Floating Castles

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.