A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  Pors lit another cigarette into bittersweet pseudo-flame, his third since Seth had exited the pilot’s bubble.

  Distracted, Seth replied, “I understand.”

  “Can’t we wait until we reach Palija Kadi?” Pors asked. He blew a puff of smoke and nodded deferentially at the Magistrate. “I intend no rudeness, Magistrate Vrai. It’s simply that Master Douin and I like a few moments of undisturbed contemplation before undertaking an enterprise of this importance. Also, I’m beginning to feel the heat, even through the skins of our airship.”

  “Maybe if you—” Seth, who had been on the verge of advising the Point Marcher to stub out his cigarette, caught himself.

  Vrai nodded politely at Pors, and the conversation, which seemed at least as vital to Seth as a few final moments of fehtes-blurred thought, was apparently dead. The Point Marcher had killed it.

  —We record modern history from the first year of Seitaba Mwezahbe’s magistracy. This, then, is the year 912.

  Seth started again. To bypass the obstacle posed by Pors, the Magistrate had cerebrated this message. A windfall of microscopic seeds burying themselves in Seth’s mind and instantly sprouting . . .

  —I’m the sixth magistrate of our planet, Kahl Latimer, for we live what you might consider gratifyingly long lives. We do so without the biochemical assistance and the genetic tampering which we believe you must use to enjoy even a fraction

  of our longevity.

  “But,” Seth said, freshly dumbfounded, “but—”

  Pors looked at him with irritation, and even Douin, propped on an elbow in his bunk, seemed confused by the tardiness of his bit-off objection. They had “heard” nothing of the Magistrate’s message.

  —Every Tropiard undergoes a series of evolutionary developments within his own person. These are preceded by biochemically induced events that we call auxiliary births. Their purpose is to offset our lack of prolificity as a species by ensuring that each individual effects in himself a process of ‘natural selection’ culminating in the emergency of his strongest and most viable personality. The ability to cerebrate seldom appears until after the fourth or fifth auxiliary birth.

  “Except among the Sh’gaidu,” Seth said aloud.

  “Master Seth, you’re talking to yourself,” Clefrabbes Douin informed him gently. “Has the heat reached you, too?”

  Flustered, Seth glanced apologetically at the Kieri in whose geffide he had lived for over a Gla Tausian year. “No, Master Douin, forgive me. A stray thought that escaped before I could stop it. Nothing more.”

  Douin nodded dubiously and lay back. Pors was smoking with his eyes closed, gauzy dragon wisps curling from his nostrils and half-parted lips. And the Magistrate was still gnawing at the purple-skinned fruit from the hanging basket. His concentration on the fruit was heroic, superhuman.

  —The Sh’gaidu may indeed be exceptions to this rule. I confess this to you mind to mind.

  This time Seth said nothing.

  —But you have just asked about Mwezahbe. He was a genius without benefit of auxiliary births. He midwifed the births of his own successive selves, in fact, without resorting to biomechanics. And just as Mwezahbe was many geniuses, each Tropiard is a series of progressively more enlightened consciousnesses in the same body. Unlike Mwezahbe, however, we must undergo the encephalic reorganization of the evo-steps, or our auxiliary births, in order to approach perfect rationality. The goal itself, of course, is never attained.

  Perfect rationality. The irrationality of this goal seemed transparent to Seth. Did the Tropiards wish to achieve godhood through these cryptomystical auxiliary births of theirs? Did they not see the contradiction inherent in the desire? There sat Magistrate Vrai, licking his fingers of the last bits of pulp from his sunfruit while transmitting verbal thought patterns to Seth; and, against the bizarre conjoining of these behaviors, he was telepathically prating of, dear God, perfect rationality.

  —Each individual possesses the capacity to become a multitude of individuals; the possible permutations of the mind are uncountable. In his lifetime a Tropiard may become as many as seven completely different people, concluding his evo-steps with a consciousness as far above his first as intellect is above instinct. Mwezahbe taught us how to prepare for and successfully pass through these biochemical auxiliary births. Having contributed what they could to the state, Kahl Latimer, our old selves die and fall away.

  Like snake skins, thought Seth.

  The cerebrations continued: —I’ve served as Magistrate of Trope for forty-three of our years. In my lifetime I’ve passed through five auxiliary births, each time working out my neonatal potential for the general good, as we all do. The dascra provides continuity not only with the distant past but from one life to the next.

  The Albatross was sinking, slowing. Seth could feel these changes in both his ear canals and his gut. A faint whine accompanied them, and the whine shimmied audibly through the hull of the airship. Pors’s eyes were open again, and Douin swung his feet over the edge of the bunk, dropped to the floor beyond the Point Marcher, and took up a swivel chair. Seat harnesses were available, but Emahpre’s piloting was so adroit they seemed unnecessary.

  “May I ask the Magistrate a final question before we put down, Lord Pors?” Seth asked. “We’re almost there, I think.”

  “Go ahead,” Pors replied, stubbing his cigarette in his palm.

  “How do Tropiards choose their magistrate?” Seth wanted to remark on how infrequently leadership in Trope changed hands, but to have done so would have alerted the Kieri to the fact that he had recently acquired information new to them. How, they would wonder, had he come by it?

  This time Magistrate Vrai started. He looked at Seth as if his cerebrations had been betrayed. They had not, not by any means, but even the mask of his goggles didn’t conceal the fact that his dark face had flushed a deeper shade of brown.

  “How do Tropiards choose their magistrate?” Vrai repeated aloud.

  Seth nodded, puzzled by the hesitation.

  “Each magistrate selects his own successor,” the Magistrate said, striving for forthrightness. “Only his decision matters.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as the head of a nation based on the statutes of the Mwezahbe Legacy he is the gosfi embodiment of reason.”

  “Other Tropiards have no say in the selection?”

  Vrai swiveled his chair so that he and Seth might take each other’s measure with locked eyes. He seemed to feel that a gauntlet had been dropped. The mahogany flush in his face had not gone away.

  “If I put to referendum the question of whether the sun is hot or cold, and if the populace overwhelmingly responds that it is cold, does this vote alter the basic truth of the matter?”

  Seth was appalled by this tactic, one that his isosire would have ridiculed instructively. The Magistrate was trying to throw dust in his eyes: a blast of pseudo-Socratic jinalma. It didn’t even graze the issue.

  “Magistrate—” Seth started to protest.

  “Come forward if you wish to see Palija Kadi from the air!” Ehte Emahpre shouted from the pilot’s compartment. “Come forward, friends!”

  BOOK THREE

  NINE

  Ulgraji Vrai led Seth and the two Kieri envoys forward to see what they could of the Sh’gaidu holdings. Kaleidoscopic patterns of light ran through the pilot’s bubble, inducing Seth to lift the lightweight hood of his tunic against the glare—the Magistrate had his goggles. Pors, without invitation, sat down next to Emahpre while the others hunched forward to peer at the tilting landscape.

  “I’m going to make a circle over the area so that you can see the surrounding cliffs as well as the basin,” Emahpre said.

  The Albatross, shuddering gently, banked to the right.

  The Magistrate pointed. “Those are the permanent encampments of our surveillance force—there, along the cliff edges.”

  Seth and the others looked down. Small, dome-shaped structures resembling toadstools sprouted from the
rocks. A number of squat land vehicles were parked in a dusty semicircle beside one of the toadstools. Farther along the cliff face, more craftily concealed, wallowed a camouflaged panel truck with its front end pointing toward the basin.

  “What’s that?”

  The Magistrate had also been staring at the van. Seth’s question seemed to jolt him from a reverie. “A van,” he answered vaguely. “A troop-controller van, nothing extraordinary.”

  When The Albatross banked again, they saw the blindingly white figures of the soldiers themselves. Their chromium helmets flashed like silver platters. Perched on rocks, sitting in open truckbeds, strolling among the domes, they were terribly conspicuous from the air. The Sh’gaidu, Seth thought, must also be aware of them. What must it be like to live—minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day—with such clumsy prying? The state lacked even the grace of subtlety.

  “Do they know we’re coming?” Seth asked.

  “Last night,” the Magistrate replied, “I communicated with Commander Swodi of the surveillance force. He sent a soldier to the crofthouse to inform the Pledgechild of our visit. According to Swodi, she agreed to receive us.”

  Seth noted the pronoun. He asked, “Could she have refused?”

  “Be civil,” Douin rebuked him. “Remember where you are.”

  But the Tropiards had apparently heard no sarcasm in Seth’s question, and Emahpre said, “She would have received us without notification. Now, however, she knows something’s up. She will have spent her time since last night anticipating our motives and devising counterstratagems.”

  “Our motives aren’t fungi, Deputy Emahpre,” Vrai said. “They’re not corrupt things that grow in the dark.”

  Emahpre addressed his passengers as if Vrai hadn’t spoken: “I’m going to land on the roadway on the basin’s northern end. Look for the crofthouse and the towers. The galleries are carved into the eastern cliff walls. You can also see the bridges linking the galleries to the basin’s floor.”

  A road came out of the high rocks to the east and made a dusty, buckled ribbon through the formations grading into the lower, or northern, part of the Sh’gaidu holdings. Seth imagined that state vehicles would have no trouble getting down that road when it came time to evacuate the basin. Meanwhile, the bridges that Emahpre had mentioned were immense, coral-colored structures of astonishing intricacy; they made stairways from the eastern cliff face to the cultivated fields dominating the basin, and they crossed or intertwined at various heights like Möbius strips of stone. The galleries in the eastern cliff face were intricately balustraded with rock resembling twisted coral. From the air, the panorama was breathtaking.

  Palija Kadi, the basin, raged with orchestrated color. Cleanly divided and terraced, the fields lapped almost to the tumbled rocks from which the walls of the basin arose. The crops undulating in these fields were mint green, cabbage red, Anja blue. They rippled under a wind whistling across them from the north and coursing them with graceful shadows.

  The Albatross banked again.

  Almost directly below the airship Seth saw terraces stepping upward in a wide semicircle to the huge wall enclosing the basin on the south. Unlike the other cliff faces, this wall was smooth rather than rugged, bone white rather than coral red. Emahpre brought The Albatross down a hundred meters or so and, after sweeping along inside the great southern wall, piloted them northward over the basin.

  A tower jutted upward from each corner of Palija Kadi. The one in the southeast corner, rising from a field just below the southern terraces, pricked at The Albatross like a spear. Made of saplings bound together to form stilts, with a closed platform atop the stilts, the tower swayed like a lithe tree in the wind. A moment later the forward motion of the airship eclipsed it from view.

  Hanging onto the back of Emahpre’s metal chair, Seth glimpsed in the middle of the basin a vast, circular clearing. In the center of this clearing, a circular stone building thatched over with crimson reeds. Positioned at intervals about the building were lovely blue-green trees that reminded Seth of the cypresses in Lausanne. Descending crookedly to the building from the eastern cliff face, a prodigious rock bridge that extended so far into the basin as to halve its eastern hemisphere. When The Albatross flew over this bridge, the airship’s bizarre shadow was thrown into one of the western fields bordering the circular clearing.

  As they approached the roadway at the northern end of the basin, the stilt tower in the northeastern corner resolved itself out of the morning glare.

  “What are the towers for?” Douin asked.

  “Those are kioba Najuma,” the Magistrate said. “The Holy One’s lookouts. It’s from these towers that the Sh’gaidu claim they’ll see Duagahvi Gaidu returning from her odyssey through the continent of crazies to which she allegedly betook herself in search of converts. They believe she’s still in the land of the Nuraju.”

  “But the towers don’t clear the top of the basin,” Douin pointed out.

  “A matter of no concern to the Sh’gaidu,” Emahpre said. “Nor is the fact that Gaidu herself disappeared nearly a century and three quarters ago, sixty-two years into the rule of Orisu Sfol, Magistrate Vrai’s predecessor.”

  “Look!” cried Pors.

  The Albatross began easing its ungainly bulk down toward the roadway, and clustered beneath the descending craft were small humanoid figures. Looking up, they nearly blinded the occupants of The Albatross with their gemlike eyes. Flashes of emerald, amber, and topaz detonated in their faces, each explosion pinwheeling brilliantly. Seth turned his head, but could still see, sidelong, small, naked figures running and dancing on the roadway.

  Children. Sh’gaidu children.

  They were the first children Seth had seen on Trope, the first gosfi to appear before him naked, and the first to come forth without eye coverings. No wonder the Deputy was outraged by these people: They had no shame.

  As The Albatross settled lower and lower, the children prudently scattered. Then The Albatross was down. No one aboard had had to strap himself into a chair, and a side panel behind the pilot’s bubble clicked back so suddenly that the heat of Palija Kadi roared in.

  “We’ve indeed come to Hell,” Pors whispered.

  Nevertheless, he and the others exited. Anja hung low in the east, precarious above the galleries. The sky was a lavender parchment burning inward from its edges. The excitement of the naked children, the fever of their curiosity, trembled in the air. Resolute, the Magistrate gestured Seth, Douin, Pors, and Emahpre after him, then struck off through the gamboling children toward the Sh’gaidu crofthouse.

  Seth found himself turning about to look at the ragtaggle group scrambling along with them. Several of the children seemed to be trying to make out his face inside the hood of his tunic. Their eyes had an acute monarchical fire.

  Despite their nakedness, it wasn’t easy to determine the sex of these children. They more nearly resembled females, for between their legs they had no conspicuous rope of flesh to identify them as males. Still, the external genital configuration was slightly more complicated than the soft, split mound by which Seth had long ago learned to recognize the parts of a young human female. There was this, but something else as well. A kind of dark fleshy button at the top of the cleft, like the head of a tiny animal indecisively peeping out. . . .

  And none of the children, Seth noted with wonder, had navels. It seemed likely, though, that the gosfi umbilical cord might attach to the unborn child somewhere in the perineal region. No one had yet claimed, in any case, that gosfi—whether Tropiards or Sh’gaidu—sprang entire from their birth-parents’ foreheads.

  Was this what Ulgraji Vrai and Ehte Emahpre looked like under their jumpsuits? Seth refrained from asking. The lavalet equipment in the dormitory on the tablerock suggested that their morphology might well be similar to that of the Sh’gaidu children. This speculation gave rise in Seth to the private hypothesis that Tropiards and Sh’gaidu alike were . . . well, androgynes. Hermaphrodites. Yet—in Vox, at lea
st—the Magistrate and Deputy Emahpre had consistently employed masculine pronouns for the citizenry of the state and feminine pronouns for the dissident Sh’gaidu. Why?

  Meanwhile, the children bobbed and darted along beside their party of clothed interlopers.

  Trailing his comrades, Seth watched Emahpre shake a jerky arm at the children, shoo them away, and threaten to cuff those who approached too near. Pors was similarly protective of his person, although less overt in his gestures of both warning and reproach.

  “Kwa tehdegu!” Emahpre shouted. “Kwa tehdegu!”

  For the most part, the children were unimpressed. They made mocking moues and performed temper-provoking dances, jigging along beside the newcomers on the narrow path leading to the crofthouse. On both sides of this path grew shoulder-high grains with ribbed stalks and enormous red-gold leaves.

  Seth turned about and caught sight of a young Sh’gaidu as tall as Deputy Emahpre. She—yes, she—did not commit herself to the mindless revelry of the younger children. She followed along about ten meters behind Seth, maintaining a predetermined distance and a measured pace. Her skin, although a deep brown in color, had the unblemished texture of fine writing paper. Her eyes were a luminous tiger-eye green, hard and faceted. Seth found it difficult to look away from her. Her gaze ensnared. Worse—rut-driven even on a world where humans had no niche or claim—Seth registered an involuntary but torturous erotic stirring.

  Idiot, he chastised himself. Miscegenetic goat.

  But, helplessly, he kept glancing back at the young Sh’gaidu. Was there no cure for his libidinous feelings outside of their actual expression? The children romping about him had less substance than ghosts, for his whole attention now belonged to the creature pacing behind him, even if he found himself stumbling trying to keep his eyes on her. Ridiculous.