Certainly he had spells when one emotion or the other predominated. The unavoidable sight of his beloved Home from her new “bridge” constructed from the abbreviated “battlement” made him sad. Gone were Salissa’s three great pagodalike structures, the apartments of the wing clans. Gone as well were her towering tripod masts and vast “wings,” or sails. All that, almost her very identity, her soul, had been demolished in the great Battle of Baalkpan. Salissa Home, or Big Sal as his human friends called her, had been altered forever by that cataclysmic day and night. She was not dead, however, and difficult as it sometimes seemed, he still believed he sensed a soul within the pounding, vibrating body beneath his feet. Salissa now had only a small offset superstructure and four large, equally offset funnels, venting gray smoke from her eight oil-fired boilers where once the Body of Home clan and her vast polta gardens and fish-drying racks occupied her main deck. She looked like nothing Keje had ever seen before—squat, in a way, but longer somehow, even though he knew she wasn’t.What Keje believed was still Salissa’s “soul”
