A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  Entering, Seth saw three sleeping pallets sunk like shallow graves into the carpeted platform. Pors and Douin sat in tulip chairs near the window, hunched over a small plastic gantry playing a Kieri counter game called naugced. It was comforting to see that they had retrieved their effects kits from the transcraft before coming to the dormitory; Seth’s, too. He pulled off his clammy gloves and tossed them toward the only pallet not already littered with Kieri hair clasps, pumice-soap bundles, and ministerial caps.

  This would be the first night since his boyhood in the Lausanne Paedoschol that he had slept in a room with someone other than Günter Latimer or his own isohet. How strange that his bedfellows should be Gla Tausians, jauddeb, aliens. A scent as of bitter cinnamon pervaded the area, and Seth knew this to be an intimate Kieri scent. Although Pors was smoking fehtes, a rare Feht Evashsted “tobacco” said to have strange effects on jauddeb metabolism, the smell in the room derived less from the burning cigarette than from the simple presence of Pors and Douin themselves.

  They had turned their corner of this Tropish dormitory into a Kieri geffide.

  Seth tossed the dairauddes into his pallet after his gloves, and Douin, who was awaiting Pors’s next play, looked up.

  “Master Seth!” he cried, rising.

  Pors also looked up, and Seth was momentarily startled by the haggardness of the Point Marcher’s face. It had an indrawn, cadaverous look that Seth couldn’t attribute solely to fehtes and fatigue. But Pors returned his attention immediately to the naugced game, thus freeing Seth of the need to explain why the ebony demon killer was still in his possession.

  He spoke first of his success: “Magistrate Vrai will accompany us tomorrow to the Sh’gaidu commune. He will intercede on our behalf with the Pledgechild—which, it seems, is the title of the Sh’gaidu leader.”

  “Excellent!” Douin exclaimed.

  “I also met Vrai’s administrative deputy, a Tropiard named Ehte Emahpre. He says he’s going, too.”

  “We also met Deputy Emahpre,” Douin said. “He showed us a portion of the J’beij and a little of the tablerock. He has no very good opinion of the Sh’gaidu, I’m afraid.”

  “Ekthep ath agronomithz,” Pors mumbled. “Which ith all we want them for.” He ran a counter along one of the struts of the naugced gantry. Then he, too, rose.

  Bewildered by Pors’s appearance and unintelligibility, Seth confessed his only failure: “Magistrate Vrai refused Lady Turshebsel’s gift. He said that the Mwezahbe Legacy prohibits him from having either weapons or religious artifacts. The dairauddes is both.”

  “Where is it?” Pors demanded.

  Seth gestured toward his pallet. Pors, in turn, gestured brusquely at Douin, who walked with calm dignity to the sunken bed, knelt beside it, and picked up the spurned Kieri offering. It was with difficulty that Pors maintained his composure, and when he next spoke, expanding his barrel chest to keep the words from spilling too quickly out, Seth realized what had caused the unsettling change in his looks and diction.

  “Thith ith an inthult to uth,” he began. “Thith ith . . . Mathta Douin, fetch him afta my thurrogathz! I won’t continnoo like thith!” And Pors turned abruptly on his heel and faced the great bronze window.

  “There’s a lavalet at the end of the corridor,” Douin told Seth, still kneeling. “He wants you to bring him his surrogates.”

  “His dentures?”

  Douin merely nodded, embarrassed for the young isohet and chagrined that his Point Marcher had chosen this way to chastise Seth for a foreordained failure. Seth was amused, sorrier for Douin’s discomfort than for the supposedly degrading task Pors had just set him. Never had he imagined that the Kieri had perfected orbiting vehicles before stumbling upon the necessary prophylactic measures to preserve an individual’s natural teeth. Maybe someone had knocked Pors’s out for him. Considering the Point Marcher’s disposition, that seemed highly likely.

  Seth left the sleeping area, walked down the corridor, and entered his first Tropish lavalet.

  A transparent pedestal surmounted by a circular ceramic basin dominated the room. Against one wall was a wide marble shelf upon which stood three wingbacked lavatory chairs, stone strategically upholstered with a velvetlike fabric the same shade of plum as the Magistrate’s carpet. Chromium pedals protruded from the base of each chair. Did male Tropiards stand or sit when they had to make water? The chairs seemed ill designed for the upright, face-on technique, nor were there any urinals or canted troughs to accommodate such an approach. Whatever your business, you apparently had to sit. Seth mounted the shelf and pushed a pedal with his foot. A blast of air rather than water cycloned in the hopper, creating an echo as if from the fathomless catacombs beneath Huru J’beij. That was all.

  Satisfied that the contraption would neither devour nor emasculate him, Seth sat and relieved his bladder. Toilet training in the Lausanne Paedoschol all over again. He remembered that training only because one of the male warders had delighted in telling him what a troublesome case he had been. The bastard . . .

  Water rather than air flowed through the pedestal of the wash basin. Seth used a half-melted bar of pumice-soap to scrub his hands, then shook them over the basin and wiped them lightly on his pantaloons because he saw no towels or air-blowing devices on the walls. Maybe Tropiards dripped dry.

  Lord Pors’s “surrogates”—which Seth had seen upon entering—hung by a thread of dental floss from a circular tray above the basin. Out of his mouth, they were, well, australopithecine. Obscenely australopithecine. At least to Seth’s eye. The sort of thing that a fossil hunter—not a modern dental technician—would cast. But this was a homocentric prejudice that did him little credit. Really, what most disturbed him (Seth tried to tell himself) was having to tote the damn things back to Pors on a thread. He would have been no happier if the dentures had been designed for human use. But who, then, would? The task was just as demeaning as Pors wished it to be, although, it seemed to Seth, the Kieri lord lost as much face by exposing himself without his dentures as he saved by wreaking this petty and absurd punishment.

  Carrying the teeth, Seth returned to Pors and Douin. Their naugced game was forgotten. Pors grabbed the surrogates from Seth, unwound the thread of floss, and stuck them firmly in his mouth. When he spoke, he was again intelligible:

  “There’s no excuse for his refusing the dairauddes! If he wished to insult us, he might just as well have pissed on our boots!”

  “He didn’t wish to insult us,” Seth replied. “And the insult you propose may not be possible for Tropiards.”

  This made no impression on the Point Marcher. He stalked along the window, halted, and stared at Seth while ruefully shaking his head.

  “It’s senseless to worry about this,” Douin told him. “We want to take the Sh’gaidu back to Gla Taus with us. The ultimate disposition of a ceramic blowgun is a simple irrelevancy.”

  “Not to the aisautseb!”

  “The aisautseb aren’t here.”

  “No, Master Douin, but we are. And by Chappouib’s command we’re their agents on Trope, as Master Seth is principally Lady Turshebsel’s.”

  Seth asked, “Have either of you seen any female Tropiards? Any . . . women?”

  Chappouib’s Hawks of Conscience looked at Seth in surprise. Neither appeared to regard his question as meaningful; and, briefly, Pors and Douin were united again—in their annoyance at Seth’s interruption.

  “The lavalet facilities would suggest—” Douin began.

  “Yes, they would,” said Seth. “But were either of you introduced to a Tropiard who responded to a feminine pronoun? We bring jauddeb and human prejudices to our understanding of the lavalet facilities.”

  “This is their government complex,” Pors snapped. “Their ruling hierarchy is masculine, as it is in Kier—with the exception of our Liege Mistress, may God protect her.”

  Douin put in, “Why do you ask, Master Seth?”

  “I’m not sure, really. The Magistrate seemed pleased
that I am an isohet: the male child of a single male birth-parent. J’gosfi, male sapient, was the term he used.” Seth glanced toward the corridor behind him. “In the lavalet, though, it occurred to me that—except for height differences—everyone in the J’beij resembled the Magistrate. Do female sapients exist on Trope? That lavalet’s not much evidence either way.”

  “We’ve seen nothing of Ardaja Huru or any of the other Tropish cities,” Pors said. “Of course there are female sapients.”

  “I don’t know,” Seth demurred.

  “It makes no difference!” Pors cried. “We don’t wish to . . . to poke with them. We wish to put them in the Feht Evashsted as farmers.” He strode to the naugced gantry and found the butt of his forgotten cigarette on one of its struts. One quick inhalation set the fehtes tobacco glowing again and the smell of bitter cinnamon drifting lazily toward Seth.

  “Another possibility,” Seth said, “is that female Tropiards may not interact with foreigners and offworlders.”

  Pors looked at Douin. “This is useless speculation. Nights on Trope are short, and we’d best take our rest.” He inhaled deeply and expelled the pale blue smoke in a lacy, dissolving plume.

  That was when Douin caught sight of the amulet hanging from Seth’s neck. He approached to examine it.

  “Every Tropiard wears one of these,” he said, “much as devout Kieri wear their dairauddes. Where did you get this, Master Seth?”

  “It was the Magistrate’s.”

  “He gave it to you?”

  “He insisted that I keep it until we’ve completed our mission to Palija Kadi, where the Sh’gaidu live.”

  “You should have refused to accept it,” Pors said sourly.

  “What is it?” Douin asked, still supporting it in his palm.

  “A dascra gosfi’mija, or treasure of the birth-parent. He demanded that I give him my goggles in exchange.”

  “Was he dissatisfied with his own?” Pors asked, blowing out more smoke. “They all resemble jongleur-thieves, wearing those masklike goggles. Why would he want your pair?”

  “In exchange,” Seth said. “He had to have something in exchange.”

  “So long as it wasn’t our dairauddes,” Pors carped. But the amulet had begun to interest him, too, and he approached to grasp and heft it. “What is the birth-parent’s treasure, Master Seth? The pouch feels as if it’s laden with powder or fine sand. Do you know what it is?”

  “No, Lord Pors. The Magistrate didn’t say.”

  “Let’s look, then.”

  Seth and Douin exchanged doubtful looks.

  “Come, Master Seth. Remove it, please. It won’t hurt to find out exactly what sort of treasure you’re packing about for our host.” Pors’s garments reeked of fehtes—but his teeth were, or had been, clean.

  “I’m afraid to do that,” Seth said.

  “Why?”

  Seth told the Kieri about the Magistrate’s ability to make messages flower in his mind. “I’m afraid he’s also capable of reading my thoughts. He denied that he had this power, but if the Sh’gaidu possess it, as we’ve come to believe from the old Interstel reports, then why not Tropiards, too? What if . . . what if the Magistrate should see us opening his gift to me and examining its contents?”

  Now Pors and Douin exchanged a glance. Their expressions, although full of meaning, were unreadable to Seth. A new uneasiness gripped his heart. He was among strangers.

  Pors stubbed his cigarette in the palm of his hand, indifferent to the burn. Fehtes was supposed to offer the Kieri a degree of metabolic immunity to intense heat, but Seth had not known it could make a smoker unmindful of burns. The Point Marcher, understanding that Palija Kadi would be much warmer than Huru J’beij, was smoking in preparation for their journey there. The inhaled drug had numbed not only his anxiety about this trip but also his sensitivity to pain.

  “Let me see the amulet,” he said. “If the Magistrate gave it to you, he’s also given you its contents . . . at least for the time being.”

  Seth relinquished the dascra gosfi’mija. Pors carried it to the ledge of smooth white stone traversing the dormitory’s window. Seth and Douin followed. At the ledge Pors removed a tiny pin from the neck of the pouch and carefully laid the pin aside. Then he spread the lips of the amulet, shook it gently, and fanned a pattern of grayish-green dust across the ledge. Enough dust, thought Seth, to fill a pair of good-sized human thimbles. Little seemed extraordinary about the substance, but if Pors indulged a sudden whim and swept the stuff away merely to demonstrate his contempt of it, what would happen to them? Even a mere puff of breath would irrevocably scatter the substance. Seth, frightened, refused to breathe—but Pors turned to Douin with an exasperated shake of the head and gestured at the powder.

  “Tropish gold?” he asked. “A rare mineral? A religious hallucinogen?”

  “The Tropiards have no religion but reason,” Douin said.

  “Then what by the unholy Evashsteddan must it be?”

  Averting his face, still half afraid to breathe, Seth said, “It may have religious significance. The Magistrate told me that by wearing the dascra gosfi’mija Tropiards acknowledge the ultimate mystery of origins.”

  “Dried semen?” Douin hazarded in complete seriousness.

  “Wouldn’t that qualify as a birth-parent’s treasure?”

  Pors made a noise of amused disgust. “Gosfi semen? Why not a powder of well-pestled gosfi ova?” He made the noise again. “Master Douin, your imagination indicts you for a morbid dreamer.”

  “I was simply attempting—” Douin began.

  “We don’t know what it is,” Seth told the Kieri. “Nor do we have any way to analyze the substance. I’d feel much better if we returned it to the amulet. Suppose the Magistrate knows its quantity by weight. We may have all indicted ourselves not as dreamers but as losels and snoops. What footing do we gain by that?”

  “None,” Douin admitted. “You’re right. You’ve gained us what footing we have by earning the Magistrate’s trust, and we’ve imperiled that by strewing this substance about as if it were ground pumice.”

  “I would hardly call it strewn,” said Pors testily, gesturing at the ledge. He took two small pieces of paper from his jacket, swept the substance onto one piece with the other, and carefully funneled the powder back into the amulet, which he then closed, pinned shut, and handed to Seth. “Wear your precious treasure, then. If this attire brings the Sh’gaidu to Gla Taus, it little matters to me what sort of foulness you wear around your neck.”

  Seth donned the amulet again. He watched as Lord Pors retrieved the dairauddes from his, Seth’s, pallet and laid it reverently in the padded interior of a small leather case. Pors placed the case beside the pallet he had earlier claimed, and slumped back into his tulip chair.

  “Do you wish to complete the naugced?” Douin asked him.

  “Who leads in counters?”

  “I do, my Lord.”

  “Then the naugced can go to Hell with Master Seth’s isosire.”

  Seth, stung, glanced, indignantly at the Kieri lord. But before he could act upon his anger, Douin stepped forward and intercepted him. The Point Marcher, meanwhile, appeared completely unaware of the effect of his words. His posture betrayed his weariness. His mouth had fallen open, and his australopithecine dentures glittered in a film of saliva.

  Thith ith an inthult, Seth thought at him mockingly, desperately coveting the Magistrate’s ability to cerebrate.

  Douin said, “The nights here are indeed short, Master Seth. We’d better get what sleep we can.”

  How could anyone sleep in those gravelike indentations on the floor? For that matter, how could he sleep in the same room with Pors and Douin? The contemplation of both prospects chilled Seth.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” he told Clefrabbes Douin. “I need a few minutes alone.”

  Douin knelt and lifted something from his pallet. Approaching Seth, he said, “Here, you must be hungry. Take this with you. I’ll leave the lights diml
y glowing for your return.”

  Seth took the gift. Like a pear encased in a rind the color of Anja at sunset, it was a specimen of Tropish fruit. Holding it, Seth exited, strolled through the echoing darkness toward the dormitory’s foyer, and, once there, bit into the fruit. Warm and juicy, tasting a bit like a Concord grape despite its size and texture, it appeased his hunger and somehow seemed to dissipate his wrath.

  After he had finished the fruit and wiped his hands on his flanks, Seth studied the starscape. One of the stars was the Dharmakaya. Abel, his isohet, was inside it. Seth missed him.

  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.