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

alter and so delay us.”
    “They’re just as likely to alter in our favor, Lord Pors. The Sublime is highly mutable. That’s why a light-tripper must have a pilot who reads the subdimensional fields quickly and expertly, and who’s able to compensate almost intuitively for the changes. Interstel and most of the trade companies develop their pilots from birth. In truth, the selection is prenatal, and one such as Caranicas is destined for no other occupation. This triune has spent almost sixty years in the service of Ommundi, although much of that has been in cold sleep.”
    “Of what . . . species . . . is your pilot?” Pors asked.
    “Caranicas is human.” The fact that in Vox the pronoun “it” had three forms—one for animals and plants, one for inanimate objects, and one for abstract concepts—momentarily stymied Seth. After sifting among his choices, he settled almost at sheer random upon the feminine pronoun. “Despite her appearance, she’s human—of the basic stock from which Latimer, Abel, and I derived. The differences are genetic, surgical, and cybernetic.
    “The platinum lobe on the back of her neck augments her ability to create a cognitive map of The Sublime. It gives her a heightened awareness of spatial relationships. She has good depth perception, good orientation in nonlinear environments. She’s capable of rapidly synthesizing all this simultaneous intake for navigational purposes. The third lobe was cloned and developed especially for subdimensional flight, Lord Pors, and Caranicas uses it almost exclusively when she’s jockeying back and forth among the conning turrets. The computers handle many of the analytical functions involved in piloting, but she feeds the information gleaned from her observations to the machines by way of the keyboard at her left hand. Her own right hemisphere—the one she was born with—processes a musical code through the keyboard in order to file the information.”
    “She?” Pors asked.
    “Or he,” Seth admitted. “Caranicas is without sex, although a chromosome study would probably reveal her original in vitro gender.”
    “She doesn’t speak?”
    “Only through the keyboard, to both her consoles and to us—when, that is, she has anything to say. We talk to her through the computer, which converts our speech to her musical code. It’s an eerie, triple-layered twelve-tone system, if you amplify it, with some difficult phonetic correspondences.”
    The triune emerged from an overhead turret, whirled in its chair, and spun along its gyroscope tightrope to a bank of equipment directly in front of the two men. In many ways, Seth suddenly realized, Caranicas seemed even more alien than the Kieri lord whose manner and appearance he had grown to dislike so. Pors was at least a personality, whereas their pilot seemed merely an inarticulate complex of tropisms and linkages that defied anthropomorphic cataloging. Did anything but spatial calculations and solid geometry happen inside Caranicas’s head? Of what value was his/her/its humanity? Latimer had never said, and Seth had never inquired.
    We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor.
    Pors looked at Seth with an expression full of complicated loathing. “I wouldn’t be your triune for all the wealth of Ommundi,” Pors said.
    Seth attempted to change the subject. “Have you been in contact with Magistrate Vrai’s people?”
    “You’ve cut away her spirit,” Pors persisted.
    “No,” said Seth. “This is all Caranicas has ever known. Her existence is piloting. Piloting is therefore her happiness.” He was amazed to find himself on the defensive, particularly since it was the brutish and insensitive Pors who had put him there.
    As Seth understood it, Pors, like the male children of all Kieri nobles, had been raised in a camp in the Orpla Mountains northwest of Sket and trained to a life of aggressive self-reliance. The products of this system were seldom well attuned to the