A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “If I wore your dascra, I would be Sh’gaidu myself.”

  “No, Ulvri. You must be Tropiard. It’s fitting that I should have a j’gosfi heir, hostile in his appointed post but friendly in his inmost self. Thus the Sh’gaidu, who will always be few, may come to fulfill themselves on Trope.”

  “And I will be Magistrate after Orisu Sfol?”

  “For having killed me. For having preserved the secret of my death. For being who you are.”

  “One isn’t preferred to the magistracy of Trope for a single deed, even that of slaying Duagahvi Gaidu!”

  “In the years following this one, you will grow in wisdom, heart, and purpose. Your rise to the magistracy will have its basis in a body of achievement totally apart from the murder you must commit. Only you and Orisu Sfol will know of this murder.”

  “How can you possibly guarantee this?” Ulvri cried.

  “I will work for you in death, as will my people, infusing you with wisdom, heart, and purpose. . . .”

  “Enough!” Terrified by these speculations, Ulvri tightened his hands about Gaidu’s neck, slammed a knee into her belly, and bent her backward over the rock. Crimson spilled from her nostrils, and the Holy One, still youthful in her appearance, lay dead.

  Ulvri considered what to do. Deeply agitated, he went to his van, found a flat-bladed knife in a compartment beneath the driver’s seat, and returned to the body to cut away its eyes. Although his hands trembled, he removed the eyes cleanly, emptied the sand from his dascra, and replaced it with the Holy One’s two eerily perfect eyes, there to bulge grotesquely until they disintegrated. Lost in the lofty dark, he felt like a vivisectionist as well as a murderer. The person he had killed was in some ineffable, threatening way still alive. He had started back toward his van when a faint cerebral tingling halted him between steps.

  —My body, Ulvri. Don’t leave my naked body the prey of your soldiers.

  Ulvri, willing each step, went back to the body, lifted it to his shoulders, and carried it along the basin rim. When he had found a funnel in the cliff similar to the one Gaidu had climbed, he dropped her into it and nearly toppled headlong after her as she plunged into the dark.

  Who would find the corpse in this place? Only Ulvri, no one else. One day he would reveal the site to Orisu Sfol and would be believed. He would bring the bones up, the bones would be studied by Tropiards ignorant of what they studied, and he would be formally preferred for killing the Holy One and for withholding from the world the fact of her death. In the years between the murder and the secret revelation, he would grow in moral stature just as Gaidu had predicted, developing a character fit for the needs of the position he would one day assume. Eventually everything would happen just as the Holy One had said.

  Ulvri became Ulgraji Vrai, Sixth Magistrate of Trope, without renouncing his former self or the understanding of that self acquired after the Holy One’s death. He did not fully understand the process by which he had reached this pinnacle, but he hoped that one day he could bring about a spiritual reconciliation of his people akin to the private one that had taken place in his heart. When he became magistrate, he halted the persecution of the Sh’gaidu pursued so vindictively by Orisu Sfol, a well-meaning butcher, and waited. Although he feared that because of the Mwezahbe Legacy few real Tropiards would ever subordinate themselves to the “illogical,” he hoped that a more rigorous and humane logic would one day prevail.

  Officers and advisors—Ehte Emahpre among them—pressed for a policy of watchfulness, along with discreet applications of force. Vrai accepted surveillance as reasonable, but resisted using force for as long as he was able. The power of the magistracy is not unlimited, he had learned, and under intense pressure even moral force may erode. He began to fear that he was no longer strong enough for the task that Gaidu, a dreamer and mage, had said he would carry out with honor. Sometimes it seemed that love and tolerance were at odds with the priorities of his office, and that he must either abdicate or enforce a minority tyranny that would finally drive him from power.

  Then came overtures from Kieri officials aboard an Ommundi ship in orbit about Gla Taus, and Vrai began to believe that if reconciliation were impossible, the voluntary emigration of the Sh’gaidu to another world might offer a lasting solution. He rejoiced. Upon learning that two men from Earth had agreed to help, his hopes soared. There was something fatefully compelling about aid from so far away, particularly since for decades Trope had allowed only limited contact with the agents of Interstel.

  As the Dharmakaya traversed The Sublime, Vrai cultivated the conviction that the human being destined to speak for the Kieri must be someone with goals and motivations like his own. A native of neither Gla Taus nor Trope, he would view the situation on each planet with a keen and impartial eye. The Magistrate’s first interview with this person confirmed him in his initial opinion. By a rare but fortunate string of events, Seth Latimer had arrived on Trope, and a new era had arrived with him.

  The Magistrate fell silent. A less fortunate string of events had destroyed his belief in this apocryphal “new era,” and even if the Sh’gaidu ended up seven light-years away, Trope would go on as hidebound and as enmired as before—in the name of Mwezahbe, Reason, and Holy Technocracy, the sacred trinity by which it had lived for over nine hundred years.

  Seth whispered, “Magistrate, you can reverse what happened today. Simply send the Sh’gaidu back to the basin.”

  “Emahpre had Palija Kadi destroyed the moment this convoy was safely clear of the cliffs.”

  “Destroyed?”

  “The reservoir above the basin was undammed, explosives were planted in Yaji Tropei, and what was not blown apart, Kahl Latimer, lies under at least fifty meters of water. Tonight Palija Kadi is a lake.”

  “Then relocate the Sh’gaidu somewhere else!”

  “Yes, Kahl Latimer. On Gla Taus. They deserve the benefit of what you propose, and I bequeath the Pledgechild’s people into your care. Do you understand me? They’re your responsibility and your charge.”

  “Magistrate—”

  “The Pledgechild knew for years that Gaidu was dead—but she continued to have visions presaging the Holy One’s return. I think, Kahl Latimer, that you are Gaidu, returned from death at this crucial time.”

  “That’s nonsense!” Seth hissed, trying to keep his voice low.

  “Your eyes, albeit different in kind, have the same brisk blue as did Gaidu’s.”

  “Abel and I undertook this mission only to regain our ship.”

  “None of us knows precisely who we are, Kahl Latimer. That’s as true for the Sh’gaidu as for Tropiards, as true for you as for me.”

  “You’re talking like the Pledgechild or Lijadu.”

  “In my own way, I am one of them. Tonight, in fact, I declare myself sh’gosfi. I repudiate both my office and the state.”

  “Declare yourself sh’gosfi?”

  But the Magistrate rose from the mat, stumbled past Seth to the tailgate, and stared into the darkness. Seth followed. They were still in mountainous country, not yet having descended to the prairie known as Chaelu Sro, and the vehicle trailing theirs had fallen a quarter of a kilometer behind. They could see its headlights, along with those of two or three other trucks, burning fiercely in a declivity far below them. The remaining convoy vehicles were eclipsed by the rocky terrain through which the switchbacking road climbed. Despite the whine of the truck’s engine and the continual jouncing, Emahpre and Douin slept on.

  “Farewell,” Magistrate Vrai said. She eased herself over the tailgate to stand on the truck’s step-like rear bumper. Her eyes coruscated almost merrily.

  “What’re you doing?” Seth asked her, stunned.

  “Defecting to the outlanders. What the Sh’gaidu represented must be kept alive here. Although they go with you to a better place, I will range about this nation like their righteous walking ghost.”

  “Then be their ghost from a position of power!”

  “That’s impossible
. I was too hemmed in by the magistracy’s restrictions and limitations, and today I disgraced myself by a spiritual failure. Nothing like that will ever befall me again. Tonight, I’m free.”

  Seth pointed at Emahpre. “What do I tell him? How do I explain your absence?”

  “Pretend to be asleep. Explain nothing.”

  At the top of a steep grade, the Tropiard called Ulvri leaped free of the truck. Seth watched her roll several meters down the slope, a tumbling shadow. Then, in stark silhouette, limned by the trailing headlights, she scrambled into an outcropping of rocks at roadside. When the lead truck crested this grade and headed down the opposite slope toward Chaelu Sro, a portion of Seth’s life departed with that surprising sh’gosfi convert. He would never see her again.

  Much later, dawn seeping up and the sixteen-vehicle convoy strung out single-file across the vast tabula rasa of the prairie, Seth was still standing at the tailgate. Deputy Emahpre awoke, stirred, looked about, and sprang to his feet. Bracing himself with one hand against the truckbed’s wall, he made his way to Seth.

  “Where’s Magistrate Vrai?” he asked in his most piercing falsetto. “Where’s the Magistrate?”

  “Gone,” Seth said. “She’s long gone, Emahpre.”

  That evening Clefrabbes Douin and Seth shared a dormitory room on Huru J’beij where they had slept two nights ago. This time only two gravelike indentations for pallets deformed the carpeted floor’s platform, and the smell of fehtes tobacco, at once acrid and sweet, was only a memory.

  They had arrived by airship from Ebsu Ebsa late that afternoon, and already a Tropish shuttlecraft holding a fourth of the Sh’gaidu dissidents had been dispatched from the tablerock toward the orbiting Dharmakaya. Another shuttle would leave in the morning, and by tomorrow evening two additional shuttles would complete the transfer of Lijadu’s people from Trope to the Ommundi light-tripper. Once all the Sh’gaidu were aboard, Deputy Emahpre—in his capacity as interim magistrate—would let Seth and Douin pilot their transcraft back to the light-tripper’s underslung hangar; and the history of the Sh’gaidu on Trope would be a chronicle written entirely in the past tense.

  Douin was sitting in the chair from which he’d directed his last game of naugced against Lord Pors. Barefoot and shirtless, Seth paced the perimeter of the arbitrarily delimited room, anxious to be off-planet and on his way home. The ache in his breast derived from the utter impossibility of his second desire: Magistrate Vrai, before leaping into the dark, had given him a charge to fulfill.

  “I must confess something.” Douin’s words fell like pebbles fretting the surface of a pond.

  Seth kept pacing.

  “Lady Turshebsel and the Kieri government—specifically, Lord Pors and I—were reluctant to engage the Magistrate in face-to-face negotiations.”

  At this, Seth halted and stared at Douin.

  “We needed an innocent, Master Seth, someone who could present our case with conviction because he believed in it implicitly and therefore felt no need for subterfuge or dissembling.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We lied to you, Master Seth. The Sh’gaidu won’t be given a fertile piece of property in the Feht Evashsted. We told this same lie to Narthaimnar Chappouib knowing that the aisautseb would reject the plan upon which Lady Turshebsel, Lord Pors, and I had secretly agreed.”

  “Then where will they go?” A sad indignation arose in Seth, as if his conscience had reactivated in a tiny homunculus somewhere near his heart.

  “An arid group of islands in the Evashsteddan called the Fire Chain, where they’ll labor under Ommundi supervision to exploit those islands’ animal and plant resources for the pioneers in the Obsidian Wastes and also for themselves. Much of the Feht Evashsted is wasteland. Its volcanic topsoil is tainted by a chemical indigenous to the subterranean geology there, and we’ve no cheap way to remove it. Even Chappouib doesn’t know this. That’s why we couldn’t tell either Chappouib or the Magistrate our true plans. Chappouib would have objected for religious reasons stemming from antiquated superstition, the Magistrate for reasons of conscience.”

  “Are reasons of conscience antiquated, too, Master Douin?”

  Douin stared out the window at the massive red-brown J’beij, far across the tablerock. “From the beginning, I’ve believed that we’d be doing the Sh’gaidu a service by getting them off Trope.”

  “Then why in God’s name did you need someone to lie for you?”

  “To make it work. Nonetheless, I’m ashamed that it’s worked out as it has, that we had to gull you in order to pull off a larger deception.”

  Seth approached Douin. “Did Abel know about this, too?”

  “From the beginning,” Douin said.

  Turning, Seth hurled the sunfruit in his hand through one of the paper partitions dividing their room from the emptiness of the dormitory beyond. “My own isohet! The flesh to which I’m twin!”

  “He wished to regain the Dharmakaya and take you home, Master Seth. He saw no other way. Nor did we, for our purposes.”

  Seth stood dazed by the outrage he ought to be mining from his hurt. It lay somewhere beyond him, this vein of outrage, but he ached too badly to break through to its coal-black gleam. He looked at Douin. “There’s an aisautseb aboard our light-tripper. How will you transfer three hundred Sh’gaidu to the Fire Chain without his knowing and reporting the fact to Chappouib?”

  “One of the taussanaur aboard will help him have an accident before we reach Gla Taus. Chappouib will simply be told that our mission failed.”

  “I would never have believed that you’d sanction murder, Master Douin.”

  “The tyranny of the aisautseb moves me to it. For too long their ritual obfuscation of simple truths and their bloodthirsty commitment to bogus mysteries have betrayed the Kieri into superstition. Lady Turshebsel is a beacon out of that darkness, and my belief in her prompted me to otherwise uncharacteristic deeds. I make no apologies.”

  “Except to me,” Seth said.

  “For implicating you, Master Seth, in a scheme that’s gone awry: The Sh’gaidu are victims twice over, and so perhaps are you.”

  “Ulvri—Magistrate Vrai—bequeathed the Sh’gaidu into my care, Master Douin. Spare us further victimization. Let me fulfill this charge.”

  “And remain on Gla Taus?”

  Seth waved one hand distractedly. “For a time,” he said. “I swear, Master Douin, it seems I’m under a painful obligation. . . .”

  *

  We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor.

  Lying awake in the dark, half encoffined by his pallet, Seth silently cursed Abel for betraying him. He wished Abel in Hell, his testicles enshrined in hardened clay, his body strapped to a rotating spit, flayed alive by lovely Kieri women, and consigned to suffocating vacuum. None of these horrors conveyed the vehemence or the confusion of his hate, however, and at last Seth wished for Abel the ultimate curse at his disposal: a death like Günter Latimer’s.

  —Seth, don’t do this to me!

  The words sounded in him as clearly as if they had been spoken. They came along with a corollary of Abel’s emotional pain and a vague sensation that seemed to Seth an analogue of his isohet’s rising nausea. For the first time in their lives, though separated by great distance, Abel and he were yoked through the manifold links of their common biological heritage. It had finally happened: They were attuned.

  —Abel, you used me like a whore.

  —We needed someone free of any motivational taint, Abel replied faintly, still recoiling from Seth’s curses. —Someone who believed in the righteousness of what he was doing.

  —Taint? Seth cerebrated. —Then you see the taint in your own soul? You know your own guilt?

  —We’ve no world of our own, not where we are now. I wanted to get us home. . . .

  —You knew the Sh’gaidu were to be transshipped not to the coast of Kier but to a group of islands in the Evashsteddan?

  —I knew.

>   —Then picture the Kieri Obelisk in Feln again, Abel, and see yourself going up it like a trussed pig!

  —Seth, have pity. . . .

  A wave of hysteria—pain, bewilderment, nausea—swept through Seth, a comber of such undulant weight that, to divert its course, he had to address Abel in his mind, say No to his isohet’s image, and utterly break contact.

  Seth awoke again in a room on the tablerock of an alien world. Bathed in clammy sweat, he arose and paced about until Anja was a half circle of radiant blue on Trope’s northwestern horizon.

  EPILOGUE

  At a point nearly equidistant between Trope and Gla Taus, where the closest suns were mere fiery dots, Seth Latimer and Clefrabbes Douin pushed away from an airlock on the Dharmakaya’s conning module, fired their backpack rockets, and floated out into interstellar space. Between them, they hoisted a spacesuit just like the ones they wore—except that it was empty.

  This unscheduled stop, which had required the Dharmakaya to emerge from The Sublime fourteen E-days after leaving Trope, was Seth’s doing. The empty suit between Douin and him represented the dead Porchaddos Pors. Seth had insisted that the slain Kieri noble be given an impromptu but decorous “burial” in space, a funeral ceremony to commemorate his efforts to bridge the light-years between two distinctive and dissimilar worlds. Nothing anyone aboard the Dharmakaya could say to Seth—whether to cite the astrogational problems such a stop would cause, or to say that Pors would have rejected a funeral in space, or to scold Seth for trying to mitigate his guilt in the matter of Pors’s death—nothing would dissuade him from this goal. It was as if only the lineaments of ritual could exorcise for Seth the trauma of recent events. Hence, no one held out against him too insistently, for no one wanted an avenging madman loose in their light-tripper the last fourteen days of their voyage.