A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  And she began:

  A light comes on inside my mind. Seitaba Mwezahbe and our Holy One stand together on a lofty glass scaffold in the building that Tropiards call the J’beij. The light in my mind goes out. When it comes back on, I see the messiah and the magistrate standing in each other’s company atop the wall we know as Palija Kadi. For the remainder of my dream, these places alternate so rapidly that only the figures of Mwezahbe and Gaidu themselves have any real outline. Time doesn’t exist for them. Gaidu has not gone back to the era of the First Magistrate, nor has he come forward to the advent of the Holy One. Instead, they have met at a flickering intersection of their intellects and souls.

  When Mwezahbe speaks, however, he attempts to define the moment in terms of measured and identifiable units. It’s as if I’m dreaming a vision that Mwezahbe has dreamed before me.

  “Welcome, Gaidu, to the year 223,” he says. “This is the last year of my life, three and a half centuries before your own birth. It’s only in this way we’ll ever be able to talk, for very shortly in your own lifetime you’ll disappear from your people and suffer a violent death.

  “Each of us has striven to alter and improve the lot of our followers, I as maker and lawgiver, you as apostate. Many of those who come after me will wish to kill you. One will undoubtedly succeed. Still, I don’t wish to punish you for your apostasy by threatening you with a death that you won’t believe in. What sort of punishment is that? Instead, your punishment must consist of a single, soul-destroying revelation.

  “You see, my late-arriving adversary, your life hasn’t been your own.”

  Gaidu does not respond. She stands before the First Magistrate in a state of silent receptiveness, attempting to read the multifaceted personality behind his concealing goggles. She herself is naked.

  “You were a statistical probability,” Mwezahbe continues. “All my life I’ve encountered resistance to my Legacy, minor insurrections that failed out of sheer, short-circuited wrongness. But I knew that one day a few would rebel because, touched to the heart with an ancient sh’gosfi madness that we’ve labored, first, to mute and, finally, to forbid, they would elevate superstition over science, and mysticism over the probing empirical mind. The Tropish state being what it is, Gaidu, I knew that any future rebellion would evolve as a movement more religious than political, and that a madwoman would become for the apostates a new focal point of authority. I’ve known all along that you would come, and that your advent would cast you in the role of a savior.”

  But our savior answers Seitaba Mwezahbe nothing.

  “The domination of the sh’gosfi—as a people rather than as an essential aberration of the light—will be cramped and short-lived,” the First Magistrate declares. “It has no future. It evolved in the first place only out of a failure of full self-awareness, and its purpose was to provide the necessary contrast by which we could come to recognize and pursue the path of an aggressive, thoroughgoing rationality. I’m the embodiment of that recognition and that pursuit. It was for me to codify the way to both, and I did so, much to your disadvantage, long before you arrived on the scene to challenge my success.

  “Holy One, the simplest and most decisive truth about your advent is that it will be inopportune. You will have come too late to undo the good that my reign inaugurates and gives enduring passage.”

  Gaidu’s eyes bejewel the darkness of my dream, but still she keeps her peace, letting Mwezahbe accuse and chastise.

  “Gosfi of reason—j’gosfi, by very definition—function beyond the limits of worship, Holy One. They cry out for ideas to respect, for rulers who will capture not only their imaginations but their intellects. Therefore, they have subordinated themselves to my Legacy, which has freed them from the irrational fears and the animal longings of their baser selves. In being bound to reason, Gaidu, there is no slavery and no despair.

  “But the beginnings of your ministry, over four centuries hence, will dazzle and enslave only those who have failed to assimilate the statutes of the Legacy. From the state you’ll siphon off only those still backward enough to demand a focus of veneration rather than a fount of inspiration. You will have gained the souls of harlots, perverts, and madwomen, the very ones too feeble to abide by the truths that commit their souls into their own keeping. These are the ones who will be looking for a Great Mother to save them from themselves, the sh’gocodre of legend who hides her crippled broodlings under the monumental tents of her double wings. For your own purposes, then, you will have come too late. Can’t you recognize your failure, Gaidu?”

  Although the eyes of the Holy One gleam, she doesn’t speak.

  “As one who would provide an alternative authority by ensnaring gosfi souls, you’ve timed things badly.

  “Perhaps, however, you could argue that you will perform miracles to bring about your Sh’gaidu Millennium. But we have created a society in which the miraculous is looked upon with all the grand and mighty suspicion of the intellect. Even that which briefly appears worthy of the mind’s dread has explanation, and derives from this fact a mystery of its own. It becomes even more miraculous for having an empirical basis.

  “If an unsolvable riddle exists, it may well be death, or entropy, or the spirit’s waste. But we deny that you unriddle these final conundrums. You shroud them in the rags of superstition and answer them with riddles of your own.

  “How, then, can you disclose to any gosfi a metaphysics more incisive and transcendent than the state’s? Our miracles, grounded in a method quantifiable and exact, are so much more certain than yours. And because we have deprived you of the weapon of miracle, Gaidu, you’ve presented yourself to the Tropiards of the Thirty-three Cities too late to make use of it.”

  Now I thrash in my sleep, angry for my Holy One and desirous of rebuking her inquisitor for his rudeness. A light goes on and off in my brain. Now I’m on a scaffold in the J’beij, now on the edge of Palija Kadi overlooking the laser-singed fields of the basin. I see the ruin that’s to come, and I wish to wake up. But Gaidu holds me in my dream. With the violence of a rape, she opens me to the relentless arguments of First Magistrate Mwezahbe.

  “Why don’t you answer me?” he asks. “Do you believe yourself the spirit-of-mystery made flesh? Do you mean to imply by your silence that you must work through mystery to attain your ends? Mystery. Is this the metaphysical cloister in which you take refuge? Well, it won’t do, Gaidu. It won’t do. Even you must realize the inadequacy of your stratagem.

  “Mystery made flesh! The mystery of your birthing—if mystery you insist upon—lies in the fact that insentience may somehow generate life, that the organic may somehow derive from the inorganic, that flesh may contain spirit. But you’re not unique in being the product of such a wondrous quickening. Not by any means. What feeling, fiery creature doesn’t illustrate and embody the same mystery, Holy One?

  “Answer me! Open your soul to me! How are you, Gaidu, more miraculous—in essence, not simply in degree—than the smallest mite that hatches, gluts itself on blood, and dies? Answer me!”

  At this point, I’m in torment. I begin to fear that Mwezahbe has pushed our savior to the extremity of self-doubt. But she remains serene. She grants my dreaming self a brief glimpse into the calmness of her heart. Otherwise, she knows, I would rage out of my sleep like a j’gosfi warrior dutifully fulfilling the madnesses of reason.

  Mwezahbe resumes his inquisition: “We both know that your coming coincides with a time not truly vulnerable to your message. Who’s to blame for that? You know as well as I, and this knowledge, by itself, is partial punishment for your apostasy, Holy One. However, there’s more, and I intend to reveal to you that which must condemn the worthiness of your ministry and so inflict upon your soul a punishment suitable to your betrayal.

  “My Legacy has sought to provide for the weak, the mind-crippled, and the pathologically sh’gosfi, either by curing them or by offering them an outlet for their weaknesses. One such outlet will be your Sh’gaidu community of misfit
s and mystics.

  “Therefore, on a modest if misleadingly successful scale, the experiment at Palija Kadi will survive for some time. But eventually you’ll find yourselves outdistanced by the programmed evolution of a million Tropiards working through their minds and auxiliary births toward a transcendental gosfi condition. When we attain to this condition, Holy One, your people will have perished. The Sh’gaidu will have disappeared from the face of the planet.

  “Holy One, you came too late.

  “Had you come earlier, before my own lifetime, nothing I could have done would have erased your image. The nation would be wholly sh’gosfi or divided against itself in the self-destructive polarity of desperate males and unmerciful madwomen. Probably the former—for I would not have yet appeared to lift all Trope out of ignorance and superstition. Your own view would have prevailed, and sh’gosfi nationwide would have bravely resisted the imposition of my upstart authority. Martyrs by the thousands would have arisen to die for your holy illusions.

  “And I, Seitaba Mwezahbe, would be the Second Messiah. A second messiah is an anomaly, Holy One. She is either Nuraju or charlatan. She has no official status and only the adherents she deserves. Her Elect are a pitiful and deluded group, and that’s why she has them. In fact, it may be that she needs her Elect far more desperately than they need her. Though they’re too weak to live entirely by their own wills, a few will gain the strength to desert her. Others will deny reality their whole lives, and these few sad specimens of gosfihood she will exploit, their needs feeding hers and hers theirs in a melancholy symbiosis.

  “Meanwhile, the religion of her rebellion has become a cauldron wherein the disenchanted, the deranged, and the desolate are boiled away. The real substance of the state remains behind, purified.

  “And those who are boiled off, Gaidu, what of them? What do you care for them beyond their usefulness as psychic grist? Can you even answer? If so, try. Answer one who’s granted freedom and dignity to his people—for I’ve done that by administering to their worldly needs, giving them fathomable mysteries, and vanquishing their terror of the dark. All this I did from the challenge of doing it, and from love, and from a secret but not unnatural desire to be known forever as a powerful benefactor.

  “But what of your motives, Holy One? What are they? Are they too dark to voice? Speak, I command you!”

  Gaidu torments me in my sleep by refusing to respond to these provocations. I would answer for her, sing her praises, but my tongue is a hibernating animal in my mouth, no more able to awake than I.

  “You came too late,” the First Magistrate says. “The source of your strength lies in a vast pettiness yearning toward the honor that three million Tropiards give me alone. If not, speak. Give me your thoughts, or vanish into time like the phantom you are.”

  Here the Pledgechild stopped. She lifted her Y-shaped scepter, studied it, and put it back in her lap. Everyone in her reception cell waited for her to go on.

  “Is that all, Pledgechild?” Porchaddos Pors asked. “Does the vision have an ending? Does your messiah answer Mwezahbe anything?”

  The old woman looked up. “You may judge for yourself, Kahl Pors. My dream vision always concludes in the same way.”

  “Tell it,” Lijadu urged from the windowsill.

  “Never fear, my darling Lijadu.” The Pledgechild pointed her stick at Seth and Magistrate Vrai, one prong to each. “It’s at this point that Gaidu replies, you see, and although she doesn’t attack Mwezahbe verbally or disparage Tropish ideals, her behavior would strike a good Tropiard—a successor to the First Magistrate—as unseemly. I spell this out explicitly before I proceed.”

  “Do you want my permission to finish?” the Magistrate asked.

  “Oh, no,” the old woman said. “I must finish every recitation, as Lijadu, despite her unnecessary urgings, well knows. But if you don’t wish to hear it, Magistrate, you may join Emahpre in your airship.”

  Vrai hesitated only a moment. “I will stay.”

  “Yes,” the Pledgechild said. “My vision ended last night as it always does.”

  With a nervousness I can feel, Mwezahbe waits for Gaidu to rebut his attack. The Holy One senses the First Magistrate’s fear that he has not woven tight some threadbare place in his argument. But, strangely, she also senses that Mwezah-be longs for the rebuttal he fears.

  At length she turns toward the First Magistrate and spreads wide her arms. In the next instant—there in the J’beij, here on our wall’s summit—she steps into the body of Seitaba Mwezahbe. She joins with the dream flesh of her inquisitor. For a moment, the two are a unity, drinking starlight through the same fiery eyes and sharing a pulse that reverberates in time with my own. Together, they are whole and seamless.

  So is the world.

  But Mwezahbe shakes his head, discomfited by the surrender of his self. When he can stand it no longer, he backs away from Gaidu’s all-encompassing embrace, thereby denying his nuclear union with her. I can read his feelings. Exhilaration diluted with shame. Against his will, he has been immersed in sh’gosfi consciousness, and although the immersion has not deprived him of his self, he feels disoriented and shamefully aflame.

  “Return to your time,” he commands our Holy One. “Soon, in our own eras, you and I will die, nor do I believe that we’ll meet again. That which created us has little use for dialectics. Farewell, sibling and fleshsharer.”

  Gaidu touches the First Magistrate with her mind, tilting her head so that the stars may evict her from my vision. A nimbus seizes her, light winks in her veins, and she is gone. Mwezahbe, too, crumbles, and all that remains in my vision is a glittering panorama of Palija Kadi: cliffs, fields, bridges, Sh’gaidu communicants. Our crops rage with fire. The roar of their burning climbs through the night like the cries of a million tortured spirits.

  No one moved. Seth could hear the roaring of the fires. Outside, however, through the window, only the wind-stirred Sh’gaidu crops. Lijadu’s tigerish green eyes captured his. Her stare unsettled him. How could you interpret the meaning of such a stony, inhuman appraisal? Guiltily, he looked away.

  The Pledgechild rescued Seth with a question: “Does the ending of my dream vision displease you, too, Kahl Latimer?”

  “Displease me?” Seth shook his head. “No, Pledgechild. In many ways, Gaidu’s response to Seitaba Mwezahbe is more poetic than his lengthy inquisition.”

  “That poetry displeases Magistrate Vrai,” she said. “It and the merging of j’gosfi and sh’gosfi in a‘union whose significance is not simply sexual.”

  Vrai said, “If Gaidu triumphs in your vision, Pledgechild, she does so because your sleeping self controls the dream’s direction. That’s self-evident.”

  “Is it?”

  “The vision has an aesthetic rightness, from the Sh’gaidu perspective—but it doesn’t reflect reality, and the flames at the end are history rather than prophecy.”

  “In which instance it does reflect reality,” the Pledgechild said. “In its other parts it symbolizes rather than reflects the real. Do you expect consistency of a dream?”

  “Dreaming is a sh’gosfi enterprise, Pledgechild.”

  “You never dream?”

  The Magistrate shifted in his seat. “Of course. Dreams are a natural outlet for the irrational, a failsafe against madness.”

  Lijadu continued to study Seth. Her interest made his earlobes burn, but it also quelled the ardor that had earlier tormented him.

  The Pledgechild also swung her attention from the Magistrate to Seth. “Do you love anyone, Kahl Latimer?”

  “Love anyone?” Everyone in the room seemed to be regarding him.

  “I ask because love is an emotion—a fixation, if you like—that often has no rational source. Sometimes we love as helplessly as we dream. Do you, then, love anyone, Kahl Latimer?”

  “My isosire,” Seth said after a moment, glancing at Pors. “My birth-parent. And my isohet, my older sibling, Abel.” Would this admission convict him in the Sh’gaidu’s gl
ittering eyes as a narcissist? Did they know what isosire and isohet meant? Would his heart love for Abel absolve him of the charge of narcissism? After all, he did finally love someone outside of Seth Latimer, even if this love object happened to be his genetic twin. Abel was a person, as was he.

  “Is this a rational love?” the Pledgechild asked.

  “Stop,” the Magistrate said. “Kahl Latimer is a guest on Trope and a guest here in Palija Kadi.”

  “It’s all right,” Seth said. “I don’t mind her questions.”

  “Well, then?” The Pledgechild waited.

  “I would suppose that pure reason would rule out love as a human, or a gosfi, or a jauddeb, possibility. Instinct at least preserves the possibility. I don’t believe I’m a full-fledged devotee of either system.”

  “You define the Sh’gaidu ‘system’ in terms of instinct?” the old woman asked.

  “Maybe as a ritualization of it, Pledgechild.”

  “Then how would you define the Magistrate’s ‘system’?” The last word emerged from her lips like something contaminated.

  Seth glanced at Vrai. “Maybe as an attempt at instinct modification,” he said.

  “Not as a negation of instinct?”

  “That wouldn’t be possible, would it?”

  The Pledgechild began to rise from her backless chair. Lijadu, springing from her place on the windowsill, hurried to help her. Everyone else rose out of deference to the Sh’gaidu leader, who, freeing herself from Lijadu’s hand, put her scepter down and tottered the few remaining steps from her chair to Seth’s. Her almost predatory black eyes approached. Her thin arms opened. A moment later he was captive in their embrace, rigid under the baffled gazes of the Magistrate, Pors, and Douin. The Pledgechild held him for at least a minute, released him, and shuffled unassisted into the room opposite the pottery-storage niche. For a time, no one spoke or tried to sit again.