Free A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire by Michael Bishop

embrace proved that they were locked in formation at precise intervals impossible to close. No danger of either collision or escape. Meanwhile, deserts of yellow-red parchment fled by at speed, rising inexorably. From what he’d seen of Trope so far, Seth would have judged the planet an uninhabited desert. The pilotless mosquitoes seemed its only native life form.
    A voice crackled over the transcraft’s radio in confident Vox:
    “Permit our remotes to lead you in. Don’t attempt to shake or outrun them.”
    “As you say,” Seth replied.
    Then, with the same gap between their wings, the mosquitoes shot forward fifteen or twenty meters, and Seth pursued, adjusting and readjusting to keep from falling farther behind. A clockwork city flashed into view beneath them. It lay in the lee of a tablerock, or plateau, upon which showed a complex pattern of rust-colored edifices and bone-white walkways. The mosquitoes peeled away on either side, and both the clockwork city and the acropolis on the tablerock disappeared behind the transcraft before Seth could adjust to the fact of their existence. At almost three-quarters the speed of sound, the transcraft kept skimming southward.
    “You’ve overflown Ardaja Huru, our capital, and Huru J’beij, the tablerock on which we have our administrative facilities,” said the melodious Tropish voice over the radio. “Make a circuit and land atop the butte, please.”
    “Where, exactly?” Seth asked.
    “Do you require a landing strip?”
    “No,” Seth answered. “Our vehicle’s capable of both hover and vertical descent.”
    “Then put down on the landing terrace in front of the J’beij—the great building running the western length of Huru J’beij.”
    The radio cut off, and Seth banked the transcraft into a stiff southerly wind to return to Ardaja Huru and its sheltering tablerock. Douin and Pors were rubbernecking like tourists—which, indeed, they were. For his own benefit as well as theirs, Seth slowed and swung wide, bringing them in so that they could get a leisurely panoramic vista of both the city and the government complex.
    Ardaja Huru—as much mechanism as living entity—shone in the desert like the intricate, perfect bones of an extinct land leviathan. It was clockwork and skeletal at once, ordered but spare, so pruned of excess and ornament that the wind might have scoured it into this shape. The metals comprising its structures were the color of red-clay bricks. The pedestrian wheels clicking through its heart-hub and the transport cars circumnavigating both its oval perimeter and its many interlocking circular courts might very well have been sophisticatedly wind-driven. The trees lining the city’s thoroughfares and standing like sentinels on its terrace levels burned in the sun like torches. Ardaja Huru seemed to be alive principally by virtue of the movement of its parts rather than by that of its population, for its people were mostly invisible—indoors, underground, somewhere out of sight.
    More than this, Seth and the Kieri envoys had no time to deduce.
    Huru J’beij, the butte behind the city, filled the transcraft’s windscreens, and Seth was suddenly busy shifting into virtual hover and easing the vehicle across a magnificent expanse of blood-red rock toward the government buildings on the plateau. These had more substance than the structures of the city, as if they’d been hewn rather than delicately carved—but even they seemed outgrowths of the land. Unnatural outgrowths of the land. Unnatural outgrowths, like tumors or lepromata, but physical extensions of the planet, nonetheless. The landing terrace, which Seth now saw, was a circle of whitened stone in the midst of all this encompassing red.
    Seth put the transcraft down within that circle, shot the turret back, and unstrapped in the stingingly cold air. A surprise, this coldness—even though, intellectually, he had known that Trope’s desert uplands were chilly and that the atmospheric