Floating Castles

"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.