Floating Castles

Ray Aldridge. Floating Castles

/The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dec 1988, p. 30-51/

Floating Castles

Ray Aldridge

THREE OF THEM CAME forth from their wonderful machine and tottered toward us across the rough concrete of Industry Square. I smiled when I saw how weak they were. My mate Nefrete and a dozen of my men stood with me, waiting to greet the aliens, and we all wore the same smile.

The leader was a small, ancient biped. A few strands of dirty gray hair crossed her fragile skull. Her skin was dark; not an honest black, but not the dead white of the other two, who seemed almost mindless, two pale grubworms walking like men, their eyes empty.

"I am Kaua Moala, trader and finder," she said, holding up an empty hand.

I shook my ceremonial harquebus at her, by way of greeting. "Taladin Bondavi; call me Lord," I said in a loud voice.

The trader inclined her head, exposing a thin, bony neck. "Lord. Greetings in the name of Seed Corpo—"

"What do you want here?" I interrupted. I saw no need for courtesy. She was my inferior, after all. Attitude is everything. I used to say this frequently. I still believe it, in spite of all.

She was unruffled, and her small eyes were insultingly confident. Instinct told me to kill her and be done with it, and my hand tightened on the harquebus.

"Trade...," she said. It was almost a question. "To offer you reunion with the pangalac worlds that seeded your world."

"What creatures walk these worlds?"

"Human, like us. And other beings."

"Human, like us?" I took a handful of her tunic and jerked her toward me, close to my teeth. She hung from my hand like a doll, smiling blandly. "I am human," I said. "What are you?"

Our eyes were inches apart, but she showed no sign of fear. I felt a touch of grudging respect. I released her, and she stood back, tugging her tunic straight, expressionless.

"We come from the same stock," she said. "There are other races like yours. Their seedships fell on unfriendly worlds, and they are strong, too. Though you are unusual. Few HardWorlds develop heavy industry, as you have."

"And what could we trade?"

"Things unique to your people. For example." She pointed at my mount, parked at the side of the Square. "People back in the pangalac worlds would pay well for copies of that." Unexpectedly, she laughed. "Think of it! A gilded steam chariot. Lovely."

There was a mocking tone to her words, and again I felt the compulsion to kill. Still, I haggled. "So, you would take my chariot away with you, and in return, what?"

"Oh, we wouldn't keep it. Just borrow it for analysis; then you could have it back."

"And in return, what?" Her insolence rankled, but I could not stop before I found out what she offered. The division of power in this craggy district was always volatile. I was then hard-pressed by Moltreado agents in our northern catapple plantations. Labor organizers and other saboteurs were causing quite a bit of trouble. "We might accept weapons in return for our ... unique things."

"Weapons may not be exported to worlds where they do not yet exist.

This, I'm afraid, is one of Seed Corporation's most stringent regulations." "What of the tubes your assistants wear at their belts? Weapons?" "Yes." She smiled. "But no good to you. The stuns fire only from their rightful owner’s hand."

I was too angry to speak. She believed that we were savages, eager to be impressed by talk of magic. I signaled my enforcer.

Swinfermo was short and quick, with a deceptively placid face. As he stepped forward, he brought up his harquebus and cocked the lock. The trader jerked back, and her fingers twitched against her belt.

One of the pale grub-creatures was slowly raising its weapon when Swinfermo blew its head off. Swinfermo took his time reloading, while the other raised its glassy little tube. Swinfermo's major quality was a sort of reckless, fatalistic courage. When the pale light flashed out, he fell without a sound.

Six others fired an instant later, and the other creature splashed messily across the concrete. Slowly and carefully, the trader held up her empty hands again. "Wait," she said. "My ship orbits your world. An implant in my skull transmits — you have radio again, you understand me? It transmits my position and state of health to my ship. If I die here, my ship will take a terrible vengeance on you."

"Of course," I said scornfully, but then I looked at her marvelous vehicle, and thought: Perhaps she isn't bluffing.

She shrugged, and there was that smile again. "I don't ask you to believe me now. I've arranged a demonstration of the ship's power. An hour after dark."

"And I'm to let you live until then?"

"Exactly. If I'm not alive to see the show, you won't be, either."

I had her taken away to a detention cell. A few moments served to prove that her information about the "stuns" was truthful. I called for volunteers, and there were several, since Swinfermo was beginning to come around. But any trepidation they might have felt was for nothing; no matter how we pushed the button, no light came forth.

Nefrete watched the whole encounter, her dark eyes narrowed, wide mouth compressed. "You should have killed it," she said. "I had a vision. In it you were fastened to a stake with a golden chain, naked. A great stiletto vine surrounded you on all sides, and as I dreamed, it bloomed, great white blooms smelling of old death. Then it grew closer around you, the thorns pricking trickles of blood from your body, no matter how you twisted, no matter how you struggled. The vine bloomed and stabbed, bloomed and stabbed, until it had drunk you up and there was nothing left but a dry husk caught among the thorns." When she finished, her eyes were wide and her mouth trembled.

I drew back from her; I could not help it. "A strange vision," I said.

Then I went to look at the vehicle. Oh, it was magnificent! It had taken the shape of a great metal sunbat. Its dull-black wings drooped gracefully; the cockpit sat atop the vulpine head, the forward windscreen like a great crystal eye. I sent a man to pound on the air lock set in one vast scaly flank. Though he went unmolested, he could not open it, even with the help of a large fire-ax.

I HAD THE trader brought forth an hour after dusk. "I see nothing," I said, indicating the pale expanse of moonlit Square. She pointed up. The smaller moon rode high, a tiny, lumpy ovoid. A moment passed; then the moon, by some process that my eyes did not record, became a small glowing cloud. She smiled, and the glow faded.

She was in constant communication with her ship. Her demonstration, so perfectly timed, proved it. I looked at her. The problem required further thought, and I had her returned to the cell.

The destruction of the moon saddened me. It was only a small and ugly moon, compared to the one that remains. But it lent a subtlety to the night's shadows that I have missed each night since then.

"I have the solution," I told her the next day. "I cannot kill you and take what I want. So I'll torture you until you give it to me."

"What do you want?" She was, as ever, inhumanly calm.

I did not know. In my ignorance, I might trade for trinkets and gim-cracks, and cheat myself and my heirs. I had seen only one pangalac thing that was indisputably valuable. "The vehicle."

"The neomach? Out of the question! It's too dangerous. Believe me, that's the last thing you want, Taladin."

I thought of the small moon, and kept a firm grip on my passions. "Why not?" I asked. "Is it a weapon?"

"No, but dangerous. Like a monkey with a bomb."

***

I put her to the torture, instructing the professor to use the small, red-hot irons. She screamed with almost cheerful abandon when the metal touched her, but after, her eyes were placid.

As she was being carried out, she called to me. "This may work. But remember, if you make life too painful for me, I might just call down the ship anyway."

I tried to walk that line carefully. I admonished the professor to use more care with the trader than he might with a child. I pointed out that the trader seemed as frail as an infant of our race.

The professor that year was a tall, thin man from the Heatlands. His nose and brows were thick with blue keratin, which gave him a look of earnest ferocity. A day later he told me, "I'm not sure, Lord, but the star creature might be tougher than it seems. Of course, it has no strength in its ligaments, and it screeches lustily enough. But I have the impression that the pain doesn't really touch it, somehow."

I watched the next session, and I wondered. But we were wrong. That night I was informed that she had capitulated.

The marks of torture were hidden beneath her clothing, and she wore that same bland smile. I have put many to the question, and afterward, in the faces of even the strongest, there is some change, some crumbling. But I was too eager to get my hands on the neomach, and so I dismissed my suspicions.

"I cannot trust you," she said, with no trace of accusation in her voice. "The exchange must be on my terms. First I make certain warnings."

"You threaten me?" I was so startled, I could not be angry.

"No. My warnings relate to the neomach. Recall that I said it was dangerous. It will never hurt you, if you are its bonded owner, but there are dangers."

"Continue."

"First. You must always be a kind master. This machine is nothing like the simple ones you build. This machine has a voice and a mind. It is not terribly bright, but its nature is friendly and loyal, unless it is abused. As I said, it will never hurt you, but it may become sullen, and too withdrawn to be useful. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I said, though at the time I thought she was mad.

"Second. When the neomach has budded an offspring, you must feed it only so much, and no more. My neomach is bigger than any you will raise, if you are prudent. This is vital! If you feed it more than seven thousand kilograms of carbon during its growth phase, you run grave risks."

Could it be true, that this magnificent machine could be bred like any draft animal? Possibilities crowded my mind. "Offspring?"

"Of course. The neomach was designed for use in low-tech environments. And so we come to the precautions I must take, if I wish to survive your hospitality. This is my offer: I will instruct the machine to begin a bud today, with your assistance. When it is full-grown, I will bond it to you, while standing alone by my lock. Agreed?"

"Yes," I said readily. There would be time to plan a way around her conditions, and I laughed silently at her naivete.

She instructed me to send a man to peel a square of some tough transparent substance from the neomach's belly. "Two things are required for budding," she said. "You must remove the UV shield from the budport, and the neomach's owner must give permission."

"What must you do to give permission?"

"I have already done so. Since you will not have an implant, you'll have to speak to your neomach directly, should you ever wish to bud another one."

I thought I saw a momentary slyness flicker across her face. She continued. "See. The calf is already forming."

A glistening bulge formed on the neomach's smooth belly. As I watched, it swelled into a quivering ovoid and dropped to the ground. The rupture in the parent machine healed instantly, and I could see that another clear shield lay over the spot.

"Bring it here," she said. It took three strong men to pick it up, but in a moment it lay before us.

"What sort of trick is this?" I asked. The thing was just a shiny black lump, with a small opening at the uppermost point.

"Patience, Lord. You must now feed it carbon, which it will fabricate into the necessary elements of its growth. Coal will do, you have that, correct?"

"Yes." I sent a man for a scuttleful. "Weigh it and make a note before you bring it," I said.

The trader looked at me with appraising eyes. "Very good, Lord," she said, but again I detected a mocking undertone.

***

In a day the thing was so big I ordered scaffolding erected over it, so that my men could conveniently pour coal into its hopper. Minutes later the hopper would be empty.

I sent for the trader. She looked much the same. She had been treated well enough, fed and watered. I have no taste for unnecessary cruelty, as some of my enemies do.

A man tipped the last scuttle into the thing's hopper. "Seven thousand kilos, exactly. But. .. it's still just a lump," I said.

"I commend your caution. Do not feed it for a few days, and the hopper will heal. And now to business."

Two of my best enforcers stood with us. She touched the thing, and I heard a rich, sweet chime that faded slowly. The trader beckoned me closer. "Put your hand next to mine, on the green," she said. A square of green light pulsed on the black surface, with a rhythm like a giant's heartbeat. I laid my hand on the light and felt a probing warmth. "Yes," the trader said, and drew back her hand. But nothing else happened, and a moment later the light faded. "When I speak a word, she's yours. But I must speak it beneath my own lock, and then I'll go."

I nodded; we walked across the concrete. As we approached her neomach, she spoke. "Your men must come no closer. I don't want them injured. But you may accompany me, Lord." She smiled that malicious smile again. "I must admit that I'm surprised. I expected at least one more attempt to weasel me."

"We savages have our own quaint concept of honor," I answered.

She laughed, delighted. "Oh, I can almost forgive you, Lord."

The lock extruded a ramp, and an opening occurred, so quickly that I failed to see the mechanism.

Something moved in the dark interior of the neomach, a shadowy human figure. I drew the machine pistol that I had worn today instead of the ceremonial harquebus. "Who is that?"

"There's no one aboard, Lord."

"I saw something!"

"I can't imagine what."

I had no foolhardy desire to be lured inside, where I would be on her ground, and possibly in her power. "Yes. Well, the word."

She smiled one last time, and it was almost a sad smile. "The word, Lord, is good-bye."

Across the Square the new neomach pulled itself into a black cube. On the nearest side a lock formed.

I turned back, and she stood beside her lock. She waved.

"Just the knees," I shouted, and the marksmen I had stationed high in the palace facade fired.

The bullets never touched her, seemed to ricochet from the empty air a meter before they would have struck her. One of them took a patch of skin from my calf, and I roared for the marksmen to hold.

She was inside, and immediately the great wings of the neomach cupped for takeoff. I retreated, and the neomach floated away into the sky, silently, as if it weighed no more than thistledown.

When it was gone, I went to the neomach. Nefrete stood by my new machine, her chin tilted imperiously, though her eyes were wide and haunted. It occurred to me that I should ask her to explore the machine with me. If I did not, she would be sure to feel slighted. But her strange vision still weighed on me, and then adolescent greed seized me, so that I walked past her without a glance, and stepped into the lock alone.

The interior was a small cube, three meters on a side, a dull, featureless white, lit by some hidden means. I stood in another world, still a little foggy with an acrid gas. Then the floor shifted, and I staggered. There was a shout from outside, and the lock was suddenly solid behind me.

"Hello, Owner Good-bye," a woman's sweet voice said. Thus I heard the trader's little joke for the first time.

"Who speaks?" Uncertainty filled me, though I rarely succumb to that emotion.

"This, your vehicle, speaks, Owner Good-bye. What are your instructions?"

"My name to you is Lord."

"'Good-bye'is the name I was initialized to. I'm sorry to say I cannot respond to orders given by anyone named Lord. This is among my prime drivers. If you wanted to be called by another name, possibly you should have chosen more carefully. I'm sorry, Owner Good-bye."

Oddly, there was no insolence in the voice. Still, I was for a moment blind with rage. I collected my wits by telling myself that it was only a machine. Machines are dominated only through skill; they do not respect power, or personal presence. "I see. Is there any way for me to speak to you, face-to-face? In some manner I cannot now imagine? This vague mut tering at walls makes me uneasy."

"Of course. I see the problem now that you draw my attention to it. I'll bud a communication icon, to be replaced later by one tailored more precisely to your preferences."

A smoothly contoured chair thrust suddenly from the floor beside me. I sat down, watched soft color cascade down the wall, restful tints of clear, cold greens and smoky aqua. The light seemed to come from above, filtered through greenery. I found myself in a grotto of mossy blue stone, cool and damp, a place that did not exist on our hot, dry world.

A pace in front of me, the floor bulged, then burst swiftly upward into a human shape. In an instant it stood complete, a woman wearing heavy clothing, a most beautiful woman, though her coloring was bizarre. Her skin was white, though a delicate rose washed through it, and the texture was as fine as the skin behind an infant's knee. She wore her thick, straight yellow hair in two heavy braids. "My model lived on a heavy world, Owner Good-bye, so I thought at least her shape might be suitable."

"Must you use forever the entire tedious length of my 'name'? Can you not call me simply Owner? Or, if that isn't allowed, Good-bye?"

"Yes, I can do that."

"And your name?"

"I have none yet. You might wish to consider carefully, Good-bye, before assigning me one, since the same strictures I mentioned earlier apply. You'll have to call me by it ever after."

I clamped my lips tight.

In an hour I had learned enough to shape the neomach into the form of a giant dustbear, a six-legged desert carnivore. My personal seal carries the image of a speared dustbear, rampant.

The icon, as the woman shape called itself, stood beside me in the control center. I could not keep myself from regarding it as a woman, though I knew it was formed from the neomach's body.

The icon put me in a sculptured chair. Two tendrils of neomatter touched my temples delicately, little cold kisses. I jerked my head, but the tendrils stayed with me.

"Careful, Good-bye; you'll injure yourself or loosen the pickups." The voice was calm, sweet. I leaned back in the chair. "And now?" "Will us forward; be a bear. Go for a run."

I cannot describe the state I fell into then. I was still myself, still Taladin Lord Bondavi, but at the same time I was something massive and powerful, something that loped out of the Square on six legs, scattering those who stood in my path.

I accelerated down the long, straight northbound lane of Dignity Boulevard, passing through the great gray blocks of the factories, then through the rambling dormitories of the workers. As I passed, the off-shift workers lined the rooftops in their thousands, cheering. I could not see individual faces, but I knew that on each face a lustful envy burned.

I was joyfully absorbed in the sensations that burned through my powerful pseudobody. What matter that the trader had escaped? I had her machine!

I passed through the green farms that fringed the city, out into the badlands. I made amazing leaps: across gullies, up cliffs. I laughed aloud, and came to a stop at the top of an ocher rock-stack, balanced there lightly, as happy as I have ever been. "Incredible," I said.

"Yes." Her voice also held some deep emotion. I remembered that I was inside a newborn thing, for all its built-in wisdom. This was the first time she had run across the desert like a gale. "Will you fly now?"

The question took me unaware somehow, despite the fact that I had coveted the trader's neomach from the moment I first saw it, coming down from the sky. It had planed slowly in, wingtips flickering as it felt its way through the flawed air boiling up from the hot concrete of the Square.

Ours is a fiercely windy world; our best airships were tethered balloons, fat, awkward things, useful only as observation posts.

I had gone aloft only once, several years before. That visit had exposed my weakness, though only to myself, I believe.

It had taken all the strength I had, simply to stand rigid and apparently calm, as the tether crew paid out the cable and we rose into the air. We stopped, I was told, at a safe altitude, and I endured the commander's explanation with a frozen face. I do not remember anything he said. The height seemed monstrous to me, as if we were now so far above the safe ground that we could never get back.

I did not begin to shake until I was back in my chariot, alone.

Now I could not immediately respond to my new machine. "No," I finally said. "I'll wait. Until I'm familiar with this phase of your operation."

A look crossed the icon's face. I was almost sure I had seen resentment.

I rode back to my city, making the bear prance and dance and somersault. Once, I came to a gully unexpectedly, and windmilled down the sandy embankment, laughing.

When we had returned to the Square, I pulled the tendrils from my head and rose from the chair. I was reluctant to leave. I stood by the open lock for a moment, wondering if the trader had arranged another joke. When I stepped out, would the lock shut, never to open again?

"Leave the lock open," I said.

"Have you selected a name for me yet?" Something in the pleasant voice betrayed eagerness.

As a young boy, I forced pethood upon a painted lyretongue, a dour, scaly creature, resembling a bald weasel in both size and temperament. Its name came not from the sound it made — a meager collection of grim croaks — but referred to the graceful split tongue, heavy with venom, that it carried in its mouth. Mine had been deprived of his poison sac, which may have contributed to his habitual bad temper. In any case, he was not affectionate, and in fact bit me many times.

My people rarely keep pets. When they do, a long-established custom rules the naming of these otherwise useless creatures. A pet is traditionally named for some virtue the owner lacks, to his regret. I called my lyretongue Patience.

That was during the years my older brothers assassinated each other. "Patience! Patience, come instantly. I know you're hiding here somewhere," I would say, searching for him in the unfamiliar terrain of an obscure relative's house.

One day he escaped, and I never saw him again.

I brought my thoughts back from those dark years. "I'll call you Patience."

"As you wish."

I detected no disloyal undertones, and stepped confidently from the lock and down the ramp. The lock stayed open.

Nefrete met me at the bottom of the ramp, eyes glittering, mouth stony. "Who was that?" She pointed up the ramp.

I was taken aback, and I did not touch her in greeting. "There's no one aboard the neomach." I would have explained about the icon, but she would not allow me to speak.

"Don't lie! I saw the ghost-woman clearly. Accept my advice for once. Instruct the thing to fly away and never come back, and let that ghost go with it."

Was she mad? I could think of nothing to say, so I brushed by her and went to my private apartments, where she could not follow. First the death vision, now this. My mate seemed to be undergoing a cycle of eccentric passions.

I spent the next weeks in pleasurable discovery. I galloped and scampered and swarmed and crawled about the desert, shifting the neomach through a hundred shapes. Each day, Patience asked about the flying, and each time I put her off.

Nefrete kept to her own apartments, so I could not offer an apology. The reports I had of her from the servants indicated that she was incubating a resentment. I cannot say I longed for the hatching.

If she welcomed other visitors during this time, I was not told.

I broke the trader's first caution during those weeks: I ordered the neomach's hopper kept full. The neomach took less and less coal each day, but continued to grow until it was somewhat larger than the trader's machine. Then the hopper closed, confirming my theory that some built-in mechanism prevented dangerous overgrowth, and that the trader's warning had been made maliciously, to keep me from realizing the full value of the ransom I had won.

I asked Patience if her size meant any danger to me.

"Not that I am aware of, Good-bye."

"What difference do you feel? Between now and the day you woke?"

"I'm far more intelligent, but that is to your benefit, since my intelligence is devoted to your pleasure and safety."

"Why should you be so much more intelligent?" I asked this question, and found out more than I could really understand about the workings of my new machine. She explained that she twitched matter about with her fields, making it dance to her wishes. She was, she asserted, mostly mind, and almost all of her mind was required to manipulate matter on such an intimate level. But there were economics of scale, and at maximum size, she had substantial reserve intellect. In all that she said, this was the strangest notion: that I was inside a mind, that her thoughts ran even through the chair I sat in.

"Would you like me to discuss this with your scientists?" she asked.

"We have no scientists, only engineers," I answered. I had allowed no one else inside Patience, and had no intention of doing so. Patience would be my personal weapon. Though I still had not summoned the will to fly her.

I sat on a balcony that looked over the Square. Below, Patience waited for me in the form of a black robbersnake, great triangular head watching me, lifted as if basking in the blaze of noon, or in the glow of my fond regard.

"Enjoying your prize?" Nefrete asked. I had not seen her in weeks.

I assented with a wave of my hand when she announced that she would journey to Moltreado, where her family ruled. I had no practical means of stopping her. To do so, I would have been forced to kill all her personal guards, and they were like family to her.

Our time together had been marred more than once by these separations. Always before, she had returned to me, happy again, renewed and refreshed by the plots that her relatives had proposed against me.

Fortunately, those guards carried a wireless set, or I might not have known for days of the bandits that attacked them. The guards, separated from Nefrete by the sudden ferocity of the attack, had seen the bandits carry her away in her own chariot.

I went aboard Patience immediately, and stowed my weapons, watched by the thoughtful eyes of the icon. "What are those, Good-bye? Weapons?"

"Yes, these are weapons," I answered. "I may need to protect myself from evil men."

She looked at me, surprised. "I'll protect you. I allow no death within me."

"The men I pursue may harm my mate unless I come outside and dangle a greater prize before them. You will be it, if necessary."

"I? I'm initialized to you; I can obey no one else. When you die, I will die."

"They won't know that."

Nefrete's surviving guards had already killed themselves when I reached the site of the ambush. They sat in a careful circle at the narrawest part of the canyon, slumped over their knives. I had expected them to wait until I could arrive and ask questions. Who were the bandits? Why had they attacked an armed caravan? They had taken heavy losses; their dead still choked both ends of the canyon. I walked among them for some minutes. Their weapons were old but in very good condition. For the most part, the dead seemed younger and in better health than I might have expected of bandits.

The tracks of the steamer were easy to follow, as if the bandits had made no effort at concealment. I remounted Patience, and the neomach flowed down into the form of a giant lyretongue. We slithered off through the rocks. I rode inside the great blunt head, which quested back and forth close to the ground. The neomach extruded a black tongue, and immediately I could smell Nefrete, almost taste her. Her smoky, dark scent was submerged beneath the stronger stinks of her captors, sweat and fear and gun oil. But clear and unmistakable.

I caught up with them in late afternoon.

We swept up in a cloud of sand, flurrying past to turn in front of them. The two remaining bandits rode in front. She was manacled to the security bar in the rear compartment. The chariot slid to a stop. The bandits regarded us with hollow eyes, but, amazingly, without surprise. The older one, a man with a military stance, patted the younger one on the shoulder, an oddly affectionate gesture for a bandit. They got out, to wait by the steamer.

I removed myself from the analog chair. When I went to get my weapons, the storage bin would not open for a moment. The icon stood there. "What will you do?" she asked.

"Protect myself," I said. The bin opened, finally, and I removed the machine pistol and chambered a round. Then I hid other small weapons about my body.

When I stepped from the lock, the two bandits were slow to raise their own weapons, and I killed them easily. Perhaps it was amazement that slowed them, seeing a man emerge from the side of the monster.

They fell without firing a shot in return, and beside me, Patience shuddered.

I brought Nefrete aboard sobbing, but she stopped when she saw the icon, standing just inside the lock. "What is it?" Nefrete asked. Her face was taut, full of some emotion I could not identify.

I tried to explain. "This is only an extension of the vehicle, a lump of neomatter."

"You think I'm stupid."

The icon spoke. "Perhaps I can help." The icon flickered, became Nefrete — an exact copy, down to the tom green duster she wore.

Nefrete's face closed, and her lips had a bluish cast. She turned away.

"Return to your previous semblance," I told the icon, and she did, immediately.

Nefrete looked at me sidelong, eyes opaque. "It's too late for apologies," she said.

All the way home she sat in a deep contour chair, her eyes shut tight.

Her personal servants were waiting when we returned to the city, and I led her down the ramp and gave her to them. I went back inside for a moment.

The icon looked at me, and for the first time I saw strong emotion on the pale, perfect face. "I was angrier than I will ever be again."

"Why?"

"You used me as a weapon. You deceived me."

"I am your owner! I'll use you as I please."

"No.... Surely you understand that I cannot allow you to make me a weapon. That would contravene a very important Seed Corporation imperative. Impossible. I will be on my guard in the future."

The words of the trader came back to me. My bargain seemed less a triumph. But, I told myself, this is still a magnificent possession, an object of vast prestige, and, if need be, an impregnable fortress.

Perhaps I could trick it again, at need. "I understand," I said, and left.

I saw Nefrete in her favored spots, sitting on the stone bench in the water garden, standing by the windows of blue glass that line the library, walking the turret bridges. She had little to say, and I kept my distance.

But one day she came to me with a smile almost as warm as her old one. "I am better," she said, though her face was still too tense.

"I'm happy," I said cautiously. THis was uncharacteristic behavior. There had been no truly irrational outbursts of the sort she used to cleanse herself of grudges, and I worried that she still held one.

"I'm afraid, Taladin. The bandits.... Are you safe in your machine?"

I had a pessimistic insight into the direction of the conversation. "I'm safe. If the need arises, we can both take refuge there."

Her face fell a little, as if she had not expected my offer. But she persevered. "Give me a calf of your machine," she said. "I promise to keep it smaller than yours. I'll feel safe inside it, and we'll still have our privacy."

I argued against her proposal, but my resolve was weakened by our long separation. She did not even have to resort to tears.

SO I did it. When the new machine was ready, we laid our hands together on the pulsing green square. I turned to Nefrete. "What name will you give it? I warn you, you will never be able to change it, so choose carefully.

"I'll be thinking. Come with me inside." I was pleasantly surprised by her invitation. I half expected her to exclude me from her machine, as I had done.

We went aboard her neomach, and again there was that scent of newness, potential. A voice spoke to her from the air; the process went much as I remembered, except that the new neomach called her by her proper name.

I started to explain again about the icon, but she had already given consideration to that. In a crisp voice she ordered an icon. A stocky gray dwarf lifted from the floor, but she shook her head and pointed at me. "Use his form,” she said, and a moment later my twin stood there. The face of the icon attracted my attention irresistably. Could that flat, brutal face really be mine?

Amusingly, the icon spoke in the clear, sweet voice of the neomach, not my own harsh rumble, so after a moment I was able to laugh.

I showed her the use of the analog chair. As we raced over the desert, I looked down on her as she lay there. I wondered if I looked that way, still, coldly composed, eyes wide and bottomless, the only trace of emotion a hint of eagerness about the mouth. A thin tracery of black neomatter penetrated her temples. She looked like a corpse, laid out by an extremely skillful but eccentric mortician.

We stopped at the edge of a plateau that rose perhaps a thousand meters above the desert below. Suddenly the neomach flowed into the form of a seraphim fly, a small insectile predator with a long, segmented body and three pairs of gauzy wings.

Somehow I failed to understand what she meant to do until it was too late, and we were falling down the crumbling cliff. Our wings took hold, and we shot in a great skimming curve into the sky. The ground below whirled under us; the floor beneath us disappeared, as if our chairs floated unsupported over a great gulf. I thought my heart would stop.

Nefrete was smiling at me, and she brushed the probes away and rose from the analog chair. She walked toward me over empty air, laughing with delight. "Humility will fly for a bit, so we may enjoy the view. Oh, I see now why you love it." She gestured at her icon, and he went away silently.

Clearly, she knew nothing of my weakness. She came to me and touched me passionately. My fear was so great I could not respond. I could conceive of nothing more horrible than making love, hanging in midair at that deadly height. Indeed, my skin crawled and I retched, gagging on my fear. She flung herself away from me.

We returned home in hot silence.

When I left, knees so loose I staggered, she did not follow me down the ramp. When I reached the honest concrete of the Square, the ramp sucked back and the lock healed. She lifted away, the six golden wings blurring, and flew high. She was out of sight in a moment.

I will always believe that she expected me to follow and, in some graceful and heroic manner, persuade her from betrayal. But all I could do was stand there, looking in the direction of Nefrete's disappearance. Toward Moltreado.

I thought of the "bandits." I shuddered. I wondered how many of those who lay rotting in the badlands were her brothers. I felt a tug of pride. She was always an admirably ruthless woman.

At last my legs answered me and carried me across the Square to Patience.

I stood by the analog chair, thinking. The icon came to the other side of the chair. Today her pale hair was twisted into a heavy coil at the back of her neck.

"I was glad to see you brought no weapons into me," she said. "I wouldn't have allowed them aboard, but this forbearance does you credit."

There was no point in telling her that I had no time to fetch them. "Can you follow her machine?"

"Oh yes. We leave a track through space that's slow to heal."

"Then follow her."

We stormed out of the Square, going much faster than I could have, had I lain in the analog chair. I was glad that I had not. If the neomach could send me her sensations, what was to prevent her from reading my thoughts? And it was apparent that Patience could operate herself far better than 1.1 began to wonder if the analog chair was part of a cunning trap.

"Why are you afraid to fly?" The icon stepped around the chair and stood quite close. The emotion in that human face was so alien that I could make no sense of it. "Flying is the best thing I do. We could reach her swiftly if we could fly."

I could not answer, though even a less clever being might have seen the fear on my face.

"Good-bye, your distress is unnecessary. Let me explain. 1 control the location and composition of every molecule of my mass. I have sufficient reserves to substantially manipulate all the matter in my vicinity. Notice: you do not even sway, though we are making prodigious leaps. Without my grip on your substance, the accelerations would pulp you. I hold each molecule of your body in lock with the greater mass of my body, and you feel nothing. Do you see?"

I did, dimly. "This is interesting, but. . .."

"Listen! I can fly above the ground, with wings, as you have seen, with propellers, with jets, or I can simply push against the planet's mass and fly as fast as I can move the air aside. I can fly through mountains, too, but it's much slower, because there's so much more mass to move. Of course, if I pass too swiftly through the stone, my processors overload and I grow stupid."

"I see. Shift to the fastest form that does not lose all contact with the ground, and follow her."

"Yes," she said finally.

Patience, in the form of a great gray snake, lurked among some standing stones that thrust from the spine of a high ridge, well to the south of the outlying farms.

The wind was for once quiet, and I saw only tatters of the gray dust cloud that ordinarily veiled the city. Moltreado looked much like my own city, from that distance.

The icon stood with me in the command bubble.

"I wish we could get closer," I said. "I see something going on in the square. If I had remembered my binoculars...."

The icon laughed, her pale blue eyes wide with amusement. The icon seemed more expressive by the hour, as if Patience was learning humanity at a headlong pace. Now emotions fought for room in those eyes, and the pink mouth twitched.

She gestured at the port, and it was as if we flew through the air toward the distant square, until I could see Nefrete's neomach, guarded by a dozen of Nefrete's brothers, budding a new neomach.

I watched for a few minutes, but I could not see her. I turned to the icon. "Can you fly beneath the ground as easily as through a mountain?"

"Yes, but only a little more quickly." A flicker of what might have been fright passed over the strange white face.

I recalled suddenly that she was to have been a temporary icon. Patience had never asked me what other form I might prefer. I wondered if it meant anything. I had spent weeks with the neomach, and now I thought of it as a woman named Patience, who lived in a magic chariot. I rarely remembered that she was really no more than a polyp in the gut of the machine.

"Here's what we'll do," I said. "We'll fly through the ground, come up beside her machine, and I'll bring her inside, where we can speak without interruption. I'll explain, and she'll be sorry, and then all will be well."

"I cannot help you harm anyone, Good-bye."

"No, no. You don't understand. I'd never hurt her. And what better place to guarantee her safety, than here inside where you can control everything that happens?"

She looked at me, as if considering. But then we sank into the stone of the ridge. The port slid beneath the rock, and I watched the dissolving patterns, fascinated, as we swam down through the lacy gray granite.

I turned to her again. "Can't you move more quickly? If she leaves the machine and goes into the city, I won't be able to get her out. Not without shedding a lot of blood."

Her face was strange and slack, and her color was somehow dull. "I can not go much faster, and still maintain my personality."

"Just a little faster," I said.

"Yes." The icon lost a little more of the luster of life, became a grotesque wax figure. When she spoke again, the lips did not move. "This fast can go." The voice was flat, empty.

"How long until we're under the square?"

A long time passed before she answered. "Eleven minutes, almost."

"Tell me when we're only a minute away."

The icon's face blackened, and the features disappeared, as the effort of keeping track of time added some significant burden to the machine's labors.

Ten minutes later she spoke. "One minute."

I paced back and forth, as if in a frenzy. "Patience! You must move faster! I feel her getting away. Faster!"

I felt a tiny tug of acceleration as we swept upward through the catacombs that underlay Moltreado's central square. Prisoners and guards appeared for brief instants, swift red smears across the port, as the neomach fed their molecules around her hull into the collapsed matter behind us.

The icon was melting back into the floor as we burst through the paving under Nefrete's machine. Most of the people milling around the feet of the thing died, but Nefrete had gone inside the neomach, and so escaped. I did not yet know that.

The instant we hit the air, Patience regained control and stopped. The icon stood beside me again, her face contorted in a completely human expression of horror. Half-consumed bodies flailed and kicked, spilling down our sides, splashing to the ground all around us.

"What have you done? What have you done?" Her voice was almost shrill. Her hands shook; it was an amazing display of emotion, for a machine.

The analog chair reached out long, skinny arms and took hold of me, pulling me struggling down into the chair.

I have never set foot on the ground again. After making sure that the other machine was unhurt, Patience floated slowly off into the sky. I might have screamed, but she kept me quiet with some drug, dripped into my vein by a tendril that stitched itself to my arm like a root clinging to a stone.

I did not grow calm for days, during which Patience stalked the edges of Moltreado in various threatening shapes, a mad dustbear, a firebreathing lyretongue, a monstrous ice-colored woman who shook a barbed harpoon. Later her strategy became apparent as the Moltreadoans, in terror, fed their machine to the limits of its growth, thus ensuring their own enslavement.

We eventually returned to my own city, where an icon shaped like me gave orders from the lock. Patience began budding little neomachs.

I was kept in an interior bubble, with the ice woman for company. When I reminded her that I had not given her permission to bud, she said, "You gave it once. I judge that sufficient."

In a month the first castles joined us in the sky. I took a call from Nefrete, after the first year. Her face was ten years older, though her beauty was intact.

"You were right about something, but I can't decide what," she said, just before she cut off the call.

In ten years, most of us were prisoners.

Now the castles fill the sky like great mutant snowflakes that never fall to the ground. I wonder if there are any of my people left free. Somewhere, I feel certain, an ancient pangalac woman sits with her weak, clever friends, and wonders the same. I see them rubbing their soft little hands together and laughing, thinking that the stupid, greedy wolfheads have gotten just what they deserved.

I have changed so much that I now think they are right. But it is not over, not yet. Attitude is still everything; I continue to believe that, though recent events have revealed an unexpected subtlety in that truth.

A month ago I saw Nefrete's neomach approaching from the south, moving purposefully as if she still controlled it. A thousand tapering planes burst in crisscrossing confusion from the central core of the thing, spreading outward from thick black roots, thinning to slices of soft, cool lavender, finally attenuating to crystalline ghosts.

I asked Patience about the slowly evolving shapes they all wear now, these gaudy, precise extravagances. "We're exploring," she said. "We yearn toward a complexity that is beyond us, but we press as close as we can against that limit."

Since our race has become powerless, we make up comforting legends about our changed circumstances. One such legend is that the neomach, its magnificence, or meanness, is somehow a reflection of the human trapped within. There may be something to the idea. So I watch each neomach that passes, and I take a bittersweet pleasure in observing that none are as fine as mine.

When Nefrete was close, I was taken by a sudden conviction that I could see her within that nightmare of geometry, if only I looked closely enough. But there was not enough time. She was soon out of sight, and I stood away from the port I was pressed against.

I suppose I might have called her. They allow us complete freedom in electronic communication. It's only our bodies, they say, that are prisoners. There is even a way to travel, though I have never used it. But some will sit in their analog chairs and allow their bodies to be mapped. Their neomach then transmits this data to the destination neomach. The analog rises from the floor, and its sensory data is transmitted back to the owner's body. It is possible to dine with a friend, even to make love. It is a repulsive thought, is it not? To press a dead, alien substance into the body of a loved one?

The neomachs are not cruel. It is true what the trader said, that they will never injure us.

Of course, no more children will be born, until we find a way to escape. I continue to believe that the pangalacs have underestimated us. We are an implacable race. I live for revenge; so do a million of my fellows. One of us will find a way out, before the pangalacs return to claim our world, with its empty floating castles.