Floating Castles

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.