Floating Castles

"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.