Read Online A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire by Michael Bishop - Free Book Online

feelings of others, although they did emerge competent and independent. You recognized a courtier on Gla Taus by his swagger and his latent hostility toward the lowborn rather than by his mastery of the social graces, which were largely the province of appointed officials like Clefrabbes Douin. But here was Pors expressing an angry sympathy for Caranicas and holding Seth responsible for the triune’s denatured spirituality.
    “I want to talk to her,” Pors declared.
    “But what for? Talk is a distraction from her piloting. She can handle it, of course, but it imposes a low-level strain she’d probably be better off without.”
    “Doesn’t she eat, eliminate, sleep?”
    “She slept while we were on Gla Taus. She feeds and eliminates through the hookups on her chair. She may also rest by switching back and forth between her original right hemisphere and the cloned one. She shuts completely down, though, only in cold sleep.”
    “Does she pray?” Pors asked.
    Seth’s exasperation mounted—first the argument with Abel and now this inane discussion about Caranicas. “I don’t imagine she has the time,” he said, hiding his impatience. “Nor would I imagine she’s had much opportunity to think about it.”
    “Ask her.”
    “Ask Caranicas if she prays?”
    Pors irritably gestured his assent, and Seth removed the microphone from the astrogation console, switched it on, and said, “K/R Caranicas, a visitor aboard the Dharmakaya wishes to know if you pray.” Nothing more. He felt infinitely silly framing the statement. Even before he had finished speaking, the computer had begun coding his words into the three-layered dodecaphonic language by which the triune communicated with its shipboard colleagues. The weird music of the translation ran through the pilot-house like a bevy of electronic mice.
    “I may have to define that term for her,” Seth told Pors, averting the microphone. “I hope you have a definition ready to hand.”
    But when the triune’s chair whirled away from the equipment bank in front of them, threaded noseward, and dropped into an underslung turret at the module’s apex, Seth began to fear that—in spite of the eerie music from the computer—his message had not coded through at all. He was about to repeat the message when a second series of indecipherable notes began toodling in cryptic response to the first. An instant later the translation sounded from a console speaker:
    “ My piloting is a prayer. ”
    Seth felt vindicated. He had not expected this answer, but because it seemed to turn the tables on Pors, he inwardly congratulated the triune on its cleverness. If the life of the Dharmakaya ’spilot was a prayer, how could Caranicas be spiritually bereft? As for Pors, skeptically watching the triune scoot and spin along its gyroscopic tracks, he made no more demands on Seth to have it speak. Its first response had killed rather than piqued Pors’s interest.
    “Have you been in touch with Trope?” Seth asked him again.
    “Master Douin informs me that the Tropiards prefer to wait until our arrival to begin full-blown discussion. They keep their radio contacts brief and send no visuals.”
    Seth had hoped to see a Tropiard by way of a sublimission image. Here on the Dharmakaya he had reviewed all the library tapes devoted to the Anja system and its one inhabited planet. The available information was scant and sometimes self-contradictory. Interstel had never established a secure foothold on Trope, and because its level of technology rivaled or surpassed that of the most advanced members of Interstel, no one could pretend that coercing Trope’s full partnership would lift that world out of the dark ages. Therefore, only an ambiguous partnership—if any—obtained. The result was ignorance about both the planet and its people. That the Tropiards had long ago adopted Vox for their dealings with Interstel ships and agents seemed highly promising of a comprehensive accord, but no one