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

mix would sustain all three of them. Had he waited to throw the turret back, doubt might have intervened. He knew himself just well enough to understand that hesitation rather than conscience frequently made a coward of him.
    “A prayer for all of us,” said Porchaddos Pors. “I thank God that this place is blessed with a proper coldness.”
    “And I, too,” acknowledged Clefrabbes Douin.
    They descended to the terrace and stood in the canting shadow of the J’beij, a monolith of rust-red stone and metal. Ten fluted columns fronted the great building, buttressing the long winglike awning of rock capping its portico. The J’beij was almost as large as the Dharmakaya, and behind their transcraft, for a distance of perhaps a kilometer, stretched flat tablerock lined with bone-white walkways, intermittent buildings, and an occasional structure resembling a gazebo of stone. Far to the east Seth thought he could see a flotilla of mosquitoes—remotes—glinting in the afternoon sun on the plateau’s landing field.
    A pair of Tropiards stood in the portico of the J’beij. Tall figures in cloaks, they neither approached nor retreated.
    Seth was disappointed to find that he could still tell nothing about their eyes, for their garments hooded them, putting half of each man’s face in shadow. They might call their planet Trope and their humanoid species gosfi—an ugly, ugly word in Seth’s estimation—but at this distance they were more aesthetically pleasing replicas of Earth-born humanity than either Douin or Pors. (This, Seth knew, was an ethnocentric bias, but he was powerless against it, at least after long incarceration in The Sublime with the Kieri.) The clay-colored cloaks of the Tropiards seemed to betoken . . . Seth’s imagination galloped off higgledy-piggledy, and his hands began to sweat again. Above, the sky flowed like thin blue lava.
    One of the Tropiards beckoned to them, after which he and his companion turned and retreated toward a hidden doorway. Wordlessly, exchanging uncertain glances, Seth and the two Kieri envoys followed these monkish figures beneath the portico and between a series of tall metal stelae depicting what Seth supposed to be episodes from the heroic Tropish past.
    There were seven of these stelae on each side of the aisleway, staggered rather than directly opposite one another—but they were not especially informative about the facial features of the gosfi because the figures in each panel almost invariably had their heads averted or their eyes shielded. One figure recurred from panel to panel, but in every case it was depicted without eyes. The engraver had simply—and purposely, no doubt—failed to include its organs of sight.
    A door of buff stone and red-gold metal admitted the three offworlders into the vast interior of the J’beij.
    White predominated here, accented on the walls and vitricite partitions with hanging tapestries. Seth took a deep breath. The ceiling was a good four stories from the floor, and the tapestries—whose designs resembled wiring diagrams, or the convolutions of a human brain, or maybe even the intricate layout of Ardaja Huru—hung at various heights all the way to the ceiling. Individual floors did not exist as such. Instead, arranged at different levels above the main floor were transparent scaffolds to which you could ascend by lifts or narrow, helical stairways. The Tropiards employed on these scaffolds seemed to hang dreamily in the air.
    Despite the enormousness of the J’beij, and the number of platforms distributed like pieces of kaleidoscopic glass throughout its interior, its gosfi occupants were few. The cabinets and consoles on the various levels were probably self-sustaining types of equipment, for information storage or arcane telemetric tasks.
    Light flooded the J’beij, emanating from everywhere at once. But when one of the Tropiards turned to urge Seth’s party on, letting his hood fall aside, it was still hard to see what kind of