Read A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (22 page)
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.
Looking “down” at the conning module and the stark, trailing superstructure from which hung the passenger and cargo nacelles of the ship, Seth felt isolated and lost. Much had happened since departing Trope. Most of it had either enraged or perplexed him. The beadlike lights winking along
Dharmakaya
’s skeleton seemed to him more illusory than the flashes of clairvoyant doubt that plagued his sleep. Even aboard the great ship, he was isolated and lost.
Two days out from Trope, the young aisautseb aboard had been found dead in his cabin’s lavalet, his head plunged into the hopper of the chemtoilet. The cause of death was inhalation of the solvents used to decompose and deodorize waste matter. Although Seth knew that one of the taussanaur had murdered the young priest, he found it hard to credit that Douin had sanctioned the act. Douin, whom Seth had lived and worked with, was an exemplar of good behavior, a writer, the head of an enviable geffide. How could he have shown his loyalty to Lady Turshebsel by authorizing an orbital guard to hold the face of that poor aisautseb in a chemtoilet? Now the priest’s body lay in a preservation cylinder in a cargo module. This same module held the corpses of the Pledgechild and thirteen Sh’gaidu dissidents who had died from the effects of gassing, close confinement, and brusque transshipments into orbit from Huru J’beij.
To Seth, the empty spacesuit represented all these unfortunate people, too: priest, Sh’gaidu, and Lord Pors alike. They all deserved commemoration. Once, their lives had meant something to others. That they should all go to the special territories beyond death without eulogy or remembrance struck him as vile. The truth, as Seth understood, was that this funeral for Lord Pors, the aisautseb, and the fourteen Sh’gaidu was also a funeral for a piece of himself. That was why he had insisted on what still seemed to both Abel and Douin a time-consuming travesty.
Seth and Douin fired their backpack rockets again. By its unresisting arms they pulled their tenantless companion along, out into the tenantless wilderness of night. Amazing, the silence and the ebony cold . . .
No longer did Seth share a cabin with Abel. He had taken up the farthest aft cubicle in the passenger nacelle where Douin lived and where the Kieri priest had met his mocking end. This change of quarters, considered objectively, had done little to separate Seth from his isohet, for the ability to commune with Abel through cerebrations had come from Trope to the
Dharmakaya
with Seth. He could tap into his isohet’s emotional and mental state whenever he wished; and Abel, although less adept at initiating such contact, was now possessed of a like skill. They had intimacy without proximity. What they no longer had, however, was sexual intimacy. In that context, Abel had always been the initiator, and for Seth it had meant submerging himself in the grander image of his isohet’s desire. No more. That was over. He would never find the whole of his identity in Abel; and, if nothing else, the fiasco of their expedition to Trope had given him the freedom to mark out his own boundaries as a moral agent. Perplexedly, he was still trying to stake these boundaries out. They were, he had learned, far more nebulous and far less arbitrary than those of death.
In the meantime, he had forgiven Abel his trespasses.
Douin grew alarmed at the distance between them and the dreamily floating bulk of the light-tripper. Mere specks in the universe’s obsidian fishbowl, they had traveled nearly half a kilometer from the
Dharmakaya.
“Master Seth,” Douin said, his voice hollow-sounding in the earphones of Seth’s helmet. “Master Seth, let’s finish this.”
“Let me take Lord Pors a bit farther out,” Seth replied, peering through two sets of faceplates at Douin’s features. “Far enough out to send him to his death privately—to commit him to the infinite suns.” He had come out here expressly to put distance between himself and the hovering Ommundi ship, and he could not understand Douin’s reluctance to proceed.
“Lord Pors was my kinsman,” the Kieri said. “I’ll take him out.”
The empty helmet of the empty suit gaped at Douin, who, before Seth could protest, fired his backpack rockets and whirled the suit away with him in a slow-motion waltz. Tilting his clumsy helmet back, Seth watched the two figures dwindle “above” him, faceplate to faceplate like dancers in a ballroom of shiny black marble.
Meanwhile, he hung virtually nowhere, dream-suspended. In one direction, the
Dharmakaya
maintained a gaudy hauteur; in another, Douin and the suit climbed into the night’s vertigo-inducing recesses. Elsewhere, only the star-dusted void.
“Master Douin,” Seth said. “Master Douin.” But a dead light inside his helmet indicated that Douin had switched his suit radio off. He undoubtedly maintained at least listening contact with the light-tripper’s conning module, but Seth’s umbilical to Douin had been cut. Why? Did Abel and Douin intend to murder
him,
too?
Alone, Seth recalled boarding the
Dharmakaya
fourteen days ago to find the Sh’gaidu cramped together in an aft cargo nacelle with only poor life-support facilities: four chemtoilets for 274 people, water from a condensation tray beneath the ceiling of the nacelle, once-a-day food calls at twelve automatic dispensers in the port bulkhead, and a sadly inadequate supply of bedding. About all you could say for the accommodations was that the air was good and no one harassed or intruded upon the Sh’gaidu.
After checking on them that first evening back aboardship, Seth had purposely avoided setting foot in their squalid barracoon. Ulvri—Magistrate Vrai—had bequeathed the Sh’gaidu into his keeping, yes, but he would not exert himself on their behalf until they made planetfall and established a permanent colony in that cindery group of islands called the Fire Chain. For now, though, he had to come to terms with the custodial duties awaiting him and the odd chain of events that had foisted these duties on him. Earth was Paradise Lost. In the hardship of honor, he had given himself to Gla Taus, and, dear God, he deserved a reprieve from the burdens of that commitment. Reasoning thus, he stayed away from the compartment where the Sh’gaidu dwelt.
Lijadu had been amid that crowd the first and only time that Seth had gone back there. He hadn’t seen her. Or, if he
had
, he hadn’t recognized her among the naked and gem-eyed scores confined in the nacelle. They had stared at him as if he were Ehte Emahpre, Seth had thought, or some other tight-assed agent of the Tropish state, and he had hurried off without trying to find the one pair of crystalline, tiger-green eyes that would have identified their owner as Lijadu. What would he have said to her?
Seth had no idea.
Abel and Douin had seen to the most pressing needs of the Sh’gaidu, without ever suggesting that any come into the main passenger compartments. The only change of accommodations they had supervised was the shifting of the thirteen dead Sh’gaidu to the compartment where the Pledgechild and the murdered Kieri priest lay. Later, they had let one of the midwives visit this compartment to cut away the eyes of the corpses, in accordance with Tropish custom. Abel had also regularly provided medical treatment since the first fatality, but the
Dharmakaya
was not equipped to handle so many living passengers in its cargo bays. Seth felt sure that three or four more Sh’gaidu would die before they reached Gla Taus. Inside his helmet, he grimaced and opened his eyes on the surreal and painful blankness of space.
“Seth, how are you doing?”
The voice was Abel’s, coming to him from the conning module through a faint rush of static. It disoriented Seth.
“Fine,” he fuzzily replied.
“What’re you doing? Are you about finished?”
“Douin’s waltzing the empty suit away. They’re almost as far from me as I am from the ship. I seem to be something for Douin to mark distances by. Yes, we’re almost finished.”
“Want me to pipe you some music?”
“Abel,” Seth said, “I don’t care.”
“Okay. Hang on and I’ll do it.”
There was a scratching in Seth’s earphones, an audible retreat, and a moment later “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s
Ninth
poured into his helmet from the conning module. Although Seth spoke Abel’s name admonitorily, the music overrode him, climbing on exultant strains. Looking about, Seth realized that he could no longer find Douin or the empty suit; that, in fact, he had managed to lose even his fix on the
Dharmakaya.
All that remained as reality supports were Beethoven’s music and the illimitable night.
“Abel!”
To glide out of his vertigo, Seth fired his backpack rockets. He moved, but did so in a drowning pool of haloed stars. What were Abel and Douin trying to do to him? Then he spotted Douin. The Kieri envoy was alone, hanging motionless some distance away. Seth headed for him, and as his rockets’ pale flames propelled him toward Douin’s suited figure, the music in Seth’s earphones died. He shot a glance “downward,” but instead of the
Dharmakaya
saw only the depthful obsidian of space. His orienting focal point was the unmoving Douin, who hung “above” him like a nameless god’s pathetic trophy. Why didn’t he fire his rockets and drift back to Seth? If Seth had thought, he would have known. But in striving to reach the one thing in the cosmos that seemed familiar, Seth did not think; he glided passively toward solace and companionship. No voices spoke to set him right. He had only his own imperfect knowledge for guidance.
And so Seth came face to face with the tenantless suit that Douin had waltzed into this place and then deserted. Bemused, Seth stared into the helmet. He saw himself in the warp of the faceplate, a hundred colors dancing in the glass. Then he saw something else: He had forgotten to screw the suit’s corrugated gloves into its sleeves. As a result, he could look into one of the suit’s bent arms, right into the blackness of its nonexistent occupant. Inside his own suit, Seth shuddered.
As if dredging some prehistoric era of his own consciousness, he remembered the myth about the jongleur-thief Jaud that he’d read in Master Douin’s geffide, from one of Master Douin’s books, and how Jaud had confronted his own handless image in the final wall of the Obsidian Wastes. Somehow, Seth realized, this was the same thing, this confrontation.
He could not move. He could not draw away from the empty spacesuit’s aura of accusation and reproach, not even when voices began to call to him in his earphones. At any moment, he feared, the creature before him would throw out its arms and embrace him as the aged Pledgechild had done in her cell in Palija Kadi.
Not until the real Clefrabbes Douin appeared from out of nowhere, touched his sleeve, and tugged him away from the suit did Seth begin to grasp what had happened. Then his perspective returned. He found the fragile lights of their ship blinking in the dark, and he yielded as Douin, who had sanctioned murder, guided him through the unmappable void to the haven of the
Dharmakaya.
Through the ritual of a mock-funeral, he had sought to make himself whole, and if no one else understood the mystery or the mechanics of such a feat, Seth no longer cared. Let them mock him.
Later that “evening,” Seth recommended that many of the Sh’gaidu be allowed to take up quarters in the forward passenger rooms. There were forty-two unoccupied cabins in the two adjacent passenger nacelles, and if they put three dissident sisters in each available cabin, they could almost halve the number of Sh’gaidu now crowded in the bay of the aft cargo nacelle.
It was criminal that they had not already made such an arrangement, and if Abel and Douin resisted his suggestion, Seth vowed to delay their reentry into The Sublime by plying K/R Caranicas with dodecaphonic messages of moral outrage that would seduce the triune to mutiny against them, too. Caranicas would strand them all in normal space until they submitted to Seth’s superior humanitarian view.
To prove that he meant what he said, Seth took up the microphone from the astrogational console and regaled Caranicas with the details of his plan. The computer translated his words into a weird electronic toodling; and soon, after the triune had spun about on its gyroscopic track to face Douin, Abel, and Seth, a reply was coded through the communications unit:
“
We’ll remain here until the transfer is complete.
”
Seth headed for the aft cargo section. When he presented himself to the occupants of the nacelle, which stank now with the natural effluvia of living bodies pent together for long stretches, he strolled through them until he found Lijadu caring for an elderly sister near the starboard bulkhead, not far from a segment of the clear condensation tray cutting across the ceiling.
Lijadu looked at him without accusation. He explained why he’d come, what they could do, and how a change of quarters could be carried out. He would leave to Lijadu and the Sh’gaidu the issue of who would come forward and who would remain aft. No matter who went and who stayed (Seth promised), Abel, Master Douin, the taussanaur, and he would do their best to clean up and refit the cargo nacelle.
