely. He was lovely. Lijadu was lovely.

  “Their physical makeup is of no consequence,” Seth snapped, surprising himself.

  “That’s what I’ve just said,” Douin replied. “Since it’s of no consequence, neither Lady Turshebsel nor the aisautseb can object to the fact that we have returned to Gla Taus with three hundred gosfi. Gosfi, Master Seth; not men or women, but gosfi. Diplomacy is the art of the possible.”

  “Their psychology is of the utmost importance, though.”

  “We’d best go on, Master Seth. The others are entering the building. This accomplishes nothing.” Douin gently disengaged himself from Seth’s restraining hand and made to follow the Magistrate’s party.

  Seth caught his elbow again. “My isosire used to say that we are what we pretend to be.”

  “Yes?” Douin waited.

  “The Sh’gaidu pretend to be female, the Tropiards male. Therefore, each is what it pretends. We’ll be taking the members of a single culturally and psychologically determined sex back to Gla Taus with us, and we’ll be taking females, only females.” Seth’s heart misgave him. The mission now struck him as a fiasco of grand proportions. Was this a misbegotten chivalry? Would he have objected to carting away three hundred self-proclaimed j’gosfi? Yes . . . no . . . he honestly didn’t know.

  “Master Seth, you’re agonizing needlessly. On Trope, the terms male and female are virtually meaningless as jauddeb and humans understand them. The problem is as much linguistic as sexual, don’t you see?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “In any case, the Sh’gaidu won’t be compelled to do anything they don’t wish to do. If they don’t want to settle in the Feht Evashsted, why, then, we’ll simply go home without them.”

  “And Abel and I? And the Dharmakaya?”

  “Ah, Master Seth, that I can’t say. I speak neither for Aisaut Chappouib nor for our beloved Liege Mistress.” This time he succeeded in breaking Seth’s grip and in escorting the young isohet towards the Sh’vaij.

  The breeze blowing through the basin was fresh if not cool, and on the intricate coral-colored bridge looming ahead of them Seth saw a gaggle of children watching their progress. When he glanced back, Lijadu was gone. He and Douin attained the clearing of the crofthouse, an apron of well-swept, brick-red rock. Whisk patterns were visible in the clearing’s fine gravel, but Douin, determined to get him inside the Sh’vaij, gave Seth no time to examine them.

  “Wait a moment, strangers!” a voice cried. The language was Vox, and the voice—Seth already knew it—was Lijadu’s.

  He and Douin turned. Lijadu emerged from the right-hand field below the crofthouse and pointed around the building’s curve to where the circular clearing joined the great stone bridge to the cliffs. Seth and Douin looked, but still could not see what Lijadu was trying to indicate.

  “Here she comes,” Lijadu called. “Little Omwhol wants you to see her flock. —Come, then, child.”

  A moment later, a very young Sh’gaidu came around the assembly building shooing eight or nine hissing beasties in front of her. To Seth, they resembled miniature dragons. They went on four legs and waved double sets of feather-scaled wings behind their small, beaked heads. Waddling and flapping, they hurried across the apron of the Sh’vaij and into the western fields. Omwhol, the child, caught one of them and carried it to Seth.

  As she handed it to him, Lijadu stepped onto the apron and spoke: “They don’t bite. They’re gocodre. Take it. Omwhol was only recently given charge of them. She’s quite pleased with herself.”

  Seth knelt and accepted the gocodre from the child. Captured, it didn’t struggle. Transferred into his hands, it didn’t try to fight free. Its skin was leathery, patterned copper and coral. What most amazed Seth about the creature was its eyes: They were tiny chrysoberyls. In the matter of physical optics, evolution on Trope had stuck to this tack and carried it through to creatures with intelligent self-awareness.

  The animal flopped in Seth’s hands, unexpectedly. He caught it. Omwhol’s little fingers snapped in amusement. Douin stepped back.

  “See,” Lijadu said. “This one is j’gocodre, male. It had no choice in the matter. It hatched that way.”

  Seth released the beast, which scampered away after its broodmates. Omwhol skipped off, too, unperturbed that her charges seemed to be getting beyond her tiny sphere of influence.

  “We had no choice in the matter, either,” said Seth, rising. “But we weren’t hatched.”

  Lijadu regarded him peculiarly for vouchsafing this information. Then she entered the cool immensity of the Sh’vaij.

  “Come with me,” she said from inside the doorway. “The Pledgechild and the others have preceded us to her cell. I’ll take you.”

  TEN

  Even after he had thrown back his hood, it took a moment for Seth’s eyes to adjust. Horizontal window slits ran about the interior of the Sh’vaij, just below its ceiling, but the building’s thatched eaves blocked the passage of direct light. The place was dark and quiet. Gradually, however, both architectural and gosfi forms resolved themselves out of the dimness.

  Directly opposite Seth, far across the nave, loomed an imposing, sloped wall. He recognized it immediately as a replica of the wall enclosing the basin on the south: bone white, slightly convex, smooth and blank. In the Sh’vaij, the wall served as a sacramental backdrop for what appeared to be a low altar set with unlit candles and fronted by a reed mat. Someone—an anonymous Sh’gaidu—lay supine on the mat, almost like an offering. Her stillness suggested death.

  Carved wooden benches lined the walls of the assembly building. Upon these sat a number of adult Sh’gaidu, most of whom were clothed in colorful garments. They sat singly, apart from one another, either engaged in deep meditation (Seth decided) or else communing mind to mind. Their eyes were open—it seemed the gosfi had no eyelids, in any case
—but the lack of fire in these organs bespoke a turning inward of the sense of vision: These people were scrutinizing their own souls. It then occurred to Seth that perhaps they were praying for the person who now lay before the replica of the basin’s wall.

  The Pledgechild, Magistrate Vrai, Deputy Emahpre, Lord Pors, and Huspre were nowhere to be seen.

  Lijadu said, “The Pledgechild’s rooms are behind Palija Dait, that wall you see there. You would say the Lesser Door. Palija Kadi, of course, means the Great Door.”

  “You regard that wall and your entire basin as doors?” Douin enquired.

  The young Sh’gaidu found a blue-patterned garment on a bench to her left and fastened this serenely about her torso. “We regard them by the names they bear,” she said. The pastel blue against her warm brown flesh in no way diminished Seth’s desire. He cursed his desire, and she said, “Come pay your respects to my birth-parent Ifragsli, who died four days ago.”

  She set off toward the wall. Douin and Seth fell in behind, their boots scuffling obtrusively on the rock floor. At Palija Dait, Lijadu knelt beside the body of her birth-parent and swayed above it hypnotically.

  The corpse was redolent of a faint perfume, like the bouquet of certain brandies. It was draped with a white cloth to the neck, and its face was concealed by a death mask of caked red clay. Most startling to Seth was the fact that the Sh’gaidu, using a moist, emerald-green pigment, had daubed eyes on the death mask. Subtly iridescent even in the gloom, these eyes looked challengingly real. Lijadu stopped swaying, leaned forward, and kissed each painted eye in turn. Then, nimbly, she rose.

  “Ifragsli’s dascra’nol ceremony is this evening. Each of you from Huru J’beij is invited to attend.”

  “This was your birth-parent?” Douin asked.

  “My mother, you would say,” Lijadu told Douin.

  “She scarcely appears an old woman,” the Kieri noted. “What brought about her death?”