A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Whose soul do I have?” he then demanded of Lijadu. “Or did Günter Latimer die with the only soul granted by the Creator to his own DNA? If that’s so, Abel and I are as soulless as any poor, damned Tropiard you scold for losing himself at his state-ordained auxiliary births! Abel and I are shadows of our isosire, and neither of us has a soul!” He had not shouted, but pain had pushed his voice toward an alarming falsetto.

  Lijadu touched his forehead and smoothed his hair back. —You’re a person, she cerebrated. —Persons have souls.

  “Unless they’re Tropiards,” Seth whispered. “Then, in your eyes, they become nonpersons, forfeiters of their gosfihood.”

  “Not so,” she, too, whispered.

  “But you’ve already said as much,” he accused.

  “I said only that many Tropiards never truly know their souls—not that they’re soulless. They dilute their essence by auxiliary births, but they remain persons. To be j’gosfi on our world, Kahl Latimer, is to be self-estranged. I pity self-estranged persons their lack of wholeness.”

  “Do you pity me?” Anger had purged him of his tentativeness; her touch seemed a deliberate goad. He put a hand to the small of Lijadu’s back and found in his willful erection a means of declaring his identity. It scraped the cleft between her legs and slid glancingly up her lower belly, lubricating its way like a snail.

  —Stop! Lijadu cerebrated.

  But the pain of this imperative was brief, if piercing, and Seth tried to drop his hips for another angry thrust. She would know he had a soul even if he had to plant its seed in her as she had planted her cerebrations in his brain. Her body was a puzzle, though. It opened and then closed. And Lijadu, resolute, had begun to exert a willful counterforce against him. She was strong. Before he could salvage any of the momentum of his initial assault, she was astraddle his buttocks. His left arm was bent across his back. She deployed so much leverage against it that he feared it would break. His identity, smothered beneath him, deflated.

  “Would you allow me to enter you without consent?” Lijadu asked.

  Sweat stinging his eyes, he grimly replied, “You couldn’t. You can’t.”

  “I could. I could do so now. I won’t, though. Even Tropiards loathe such tactics, Kahl Latimer. They inhibit rather than induce kemmai.”

  Fear, anger, shame. Seth did not know what she was talking about. He had run a gauntlet of unpleasant emotional states, and now all he could do was lie on his belly beneath Lijadu and hope for absolution. She had pinioned him as Abel had often done, and what usually came next was acceptable or degrading according to his frame of mind. The shame of a prodigal angel filled him. He had not actually plotted his assault on Lijadu, and that he should now lie utterly at her mercy had a justice about it that was also cruel. Seth wept. What was she talking about? He had no idea why he had tried to rape her. In heart and body, he hurt. The hurt intensified, and he wept.

  “In kemmai we become lovers, Kahl Latimer, and only genuine affection and mutual longing create acceptable conditions.”

  “You invited me here,” Seth said, staring into blue darkness. “You bid me remove my clothes.”

  “I’m sorry.” She declined to release him. “Among the Sh’gaidu—even among the general run of decent Tropiards of less than administrative rank—such behaviors pass for simple hospitality. More may occur if guest and host modulate into kemmai together. Conscious orientations of life style—j’gosfi, sh’gosfi—mean absolutely nothing in such circumstances. Often I’ve passed in and out of both states during a single kemmai, altering with the alterations of my partner. Exchange and reciprocity are everything during these sweet arousals.”

  Seth heard her from oceans away. His hurt—his shame—occupied the forefront of his attention: Frenziedly, he conjured ways to release and drain it off. “You’ve entered my mind unbidden,” he told her. “That’s a trespass as violent as anything I’ve done. It’s a rape and a trespass.”

  Letting his arm go, Lijadu eased down to her place on the pallet. Seth turned to his left side and again confronted the smoky jade of the Sh’gaidu’s eyes.

  “You consider it a violation?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course. We all do.”

  “You didn’t object before. You object now because I’ve rebuked you for your unseemly behavior?”

  “Yes,” Seth admitted.

  “I won’t do it again,” Lijadu said. “No more cerebrations, even if the roaring of the waterwalls keeps you from hearing my voice.”

  They lay facing each other in the dark. The shame in Seth had not yet subsided. He had found these people’s cerebrations more fascinating than obtrusive or painful, and yet he had just extracted from Lijadu a promise never to send such pleasant messages to him again. Was this a clever vengeance for his self-inflicted shame? Maybe so: a clever vengeance upon himself.

  “Let’s sleep,” Lijadu said. “Let’s hold each other and sleep.” She draped an arm over his shoulder and with her other hand touched the amulet lying between them on the pallet: Magistrate Vrai’s dascra.

  Seth glanced down. “I don’t know whether I can. I’m overwrought. You can hear my heart pounding.”

  Her hand roamed from the amulet to his chest. There it opened and spread out as it had that afternoon against Palija Kadi, the Great Wall. How long ago that seemed, a thousand transcended selves ago.

  “If we hold each other, we’ll sleep.”

  Lijadu and Seth held each other. Her startling, faceted eyes brushed his face, her body moved chastely against his, and sleep spiraled up to Seth’s brain from the depths of a weariness he had tried to deny. Several portals away, a heartseed lantern bobbed in the blue darkness like a channel buoy. Seth’s dreams ranged unceasingly up and down these waters. Eventually his dreams began to trouble him.

  Nightmares of nitrogen narcosis, they came both surreal and suffocating, and Seth awoke from them in befuddled self-defense.

  FIFTEEN

  Lijadu was gone. As soon as Seth realized that she’d left him, he rolled his head side to side, trying to orient. Darkness blanketed him, more heavily than before.

  “Lijadu!” he called. “Lijadu!” He rebuked himself for shouting: Did he wish to wake the children, the elderly, everyone?

  His fingers felt his naked chest. Where the Magistrate’s dascra should have been, in the hollow between his breastplates, nothing! His hand moved involuntarily to his throat, groping about for the chain that had held the amulet.

  That, too, was gone. Lijadu had betrayed him, and in allowing her to accomplish that betrayal, he had betrayed the Magistrate.

  “Lijadu!” He could not believe in her treachery even though the evidence seemed damning. “Lijadu!”

  Instantly, the din of crashing waters filled Yaji Tropei. The caverns boomed with noise. A freshet of cool air swept through the chambers, a light spray circulating on its back. Seth rose on the twisted pallet, put his hands to his ears, and opened his mouth as if to scream. It was impossible—so misted was his flesh—to know if he’d been sweating in his sleep or if spray from the waterwalls had glazed him in bursts. No matter. His blood firehosed through him, his heart pumping hot gouts.

  “Lijadu!”

  He could scarcely hear himself. He couldn’t hear himself. Falling to his knees, Seth shook out his overtunic. The Magistrate’s dascra had not been hidden in it. Maybe, though, Lijadu had hidden the amulet somewhere close by. Seth pulled his damp tunic over his head, stepped into his pants, and hopped about getting his feet into his boot linings. His boot catches still undone, he ransacked the urns, baskets, and ewers arranged at seeming random about the open-ended cell. He found nothing but tools, trinkets, grain, cloth, and earthenware bowls. Desperate, he even uncapped the heartseed lantern to peer into its ceramic bowl.

  What would this theft mean to Magistrate Vrai? What did it mean to Lijadu and her people? Would she have taken the dascra if he had not revealed to her the gist of the Kieri proposal? Or if he’d kept in check the stirrings of his own
sexuality? Or if he’d somehow induced kemmai in her by a gentle human chivalry? Or could he shed his guilt by attributing the theft to Ifragsli’s haunting final vision?

  Did the placing of blame finally matter? Yes. He had betrayed the Magistrate of Trope by permitting his own betrayal at the hands of a young sh’gosfi whose loyalties were all to her persecuted people.

  Seth had to find and recover the amulet.

  He stumbled out of Lijadu’s cell into the next one, which was vacant, and from that cell to a third chamber. Here, bending above a Sh’gaidu whose topaz eyes had lit his way inward, he shouted, “Lijadu!” The Sh’gaidu’s eyes seemed to cloud, and he knew he would get nothing from this terrified person but an autistic silence, perfect and gemlike. He stumbled on, attempting to retrace the route by which Lijadu and he had first attained her cell.

  Veils of water danced where none had danced before, and every cell, every portal, was like every other. Frescoes might differ, their stylized figures killing, or cooking, or copulating in distinctive ways; even the waterwalls defining certain vast hollows in the rock might vary, swaying with colorful movements all their own—but the overall pattern of the hive was unreadable. Seth kept breaking in upon the same contingents of huddled Sh’gaidu, who either spoke no Vox or would not speak it to him.

  “Show me the way out!” he cried. Maybe they could not hear him. He was an intruder, afflicted with the impenetrable nuraj of Tropiards. Instead of triggering their compassion, he terrified them. Or maybe Lijadu had told them not to help them. She had promised not to cerebrate to him again, and, even if these bemused Sh’gaidu could cast their mental messages in Vox, none would do so. Their sole concession to his presence was lighting more heartseed lanterns—until all of Yaji Tropei flickered with radiance and the noise of the waterwalls built in increments with the light.

  Seth stepped into a room where many gocodre stirred: tiny dragons on ledges, stone benches, everywhere. Several waddled in a thin sluiceway parallel to the chamber’s rear wall. Omwhol, the child, sat up and stared groggily after Seth as he blundered into yet another chamber.

  This room, wider and higher, sheltered a bevy of silver-furred animals like the one Seth had seen earlier that evening. They bore approximately the same relation to Trope’s gosfi inhabitants as monkeys did to human beings. Resting on pallets, huddled in family groups, standing partially erect, they evinced more curiosity than fear when Seth broke in upon them. All that Seth noted about them was that the species clearly possessed both males and females.

  He retreated through the gocodre den, exited by another portal, and emerged in an immense cavern where a lone Sh’gaidu appeared to be waiting for him. Standing before a veil of water, she beckoned him toward her with her left arm: a brusque, raking motion. This person was Huspre. Seth knew her by her milky eyes and the odd misalignment of her facial features.

  “Lijadu stole the Magistrate’s dascra!” he shouted.

  Huspre stared at him blankly, with no desire to comprehend. Then she repeated her beckoning motion, turned, and strolled almost casually toward a farther portal. Seth followed. In less than five minutes she had led him along the mural near Yaji Tropei’s entrance, past the nook in which stood the statue of Duagahvi Gaidu, and on to the balustraded balcony overlooking Palija Kadi, the basin.

  “Friends below,” Huspre said in stammering Vox, pointing to the Sh’vaij. Her words were just audible over the booming waters. Stars twinkled in the southern sky, but above the cliffs to the north reared several tall cancers of clouds, metastasizing in the darkness. The torches that had been alight along the bridges looping downward from Yaji Tropei no longer flared, and the Sh’vaij was a round smudge at the center of an indistinct abyss. Huspre set off undaunted toward that smudge.

  Clefrabbes Douin awaited Seth on the assembly hall’s apron. His ministerial cap was missing, and, in the wan starlight, his face was sallow and bloated-looking. Huspre left them together.

  “What are you doing here?” Seth demanded of the Kieri envoy.

  “Lord Pors and I received pallets in the Sh’vaij. Not long ago, the Pledgechild woke me and said I ought to come out here to intercept you on your return from the cliffs. That was all she’d say.”

  “And Lord Pors?”

  “I left him to his sleep. After the Magistrate and Deputy Emahpre returned to the airship, Lord Pors disclosed the major features of our proposal—not to negotiate them, he said, but to give the Pledgechild a chance to think about them before morning. That may have been a costly misjudgment, considering the old woman’s negative state of mind.”

  “I told Lijadu, too,” Seth admitted.

  “How did she react?”

  “She seemed to believe the removal of the Sh’gaidu to Gla Taus would amount to a coup for the state.”

  Douin uttered a mild Kieri curse. Abruptly, he looked up. “And what are you doing here? Why was I roused?”

  “Lijadu stole the Magistrate’s dascra from me as we—as I—slept. I awoke and plunged through the galleries after her.”

  “To no avail?” Douin took Seth’s shoulders and peered into his face. The lashing of the cypresses was both distracting and cold-blooded in its persistence. The flailing of a nearby tree was reflected in Douin’s near-human pupils.

  “To no avail. Huspre rescued me. The Pledgechild knows of the theft, I’m certain. Perhaps she commanded it.”

  “What advantage do they hope to gain?”

  “Our embarrassment, yours and mine. They hope to discredit us with Magistrate Vrai and the entire Tropish state.”

  Douin shook his head. “If they didn’t care for our proposal, they merely had to say so. This theft, well, it’s senseless.”

  “Not to the Sh’gaidu, Master Douin. Not to them, obviously.”

  “Your carelessness discredits us,” the Kieri said. “How could you let that child deceive you?”

  “She’s not a child. She’s nearly as old as I. In some ways she’s older.”

  “Everything’s falling apart,” Douin said serenely. “I’m almost grateful.”

  “You were never going to return the Dharmakaya to us, were you?”

  “Certainly we were. I didn’t mean to imply that I was grateful our failure would deprive you and Abel of your ship.”

  “Then for what are you grateful?” Seth cried, stepping away from the man in whose geffide he had lived. “What’s going on, Master Douin? Why am I here, rather than Abel? What will become of these people?” He gestured grandiloquently, poignantly, at the basin.

  “Go down to the roadway and tell the Magistrate what’s happened,” Douin said. “I’ll see that Lord Pors knows, and perhaps, with some cooperation from the Pledgechild, we can undertake a search for your Sh’gaidu sleeping partner.”

  Seth bridled. “Don’t tell the Point Marcher!” As soon as the words were out, he regretted them.

  “Master Seth, go to Magistrate Vrai. Tell him the truth. Don’t wait till morning.”

  “Come with me. Help me.”

  But Douin strolled back into the Sh’vaij.

  The cypresses, meantime, had ceased to toss their manes, and the alien corn still made unsettling ticking noises.

  A few minutes later, approaching The Albatross on its landing terrace, Seth fixed his eyes on the pilot’s bubble. No light shone in the craft.

  Abel, he thought, why aren’t you here in my place? Why can’t I commune with you as isohets are supposed to do?

  His task set, he pounded on the airship door. A dull light came on in the pilot’s bubble, like a filament in a coated bulb. Emahpre appeared behind this bronze coating, a player behind a transparent screen. He motioned with his hands as if they were delicate, ivory-strutted fans. Be quiet, his gestures meant.

  Seth stopped pounding. Then the side panel slid back, and he climbed into The Albatross’s confessional gloom. The Deputy helped him aboard. A small heartseed globe rested in one of the baskets suspended beneath the ship’s skylight. Although a faint blue sheen encircled this glo
be, the ambient dark was scarcely affected. The lamp appeared to draw rather than scatter illumination.

  “Didn’t your accommodations in the galleries suit you?” Emahpre whispered.

  Seth’s courage failed him. “Nightmares,” he said.

  Then the Magistrate let himself down from a bunk on the airship’s opposite bulkhead. With a sleeping cape falling from his shoulders in voluted disarray, he stood in shadows.

  “You know you’re welcome here, Kahl Latimer.”

  “Of course he is,” Emahpre agreed. “But you’d best go back to sleep, Magistrate. The morning’s a few hours away.”

  But Vrai said, “Now that you’ve seen these people, what do you think of them, Kahl Latimer?”

  “I don’t believe they’re insane, stricken with nuraj.” Seth glanced at the Deputy, who apparently believed they were.

  “Do you think they’re dangerous?”

  Seth considered. If Lijadu had betrayed him, would the Pledgechild think to order some more devastating betrayal?

  “I don’t know, Magistrate.”

  “They’re not in the least a peril to the state,” Vrai said, moving aside and sitting in a swivel chair. He rotated it to peer into The Albatross’s aft section.

  “They undermine the authority of the Mwezahbe Legacy,” Emahpre said.

  The Magistrate ignored this. “One of my main duties, Kahl Latimer, is determining what constitutes reasonable action under extraordinary circumstances.”

  “It’s reasonable to preserve those institutions predicated on reason,” Emahpre said, “and to uproot those that are not.” He pointed Seth to a chair and ensconced himself hurriedly in another.

  “‘Uproot’?” The Magistrate swiveled to face them. “An invidious euphemism, Deputy.”

  “A problem doesn’t cease to exist because one ceases to consider it a problem.”

  “Very often, Deputy Emahpre, it does.”