A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire by Michael Bishop

still rankled inside him. Isohets—just as the members of any tupletry of clones—supposedly shared a heightened empathic sense, a bond of deep dimensionality. No such bond existed between Abel and Seth. Although Abel had raised him—except for Seth’s first eight years at the Ommundi Paedoschol in Lausanne—he had never felt a real psychic communion with his isohet. Gratitude for Abel’s love Seth had often known, and affection, and a terrible fear that without Abel he would never achieve a viable identity. But Abel and he had never shared any of those telepathic insights, swift and accurate, that isohets were supposed to experience. He could read Abel’s feelings only in the usual ways, by direct observation and a merely human sensitivity to nuance and mood. Abel’s mind he could not read at all.
    Never, Seth reflected as he climbed, had he known anyone so prone to vomiting as Abel. Günter Latimer had never quelled his anxiety attacks—if, indeed, he had ever had anxiety attacks—by retching up his guts. And Seth got that shamefully sick only when he had eaten or drunk too much. Most people, he knew, were not so susceptible to nausea and vomiting; and yet if anyone should share Abel’s unenviable combination of body chemistry and hypersensitive mind, why not he? He was a duplicate of Abel, for Abel was a duplicate of Günter, and Günter Latimer was the die from which they had both been struck:
    If A=G, and if S=G, then S=A.
    In which case, of course, it was pretty surprising that their minds seldom strained along the same cable toward a common anxiety, and that Seth was not also a vomiting fool. Must he feel guilty for having escaped the harsh confessional of the lavalet?
    “No,” Seth said aloud, climbing through the step-shaft. But speaking the denial aloud didn’t alter the fact that his guilt was even now pursuing him through the corridors of the Dharmakaya.
    His guilt was Abel’s revenge for his own unfeeling innocence.

    Pors rather than Douin had preceded him to the conning module. It seemed to Seth that every card dealt him bore a black spot.
    At the auxiliary astrogational console, he eased into a lounger next to the one occupied by Pors, then studied the Kieri’s concave profile. The man’s nose, eyes, and mouth all seemed to be set inside a dish of bone—but, in spite of that somewhat apish facial arrangement, he appeared both alert and cunning.
    We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor, Abel had said. A ludicrous declaration. Abel’s belief in deity ascended little higher than had Günter Latimer.
    “Good morning, Master Seth,” Pors said without taking his eyes from the astrogational screen. He spoke in Vox, which all the Kieri but the aisautseb had agreed would be their official tongue for the duration of their mission.
    “Is it morning?” Seth asked, amused.
    “For me it is. Master Douin awakened me only a brief while ago.”
    Douin and Pors took turns babysitting the Dharmakaya ’spilot to ensure that Caranicas didn’t craftily maneuver the vessel off true toward some reasonably obtainable Interstel world. Considering that the triune’s programmed mission kept it course-correcting for the whole of any subdimensional voyage, this was an unlikely possibility. An override required either Abel’s own feed-in or an apprehension of disaster on the part of the triune itself. A passenger would quickly notice any major change of course because of subfield resistance and the resultant shipboard discomfort: heat, oscillation, and noise. A wholesale shift from The Sublime to the more predictable ridiculousness of normal Space-Time would be even more wrenching. But the two Kieri took their self-assigned work seriously and monitored the astrogation consoles round the clock. Seth had taught Douin the basics of this monitoring, and Abel had taught Pors.
    Both were already well versed in the operation of the ship’s communication system: Shortly after the Latimers’ arrival