A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (3 page)

ONE

“
Why, you callow couchling, wake up! Seth
, wake up!”

Seth roused slowly, recasting his brother Abel’s idiomatic Kieri first into Vox, the established galactic tongue, and then into their native Langlish, which they had avoided speaking together for several Gla Tausian months. But, in Seth’s grogginess, every word drifted athwart his understanding, and sleep held him like a womb.

Abel’s hand tugged his forelock. “Damn it, Seth, it’s three hours to sunfall! Get up! The Liege Mistress of Kier, and thus of all Gla Taus, wishes to see you!”

To awake is to be reborn. Seth felt like an infant hoisted into the air by its heels and slapped loudly on the bum. Such a sensation defied memory, for it lay outside Seth’s experience. The little parturitions of ten thousand earlier awakenings, however, had given him a vivid, if numbing, analogue of the shock attendant upon live birth, and a galvanizing dread told him that it was to chaos and uncertainty that Abel was delivering him. Bolting upright, Seth struck aside his elder isohet’s hand.

“Damnation, Seth!” Abel histrionically shook his wounded hand. “What’s the matter with you?”

Seth regarded Abel with the same fear and grudging admiration that had marked his relationship with Günter Latimer, the slain Ommundi mercantile representative to Gla Taus. Latimer, although two weeks dead, was preserved genetically in the persons of his “sons.” Seth and Abel were isohets—as clones of disparate age were called both on the Earth of the Ommundi Trade Company and elsewhere throughout the range of Interstel where Vox was spoken—and Günter Latimer, a man of towering commercial ambition, spotty charisma, and a convincing humility in the presence of “quasi-humans,” had been their common biological template, their isosire—if
not, in fact, their “father.” In any case, Latimer’s genes lived in the persons of his isohet Doppelgangers stranded in Feln, the winter capital of Kier. Abel had been twenty-eight years the dead man’s junior, and Seth, at twenty-one, was fourteen Earth-standard years younger than Abel.

“I’m not responsible for what I do in the first full minute of awakening,” Seth managed. “That’s a period of legal insanity.” He was disoriented. His head hurt.

Abel, portly at thirty-five, continued trying to shake the smart out of his hand. He seemed a blowsy distortion of their isosire, Günter Latimer.

What a hideous end the old man had come to. A host of angry aisautseb
,
or patriot-priests, had caught Latimer outside Feln’s Winter Palace, stripped him naked, and hauled him by the heel up the southern face of the Kieri Obelisk in Mirrimsagset Square. Palace security had not intervened, and by the time the turreted copperclads from Pedgor Garrison arrived to disperse the crowd, Latimer’s body was spiculed with glass darts from the rioters’ ceramic blowguns, weapons they wore like necklaces and whose ancient Kieri name meant “demon killer.” But even violated to this degree in death, old Latimer had retained an aura of dignity alien to Abel. Abel could not muster a comparable presence even in parade-dress attire and formal mourning cap—the attire, Seth recalled, that his isohet and he had worn to the long state funeral directed by Master Douin, their host. Jauddeb, like human beings, appreciated ritual.

“While you lie sleeping,” Abel said, “I plan our future, consulting with Kieri high and intermediate. And when I come to report that my work has secured us an audience with the Liege Mistress, you greet me thus?
Damnation,
Seth!”

Seth ignored Abel’s wheedling tone, for he could be an unpredictable, sometimes even treacherous man. In his lumbering way, before Latimer’s death, Abel had proved an effective stand-in negotiator with the Kieri. Seth, on the other hand, had remained by his isosire’s and his isohet’s joint decree in the background, a son to the one and alternately a little brother and a sexual object to the other. Toddler and concubine, Seth resented the suppression of his innate talents and despised himself in the person of Abel, that grotesque caricature of his own face and figure. Simultaneously, Seth feared being cut adrift from the only human being who had ever made, or been forced to make, a long-term commitment to him. Günter Latimer had merely called Seth into existence; Abel had raised him like a natural parent.

“The question is whether we’ll live as exiles in Kier or as freegoers among the nations of the Ommundi Company on Earth,” said Abel, shifting into Langlish for the first time that winter. “Do you want to spend your whole life on Gla Taus, shuttling back and forth between Feln and Sket with the monkeys of the Kieri court? Or would you like to see Lausanne again and live among real human beings?”

“The Kieri seem as human as you or I,” Seth said in Langlish.

“Because they’re born? Polecats and ratlings descend through a uterus. Birth is a negligible criterion for the assignment of humanity, Seth. The Kieri are jauddeb, not human. Just because—”

“All right. All right.”

Abel continued his assault: “Take your pick, Seth. Remain on Gla Taus or return with me to Earth.”

“The latter, of course.”

“That demands that we cooperate with Lady Turshebsel, the Liege Mistress. Also with her uppity Point Marcher and the well-meaning Master Douin. I’ve bent myself to that end ever since Günter’s murder. We have no ship. We’re at the mercy of the quaz.”

“Why do you use that shabby epithet?”

“Quaz?” said Abel. “No one here understands Langlish. No need to worry. And what better term for our isosire’s assassins? The memory sickens me.”

Several successive nights since the aisautseb attack, Abel had awakened sweating ice water and trembling. Only after vomiting in the stone urinal in the lavalet of Master Douin’s Ilsotsa Era home could Abel return to sleep. And, clutching Seth to him atop their sour-smelling quilts, he slept fitfully. These had been the only times in the past year, not counting perfunctory bouts of “love making,” that Seth had felt even remotely necessary to his isohet. He was grateful to Abel for his vulnerability—which, however, was not a sentiment he could voice aloud.

Instead, he asked, “Will the Kieri let us go home aboard the
Dharmakaya
?”

“That depends on you.”

“Nothing depends on me, Abel.”

“This does. We have an audience with Lady Turshebsel in half an hour. If you give a good accounting of yourself, we may yet get home.”

“A good accounting? What do you want me to do?”

“Answer her questions.”

“Is that all?”

“And the questions of both Porchaddos Pors, her Point Marcher, and Clefrabbes Douin, who is kindly disposed toward you.”

“Questions about what?”

“About the mission we’ll undertake to earn our passage home, even if we must earn it aboard a vessel already ours. Be yourself, Seth. That will bring us through.”

The
Dharmakaya,
whose
Mahayana Buddhist monicker derived from Günter Latimer’s only wife’s fascination with Eastern mysticism, was the ship by which all three men had come to Gla Taus. It was a light-tripper, a vessel of more than five hundred Earth-bound metric tons, and it belonged to the Langlish Division of the Ommundi Trade Company. At this very moment, it hovered in synchronous orbit six hundred kilometers above Feln, the winter capital. Two days after Latimer’s murder, the Liege Mistress, urged on by the increasingly vocal aisautseb, had revoked the formal trade agreement with Ommundi and seized the
Dharmakaya
for the Kieri state. Its seizure, Master Douin had apologetically told Abel and Seth, was in recompense for the violence done Gla Tausian spirituality by the elder Latimer’s desire to open up to cultivation and animal husbandry the forbidden territories in the evil southern ocean. That Lady Turshebsel herself had championed this project until the aisautseb uprising merely demonstrated the mutability of Kieri politics.

Seth swung his feet to the floor, knocking to the carpeted flagstones the reader with which he had fallen asleep. Abel picked it up and examined its casing.

“What were you reading?”

“Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales of the Kieri,”
Seth replied. “Master Douin gave me the download this morning.”

“And how did you find these little jauddeb histories?”

“The story of Aisaut’s release from the Ilvaudsettan labyrinths put me to sleep.”

Abel laughed. “I can see that it did.”

“That and the motion of the draperies,” Seth hurried to add. “And the comfort of this couch. And my own fatigue and distraction.”

“You protest too much. Come on, then. The author of this soporific masterwork awaits us without.”

*

Clefrabbes Douin—advisor, diplomat, man of letters—sat on a stone bench in his ancient house’s
laulset,
or pool court, staring into the roiling, reddish water. Most of the power generated for home and industrial use in Kier was geothermal, and the households of powerful or wealthy citizens were often distinguished by the laulset. The central feature of the pool court was a natural hot spring circled by colorful ceramic tiles and equipped with hand rails and submerged stone steps to facilitate bathing.

During the long winter just past, Günter Latimer and his isohets had bathed often with the Clefrabbes
geffide,
which consisted of Master Douin, his two wives, an elderly female parent, and five young children. Seth had come to conclude, on anatomical as well as metaphysical and sociological evidence, that the jauddeb were
approximately
human. Moreover, he liked Master Douin’s geffide, as a unit and as individuals. How could Abel call them quaz?

Douin rose to greet his guests when they entered the laulset, and Abel asked about conditions in the streets—whether they could safely venture out again.

“There’s been no danger in Feln since Lady Turshebsel claimed your ship,” Douin said in Kieri. “Did you feel unsafe during your earlier outing to the palace, Master Abel?”

“Not in the palace itself, but in the streets—”

“You were perfectly fine, despite your fears. That’s another reason we seized the
Dharmakaya:
a sop to the aisautseb. It’s imperative to placate so powerful a force with the people.”

Douin turned to Seth. “Good afternoon. Come, Master Seth. We’ll be late for our audience with the Liege Mistress.” He led them toward a door opening on Mirrimsagset Square.

The Clefrabbes geffide—the term implied the physical structure of the house as well as the family within it—stood on the southeast corner of this great square; and, from a window in Douin’s third-story library, Seth and Abel had witnessed the last act of their isosire’s martyrdom and the cutting down of his body from the obelisk. Seth had not been outside the geffide since the state funeral, and until this morning Abel had hazarded trips to the Winter Palace only after sunfall or in the dim hours before the dawn songs of the patriot-priests. Now Abel was venturing forth for the second time that day, again in sunlight, and Seth was undergoing a kind of baptism of his own. His heart fluttered in his breast like a trapped bird.

Pedalshaws and motorized carts cruised through the immaculate square, but most of Feln’s citizenry went afoot.

Near the obelisk, an aisautseb sold tinfoil prayer-and-proclamation balloons. These he inflated with lighter-than-air gas from a tank on wheels. He then decorated the balloons in elegant Kieri script with religious or patriotic squibs. The stylus he used looked vaguely like a weapon, and his patrons were adults rather than children. Instead of walking merrily off with their purchases, these people found shop railings or bench backs or pedalshaws to which to tie their balloons—so that their prayers or proclamations might soar aloft on whatever they had been able to afford. Sunlight ricocheted off the tinfoil balloons, whose messages revolved against a backdrop of unceasing mercantile activity. High above the square, tethered to the Kieri Obelisk itself, drifted a huge hot-air balloon whose message was patched against its off-white bulk in velvety black letters as tall as any adult jauddeb.

“What does that one say?” Seth asked Douin. Although Abel and he could speak Kieri, they still could not read its fluid written characters.

Douin replied, “
God is the foremost patriot, for the land is holy.
”

“It’s a veiled allusion to the presence of offworlders on Gla Taus,” Abel told Seth as they strolled northward toward the pool of the Shobbes Geyser and the stone-and-ceramic façade of the Winter Palace.

“Nothing of the kind,” said Douin, without rancor. “It’s an expression of belief—pure, if not altogether simple.”

“But it wasn’t there before the murder,” Abel said.

“Then let’s simply note that the proposals of Ommundi Company have led to a resurgence of religio-patriotic fervor in Feln. Even so, Master Abel, the proclamation on the obelisk balloon is a traditional one.”

“And those on the smaller balloons?” Seth asked.

“Prayers, market slogans, warnings, even witticisms. The sale of the balloons is an aisautseb monopoly, and their customers, by buying the balloons, are exercising their rights to creative expression and free speech.”

“Do the customers make up the slogans, then?”

“Many do, yes. Of course, Master Seth, the aisautseb may veto any message he doesn’t care for and refuse to sell the balloon. It’s customary, though, to pay him before announcing the slogan you wish written.”

“Ha,” said Abel, pointedly.

“Translate that one,” Seth said, pointing to a balloon jiggling from the awning of a nearby bakery.

Douin halted, cocked his head to one side, and read,
“Beware such demons as would drag us back to Hell.”

“Meaning us?” said Abel.

“Yes, I’d suppose so,” admitted Douin. “But let me comfort you by pointing out that this is also a ritual warning of some antiquity. Its pertinence to you, if any, may be accidental.”

“I doubt that,” Abel said.

“As do I,” said the affable Kieri.

When they resumed walking, shouldering through a crowd devoid of deference for Douin’s ministerial skirts and leather cap, Seth noticed that almost everyone in the streets was wearing a “demon killer” about his or her neck. Some of these lethal ceramic flutes hung straight down, while others lay crosswise like tubular gorgets.
Dairauddes,
the Kieri called them. And the small glass darts that these instruments propelled the people wore on combs in their hair, or as pins in their clothing, or even as ornaments on bracelets and boot tassels. Since everyone was armed, including the patriot-priest near the obelisk, Seth took scant comfort from his knowledge that a single
thet,
or glass dart, was seldom sufficient to kill. Too, Seth had gradually become aware of the attention that Abel and he were attracting: long, sneering stares and snatches of angry talk in bistro and market-stall doorways.