A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

She put her hands on his shoulders. “The tiny black eyes inside your outer eyes are widening. The blue’s being eaten away from the inside out.”

  Seth laughed, startling Lijadu away from him. He gained her back by drumming his fingers on his chest to translate into gosfi terms the meaning of his laughter.

  “Then you’re not ill—your eyes aren’t . . . misbehaving?”

  “No. I’m well enough. I think.”

  They hiked together up the first long, swooping incline, barricades of dark red stone glinting in the buffeted torchlight, the wind’s warmth a benediction. The jagged, coral arc of another span passed over their heads, like a streamer of petrified dust, the roaring of the wind inordinately loud.

  Then Seth realized that a portion of this roaring was emanating from the galleries. He’d heard this sound earlier in the kioba and had taken it, briefly, for the intransigent droning of machines. Four pairs of eyes flashed in the darkness ahead of them, and a moment later four naked children came hurtling past Lijadu and Seth on a narrow span near the summit.

  “When do they sleep?” Seth asked.

  “When they tire of play. Or when the adults around them see that they’re running on spent energies.”

  At the top—and the terminus—of the central bridge, Lijadu led Seth to the left along a gallery running north and south like a wide natural stratum in the rock. Here the roaring of Yaji Tropei was deafening. Heartseed lanterns placed about the honeycombed interior provided an almost phosphorescent illumination. By this light, Seth could see wavering curtains of water pouring through the cliff, dividing it into rooms. How far back into the mountain these chambers went, he could not tell—but the silvery veils falling continuously from ceiling crevices to narrow gutters in the floor, then cascading through deeper rock to irrigation conduits below the galleries, dazzled the eyes and buzzed in his ears.

  “Is it always like this?” Seth shouted.

  Lijadu spoke mind to mind: —There’s a reservoir in the mountains north of Palija Kadi, and our irrigation system operates through the force of gravity. There are times when we let the waters fall.

  Having to shout while Lijadu simply eased her messages into his mind struck Seth as an injustice, but a fascinating one. “You can turn it off, this system?” he cried.

  —Easily. The walls shimmering here exist only intermittently. The Sh’gaidu aren’t altogether ignorant of engineering and technology.

  “The noise!” Seth shouted. “It . . . it hurts!”

  —It won’t plague you long. We shut off the flow at night—but in the evening, with the lantern glow playing on the curtains, isn’t it beautiful, Kahl Latimer?

  “Indeed!” Inward from the gallery, Seth saw Sh’gaidu shadows outlined against the veils. Yaji Tropei teemed with shadow beings, some of whom emerged from behind their waterwalls, to study him as intently as he scrutinized their fastness. Spray misted outward from the caverns.

  “The protogosfi used this irrigation system?”

  —Oh, no, Lijadu cerebrated. —This was the result of nearly sixty years of labor, made possible by the many channels already present in the cliffs, the technical ingenuity of the Pledgechild, and Sh’gaidu courage. Yaji Tropei claimed several lives toward the end, giving us to know that we had done all she would permit. The bones of our dead lie deep in her body, as sacrifices to her patience.

  At the north end of the gallery, Lijadu took Seth into the cliff and halted him at a niche holding a large, slate-grey statue. Seated on an ottoman of rock, this naked figure had been worn smooth by people passing by it on their way to and from the fields. Even now a young Sh’gaidu, only slightly older than Lijadu, had paused to drape her arm over the statue’s shoulder in confession and prayer. The statue’s eye sockets contained no eyes. In the shadows beyond it, dozens of Sh’gaidu waited to embrace or commune mind to mind with the stone figure.

  —This is Duagahvi Gaidu, Lijadu cerebrated. —We come to her with our prayers, our love, and our fears.

  “Who?” Seth made chiseling motions with his hands.

  —One of the first of the Palija Kadi communards made this image, working many days to achieve what you see. She spent her daylight hours laboring in the fields or crawling through Yaji Tropei to open irrigation conduits.

  Seth drew Lijadu to him and spoke directly into her ear: “What have they come for tonight? Are they praying, or confessing, or speaking their fears?”

  “Most are frightened.” This time Lijadu also spoke aloud, using their proximity to good advantage.

  “Of what?”

  “Of my birth-parent’s final vision. The Pledgechild said that it interpreted itself, but no one here is certain of its meaning.”

  “I don’t find the meaning of Ifragsli’s vision in what I saw on the wall, Lijadu. In that, I suppose, I am like Deputy Emahpre.”

  “And in little else, thankfully. But we may find its meaning in the Pledgechild’s reticence.”

  “What meaning, then?”

  “An evil, Kahl Latimer. The Pledgechild didn’t wish to interpret Ifragsli’s vision for fear of frightening us.”

  “But she’s frightened you by not interpreting it?”

  “Yes.”

  “An error on her part.”

  “She’s mortal, Kahl Latimer. Nor did she like to be prodded to her reading by Emahpre.” Lijadu separated from Seth and strode past the long curving file of Sh’gaidu waiting to commune with the statue.

  —Come, she cerebrated from beside a curtain of water.

  Then, astonishingly fleet, she leaped through it, her image an evanescent pattern in the torrents of that swaying wall. Like a ship sliding into The Sublime, she had more or less disappeared.

  —Come, she beckoned again, invisible.

  The roaring of the waters and that of his blood virtually indistinguishable, Seth followed. Mist prickled his face and hands. When he leaped the wide gutter beneath the ever-falling veil of the wall, his heart leaped inside him, too; and the iciness of the water plunging down his back and running from his brow woke him immediately to the beauty of the farther chamber.

  Taking his hand, Lijadu led him through a corridor whose left-hand wall was rock plaster and whose right-hand wall was water. An arabesque red and tan fresco dominated the plaster wall, depicting fish, gocodre, birdlike creatures, strange four-legged landgoers, and a variety of hominid, or protogosfid, figures arrayed in cryptic community. The scene was not altogether idyllic. The farther along this fresco Seth went, the more vivid and disconcerting were the figures portrayed.

  Gocodre ate gosfi, gosfi dismembered birds, and disembodied eyes, pressed into the plaster in pigments of metallic blue or green, surveyed the carnage from lofty or well-hidden vantage points: cliff ledges or caves.

  This fresco, a virtual mural, looked ancient to Seth. Its surface was cracked in many places, or blistered. Parts of the underlying rock had long ago crumbled and broken away. The Sh’gaidu had clearly spent a good deal of time and effort restoring the fresco, replastering, freshening the faded colors, maybe even improvising detail where the many indifferent millennia had erased it.

  “How old?” Seth shouted.

  —We don’t know. But older than any other paintings discovered on our world. Gosfi have lived here perhaps since the beginning.

  Sh’gaidu of every age passed them in the corridor. One adolescent, naked and amber-eyed, carried a silver-furred creature whose eyes almost exactly matched her own, in both size and color.

  They continued inward, until—without warning—the roar of the falling water became a single stupendous crash, followed by a series of wet pistol shots echoing back and forth. Afterward, a thunderous whooshing and a delicate runneling away into the lower depths of Yaji Tropei. The waterwalls had vanished, but the ceilings continued to drip and a blurry dampness hung in the air.

  Other rock walls—wide portals cut in their faces and earth-colored frescoes daubed upon them—glistened in the lantern sheen. Seth could look from one chamber into the next, a
nd so on, almost forever. Against the painted walls were sleeping pallets, urns, stone hampers, benches, woven baskets, and a variety of simple housekeeping items. On many of the pallets, Sh’gaidu lay, alone or paired, their eyes brilliant signal fires. No one here wore slit-goggles, but the community had not disintegrated because of the relentless provocation of so many uncovered eyes. No one here was property, Seth told himself; everyone was a person, and, as several sh’gosfi muffled their lanterns and shadows began spilling through the abutting rooms, Seth walked and watched.

  “Where are we going?” he asked Lijadu.

  “To my sleeping place—only a little farther.”

  “Many portals, but no doors.”

  “Doors make no sense among us,” Lijadu said. “Palija Kadi and Palija Dait are the only doors we require.”

  At last they entered a cove where a lamp still fitfully burned. Lijadu pointed Seth to a ledge at the foot of the widest wall, upon which an erotic fresco blazed, and handed him two small bowls. One she filled with dark meal from a stone hamper, the other with water from a pretty urn. After serving herself, she climbed atop the hamper and ate. When Seth had eaten, he handed his bowls to her and gestured for more. He felt, as she replenished them, that she saw his hunger—his show of animal rapacity—as something extraordinary if not reprehensible. But he was famished, and he ate until the ache inside him had dwindled to a faint throb, the ebbing of his exhilaration and the resurgent pulse of his anxiety. What strange place had he come to?

  “Are you finished?” Lijadu asked. He nodded.

  She removed her garment and used it to wipe the moisture from her limbs and flanks. Her dark body glistened, a configuration of planes, triangles, lines, and functional curves implying health and vigor rather than any distinct sexual identity. Above Seth, the fresco. He leaned out to look at it: two gosfi entwined about each other in an excruciating coital ballet. The partners’ eyes were visible, nearly twice life-size, at least in proportion to the figures themselves. Lijadu, meanwhile, laid her short sari aside and crossed the chamber to douse the heartseed lantern.

  “There’s only one sleeping pallet,” Seth said.

  “Unless you object, we’ll share it.”

  This news, casually proffered, startled him. Still, he’d hoped for it. Paragenation. Intensifying his confusion was the ambiguity of their relationship. Lijadu was the Pledgechild’s heir, ostensibly a female, and nothing in her earlier behavior had suggested anything more intimate than the desire to be a good host. With the exception, perhaps, of her eagerness to bring him into Yaji Tropei . . .

  “Share it?” he said.

  “For comfort. For warmth. For sleep.” A thin blue glow seeped into Lijadu’s cove from another part of the Sh’gaidu hive, and her body was defined by the highlights shifting on her limbs and by the wan jade fires in her eyes. “I can get another pallet if you wish me to.”

  Seth heard a Günter Latimer pragmatism escaping his lips: “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to sleep.”

  “Then let me fetch another pallet.” Lijadu turned as if to get it.

  “We could try it this way.”

  Lijadu returned and sank to her knees before him to smooth the pallet with her hands. Then she folded back the coverlet and arranged herself so that half the sleeping area remained for Seth. When he did not move to join her, she said, “You’re not yet tired enough to sleep?”

  “I’m taking off my boots.” Seth took off his boots. He spent two minutes on each one, undoing every plastic catch. Then he aligned the boots on the ledge and wiped their toes with his sleeve.

  “Remove your tunic,” Lijadu said. “It’s damp. You won’t be comfortable wearing it to sleep in.”

  It wasn’t cold in the galleries. The suggestion seemed sensible. Seth took off his tunic, rolled it into a bundle, and, damp or no, placed it at the head of his side of Lijadu’s pallet for a pillow.

  “And your leg coverings, if your customs permit.”

  “For sleeping? Yes, it’s permissible. Besides, they’re damp, too, and a bit grimy from hiking through the basin.” He began, tentatively, to remove his leg coverings. “I don’t like to sleep in my clothes if they’re grimy. Sometimes I do, of course, but not often. It depends on circumstances. In Master Douin’s geffide—his house in Feln—it was customary to wear a special sleeping garment. I didn’t always conform, however.” Lijadu stared at him as his words spilled out. “The term in Vox is pajamas. It’s taken directly from an ancient language called Persian, I believe—an ancient Earth language. My isohet Abel—my sibling, my brother—has a brown pair with yellow polka dots. They’re made of synthetic silk. But we don’t consider pajamas a necessity. Some people never wear—”

  “You’re wearing a dascra,” Lijadu observed.

  Naked but for the Magistrate’s amulet, Seth hurried to lie at full length beside Lijadu, to take most of his body out of the range of her vision. Gooseflesh stippled his flesh. Cued by embarrassment, his member maintained a decorous profile. He had never slept with an alien before. Douin and Pors, he recalled with belated gratitude, had kept to their own pallets last night.

  “Whose dascra gosfi’mija do you have, Kahl Latimer?”

  “Magistrate Vrai’s.”

  “I saw in the Sh’vaij that he wasn’t wearing one. Instead he had an additional pair of eye coverings.”

  Shivering, Seth said, “I gave him the goggles in exchange for his amulet.”

  “He suggested the trade?”

  “He did, completely unbidden.”

  “Why?”

  ”I’m not sure. He seems to think we’re . . . well, j’gosfi of one mind. He wants our mission to Palija Kadi to succeed.”

  Lijadu’s breath had the sweet fragrance of the pasty grain they had shared—but her eyes seemed to belong to a smart predatory insect: They scared him. The dark had dehumanized Lijadu. Her supple body could have been made of chitin or calcium. “What, exactly, is your mission?”

  “We’ve come to offer the Sh’gaidu a territory on Gla Taus richer than your basin here on Trope. If this offer pleases you, we’ll transport your entire community there and free you forever from the persecution of the state.”

  “And the state from the conscience-pricking of the Sh’gaidu?”

  “I should not have spoken,” Seth said. “The Pledgechild said we’d negotiate in the morning, and I’ve broached this matter too soon.”

  “Have you heard of auxiliary births, Kahl Latimer? We spoke of them briefly this afternoon, but do you know what they are?”

  “The Magistrate told me something. They’re a means of promoting evolutionary diversity among a long-lived but unprolific species.”

  “Social diversity, perhaps. Acquired characteristics are no more inheritable on Trope than elsewhere.”

  “But the effects on gosfi society are the effects of a much larger gene pool, aren’t they? Isn’t that why Trope has outpaced the nations to the north?”

  Lijadu placed a chilly hand on his flank. “You’re wearing the dascra of a j’gosfi who, for evolution’s sake, has gone through perhaps five auxiliary births. But from one rebirth to the next there’s no continuity. The old self dies, but the new self doesn’t even possess the soul of the old one. Everything about the person is different.”

  “Better, the Magistrate says.”

  “Different, Kahl Latimer. Wearing the dascra of a person who’s not the person originally born out of the birth-parent is an evil.

  “An evil?”

  “The Magistrate, Deputy Emahpre—all Tropiards—have renounced their souls.”

  “Perhaps they have several souls in succession, one for each personality.” Seth indulged this speculation for its outrageousness. He was tired, desperately tired. If none of his asinine erotic fantasies were going to come true, he wanted to table all talk and sleep. Or at least try to.

  “Among the Tropiards of the Thirty-three Cities the wearing of the dascra no longer has real meaning,” Lijadu said. “You know that. And yo
u know what the dascra contains, too, don’t you?”

  “Jinalma.”

  “The eyes of our birth-parents. We treasure them for the final visions they give us before disintegrating. But the final visions of j’gosfi who have gone through auxiliary births are nearly worthless.”

  “Why?”

  “After so many different selves succeed one another, the final vision can belong only to the last one and only partly to it. The j’gosfi sacrifices part of himself each time he’s altered.”

  Altered: Seth thought of the castration of domestic animals.

  “One must live her whole life with a single consciousness, Kahl Latimer. She must change, but remember the changes. A person is a tower forever in the act of being built. The Mwezahbe Legacy destroys the tower by dividing it into segments, as if it were so many stacked stools. Such a person never knows the soul.”

  “The Magistrate claims that the personality born from the Tropiard’s final auxiliary birth is the best personality he may possess. It’s a unified self: the ultimate unified self.”

  “It’s a garment that hides the skin beneath. Tropiards bundle themselves in such garments, Kahl Latimer.”

  “Don’t they remember anything of their past selves?”

  “In Ebsu Ebsa I did the sort of work that permits them to ‘remember.’ Tropiards know their earlier lives only through evo-step genealogies, which I reviewed and indited for the most influential among them. Still, if j’gosfi do have knowledge of their early selves, it’s second-hand. They learn about these selves as if studying the biographies of dead historical personages.”

  “Maybe that’s appropriate.”

  “Entirely. There’s no sense of underlying union, though. There’s distance from the essential self.”

  “Doesn’t distance provide perspective?”

  “In the context of the essential person, Kahl Latimer, distance is estrangement. Tropiards don’t know who they are.”

  “Perhaps I don’t know who I am,” Seth said. “I’m j’gosfi by genetic dictate: a perfect replica of my dead isosire, whom I never understood, and a perfect twin of my isohet Abel, who has sent me to your Pledgechild when he might have come himself.” As best he could, Seth detailed his specific origins.