Read A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (5 page)
“If Abel believes we can do what you want—”
“Not Master Abel and you together,” Douin broke in, “but you alone, with Lord Pors and me as minor accomplices.”
“You’re at the very center of our plan,” said Pors.
“But why?”
“Because of your innocence,” Lady Turshebsel said. “A quality that everyone else in this laulset long ago forfeited. Your innocence, Master Seth, is your principal asset and an essential factor in our calculations. Let me be frank: We wish to use you. You lack many of the preconceptions and biases that could thwart Lord Pors, Master Douin, and your own capable isohet. You are clean and unspoiled.”
Seth was not flattered.
We wish to use you.
Along with Günter Latimer, dating from his sixteenth year, he had visited four solar systems, mastering Scansh and Kieri (in addition to Vox, Langlish, and two other human tongues), and he had heard of or actually witnessed cruelties that many persons far older than he would never have credited. His brief experience of the universe had early on apprised him, in fact, of the ubiquity and multiformity of Evil. To be termed an innocent, he felt, was to contradict the whole thrust of this experience.
We wish to use you.
He could still see his isosire’s body hanging like a butchered carcass from the Kieri Obelisk. . . .
“You don’t care for my candor?” Lady Turshebsel asked.
Seth had no answer.
“All right. You’ve lived among us better than a year. Do you regard the people of Gla Taus, us jauddeb, as”—the Liege Mistress shaped the alien word with humorous distaste—“what your isohet sometimes disdainfully calls, well,
quaz
?”
“Oh, no,” Seth blurted, reddening. At his back, he heard Abel shifting from one foot to another in acute embarrassment.
“This word implies a lower order of development and intelligence, does it not?” said the Lady, pressing her advantage. But Seth’s reply was apparent in his flustered silence, and she continued: “We too have ugly epithets for foreigners and offworlders, Master Seth. But I believe you when you say that
you
don’t regard us as . . . quaz. Your isohet’s opinion I cannot discern, however, for the word first fell from his lips.”
“Lady Turshebsel—” Abel began.
“Quiet!” Porchaddos Pors snapped.
“My question now,” the Liege Mistress resumed, “is if your openness to the humanity of other intelligent alien species is broad enough to include the inhabitants of Trope?”
“Trope, Lady?”
“The world that circles Anja, seven lights from our star, Gla Taunt. Do you know that world, Master Seth?”
“It’s a technologically advanced planet that holds itself aloof from Interstel, I believe. It has light-trippers and communicates with passing vessels by using Vox, but it refuses either consular contact or trade. Interstel is biding its time, as it did with Gla Taus until granting Ommundi permission to attempt a mercantile alliance.”
Pors said defensively, “We wished to develop certain aspects of our technology without aping the methods and paraphernalia of Interstel. Now we have orbiters of our own, if not light-trippers, and we did it by techniques and designs of Kieri origin.”
Lady Turshebsel ignored the Point Marcher’s chauvinistic outburst. “But what do you know about the gosfi themselves, the people of Trope?” she asked Seth.
“Their eyes—”
“Yes?”
“Their eyes are strange. But they are shaped in their bodies just as you and I are shaped.”
“That’s what
we
suppose,” Lady Turshebsel conceded. “But Master Günter told me that Interstel recently induced the greatest Tropish nation to become a provisional signatory of its charter. By your own official classification system, then, the Tropiards are
jauddebseb.
”
By this word, Seth realized, Turshebsel meant “humanlike” or “humanoid”—but the silver-eyed priest made disapproving wheezing noises at her mentions of both Latimer and the Tropiards, and it was clear that in his view only Kieri were without question jauddebseb.
Lady Turshebsel continued her argument: “Knowing these things to be true, and knowing that we on Gla Taus have been in contact for some months with the Magistrate of Trope by means of the communication system aboard the
Dharmakaya,
would you regard the Tropiards as quaz if you had to deal with them?”
“No, Lady.”
“You’d deal with them”—the Liege Mistress surprised Seth by saying her next three words in Langlish—“
human to human
?”
“Yes, Lady,” he said, disguising his astonishment. Latimer must have taught her a great deal before his murder.
“Good. Because at this moment, Master Seth, I appoint you my personal envoy to the Magistrate of Trope. His name is Ulgraji Vrai, and his nation is called by the name of his world.”
“But what am I to do?” Seth craned his neck to look at Abel. There arose within him a panic occasioned by his own inadequacy.
“As you’re told,” Abel said curtly.
“Lord Pors,” said Lady Turshebsel, “while Master Seth soaks in the waters, please detail his mission to Trope. Leave out nothing, but be succinct.”
Pors stalked about the laulset’s pool, his thongs crepitating rudely, and in fifteen minutes he outlined the economic basis of the Kieri plan and the nature of the protracted cultural conflict on Trope that seemed to make his strategy feasible: nothing but benefits for all concerned. But as Pors spoke, Seth glanced often into the ceramic glare nimbusing the white-robed priest.
Clearly, Lady Turshebsel’s plan had grown out of priestly resistance to her trade agreement with Ommundi Company. The aisautseb wanted no one to exploit the very real resources of the Evashsteddan, but to acquire the basics of an interstellar technology Kieri scientists and industrialists were even now venturing into the Obsidian Wastes from Old Ilvaudset, the first such explorers in several centuries. They were looking for rare ores, insulating materials, natural conductors, and any other serendipitous loot the Wastes might contain. The aisautseb did not object to this expansion because it was northward, but because the Wastes could support neither crops nor livestock, the Liege Mistress was counting on Ommundi Company to establish food-producing strongholds in the islands of the Evashsteddan and a reliable supply line to Kier and the pioneers pushing poleward in the Ilvaudsettan. That hope had died with Günter Latimer. This stratagem involving
Trope—which Pors was now explaining—was a contingency plan, and its chief virtue seemed to be that it was acceptable, if only barely, to the aisautseb.
“What do you think?” Lady Turshebsel asked when Pors had finished.
“I don’t like it much, Lady,” Seth replied.
“Why?”
“It works hardships on us all, even if Gla Taus and Trope do ultimately stand to benefit.”
“The Latimer isohets also benefit,” Lady Turshebsel said. “If you succeed, Master Seth, you return to your home world. If you decline my appointment, the
Dharmakaya
stays in orbit and you and Master Abel remain our guests. Narthaimnar Chappouib and his fellow priests have approved this mission as well as the reward attendant upon your coming home to Gla Taus.” She nodded to suggest that Narthaimnar Chappouib was her silver-eyed advisor, confirming Seth’s suspicions about the man’s influence.
“Gla Taus isn’t our home,” he said, “and the
Dharmakaya
is already ours.”
“He agrees,” Abel interjected. “He accepts your appointment as envoy to the nation-cum-world called Trope.”
“He accepted before he’d heard the whole proposal,” Lady Turshebsel rejoined. “I’d like to hear his opinion now.”
Lacking certainty that he could do what they wished, Seth hesitated.
“Tell her!” Abel whispered.
“I accept your appointment,” Seth heard himself say.
“Then go to Aisaut Chappouib for a blessing. You’ll depart Gla Taus tomorrow—whereas I will remove to Sket until your return.” She lifted her arms and clapped her hands. A woman entered the laulset, helped Lady Turshebsel from the water, and draped her cloak over her shoulders. Wet, the fine black hair covering the Liege Mistress’s body lay along her limbs and flanks like a delicate fur.
When the two women were gone, Clefrabbes Douin assisted Seth from the pool and pointed him toward the unblinking priest.
“My garments?”
“Not yet,” Douin said. “Go to the aisautseb.”
Seth walked naked past Lord Pors and halted before the priest’s tiled throne.
“Kneel,” said Narthaimnar Chappouib.
Seth lowered himself to the cold tiles, knees aching with the hardness under them, his flesh crawling with a variety of unnamable chills. He was kneeling, naked, before one of those who had helped slay his isosire. As Latimer had gone naked up the side of the tower in Mirrimsagset Square. . . .
“You will carry a gift to the ruler to whom Lady Turshebsel sends you as envoy,” the priest said. “This will be my blessing, for you have no belief in aisautseb prayers. In any case, your nature is such that they would have no meaning.” Chappouib looked about for someone to command. “Master Douin, would you assist me?”
Douin came forward and freed from the inside of the aisautseb’s collar a chain on which was strung a dairauddes, a tube of black ceramic as long as Seth’s hand from wrist to middle fingertip.
“Give it to me,” Chappouib said.
Douin held the dairauddes out to the priest; and Seth was taken aback because when Chappouib reached to take it, lifting his great sleeves so that they fell to his elbows, he accepted the dairauddes with a pair of raw-looking stumps. This aisautseb, like the mythical namesake of all Kieri priests, had no hands.
The dairauddes dangled between his stumps, threatening to slip away and shatter on the floor. Even so, Chappouib wished to put it around Seth’s neck, and Seth, despite not wanting the thing to touch him, inclined his head to make the transfer easier. He felt instinctively that the ritual had sexual overtones, and these confused and frightened him. Was he being honored by the priest’s gift, or was the transfer a contemptuous mockery of his manhood?
At last Clefrabbes Douin took the dairauddes from Chappouib and bestowed it on Seth. Now he was wearing a “demon killer,” and to many Kieri—this thought chilled—Seth himself qualified as a demon.
“Your dairauddes,” Chappouib said, shaking down his sleeves and covering his stumps again, “once belonged to Lady Turshebsel. She forfeited it when she drove the aisautseb from her service. I brought it back. Now she bids me give it to you to bestow on Magistrate Vrai of Trope.”
Seth waited, bemused.
“You may depart his presence,” Douin told Seth.
Seth hurried to do so, retreating toward a young Kieri attendant who had come back into the laulset with his clothes. Dressing, he watched as Abel, Douin, and Pors went forward to receive Chappouib’s blessing—even Abel, who supposedly could not benefit from the recitation of an aisautseb prayer. Afterward, the silver-eyed priest spoke softly to Pors and Douin, excluding Abel and punctuating his advice with vigorous nods and shakings of the head. At last, quite audibly, he cried, “You are my hawks, the hawks of Aisaut. Go forth with truth and courage.
“Aye, my hawks, go forth!”
“He had no hands,” Seth said as Douin led Abel and him back down the steps of the palace toward the teeming square. Sunfall was imminent, and Gla Taunt—perversely, it still seemed to Seth—oozed down the eastern sky like an egg yolk sliding through its white.
“A traditional aisautseb practice,” Douin said. “The holy one who keeps a place at Kieri court sacrifices his hands for the honor. He becomes the conscience of the nation. His handlessness signifies that he neither gives nor takes, for his domain is spiritual rather than worldly.”
“He gave me the dairauddes.”
“A spiritual gift, Master Seth, itself to be passed on to another.”
“When did Chappouib lose his hands?” Abel asked.
“The day Lady Turshebsel officially restored the aisautseb advisorship abolished thirty-seven years ago. Chappouib was chosen by his fellows, and gladly relinquished his hands to the sword.”
“Barbaric,” Abel said. “Barbaric superstition.”
Douin halted at the entrance to the square, his dark eyes flashing. “I agree.” His tone suggested that some doubt still plagued him. “It’s the sort of thing Lady Turshebsel fought successfully until the arrival of Interstel, Ommundi, and your isosire.”
This veiled accusation was as close to rudeness as Clefrabbes Douin had ever come in his dealings with the Latimer isohets, but Seth sympathized with their host’s point of view. Their presence on the planet had been an irritant and a provocation, and now they were preparing to travel somewhere else, on a mission for which Seth could summon little enthusiasm.
“Barbaric,” Abel repeated.
Now Douin held his tongue.
And Seth, looking toward their host’s stately geffide, saw a marketplace filled with bobbing tinfoil balloons. Even in the gathering twilight, the lofty dagger shaft on which Latimer had died, the Kieri Obelisk, pierced him to the heart. As for the dairauddes about his neck, it mocked him: Seth was sure of it.
THREE
The cabin’s blackness was riven by a scream
. Although Seth had been having a nightmare (a succession of blurred images underlain by an impalpable distress), the cry was not his.
“Dear God!” Abel was pleading. “Dear God,
don’t let them put their hands on me!
”
The plea soared into a bloodcurdling falsetto that seemed incisive enough to split the hull of their light-tripper and let the void spill in.
Seth pressed a button. Their cabin was filled with a soft, Earthlike twilight. His isohet, clad only in a pair of nylon sleep trousers, had scooted across his bunk so that his naked back met the bulkhead and pressed insistently against it. His pupils were fat, black suns.
“I’m here,” Seth said, lowering himself onto the foot of Abel’s bunk. “I’m here. We’re aboard the
Dharmakaya,
five days out from Gla Taus on our way to the Anja system.”
Abel’s pupils collapsed spectacularly, drinking in the reality of the cabin. Seth reached out and gripped his isohet’s ankle. He saw that Abel was finally focusing on him—but his flaccid torso ran with sweat, and his hair was plastered to his face as if he had just returned from a shower.
“Again?” Seth asked.
“They were preparing me for the obelisk,” Abel responded. “A rope hung down from its highest grate, and the aisautseb were moving in, moving in to . . . to disrobe me.”
“They didn’t get you tonight, then?”
Abel fixed Seth with an outraged, uncomprehending stare. “He was our isosire, Seth, and I’m your
brother.
How do you remain immune to what happened to him, immune to my suffering of what he suffered?”
Seth removed his hand from his isohet’s ankle.
“It happened to you, too!” Abel informed him for the umpteenth time. “You and I went up that tower with Günter Latimer, but the truth of that still escapes you. For you, Seth, it was an external rather than an inward occurrence. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be!”
“I’m supposed to have nightmares in living, bloody color?”
“Yes!”
“And wake up screaming?”
“Yes!”
“And go stumbling into the lavalet to heave up my panic and my compassion?” This was a hit, Seth knew, because now that Abel had recovered from the psychic pummeling of his nightmare, his body would begin to react. His face had already blanched, and his breathing was quickening again. Fresh diamonds of sweat were popping out on his already sweat-lacquered jowls and forehead.
Abel controlled his temper with difficulty. “My
self-
compassion, you’re trying to imply, aren’t you? Well, that’s all right, that’s fine. The word of Interstel is that we’re all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor.”
“You don’t even pretend to believe that, Abel.”
“Compassion begins at home.”
Seth winced at both the hypocrisy and the banality of this bromide. “That, perhaps, you believe.”
“You don’t
feel
anything!” Abel countered. But the trauma of the nightmare was belatedly catching up with him, and he swung his feet to the floor and headed for the lavalet, replete with the sanctity of his suffering and so close to being caught short that the argument was effectively over. Having no desire either to confront or comfort Abel on his return, Seth pulled on a pair of coveralls and let himself into the corridor outside their cabin.
The
Dharmakaya
was immense. Its living, sleeping, and study quarters occupied a pair of windowless nacelles positioned below and aft of the triangular conning module. Up there, the pilot—K/R Caranicas, an indentured Ommundi triune—was installed in cybernetic linkage with the astrogational and life-support capacities of the vessel. Caranicas, who possessed a single left cerebral hemisphere interwired with twin right cerebral hemispheres, had remained in cold sleep during the Latimers’ entire stay on Gla Taus, the equivalent of nearly ten Earth-standard months, and so had known nothing of the murder of Seth and Abel’s isosire or of the coopting of shipboard communication systems by the Kieri.
Not until revived by Seth had the triune understood that the ship’s body had been violated by forcible entry and its voice stolen by agents of Lady Turshebsel’s taussanaur,
or orbital guard. Now, as if indifferent to its new masters, Caranicas was transporting five of the
Dharmakaya
’s
captors—Clefrabbes Douin, Porchaddos Pors, two officers of the taussanaur,
and a minion of Narthaimnar Chappouib—through subdimensional id-space toward the world called Trope.
Caranicas was neither male nor female, neither isohet nor natural child, and Seth mentally referred to the triune as “it” because no other pronoun seemed to work. What gender did you consider a being whose body lacked sexual differentiation and whose fundamental
raison d’être
was conning five hundred tons of vanadium and vitricite through a nonexistent medium that Interstel wags had long ago dubbed The Sublime? Moreover, except through the computer in the conning module, Caranicas couldn’t speak.
An inability to speak struck Seth as the perfect recommendation for a companion. After composing himself against the shock of standing upright again, he set off through the corridor toward the step-shaft leading to the command unit. On the way he passed the adjacent cabins that Douin and Pors were occupying, and recollected that one of these jauddeb was probably already aloft. Their sleep cycles aboard the
Dharmakaya
seldom overlapped, and he hoped that if one of the Kieri had chosen to visit their pilot, Douin would be the one.
Seth’s argument with Abel still rankled inside him. Isohets—just as the members of any tupletry of clones—supposedly shared a heightened empathic sense, a bond of deep dimensionality. No such bond existed between Abel and Seth. Although Abel had raised him—except for Seth’s first eight years at the Ommundi Paedoschol in Lausanne—he had never felt a real psychic communion with his isohet. Gratitude for Abel’s love Seth had often known, and affection, and a terrible fear that without Abel he would never achieve a viable identity. But Abel and he had never shared any of those telepathic insights, swift and accurate, that isohets were supposed to experience. He could read Abel’s feelings only in the usual ways, by direct observation and a merely human sensitivity to nuance and mood. Abel’s mind he could not read at all.
Never, Seth reflected as he climbed, had he known anyone so prone to vomiting as Abel. Günter Latimer had never quelled his anxiety attacks—if, indeed, he had ever
had
anxiety attacks—by retching up his guts. And Seth got that shamefully sick only when he had eaten or drunk too much. Most people, he knew, were not so susceptible to nausea and vomiting; and yet if anyone should share Abel’s unenviable combination of body chemistry and hypersensitive mind, why not he? He was a duplicate of Abel, for Abel was a duplicate of Günter, and Günter Latimer was the die from which they had both been struck:
If A=G, and if S=G, then S=A.
In which case, of course, it was pretty surprising that their minds seldom strained along the same cable toward a common anxiety, and that Seth was not also a vomiting fool. Must he feel guilty for having escaped the harsh confessional of the lavalet?
“No,” Seth said aloud, climbing through the step-shaft. But speaking the denial aloud didn’t alter the fact that his guilt was even now pursuing him through the corridors of the
Dharmakaya.
His guilt was Abel’s revenge for his own unfeeling innocence.
Pors rather than Douin had preceded him to the conning module. It seemed to Seth that every card dealt him bore a black spot.
At the auxiliary astrogational console, he eased into a lounger next to the one occupied by Pors, then studied the Kieri’s concave profile. The man’s nose, eyes, and mouth all seemed to be set inside a dish of bone—but, in spite of that somewhat apish facial arrangement, he appeared both alert and cunning.
We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor,
Abel had said. A ludicrous declaration. Abel’s belief in deity ascended little higher than had Günter Latimer.
“Good morning, Master Seth,” Pors said without taking his eyes from the astrogational screen. He spoke in Vox, which all the Kieri but the aisautseb had agreed would be their official tongue for the duration of their mission.
“Is it morning?” Seth asked, amused.
“For me it is. Master Douin awakened me only a brief while ago.”
Douin and Pors took turns babysitting the
Dharmakaya
’s
pilot to ensure that Caranicas didn’t craftily maneuver the vessel off true toward some reasonably obtainable Interstel world. Considering that the triune’s programmed mission kept it course-correcting for the whole of any subdimensional voyage, this was an unlikely possibility. An override required either Abel’s own feed-in or an apprehension of disaster on the part of the triune itself. A passenger would quickly notice any major change of course because of subfield resistance and the resultant shipboard discomfort: heat, oscillation, and noise. A wholesale shift from The Sublime to the more predictable ridiculousness of normal Space-Time would be even more wrenching. But the two Kieri took their self-assigned work seriously and monitored the astrogation consoles round the clock. Seth had taught Douin the basics of this monitoring, and Abel had taught Pors.
Both were already well versed in the operation of the ship’s communication system: Shortly after the Latimers’ arrival on Gla Taus, Günter had conducted a tour of the
Dharmakaya
for several high government officials and a contingent of Lady Turshebsel’s taussanaur (literally, “world circlers”). One of the high points of this tour, at least for the Kieri, had been Latimer’s demonstration of the sublimission radio/receiver, with which he had rather showily contacted Ommundi Station on Sabik II and an Interstel facility on a colony world circling Acamar. These brief exchanges with jauddebseb beings hundreds of lights away, along with the vivid sublimission images hovering like ghosts in the radio’s receptor well, had immensely impressed one of the taussanaur—who had asked permission to put through a call to Trope, picking that world because of its relative proximity to Gla Taus.
Latimer had graciously instructed the jauddeb in the use of the unit, and even though the Tropiards were not full-fledged signatories of the Interstel Charter, the guard had easily raised a response from a tracking outpost in the Tropish hinterland called Chaelu Sro. Latimer had translated the guard’s Kieri into Vox, and the Vox of the anonymous Tropiard back into Kieri; and then, in order not to lose face before the delighted taussanaur, Porchaddos Pors and Master Douin had each politely demanded a turn at the console, speaking Vox to impress the others with their erudition. That this entire exchange had proceeded without any visual input from Trope had dulled the excitement of the touring Kieri scarcely a whit.
In fact, the episode had seemed such a triumph of public relations that Seth had inwardly approved his isosire’s spontaneous suggestion to Pors that a pair of orbital guards remain aboard the
Dharmakaya
to monitor the radio and study first-hand the electronic and mechanical intricacies of a bona fide light-tripper. Trust was the order of the day, and no one had then suspected the possibility of an aisautseb uprising, the seizure of the ship, or the need to negotiate with the Tropiards an alternative to the doomed Ommundi trade proposal. Who could have foreseen that the taussanaur aboard at Latimer’s invitation would turn pirate because of the archaic belief system of a priestly order that had exerted little real clout for almost four Gla Tausian decades? Neither Abel nor Seth had advised Latimer of the foolishness of his trust, and K/R Caranicas, who might have had a weird opinion in the matter, had been deep in cold sleep. . . .
“How long must we share subdimensional nonexistence with that creature who pilots us?”
Pors asked, nodding forward.
Seth glanced at the gyroscopically mounted chair in which Caranicas, blinkered and belted, could move vertically or horizontally past the various astrogational computers and both in and out of the cystlike conning turrets set about the nose of the module. The triune itself was scarcely visible in this chair. Its arms and legs were wired, and at the back of its head was the cranial prosthetic housing the additional right lobe cloned from an embryonic extraction of brain tissue before Caranicas’s “birth.” The housing was pure platinum, and the appearance of this artificial cap always put Seth in mind of an enormous silver goiter that had rotated unaccountably around to the nape. Caranicas was not pretty, not by any means, and Seth could easily understand how Pors could call the triune a “creature.”
“Can’t you tell from the console display?” he asked the impatient noble.
“The figures beside the miniature vessel say” —Pors shut his eyes, working to deduce the Kieri equivalent of the Arabic numerals he had painstakingly learned months ago— “twenty-three, I think: twenty-three more days.”
“If the texture and consistency of the subdimensional field we’re generating doesn’t change in the meanwhile. Then, yes, twenty-three days.”
“Earth reckoning,” Pors stipulated.
“That’s nearly thirty of your own,” Seth replied.
“If conditions in The Sublime don’t alter and so delay us.”
“They’re just as likely to alter in our favor, Lord Pors. The Sublime is highly mutable. That’s why a light-tripper must have a pilot who reads the subdimensional fields quickly and expertly, and who’s able to compensate almost intuitively for the changes. Interstel and most of the trade companies develop their pilots from birth. In truth, the selection is prenatal, and one such as Caranicas is destined for no other occupation. This triune has spent almost sixty years in the service of Ommundi, although much of that has been in cold sleep.”
“Of what . . . species . . . is your pilot?” Pors asked.
“Caranicas is human.” The fact that in Vox the pronoun “it” had three forms—one for animals and plants, one for inanimate objects, and one for abstract concepts—momentarily stymied Seth. After sifting among his choices, he settled almost at sheer random upon the feminine pronoun. “Despite her appearance, she’s human—of the basic stock from which Latimer, Abel, and I derived. The differences are genetic, surgical, and cybernetic.