A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire by Michael Bishop Page A

on Gla Taus, Günter had conducted a tour of the Dharmakaya for several high government officials and a contingent of Lady Turshebsel’s taussanaur (literally, “world circlers”). One of the high points of this tour, at least for the Kieri, had been Latimer’s demonstration of the sublimission radio/receiver, with which he had rather showily contacted Ommundi Station on Sabik II and an Interstel facility on a colony world circling Acamar. These brief exchanges with jauddebseb beings hundreds of lights away, along with the vivid sublimission images hovering like ghosts in the radio’s receptor well, had immensely impressed one of the taussanaur—who had asked permission to put through a call to Trope, picking that world because of its relative proximity to Gla Taus.
    Latimer had graciously instructed the jauddeb in the use of the unit, and even though the Tropiards were not full-fledged signatories of the Interstel Charter, the guard had easily raised a response from a tracking outpost in the Tropish hinterland called Chaelu Sro. Latimer had translated the guard’s Kieri into Vox, and the Vox of the anonymous Tropiard back into Kieri; and then, in order not to lose face before the delighted taussanaur, Porchaddos Pors and Master Douin had each politely demanded a turn at the console, speaking Vox to impress the others with their erudition. That this entire exchange had proceeded without any visual input from Trope had dulled the excitement of the touring Kieri scarcely a whit.
    In fact, the episode had seemed such a triumph of public relations that Seth had inwardly approved his isosire’s spontaneous suggestion to Pors that a pair of orbital guards remain aboard the Dharmakaya to monitor the radio and study first-hand the electronic and mechanical intricacies of a bona fide light-tripper. Trust was the order of the day, and no one had then suspected the possibility of an aisautseb uprising, the seizure of the ship, or the need to negotiate with the Tropiards an alternative to the doomed Ommundi trade proposal. Who could have foreseen that the taussanaur aboard at Latimer’s invitation would turn pirate because of the archaic belief system of a priestly order that had exerted little real clout for almost four Gla Tausian decades? Neither Abel nor Seth had advised Latimer of the foolishness of his trust, and K/R Caranicas, who might have had a weird opinion in the matter, had been deep in cold sleep. . . .
    “How long must we share subdimensional nonexistence with that creature who pilots us?”Pors asked, nodding forward.
    Seth glanced at the gyroscopically mounted chair in which Caranicas, blinkered and belted, could move vertically or horizontally past the various astrogational computers and both in and out of the cystlike conning turrets set about the nose of the module. The triune itself was scarcely visible in this chair. Its arms and legs were wired, and at the back of its head was the cranial prosthetic housing the additional right lobe cloned from an embryonic extraction of brain tissue before Caranicas’s “birth.” The housing was pure platinum, and the appearance of this artificial cap always put Seth in mind of an enormous silver goiter that had rotated unaccountably around to the nape. Caranicas was not pretty, not by any means, and Seth could easily understand how Pors could call the triune a “creature.”
    “Can’t you tell from the console display?” he asked the impatient noble.
    “The figures beside the miniature vessel say” —Pors shut his eyes, working to deduce the Kieri equivalent of the Arabic numerals he had painstakingly learned months ago— “twenty-three, I think: twenty-three more days.”
    “If the texture and consistency of the subdimensional field we’re generating doesn’t change in the meanwhile. Then, yes, twenty-three days.”
    “Earth reckoning,” Pors stipulated.
    “That’s nearly thirty of your own,” Seth replied.
    “If conditions in The Sublime don’t