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 geni
tal 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.
Such was the philosophy of Seitaba Mwezahbe, founder of the Tropish state. Although the Mwezahbe Legacy did not demand the absolute annihilation of nuraj—pointing out, reasonably enough, that various forms of madness were profitable in their proper context—it did expressly discourage the cultivation of trance states, superstition, religious fervor, passive acceptance, sexual excess, and violence. The wearing of the dascra gosfi’mija looked back to pre-Mwezahbe days, primarily as a means of providing a nominal continuity with the past, but it also defined the limits of nuraj in the daily lives
of obedient modern Tropiards.
That was why (Seth slowly gathered, talking with Magistrate Vrai as Deputy Emahpre piloted The Albatross) the Sh’gaidu were such an embarrassment to the state. Born Tropiards, they flouted the statutes of the Mwezahbe Legacy. Born Tropiards, they behaved no better than the Nuraju of that backward northern continent where stupidity, strife, and superstition were endemic. They had no excuse. They shamed their paisanos by their intransigence. They exploited the tolerance of Ulgraji Vrai, whose inclination was to recognize their gosfihood even in their flouting of the Legacy. Given his head, the Magistrate confessed, Deputy Emahpre would have solved the Sh’gaidu question decades ago, by wiping them out of Palija Kadi as unfeelingly as a soldier on bivouac might clean his dinner bowl with a crust of bread. Such a solution would have come easily for the state.
For centuries Trope, the nation, had possessed a well-equipped land- and sea-going force whose primary responsibilities were the surveillance of the many unpredictable barbarians to the north and the defense of their own country against Nuraju invaders. Periodic sea skirmishes with the crazier of the Mad Ones had kept the enemy at bay until the advent of such sophisticated Tropish weaponry that, today, the Nuraju seldom ventured more than a few kilometers from their coasts. For them and for their rational adversaries to the south, the world had been halved. What single-minded Tropiards had put asunder, the Nuraju had neither the technological capacity nor the insane bravado to struggle to unite. Hemisphere against hemisphere, like a spongy rubber ball sliced nearly but not altogether through. In such a case, the appearance of wholeness is a cruel deception.
In the decades since the Tropiards’ discovery of Interstel, however, the armies of the state—substantially diminished in numbers—had remained in readiness as a planetary defense force.
Separated or not, all gosfi were siblings. The only way for Trope, the nation, to protect itself against incursions from beyond the Anja system was to assume the larger guardianship of Trope, the planet. But Interstel put out trade and cultural feelers rather than rude, acquisitive tentacles, thereby mollifying the suspicions of the Tropiards, and the result was regular sublimission contact between Trope and the various scattered representatives of Interstel. Trade and diplomatic alliances still hung fire, but Vox had been introduced to Tropiards in all Thirty-three Cities as an essential ingredient in their educations—for union with Interstel had seemed inevitable if not imminent. Meanwhile, several units of Trope’s planetary defense force were assigned to bivouac around Palija Kadi, there to keep the Sh’gaidu—victims of a divine but dissident madness—under perpetual watch and guard.
Then, by a quirk of far-reaching simultaneity, the Latimer isohets had found themselves stranded on Gla Taus just as the Kieri Liege Mistress was deciding to take a new tack with the aisautseb, and just as the Magistrate of Trope was actively
looking for a humane solution to the disposition of the Sh’gaidu. The taussa-naur aboard the Dharmakaya had arranged a parley with Magistrate Vrai on Trope; and Seth, conscripted against both his understandi
ng and his will, had come seven sublime light-years and many hundreds of mundane kilometers to tie together the strands of this intricate and mystifying web. As The Albatross descended toward the upland basin of the dissidents, Seth silently prayed that he might somehow succeed. For Abel’s sake. For his own sake. And perhaps even for the sakes of the persecuted Sh’gaidu and the haunted Magistrate Vrai.
The interests of the Kieri, even though he admired Clefrabbes Douin and didn’t really wish Porchaddos Pors ill, no longer seemed totally compelling to him. Gla Taus was a nightmare he wanted to forget.
“Magistrate, tell me about Seitaba Mwezahbe,” Seth said. He and the others had been silent for a time, lost in private reveries, and his words made everyone in the passenger section start into grudging alertness.
“Mwezahbe was our first magistrate,” Vrai responded. “He founded Trope, lifted it out of the wallow of our prehistory.”
“A mythological figure?”
“Indeed not. The first true Tropiard. A multiselved genius. His legacy to us was civilization itself.”
Alone with the Magistrate and the two Gla Tausian Hawks of Conscience, Seth sat in a white swivel chair in the belly of The Albatross. He watched as Vrai hefted himself from his own chair and took a purple fruit from a rope basket hanging in the center of the airship’s fuselage. Pors was directly opposite the Magistrate, and Douin occupied a foldout bunk above Pors. Strange flowers hung in other baskets about The Albatross’s interior, and light spilled in from a stipple-glass rectangle in the curved ceiling. Vrai, eating the mwehanja, returned to his place. Shifting dapples from the skylight played catch-as-catch-can on the bulkheads.
“How long ago was this?” Seth asked.
The Magistrate took a thoughtful bite of his fruit. After chewing for several seconds, he said, “A little more than nine hundred years, Kahl Latimer, although I’d best explain that although Trope makes its revolution around Anja in about 453 days, our day is only three fourths as long as a standard E-day. This means that our year is slightly less than a terrestrial year. Do you understand?”
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Page 10