Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  TIME STREAMS

  ©1999 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Wizards of the Coast, Magic: The Gathering, their respective logos, and all character names and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  Cover art: Dave Dorman

  First Printing: April 1999

  eBook Publication: March 2018

  Original ISBN 9780786913442

  Ebook ISBN 9780786966417

  640-C5604000-001

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  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part I: School of Time

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II: Times Returning

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part III: Journeys

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part IV: Between Angels and Devils

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Urza says he’s sane. Perhaps he is. Measures of sanity among planeswalkers are hard to come by. He has lived for over three thousand years. He heals by merely willing it. With a thought, he steps from world to world to world. His very appearance is a matter of convenience, clothes and even features projected by his mind. How can conventional notions of sanity apply to a planeswalker?

  Perhaps they cannot, but his madness began before he was a planeswalker. Three thousand years ago, a mortal Urza battled his mortal brother. Their sibling rivalry turned fratricidal. So began the Brothers’ War. In his rage to kill Mishra, Urza enlisted the armies of the world, sank the isle of Argoth, gutted the continent of Terisiare, and wiped whole nations from the globe. He ushered in an ice age. In repayment for all this madness, he became a planeswalker.

  Urza says he regrets the destruction. True regret would be a good sign.

  It wasn’t regret that later sent Urza on his own private invasion of Phyrexia. It was revenge for his brother. Somehow, Urza convinced himself he hadn’t killed Mishra, that the Phyrexian Gix had done it. True, Gix seduced Mishra with promises of awesome power and in the end transformed him into a monstrous amalgam of flesh and artifice. But Urza was Mishra’s slayer. Not in his mind, though. In the mind of madness, Urza blamed Gix and plotted to get even. His motive was mad, and his invasion madder still. Urza attacked Phyrexia—one planeswalker against armies of demonic monstrosities. He lost, of course. He couldn’t defeat a whole world and was nearly torn to pieces trying.

  Tail between his legs, Urza retreated to Serra’s Realm, a place of angels and floating clouds. There he convalesced, but he never truly recovered. Madness still haunted him, and so did Phyrexia. Gix followed on his tail. No sooner had Urza left Serra’s Realm, thinking himself whole and hale, than Gix and his demons arrived. A war began in heaven. That place, like any other where Urza had chosen to dwell, was decimated. Centuries later, it is still shrinking in its long collapse.

  When I point out these mad indiscretions, Urza shrugs. He claims he regained his sanity after all that. He credits his newfound perspective to Xantcha and Ratepe—“two dear friends who sacrificed themselves to slay the demon Gix, close the portal to Phyrexia, and save my life. To them, I am forever grateful.”

  True gratitude would be a good sign, too.

  Urza has never, in his three millennia of life, shown true gratitude nor had a “dear friend.” I have known him for three decades. For two of those, I have worked side by side with him at the academy we established here on Tolaria. I am not his dear friend. No one is. Most of the tutors and students at the academy don’t even know his real name, calling him Master Malzra. The last person who was close enough to Urza to be a dear friend was his brother, and everyone knows what happened to him.

  No, Urza is incapable of regret and gratitude, of having dear friends, not that there haven’t been folk like Xantcha, Ratepe, Serra, and me, who genuinely love the man and would give our lives for him. But he seems incapable of returning our affection.

  That’s not enough to declare him insane, of course. As I said, measures of sanity among planeswalkers are hard to come by, but there is something mad about Urza’s blithe belief that Xantcha and Ratepe sacrificed themselves, that Serra’s Realm and Argoth sacrificed themselves, that Mishra sacrificed himself….It seems everyone and everything Urza claims to care about gets destroyed.

  And what does that mean for me, his newest dear friend?

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  Jhoira stood at the edge of her world. Behind her lay the isle of Tolaria, its palm forests and lecture halls overrun with magical prodigies and clockwork creatures. It was a realm of ceaseless tests and pointless trials and worries and work, lots of work.

  Before her lay the blue ocean, the blue sky, and the illimitable world. Clouds piled into empyrean mountain ranges above the shimmering sea. White waves broke on the ragged rocks below. Beyond the thin, brilliant line of the horizon, the whole world waited. Her soul mate was out there somewhere, she dreamed. Everything was out there—her homeland, her parents, her Shivan tribe, her future.

  Jhoira sighed and slouched down to sit on a sun-warmed shoulder of sandstone. Sea winds sent her long black hair dancing about her thin shoulders. Breezes coursed, warm and familiar, through her white student robes. She’d spent many hours in this sunny niche, her refuge from the academy, but lately the hideaway brought her as much sadness as joy.

  She’d been at the academy for eight years now, learning all she could of machines. A prodigy when she arrived, Jhoira was now a formidable artificer. She was also a woman, or at eighteen nearly so, and was weary of the school and the kids, of brimstone and machine oil. She was sick to death of artifice and illusion and wanted something real—someone real.

  Jhoira closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath of salty air into her lungs. Her soul mate would be tall and bronze-skinned, like the young Ghitu tribesmen back home—keen-eyed and strong. He would be smart, yes, but not like Teferi and the other boys who tried to get Jhoira’s attention through juvenile antics and unsubtle innuendoes. He would be a man,
and he would be mysterious. That was most important of all. She could not be in love with a man unless, at the core of his being, there was mystery.

  She opened her eyes and shifted her weight, one sandal sending up a puff of dust. “I’m a fool. There’s not a man like that in the world.” Even if there were, she’d never get to meet him, not while she was stuck on this blasted island.

  * * *

  Standing, the silver man awoke. He had moved before, had walked and spoken before. He had occupied this enormous body of metal, peered out of its silvery eyes, and lifted things in its massive hands. Before it had been always as if in a dream. Now he was awake. Now he was alive.

  The laboratory around him was bright and clean. Master Malzra liked it clean—clean but cluttered. One wall held hundreds of sketches and refinements of sketches, some in ink, some in lead, some in chalk. Another bristled with specialized implements—metal lathes, beam saws, injection molds, presses, rollers, bellows, drills. A third wall bore racks of cogs and struts and other mechanical castings. A fourth held ranks of assembled mechanisms. A fifth—very few of the school’s rooms were square—allowed egress into the room. In the center of the space, a great black forge rose. Its smokestack climbed up and away through the dome above. A second-floor gallery ringed the fringes of the room. Up in those balconies even now, young eyes peered down on the result of Master Malzra’s latest experiment. They peered down on the silver man.

  The silver man peered back. He felt frightened, awkward, shy. He wondered what they thought about him—wondered and cared in a way he never had before. Everything was like that. He had seen this laboratory many times before, but he never would have used terms like clean and cluttered and bright to describe it or the man who had created it. Now the silver man perceived more than just things. He perceived the organization of things, their disposition, and what they implied about their creator. The laboratory was a study in the mind of Master Malzra—ancient, obsessed, brilliant, tireless, preoccupied, short-sighted, grandiose….

  Master Malzra, meanwhile, studied him. The man’s gaze was penetrating. Folds of aged skin drew up skeptically beneath one eye. His nostrils flared, but he didn’t seem to breathe at all. One soot-blackened hand trembled slightly as he raised it to scratch his ash-blond beard. He swallowed, blinking—but with eyes like that, as hard and sharp as diamonds, it seemed he didn’t need to blink at all.

  “Any noticeable change in the probe’s energy profile, Barrin?” Malzra asked over his shoulder.

  It was a strange greeting. The silver man felt somewhat offended.

  “A reasonable enough question,” came the response—from Malzra’s second, a master mage. Barrin stepped from beside an injection mold. He wiped grit from his hands with a white cloth. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Malzra blinked again. “Ask whom?”

  “Ask him,” the mage repeated, quirking one corner of his mouth. “The probe.”

  Malzra pursed his lips. He nodded. “Probe, I am Master Malzra, your creator. I wish to know if you notice any change in your energy profile.”

  “I remember who you are,” responded the silver man. His voice was deep and resonant in his metal form. “And I notice a very definite change in my energy profile. I am awake.”

  A sibilance of voices came from the balcony.

  Malzra seemed almost to smile. “Ah, you are awake. Good. As you are doubtless aware, we’ve made some modifications to you, hoping to enhance your performance, your intellect, and your capacity for social integration.” He ground his teeth and could not seem to come out with anything else. Malzra glanced back to Barrin for help.

  The mage—lean, middle-aged in a white work smock—approached. He patted the silver man’s shoulder. “Hello. We’re glad you’ve woken up. How do you feel?”

  “Confused,” the silver man heard himself say, then in a voice of wonder, he went on. “Everything seems to have a new dimension. I am filled with conflicting information.”

  Barrin asked, “Conflicting information?”

  “Yes,” replied the silver man. “I sense, for example, that though Master Malzra is your superior in rank and age, he often defers to you due to his social disinclinations.”

  “Social disinclinations?” Barrin prompted.

  “He prefers the company of machines to that of people,” clarified the silver man.

  Titters of humor came from the gallery. Malzra’s expression darkened as he glanced up.

  The probe continued, “Even now, I perceive that my observation, though accurate, displeases Master Malzra, amuses the students, and embarrasses you.”

  Barrin flushed slightly. “True enough.” He turned to Malzra. “I could run some magical tests, but even without them, it’s clear the intellectual and emotional components of the implant are functioning.”

  “Only too well,” responded Malzra ruefully, to the delight of the watchers in the gallery. “Still, I would be just as glad for further tests of these components to occur outside of my company.”

  “In other words—?”

  “Send out the probe. Let it interact with the students. We can monitor its progress,” Malzra instructed.

  Barrin looked levelly at the probe. Wisdom and magic danced in the man’s brown eyes. “You heard what he said. Go out. Explore. Meet some people. Make some friends. We will recall you when we are ready for more experimentation.”

  The silver man acknowledged these instructions by moving toward the door. As he shuffled past lathes and drill presses, the probe marveled at the resentment he felt toward his creator. Malzra had referred to him as an “it.” Barrin had referred to him as “you.”

  As if reading his mind, Barrin approached the silver man and patted his shoulder once again. “You were right about Master Malzra’s ‘social disinclinations,’ that he likes machines better than people. What you didn’t seem to recognize is that he got flustered in dealing with you.”

  The silver man’s response was sullen. “I recognized that all too clearly.”

  “Yes,” Barrin said, “but that means he doesn’t think of you as a machine, not any longer. To him, you are becoming a person.”

  * * *

  As the probe and the students filed out of the laboratory, Barrin drew Urza to a wall of sketches. There, in diagrams of lead and ink, the silver man was detailed, inside and out.

  “Well, you were right,” Baffin said quietly. “Xantcha’s heart was the key. Her affective and intellectual cortexes must be intact, as you had thought. We can be thankful that none of her memories remain, or her personality—apparently. Still, I have to wonder about the wisdom of placing what amounts to a Phyrexian matrix into the head of your most powerful and advanced creation. I could have achieved the same effect with an animation spell—”

  The master waved off the comment. “I wanted to achieve sentience through purely mechanical means. Besides, there is nothing Phyrexian about the heart crystal anymore. There is not even anything of Xantcha left in it—just enough of a matrix to allow logical, emotional, and social learning.”

  Barrin winced slightly at the man’s choice of words. “Yes, well, that’s the other matter. What we’ve got here is no longer just a machine. You know it, and I know it. So does the probe. You gave him emotions. You need to acknowledge those emotions. You need to respect those emotions.” Only a blank stare answered him. “Don’t you see? This is not just a probe anymore. He is a man—no, more than that—he is a child. He’ll need to be guided, nurtured—”

  The master looked stern. “I wish you had brought this up before. We could have devised a rubric for handling this aspect of the probe’s development.”

  “That’s just it,” replied Barrin. “You can’t devise rubrics for this kind of thing. You can’t chart it out in blueprints. You have to stop thinking like an artificer and start thinking like a—well, like a father.”

  “I was an orphan at
twelve. Mishra and I both. We turned out all right.”

  The mage snorted just slightly at that. “If you wish, I will act as the probe’s mentor in your place, but in time you are going to need to create that bond yourself. And that will mean telling him who you really are—telling him he was created by Urza Planeswalker.”

  * * *

  Master Malzra’s laboratory had been daunting enough for the silver man and his new intellectual cortex. The corridors and spaces beyond the lab—tutorial rooms, lecture halls, surgical theaters, wind tunnels, test chambers, and countless more laboratories—were overwhelming. In gazing at these elaborate structures, the probe understood at last what a school was: a building designed to aid in gaining new knowledge, communicating it to others, and applying it in invention. This was a revelation. His creators needed to learn. They were not all-knowing angels, driven by logical necessity and an apprehension of the ascendant good. They were ignorant animals, ennobled only by their insatiable curiosity, and some were less ennobled than others.

  “I’m Teferi,” offered a boy who capered into the silver man’s path and stopped stock still, as if daring the half-ton creature to walk over him. “I’m the magical prodigy.” He followed the introduction with a snap of his fingers, sending blue sparks bursting through the air.

  The probe stopped in his tracks and crouched slightly to get a better look at the young scholar. Teferi’s face was small, dark, and impish. Tousled black hair jutted wildly about his gleaming eyes. He wore the manifold white robes of a Tolarian student. At his waist, a leather sash held his personal array of crystals, wands, and fetishes. His feet were bare, in defiance of school policy, though his toenails bore strange legends in bright, glossy paint. He held one of his hands out formally toward the probe.