A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  Looking “down” at the conning module and the stark, trailing superstructure from which hung the passenger and cargo nacelles of the ship, Seth felt isolated and lost. Much had happened since departing Trope. Most of it had either enraged or perplexed him. The beadlike lights winking along Dharmakaya’s skeleton seemed to him more illusory than the flashes of clairvoyant doubt that plagued his sleep. Even aboard the great ship, he was isolated and lost.

  Two days out from Trope, the young aisautseb aboard had been found dead in his cabin’s lavalet, his head plunged into the hopper of the chemtoilet. The cause of death was inhalation of the solvents used to decompose and deodorize waste matter. Although Seth knew that one of the taussanaur had murdered the young priest, he found it hard to credit that Douin had sanctioned the act. Douin, whom Seth had lived and worked with, was an exemplar of good behavior, a writer, the head of an enviable geffide. How could he have shown his loyalty to Lady Turshebsel by authorizing an orbital guard to hold the face of that poor aisautseb in a chemtoilet? Now the priest’s body lay in a preservation cylinder in a cargo module. This same module held the corpses of the Pledgechild and thirteen Sh’gaidu dissidents who had died from the effects of gassing, close confinement, and brusque transshipments into orbit from Huru J’beij.

  To Seth, the empty spacesuit represented all these unfortunate people, too: priest, Sh’gaidu, and Lord Pors alike. They all deserved commemoration. Once, their lives had meant something to others. That they should all go to the special territories beyond death without eulogy or remembrance struck him as vile. The truth, as Seth understood, was that this funeral for Lord Pors, the aisautseb, and the fourteen Sh’gaidu was also a funeral for a piece of himself. That was why he had insisted on what still seemed to both Abel and Douin a time-consuming travesty.

  Seth and Douin fired their backpack rockets again. By its unresisting arms they pulled their tenantless companion along, out into the tenantless wilderness of night. Amazing, the silence and the ebony cold . . .

  No longer did Seth share a cabin with Abel. He had taken up the farthest aft cubicle in the passenger nacelle where Douin lived and where the Kieri priest had met his mocking end. This change of quarters, considered objectively, had done little to separate Seth from his isohet, for the ability to commune with Abel through cerebrations had come from Trope to the Dharmakaya with Seth. He could tap into his isohet’s emotional and mental state whenever he wished; and Abel, although less adept at initiating such contact, was now possessed of a like skill. They had intimacy without proximity. What they no longer had, however, was sexual intimacy. In that context, Abel had always been the initiator, and for Seth it had meant submerging himself in the grander image of his isohet’s desire. No more. That was over. He would never find the whole of his identity in Abel; and, if nothing else, the fiasco of their expedition to Trope had given him the freedom to mark out his own boundaries as a moral agent. Perplexedly, he was still trying to stake these boundaries out. They were, he had learned, far more nebulous and far less arbitrary than those of death.

  In the meantime, he had forgiven Abel his trespasses.

  Douin grew alarmed at the distance between them and the dreamily floating bulk of the light-tripper. Mere specks in the universe’s obsidian fishbowl, they had traveled nearly half a kilometer from the Dharmakaya.

  “Master Seth,” Douin said, his voice hollow-sounding in the earphones of Seth’s helmet. “Master Seth, let’s finish this.”

  “Let me take Lord Pors a bit farther out,” Seth replied, peering through two sets of faceplates at Douin’s features. “Far enough out to send him to his death privately—to commit him to the infinite suns.” He had come out here expressly to put distance between himself and the hovering Ommundi ship, and he could not understand Douin’s reluctance to proceed.

  “Lord Pors was my kinsman,” the Kieri said. “I’ll take him out.”

  The empty helmet of the empty suit gaped at Douin, who, before Seth could protest, fired his backpack rockets and whirled the suit away with him in a slow-motion waltz. Tilting his clumsy helmet back, Seth watched the two figures dwindle “above” him, faceplate to faceplate like dancers in a ballroom of shiny black marble.

  Meanwhile, he hung virtually nowhere, dream-suspended. In one direction, the Dharmakaya maintained a gaudy hauteur; in another, Douin and the suit climbed into the night’s vertigo-inducing recesses. Elsewhere, only the star-dusted void.

  “Master Douin,” Seth said. “Master Douin.” But a dead light inside his helmet indicated that Douin had switched his suit radio off. He undoubtedly maintained at least listening contact with the light-tripper’s conning module, but Seth’s umbilical to Douin had been cut. Why? Did Abel and Douin intend to murder him, too?

  Alone, Seth recalled boarding the Dharmakaya fourteen days ago to find the Sh’gaidu cramped together in an aft cargo nacelle with only poor life-support facilities: four chemtoilets for 274 people, water from a condensation tray beneath the ceiling of the nacelle, once-a-day food calls at twelve automatic dispensers in the port bulkhead, and a sadly inadequate supply of bedding. About all you could say for the accommodations was that the air was good and no one harassed or intruded upon the Sh’gaidu.

  After checking on them that first evening back aboardship, Seth had purposely avoided setting foot in their squalid barracoon. Ulvri—Magistrate Vrai—had bequeathed the Sh’gaidu into his keeping, yes, but he would not exert himself on their behalf until they made planetfall and established a permanent colony in that cindery group of islands called the Fire Chain. For now, though, he had to come to terms with the custodial duties awaiting him and the odd chain of events that had foisted these duties on him. Earth was Paradise Lost. In the hardship of honor, he had given himself to Gla Taus, and, dear God, he deserved a reprieve from the burdens of that commitment. Reasoning thus, he stayed away from the compartment where the Sh’gaidu dwelt.

  Lijadu had been amid that crowd the first and only time that Seth had gone back there. He hadn’t seen her. Or, if he had, he hadn’t recognized her among the naked and gem-eyed scores confined in the nacelle. They had stared at him as if he were Ehte Emahpre, Seth had thought, or some other tight-assed agent of the Tropish state, and he had hurried off without trying to find the one pair of crystalline, tiger-green eyes that would have identified their owner as Lijadu. What would he have said to her?

  Seth had no idea.

  Abel and Douin had seen to the most pressing needs of the Sh’gaidu, without ever suggesting that any come into the main passenger compartments. The only change of accommodations they had supervised was the shifting of the thirteen dead Sh’gaidu to the compartment where the Pledgechild and the murdered Kieri priest lay. Later, they had let one of the midwives visit this compartment to cut away the eyes of the corpses, in accordance with Tropish custom. Abel had also regularly provided medical treatment since the first fatality, but the Dharmakaya was not equipped to handle so many living passengers in its cargo bays. Seth felt sure that three or four more Sh’gaidu would die before they reached Gla Taus. Inside his helmet, he grimaced and opened his eyes on the surreal and painful blankness of space.

  “Seth, how are you doing?”

  The voice was Abel’s, coming to him from the conning module through a faint rush of static. It disoriented Seth.

  “Fine,” he fuzzily replied.

  “What’re you doing? Are you about finished?”

  “Douin’s waltzing the empty suit away. They’re almost as far from me as I am from the ship. I seem to be something for Douin to mark distances by. Yes, we’re almost finished.”

  “Want me to pipe you some music?”

  “Abel,” Seth said, “I don’t care.”

  “Okay. Hang on and I’ll do it.”

  There was a scratching in Seth’s earphones, an audible retreat, and a moment later “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth poured into his helmet from the conning module. Although Seth spoke Abel’s name admonitorily, the music overrode him, climbi
ng on exultant strains. Looking about, Seth realized that he could no longer find Douin or the empty suit; that, in fact, he had managed to lose even his fix on the Dharmakaya. All that remained as reality supports were Beethoven’s music and the illimitable night.

  “Abel!”

  To glide out of his vertigo, Seth fired his backpack rockets. He moved, but did so in a drowning pool of haloed stars. What were Abel and Douin trying to do to him? Then he spotted Douin. The Kieri envoy was alone, hanging motionless some distance away. Seth headed for him, and as his rockets’ pale flames propelled him toward Douin’s suited figure, the music in Seth’s earphones died. He shot a glance “downward,” but instead of the Dharmakaya saw only the depthful obsidian of space. His orienting focal point was the unmoving Douin, who hung “above” him like a nameless god’s pathetic trophy. Why didn’t he fire his rockets and drift back to Seth? If Seth had thought, he would have known. But in striving to reach the one thing in the cosmos that seemed familiar, Seth did not think; he glided passively toward solace and companionship. No voices spoke to set him right. He had only his own imperfect knowledge for guidance.

  And so Seth came face to face with the tenantless suit that Douin had waltzed into this place and then deserted. Bemused, Seth stared into the helmet. He saw himself in the warp of the faceplate, a hundred colors dancing in the glass. Then he saw something else: He had forgotten to screw the suit’s corrugated gloves into its sleeves. As a result, he could look into one of the suit’s bent arms, right into the blackness of its nonexistent occupant. Inside his own suit, Seth shuddered.

  As if dredging some prehistoric era of his own consciousness, he remembered the myth about the jongleur-thief Jaud that he’d read in Master Douin’s geffide, from one of Master Douin’s books, and how Jaud had confronted his own handless image in the final wall of the Obsidian Wastes. Somehow, Seth realized, this was the same thing, this confrontation.

  He could not move. He could not draw away from the empty spacesuit’s aura of accusation and reproach, not even when voices began to call to him in his earphones. At any moment, he feared, the creature before him would throw out its arms and embrace him as the aged Pledgechild had done in her cell in Palija Kadi.

  Not until the real Clefrabbes Douin appeared from out of nowhere, touched his sleeve, and tugged him away from the suit did Seth begin to grasp what had happened. Then his perspective returned. He found the fragile lights of their ship blinking in the dark, and he yielded as Douin, who had sanctioned murder, guided him through the unmappable void to the haven of the Dharmakaya.

  Through the ritual of a mock-funeral, he had sought to make himself whole, and if no one else understood the mystery or the mechanics of such a feat, Seth no longer cared. Let them mock him.

  Later that “evening,” Seth recommended that many of the Sh’gaidu be allowed to take up quarters in the forward passenger rooms. There were forty-two unoccupied cabins in the two adjacent passenger nacelles, and if they put three dissident sisters in each available cabin, they could almost halve the number of Sh’gaidu now crowded in the bay of the aft cargo nacelle.

  It was criminal that they had not already made such an arrangement, and if Abel and Douin resisted his suggestion, Seth vowed to delay their reentry into The Sublime by plying K/R Caranicas with dodecaphonic messages of moral outrage that would seduce the triune to mutiny against them, too. Caranicas would strand them all in normal space until they submitted to Seth’s superior humanitarian view.

  To prove that he meant what he said, Seth took up the microphone from the astrogational console and regaled Caranicas with the details of his plan. The computer translated his words into a weird electronic toodling; and soon, after the triune had spun about on its gyroscopic track to face Douin, Abel, and Seth, a reply was coded through the communications unit:

  “We’ll remain here until the transfer is complete.”

  Seth headed for the aft cargo section. When he presented himself to the occupants of the nacelle, which stank now with the natural effluvia of living bodies pent together for long stretches, he strolled through them until he found Lijadu caring for an elderly sister near the starboard bulkhead, not far from a segment of the clear condensation tray cutting across the ceiling.

  Lijadu looked at him without accusation. He explained why he’d come, what they could do, and how a change of quarters could be carried out. He would leave to Lijadu and the Sh’gaidu the issue of who would come forward and who would remain aft. No matter who went and who stayed (Seth promised), Abel, Master Douin, the taussanaur, and he would do their best to clean up and refit the cargo nacelle.

  “Tantai should have a forward cabin,” Lijadu said. She stood, hailed a sister in a group of onlooking Sh’gaidu, and waited until Tantai had threaded her way through the others. Seth remembered the woman. Along with Huspre, she had waited on Magistrate Vrai’s party in the Sh’vaij. Deputy Emahpre had indignantly run her off.

  “Gosfithuri,” Seth said.

  “Gosfithuri,” Tantai and Lijadu both agreed.

  Even the midwife lying on a soiled blanket under the condensation tray drummed her fingers on her breast bone, and this word circled the cargo nacelle like the refrain of a carol.

  Three hours later, they completed the passenger transfer, and the Dharmakaya again effortlessly treaded The Sublime.

  AFTERWORD

  First Novel, Seventh Novel

  In February 1975, Ballantine Books published my first novel. A paperback, it bore the rococo title A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire. My seventh novel, published in 1980, was also called A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, except that, of course, it wasn’t. This may take some explaining.

  In 1975, my career as a science fiction writer was about five years old, and I had already published stories ornately dubbed “On the Street of the Serpents,” “The Windows in Dante’s Hell,” “The White Otters of Childhood,” and “Death and Designation Among the Asadi.” One of the reasons that I liked science fiction, in fact, was that Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and even J. G. Ballard—icons in the late 1960s/early 1970s—often used titles of a nakedly poetic stamp; and my own love of language put me immediately in tune with the field they represented.

  Ellison, for instance, had published “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin.” Delany had written “We, In Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line” and—wow!—“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” Zelazny had by then offered up “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” and “. . . And Call Me Conrad,” while J. G. Ballard had given us “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,” “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon,” “You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe,” and, a miracle of evocativeness, “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D.”

  A new writer, I felt, could not hope to walk among these word-drunk visionaries without jousting with them. So my early stories usually arose less from a fascinating scientific concept, or a nifty metaphysical notion, or a dazzling plot twist than from a lovely phrase, a would-be title. And if a story did not grow from an exotic concatenation of syllables, I labored to find the concatenation afterwards, for I had the titles of Ellison, Delany, Zelazny, and Ballard—plus those of an earlier influence, Ray Bradbury, he of “Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed,” “A Medicine for Melancholy,” “All Summer in a Day,” and Something Wicked This Way Comes—to live up to.

  I no doubt went overboard.

  Anyone who still has a copy of the first, and only, Ballantine edition of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire—a text I don’t want reprinted, ever—will see that the novel consists of a prologue, an epilogue, and fifteen intervening chapters, and that I gave every chapter not one, but two, titles. My tenth chapter, for instance, appears on the contents page as “PERFIDY: Out of Our Several Sleeps We Ascend.” Other chapters include “BEDFELLOWS: A Seduction Rich
and Strange,” “COVENANT: Derringer and Dascra,” and, most convolute of all, “USURPATION: Two Meteors, Prodigal of Light.” Today, I read these titles with incredulity and embarrassment, but also—forgive me—with a rush of excitement and exhilaration. The words, even those in clunky combinations, still sing (at least for me, albeit with some Dylanesque wheezing), and I recall again the youthful energy and idealism, the naive poetic fervor, with which I tackled the scary, and heady, task of writing my first novel.

  As a result, I still feel affection for the original version of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, its callow narrator, and a few of the baroque images and metaphors with which I salted the text. But I also recognize the fumble-fingeredness and immaturity of that initial version. I recognized them soon after my novel appeared to a mostly unimpressed, if not rabidly indifferent, American public.

  Not soon enough, I’ll admit in this aside, to keep me from lifting a line from Archibald MacLeish’s “You, Andrew Marvell” and calling my second novel, and first hardcover, And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees—a title that Donald A. Wollheim at DAW Books, publisher of its mass-market edition, could not envision on the cover of an SF adventure in a whirl rack in a bus station in Mokena, Illinois, or a grungy five-and-dime in Pueblo, Colorado. And so Ecbatan, as a paperback, became Beneath the Shattered Moons, with a nod to Edgar Rice Burroughs and a silent raspberry for the jilted MacLeish.

  You may now wonder if I wrote an entire novel on the dubious foundation of a preconceived title. No, I didn’t. If I had any literary forerunner in mind during the writing of Funeral, it was Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning Ace Science Fiction Special, The Left Hand of Darkness (1968).

  As I have noted elsewhere, I may owe my career as a science-fiction writer to this novel. I read it when I was consciously trying to indoctrinate myself into the best that science fiction offered: Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and all the profane radical New Wavers then cropping up in Damon Knight’s Orbit series, Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, and an occasional Judith Merril anthology such as SF 12 and England Swings SF (UK title The Space-Time Journal).