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?"
"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.
I tried to explain. "This is only an extension of the vehicle, a lump of neomatter."
"You think I'm stupid."
The icon spoke. "Perhaps I can help." The icon flickered, became Nefrete — an exact copy, down to the tom green duster she wore.
Nefrete's face closed, and her lips had a bluish cast. She turned away.
"Return to your previous semblance," I told the icon, and she did, immediately.
Nefrete looked at me sidelong, eyes opaque. "It's too late for apologies," she said.
All the way home she sat in a deep contour chair, her eyes shut tight.
Her personal servants were waiting when we returned to the city, and I led her down the ramp and gave her to them. I went back inside for a moment.
The icon looked at me, and for the first time I saw strong emotion on the pale, perfect face. "I was angrier than I will ever be again."
"Why?"
"You used me as a weapon. You deceived me."
"I am your owner! I'll use you as I please."
"No.... Surely you understand that I cannot allow you to make me a weapon. That would contravene a very important Seed Corporation imperative. Impossible. I will be on my guard in the future."
The words of the trader came back to me. My bargain seemed less a triumph. But, I told myself, this is still a magnificent possession, an object of vast prestige, and, if need be, an impregnable fortress.
Perhaps I could trick it again, at need. "I understand," I said, and left.
I saw Nefrete in her favored spots, sitting on the stone bench in the water garden, standing by the windows of blue glass that line the library, walking the turret bridges. She had little to say, and I kept my distance.