A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire by Michael Bishop Read Free Book Online Page B

suffered?”
    Seth removed his hand from his isohet’s ankle.
    “It happened to you, too!” Abel informed him for the umpteenth time. “You and I went up that tower with Günter Latimer, but the truth of that still escapes you. For you, Seth, it was an external rather than an inward occurrence. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be!”
    “I’m supposed to have nightmares in living, bloody color?”
    “Yes!”
    “And wake up screaming?”
    “Yes!”
    “And go stumbling into the lavalet to heave up my panic and my compassion?” This was a hit, Seth knew, because now that Abel had recovered from the psychic pummeling of his nightmare, his body would begin to react. His face had already blanched, and his breathing was quickening again. Fresh diamonds of sweat were popping out on his already sweat-lacquered jowls and forehead.
    Abel controlled his temper with difficulty. “My self- compassion, you’re trying to imply, aren’t you? Well, that’s all right, that’s fine. The word of Interstel is that we’re all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor.”
    “You don’t even pretend to believe that, Abel.”
    “Compassion begins at home.”
    Seth winced at both the hypocrisy and the banality of this bromide. “That, perhaps, you believe.”
    “You don’t feel anything!” Abel countered. But the trauma of the nightmare was belatedly catching up with him, and he swung his feet to the floor and headed for the lavalet, replete with the sanctity of his suffering and so close to being caught short that the argument was effectively over. Having no desire either to confront or comfort Abel on his return, Seth pulled on a pair of coveralls and let himself into the corridor outside their cabin.
    The Dharmakaya was immense. Its living, sleeping, and study quarters occupied a pair of windowless nacelles positioned below and aft of the triangular conning module. Up there, the pilot—K/R Caranicas, an indentured Ommundi triune—was installed in cybernetic linkage with the astrogational and life-support capacities of the vessel. Caranicas, who possessed a single left cerebral hemisphere interwired with twin right cerebral hemispheres, had remained in cold sleep during the Latimers’ entire stay on Gla Taus, the equivalent of nearly ten Earth-standard months, and so had known nothing of the murder of Seth and Abel’s isosire or of the coopting of shipboard communication systems by the Kieri.
    Not until revived by Seth had the triune understood that the ship’s body had been violated by forcible entry and its voice stolen by agents of Lady Turshebsel’s taussanaur,or orbital guard. Now, as if indifferent to its new masters, Caranicas was transporting five of the Dharmakaya ’scaptors—Clefrabbes Douin, Porchaddos Pors, two officers of the taussanaur,and a minion of Narthaimnar Chappouib—through subdimensional id-space toward the world called Trope.
    Caranicas was neither male nor female, neither isohet nor natural child, and Seth mentally referred to the triune as “it” because no other pronoun seemed to work. What gender did you consider a being whose body lacked sexual differentiation and whose fundamental raison d’être was conning five hundred tons of vanadium and vitricite through a nonexistent medium that Interstel wags had long ago dubbed The Sublime? Moreover, except through the computer in the conning module, Caranicas couldn’t speak.
    An inability to speak struck Seth as the perfect recommendation for a companion. After composing himself against the shock of standing upright again, he set off through the corridor toward the step-shaft leading to the command unit. On the way he passed the adjacent cabins that Douin and Pors were occupying, and recollected that one of these jauddeb was probably already aloft. Their sleep cycles aboard the Dharmakaya seldom overlapped, and he hoped that if one of the Kieri had chosen to visit their pilot, Douin would be the one.
    Seth’s argument with Abel