Floating Castles

"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?"