A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Why did she do that?” Douin finally asked Seth.

  “I don’t know.” Seth shook his head. Lijadu was still watching him, her eyes as indecipherable as alien runes.

  Pors said, “Her embracing Master Seth concerns me far less, Magistrate Vrai, than her leaving. We’ve made no substantial progress, and the better part of the afternoon lies ahead.”

  “Forgive her,” Lijadu said. “Her recitation has sapped her strength. She must rest. This evening’s dascra’nol ceremony will also be fatiguing for her.”

  “What would you have us do now?” the Magistrate asked.

  Huspre reentered the reception cell, with her milky eyes and her mismatched facial features.

  “Remain here if you like,” Lijadu said. “Huspre will bring food. Or you may tour the basin with me and eat later, or return to your airship on the roadway.”

  “I don’t care to tour the basin,” Pors declared.

  “Then we’ll eat something,” the Magistrate said.

  Lijadu spoke to Huspre in Tropish, and Huspre retreated into the Pledgechild’s adjoining room, only to come back a moment later laden with baskets of bread and fresh uncooked vegetables. Huspre refilled everyone’s water bowls from the amphora on the stand next to the Pledgechild’s chair. Then, with Lijadu’s help, she distributed the bread and vegetable stalks into another set of bowls. Tantai, the pregnant Sh’gaidu, was conspicuous by her absence.

  “I’d like to see the basin,” Seth said, anxious to escape the others. “If I could take a piece of bread with me, I’d need nothing else.”

  “Very well,” Lijadu said. “I’ll show you.”

  “Kahl Latimer,” the Magistrate blurted. Seth turned towards him. “Do you require your goggles against the sun?” He touched the chain by which they hung inside the bodice of the jumpsuit.

  “No, I’ll be fine.” But Seth wondered if the Magistrate’s concern for his eyes was actually a warning to protect the dascra that lay inside his own tunic.

  Pors said, “Master Seth, where will we meet again?” Both Pors and Douin seemed apprehensive about his departure.

  “I’ll bring him back to the Sh’vaij,” Lijadu said.

  The Magistrate said, “We’ll either be here, Kahl Latimer, or in the airship with Deputy Emahpre.”

  Seth ached to be outside. Except for a few short walks in the open air, he had been confined to walled and roofed-in places for nearly two months: Douin’s geffide, the Dharmakaya, and, if only briefly, the J’beij and the crofthouse here on Trope. Anja was an alien sun, true, but, desiring its blessing, he relished the prospect of sweating from its conjectural heat rather than from a craven anxiety.

  Lijadu beckoned him out of the Pledgechild’s cell.

  TWELVE

  It was almost noon. Seth beheld everything as if by a magnesium flare. Anja hung overhead like a pinwheel running alternately blue and white, and the whole basin had the magnified clarity of a rock garden beneath a still mountain spring.

  Lijadu and Seth walked toward the Great Wall, climbing terraces that stepped upward to its base. Occasionally, Lijadu paused to bend down a stalk and examine the fruit at its tip. Seth nibbled a Sh’gaidu breadstick that he had brought with him from the Pledgechild’s cell, deciding gradually that he liked the taste.

  In the fields labored other Sh’gaidu, adults with wooden or stone implements to chop out weeds or to ready the ground for new plantings. Seth detected their presence by the stabbing glints of sunlight from their eyes as they turned among the stalks. The heat did not worry him, but the brightness did. Should he raise his hood for protection? On so warm a day, that seemed silly. Lijadu, in her abbreviated sari, was practically naked. Whenever she moved, her limbs flashed brown: she was an uncanny brightness herself, and Seth had no desire to shield his eyes from her.

  “I can’t translate the names of all the plants,” Lijadu said. “They’re specific to Trope, as the plants of your world are specific to it—but a few we call by descriptive names that allow rough translation.” She gripped the stalk of a shoulder-high plant and showed Seth the deep-green cluster at its head. “This we call emerald-eye, lijadu. I’m not named for the plant, however, or it for me. We share our name because of the suitability of the metaphor to us both.” She let the stalk go and set off again toward the blinding white wall whose bulk dwarfed them both.

  Over Seth’s shoulder, the Sh’vaij was far away. The cypresslike trees around it rippled like small blue flames.

  Ahead, hedges of amber, lilac, and crimson encircled the base of the wall, mounting toward it inexorably. Lijadu picked her way through this vegetation with a skill born of familiarity and practice. Seth was hard put to keep up, but fixed his eyes on the Sh’gaidu’s supple legs so that admiration and desire soon neutralized his windedness. Finally, at the wall, Lijadu reached out her hands and touched the warm white rock. Seth aped her stance, palms flat and head thrown back.

  “Palija Kadi,” Lijadu said. “The Great Wall. A portion of the buried heart of the planet. It was here before the Tropish state, long before the protogosfi who first lived in the galleries.” She nodded at the balustraded cliff face in which the Sh’gaidu apparently had their individual dwellings.

  Perhaps because of an assisting wind, Seth thought he could hear vast machines whirring in the hidden chambers in the eastern wall. A kind of roar.

  “Who were these protogosfi?” Seth asked.

  Lijadu dropped her hands and faced him. “Ancestors of the people of Trope, but the state refuses to think on our origins here in Palija Kadi.”

  “Surely the state has explored gosfi prehistory, Lijadu.”

  “Excavations? Archaeology? Is that what you mean?”

  “I suppose it is, yes.”

  “To a limited extent the state has engaged in these things, on the grounds that to ignore the past is senseless. But for most Tropiards, including especially their own First Magistrate, prehistory is was. Mwezahbe said that the state must look forward rather than back. The purpose of each Tropiard and of the technocracy to which he belongs is to comprehend the significance of their becoming. They believe that this becoming defines them.”

  Seth tried a pun in Vox: “It’s the defining that becomes you.”

  “No, Kahl Latimer, it’s the being that interests us, essence rather than process. We revere the protogosfi for what they were. The state ignores them because what they were is anterior to the evolutionary path that all good Tropiards follow toward a doubtful transcendence. They don’t care to think much on that from which they’ve arisen.”

  “Why?” Lijadu’s knowledge, sophistication, and aplomb astonished and daunted Seth. He hardly expected them from a member of a dissident, mys-tagogic commune. That she and her tribe would agree to leave this place for a world light-years away began to seem more and more unlikely.

  “Because like humans and jauddeb, every species of protogosfi to live on Trope had two distinct sexes. None were—as all modern gosfi are—hermaphroditic.”

  “Is that why Trope continues to hold itself aloof from Interstel?”

  “Because humanity still has two sexes? Probably. I don’t know everything about the rational aversions of the present magistrate.”

  “He seems a decent person.”

  “Much better than the last one. I’m so grateful I never knew Orisu Sfol.”

  “But these protogosfi, Lijadu—how do the Sh’gaidu know about them?”

  She nodded at the eastern cliff. “We live where they did, or where several bands of the most successful protogosfids lived. Tropiards refer collectively to our apartments in the rock as the galleries, but their true name—which even the protogosfi who lived here may have spoken, Kahl Latimer—is Yaji Tropei, Earth Womb. They prepared these mansions for us millions of years ago, and died becoming us. Their earliest descendants survived and prospered through androgyny, but the technocracy succeeding this culture a mere nine hundred years ago arose on the suppression of the sh’gosfi impulse in every one of its sons.�
� Lijadu used the Vox for “self-aware male offspring” with what struck Seth as tactful moral neutrality. “Yaji Tropei is a painstaking feat of engineering, Kahl Latimer, and you’ll have a chance to see it before you leave. We find it satisfying that our protogosfid ancestors built these galleries many millennia before the First Magistrate codified the statutes of the Mwezahbe Legacy.”

  Lijadu led Seth along the base of the great wall and then down a series of stone-braced steps to a terrace where a regiment of stunted-looking bushes grew. Their leaves were acid green and palmate. They smelled keenly of an unnamable spice. Lijadu stalked along this tier, found a plant to her liking, and knelt beside it. After glancing cryptically at Seth, she took the plant’s central stalk between her fingers and pushed the clustering leaves aside. Revealed halfway down the stalk was a tumorlike pod not quite the size of her fist. Lijadu snapped this pod from the plant, cupped it in her hands with an affecting gentleness. She extended the pod to Seth, signaling with her chin that he should accept her gift and cradle it in his hands. He did so.

  A moment later she said, “Return it, Kahl Latimer.”

  Seth returned the strange seed pod.

  Now Lijadu peeled back the long hard petals of the iridescent green exoskin. Working carefully, she reduced the pod to a miniature chalice, in which there grew a round blue ball. Weblike filaments anchored the ball in the chalice, but Lijadu cut these by scooping her finger around the pod’s open interior. Then she let the casing drop and closed her fist around the ball.

  “This we call the heartseed, Kahl Latimer. Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Then watch.” Lijadu undid her fist and held her palm out before her. The ball trembled as if something inside it were struggling to break out. “The heartseed grows for everyone on Trope, the sane and the mad alike.”

  As in time-lapse photography, the heartseed ballooned on Lijadu’s hand. In less than a minute it had become a cerulean-blue spheroid, the size of an ancient ecclesiastical censer and almost as aromatic. But it had no more substance than a soap bubble. Seth reached to touch it and felt only a resilient silkiness.

  “Of all the plants in Palija Kadi,” Lijadu said, “only this is not for food. Not for food, but for beauty.”

  Like the mwehanja Seth had eaten in the Tropish dormitory and again aboard The Albatross, the heartseed resembled the sun.

  Lijadu stood, lifted her cupped hands to the sky, and pulled them down to free the sphere. It dipped on the wind and spun away above the colorful stairstep terraces towards the Sh’vaij. It blurred with the noon’s brilliance, lifting on a thermal and pirouetting away into infinity. Seth squinted after it into the stinging light.

  “Care to see the kioba Najuma from which my birth-parent kept watch after her death?” Lijadu pointed to the tower below them to their right.

  When Seth nodded, Lijadu led him along the same terrace to another series of stone-braced steps descending to the north. Seth could see the boxed-in lookout at the top of the tower, surprised to find it still a little below them. But Lijadu danced easily down the steps to the base of the tower, and Seth, no longer winded, followed.

  From the tower’s platform dangled a rope. Lijadu braced it for Seth so that he could shinny up it and through the floor into the lookout. Then, so gracefully that the rope hardly danced despite being unbraced by anyone on the ground, Lijadu climbed up after him. From the kioba, Seth and Lijadu surveyed the quilt patterns of the fields and terraces beneath them. Neither spoke, but Seth moved from side to side to experience each new view in turn. The curious roaring he had heard from Yaji Tropei—the galleries—seemed to have stopped. Looking that way, he saw members of the Sh’gaidu sect moving behind the cliff’s coral balustrades and pacing back and forth along the twisted stone bridges connecting the galleries to the fields. Palija Kadi was alive.

  In the center of the lookout ran a pole from ceiling to floor. Pensively, Lijadu gripped this and spoke:

  “These are places of vision. We bring our dead to them and bind them to the pole-trees, as my own birth-parent Ifragsli was bound here four nights ago. From here the dead look out on their lives and recall Duagahvi Gaidu. They remain three days. Before their eyes crumble into jinalma, the dead are cut down and their eyes taken out in preparation for the ceremony we call dascra’nol.”

  “And, from these lookouts, the dead will see your Holy One returning from her sojourn among the northern gosfi?”

  “Not with hard, living eyes, Kahl Latimer, but with the essence giving those eyes life. The Sh’gaidu believe the dead need a period of solitude in which their final visions may ripen.”

  “And what of these final visions you speak of?”

  “This evening you’ll see.” Lijadu stared out across the fields.

  Although she no longer faced him, Seth began to feel that his mind was as clear to her as a glass bell. Hadn’t she called him by his isosire’s surname even though she’d had no chance to hear his name spoken? Was she even now communing with the Pledgechild or other members of the Sh’gaidu scattered about the basin. Vrai had said that a telepathic community—where reading as well as sending is commonplace—would be a community of either wholly paranoiac or wholly indistinguishable personalities.

  That condition didn’t seem to obtain in Palija Kadi. From what he had seen so far, Seth judged the Pledgechild, Lijadu, Huspre, Tantai, and the little girl Omwhol as complete persons; suspicion was not a conspicuous character trait in any of them. Were they, though, suspicious of the mission that had brought two high-ranking Tropiards and a trio of motley offworlders to their basin? A guilt without an identifiable correlative began to well in Seth.

  “Lijadu.”

  She turned to him.

  “Lijadu, Magistrate Vrai speaks to me mind to mind. Can you do that, too?”

  —We can.

  He accepted the admission, or the avowal, as if it had been voiced—even though Lijadu had been mutely staring at him for a long, disconcerting moment. He was neither surprised nor frightened.

  “Do your capabilities extend beyond simple transmission?” he asked. “Can you read as well as send?”

  “Kahl Latimer, you are now uneasy. Would a straightforward answer banish your uneasiness or simply replace it with a gnawing fear?”

  “You’ve answered my question, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but not straightforwardly.” Lijadu drummed the fingers of one hand against her other bare shoulder. “And do you fear me?”

  Seth considered this. “No, but—”

  “You don’t know why the Magistrate is capable of sending but not of reading?”

  Nodding, Seth acknowledged Lijadu’s insight.

  “Sending is an intellectual ability, lineal in nature and active in origin. A Tropiard has little difficulty mastering the rudiments of sending because the Mwezahbe Legacy valorizes the very qualities that make the act possible.”

  “Whereas reading—”

  “Reading is intuitive, diffuse rather than lineal. It requires receptiveness rather than self-assertion. Our Holy One and her Pledgechild have taught us to esteem the sort of awareness that makes this capability as natural as breathing. Nor do we experience their capabilities solely in verbal terms. We also read emotional states.”

  “What do you read in me?”

  “Anxiety,” said Lijadu, touching his face. “A fierce desire to succeed balanced against a fiercer one to please everyone whom you inwardly validate as a person; hence, Kahl Latimer, your anxiousness.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I understand that you don’t.” She dropped her hand. On the roadway below the Sh’vaij, with all the other naked children, Lijadu had seemed a child. Now, however, she radiated the wisdom and confidence of a goddess. How had she gained her knowledge not only of Palija Kadi but of the greater world beyond it?

  A flight of cranelike reptiles passed over the basin, trailing their thin legs behind them like powder-blue streamers.

  When they had gone,
Lijadu said, “Upon attaining twenty harvests, each Sh’gaidu must embark on a sojourn to one of the Thirty-three Cities. In the year Tropiards called 908, I journeyed to the city of Ebsu Ebsa. In the guise of a j’gosfi who had still not had his first auxiliary birth, I stayed among the citizens of Ebsu Ebsa for three complete turns of the sun. Having seen the world the Magistrate rules, I know firsthand its virtues and its shortcomings. I returned to Palija Kadi grateful that the state allows our community to exist. If it did not exist, I would find a way to die.”

  “You’re older than I am,” Seth said incredulously.

  “I’m twenty-three of Trope’s years—but our years are shorter than yours.”

  “I’m twenty-one, Earth reckoning.”

  “Then, by an absolute measure, you’re my elder, Kahl Latimer.”

  Odd: To learn that Lijadu was younger than he, yet possessed of adult knowledge and confidence, seemed a slap at his own intellectual and moral progress. Moreover, on Trope, Lijadu was still a preadolescent. Chagrin blossomed in Seth, reddening his cheeks. He also wondered how Lijadu had emerged from her years in a Tropish city still a devout Sh’gaidu, if no longer a total innocent.

  Tactfully, Lijadu recited her story: “Not long after the disappearance of our Holy One, the Pledgechild established the ritual of a three-year sojourn among the j’gosfi. She stipulated that only fledglings well past the most impressionable period of their growth were eligible to go. The reason for these sojourns was not only to expose the young Sh’gaidu to an alien way of life, but to give her a chance to search among our enemies for the departed Holy One.”

  “I thought she’d gone to the barbarian northern continent looking for converts.”

  “That idea is a part of Sh’gaidu lore, but we’ve also always felt it likely that the state had taken her captive and confined her in one of the Thirty-three Cities. The hope of her captors would have been that the fellowship here at Palija Kadi would have fallen apart for want of leadership.”