A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (10 page)

EIGHT

In the morning, he was the first to open his eyes
. He caught sight of a cloaked Tropiard studying his companions and him from the doorway. This alien, having ascertained that Seth was awake, slipped into the ill-secured chamber and knelt at his side with several small squeeze flasks and a bundle of fruit. Pors and Douin awakened after the Tropiard had entered.

“Drink,” he urged in Vox, his goggles giving him the appearance of a thief. “You’ll be departing for Palija Kadi in only a moment.”

Seth accepted one of the squeeze flasks and drank. The liquid oozed into him, viscous and bittersweet, thirst- as well as hunger-slaking in spite of its honeylike consistency. He was reminded of milk and tart pineapple, smoothly blent.

Pors and Douin accepted the breakfast offerings of the kneeling Tropiard, too—undoubtedly one of the aliens who had met their transcraft yesterday afternoon—and their meal was quickly concluded. The Tropiard indicated that they should carry the fruit with them.

“What are they?” Seth asked.

“
Mwehanja
,”
the messenger said, and it was impossible to miss his emphasis on the suffix.

They gathered their gear together and followed this tall, almost swashbuckling ghost out of the dormitory onto the tablerock. The shock of the cold air was as spirit-stiffening as it had been yesterday. How big and clean Trope seemed this morning, the sky like distilled water and the plains below the butte like an immense, brick-red apron. Ardaja Huru was huddled against the plateau’s northern flank, invisible, and they walked past the rough-hewn buildings and the strange stone gazebos—which Seth supposed to be entrances to tubeways down to the city—as if they were the only living creatures on the planet.

A Tropish vehicle surmounted by a set of saucerlike wings waited on the circular terrace where they had landed the transcraft. It combined the appearance of an ancient cargo airplane with that of a modern helicraft, albeit one without rotors, and its skin shone silver-white. Two small figures stood near its nose, a bubblelike enclosure tinted, yes, a gleaming bronze; and using the figures to establish proportions, Seth judged the airship at least fourteen meters in length. It scarcely looked capable of flight. The Albatross, thought Seth. I’ll call it The Albatross.

Pors was smoking fehtes again. The smoke trailed off behind him like an exhaust. He had spoken no more than three words since awakening, and he looked as fatigued as he had last night.

Deputy Emahpre, who had met and talked with all three offworlders, made the introductions. Magistrate Vrai welcomed Pors and Douin to Trope and offered a brief set speech in which he declared his world and Gla Taus “neighbors.”

During these preliminaries, Emahpre stared fixedly at the amulet around Seth’s neck. His gaze was persistent and incomprehensible. Although the goggles Tropiards wore made it hard to interpret their expressions, Seth feared that the little deputy’s interest guaranteed his disapproval. You could read emanations without being psychic. Both Emahpre and Vrai were going to Palija Kadi, and neither was happy with the
other’s decision.

All five men boarded The Albatross. Emahpre went forward to take its helm, and a moment later Huru J’beij and Ardaja Huru were dropping away beneath Seth as the airship rose vertically. He had purposely come forward with the Deputy because the pilot’s compartment offered such a splendid window on the landscape. He watched the portico and roof of the J’beij dwindle in size, the prairie expand, and blue-white
streamers of sky creep into the peripheries of his vision. The Albatross was aloft, and moving. Its speed had increased to such an extent that the only cure for dizziness was more altitude. Emahpre considerately took them higher, and Seth turned his full attention to the feisty Tropiard.

Without looking at his human passenger, Emahpre said, “You’re the only person since Vrai’s assumption of the magistracy with whom he’s shared his dascra
.
Did you know that?” Both the statement and the query felt like accusations.

“No,” Seth said. “I didn’t.”

“You came by it terribly easily. When I met you in the J’beij yesterday afternoon, he hadn’t yet given it to you, had he?”

“No, he hadn’t.”

“Vrai has made a terrible blunder, Kahl Latimer—an administrative, a cultural, and possibly even a spiritual blunder, even if my phrasing does smack of Sh’gaidu superstition.”

“Is it your place to second-guess the Magistrate? Or to speak aloud to an offworlder the substance of such second-guessing?”

The Deputy’s chin jerked toward Seth, but quickly swiveled back. “Yes, most definitely.”

“And to voice your disagreements with him to others?”

Emahpre remained silent.

“I didn’t ask him for the dascra
,”
Seth said. “I told him that I didn’t feel the same sense of union with him that he seemed to feel with me.”

“Indeed?” Emahpre’s voice was frankly incredulous.

“I don’t even know what this is,” Seth protested, covering the amulet with his palm. “I don’t know what I’m—”

“If you were a Tropiard,” Emahpre said, overriding him, “it would be a different matter. The bond would be mutual and absolute, whether you deserved the dascra or not. But you’re a foreigner, an offworlder. It gives you an unjust advantage. You’ve become the manipulator of his peace of mind.”

Seth said nothing.

The Deputy reiterated, “An unjust advantage.”

“It’s not one I wish to exploit. It’s not one I asked for—Deputy Emahpre, what exactly has the Magistrate given me?”

“The treasure of the birth-parent,” the Deputy replied curtly.

“The Magistrate told me that. He didn’t tell me what that treasure is, though. I have no idea.”

“
Jinalma.
”

“Sir?”

“I said
jinalma
,
Kahl Latimer.” The Deputy’s head bobbed once. “Looking at you and your friends, looking at the moist places through which you perceive the world, I don’t know how well you’re likely to understand.”

“I don’t yet know what you’re talking about.”

“Would you disrobe before a being of another sapient species and stand before that being naked?”

“I did it on Gla Taus, Deputy Emahpre. The Kieri priests believe that the naked do not lie. Therefore, I stood naked before the Liege Mistress of that land and spoke to her from the absolute truthfulness of my heart.” Seth still recalled, however, that his outer garments had been stripped from him before he could prevent that indignity.

“Naked before a”—the Voxian word arrived tardily—“
woman
?”

“Yes. It happened not altogether of my own free choice.”

Seth could not understand how the conversation had moved in this direction. What was the Deputy trying to establish?

“This is a demeaning experience for you?” he asked.

“Only when it’s compelled,” Seth replied. “Any compelled action is demeaning, I think. Uncompelled nakedness holds no shame. Although my jacket and pants were taken without my consent, I removed the final garment, my breechclout. Momentarily, I must confess, I was very uncomfortable.”

By this addition Seth felt that he was redeeming the half-truths that he had inadvertently spoken. He waited.

Ehte Emahpre turned his face to Seth and with a single slashing gesture of the hand and arm removed his slit-goggles. His eyes coruscated. They were olivine crystals set in a head of mottled beige stone. Despite the startling beauty of Emahpre’s eyes, Seth helplessly recalled Pors’s false teeth. Like them, these eyes had an unreal quality. Moreover, he should never have been granted this intimate glimpse of them. The solitary photograph he had found in the
Dharmakaya
’s
tapes had not lied. Nor had it done justice to the reality.

“I am naked before you,” Emahpre declared.

“But why? I didn’t—”

“To explain to you the truth about the Magistrate’s gift. Tell me what you now behold.”

“Eyes. Eyes like fire.” Involuntarily, he glanced away. Far below—a splintering of light from one of Trope’s cities of the plains. Or maybe a jabbing afterimage thrown across his retinas by the Deputy’s eyes. The planet, after all, was nothing but a barren, blood-brown stone.

“Our eyes are a living form of crystal, Kahl Latimer. The Magistrate’s dascra—indeed, the dascra
of any bereaved gosfi—contains the birth-parent’s eyes. That’s the treasure we speak of.”

Seth looked disbelievingly from the amulet to Emahpre’s face. Last night, Lord Pors had emptied onto the ledge of their dormitory room not a dicelike pair of eyes but a mysterious grayish-green grit. . . .

“
Jinalma
,”
Emahpre repeated. “Each amulet contains jinalma
,
Kahl Latimer. That’s our word for the dust into which a Tropiard’s eyes disintegrate within three or four days after his death. It’s this substance that goes into the dascra
,
not the crystalline eyes themselves.”

“And by this you acknowledge the mystery of ultimate origins?”

“Not really. We observe, under compulsion, the only Old Custom not forbidden Tropiards by the statutes of the Mwezahbe Legacy. Through our
dascra
we preserve a dramatic tie to our irrational past. I hardly believe that such a prescribed ritual gives any of us a deeper understanding of ‘ultimate origins.’ Instead, we glorify the strides we have made away from those origins.” Emahpre reset his slit-goggles and snappishly averted his face.

“Why do you cover your eyes?”

“Why do you clothe your nakedness?”

“We don’t, not always. When we do, it’s for warmth and protection. Also, according to my isosire, since humans are bipedal creatures, we clothe ourselves to minimize the distractions of what would otherwise be a continuous genital display. Aren’t those reasons that gosfi go clothed?”

“Essentially,” Emahpre said.

“But that doesn’t explain why you cover your eyes.”

“Before Seitaba Mwezahbe established the Tropish state, Kahl Latimer, our eyes were thought to contain our souls. A gosfi’s soul is his own, as a man’s thoughts are, or ought to be, his own.”

Seth was still not satisfied. “And do the eyes of a gosfi also have evolutionary import as a sexual signal?”

A birdlike twitch of the head. “Very astute, Kahl Latimer. Yes, you’re correct, they do.”

But the deputy no longer appeared anxious to discuss the matter. He shifted in his chair, traced his finger along a line of weird digital readouts on the pilot’s console, and, so suddenly that Seth’s stomach capsized, dropped The Albatross to a lower altitude. Even in a rational society, it seemed, you could still discover moodiness among the put-upon guardians of the state.

How odd. The eyes of gosfi—like the tails of peacocks, the manes of lions, and maybe even the breasts of human females—had evolved in part as sexual signals. Simultaneously, however, they were organs of higher perception and repositories of the gosfi soul. In order to preserve civilization, Ehte Emahpre seemed to be implying, a Tropiard’s eyes had to be able to see without themselves being seen. He had uncovered for Seth to apprise him of the full meaning of the Magistrate’s gift, yes—but the sexual connotations of this act were nullified by Seth’s belonging to a sapient species with other origins and other procreational signals. Still, the Deputy was not pleased by what he had done, or had been forced to do, and the atmosphere in the pilot’s bubble grew as chilly as it had been earlier that morning on the tablerock.

Keeping his own counsel, Seth saw that sharp-edged buttes and ridges had begun to push up out of the prairie to the far northeast. These gradually underwent severe metamorphoses, shaping themselves into hills. And behind these hills appeared hazy, nickle-red mountains, girdered and columned like no mountains he had seen before. They looked as if they had been carved from copper pyrite.

“And what did you give the Magistrate to complete the bond?” Emahpre suddenly asked. But he answered the question himself: “A pair of goggles, an Earthman’s goggles. How appropriate.”

“The Magistrate chose them himself,” Seth said defensively.

Emahpre didn’t look at him. “It won’t be too much longer before we reach Palija Kadi. I’d like to have the pilot’s bubble to myself until that time.”

“Very well.” Seth rose from his chair and made his way into the cabin where Vrai and the two Kieri had been engaged in desultory conversation for the past hour. The cabin now smelled of fehtes tobacco, of close confinement, and of a strange, pervasive nervousness.

The nation Trope, with its thirty-three camouflaged, clockwork cities, was not the only political entity on the planet Trope, but it dominated the entire southern hemisphere and lay a narrow ocean away from a vast continental mass partitioned by either local decree or various topographic barricades into countries. The people of the nation Trope had held themselves aloof from these feuding, primitive states for well over nine hundred years. They wanted no part of the northerners’ warfare, resources, or unregenerate superstition. Trope, the nation, had come to its current level of technological achievement with only minimal help from its northern neighbors, whom they had long ago dubbed
Nuraju,
or the Mad Ones.

Now, despite the development of space travel and the discovery of other worlds with quasi-gosfid populations, the Tropiards held themselves aloof from Interstel and all its licensed trade companies. The habit of aloofness had become engrained. Further, who was to say that the agents and the constituency of Interstel did not represent an insidious, alien variety of the Nuraju?
Technological achievement, the Tropiards reasoned, was not, by itself, proof against the viruses of barbarism and superstition.

Madness
—nuraj—
was almost a property of nature. To defeat it, one required not only full consciousness but the unflagging regulator of rationality. If such deliberate regulation seemed to counter or thwart the processes of nature, it did so only seemingly; otherwise, reason would never have been able to assert its preeminence in the first place. Indeed, once the evolution of consciousness had given the gosfi sufficient self-knowledge to recognize their emerging rationality, it was the natural duty
of reason to establish its primacy.