Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  “This is a time field distortion device,” Master Malzra explained. “It is powered by four separate sources of energy—thermal, mechanical, geomagnetic, and of course, Thran. The thermal component provides a molecular time clock, an exact measure of the temporal vector, calibrated in atomic vibration per second. The mechanical component rotates the unit about its axis, thus creating beneath the device a cone of radiation within which the temporal distortion will manifest. The geomagnetic component provides precise coordinates of longitude, latitude, and altitude for the origin and destination points. Thran powerstones, of course, provide the main drive of the machine.”

  The silver man wondered aloud, “What is this…machine?”

  “A time machine,” Barrin explained. “Actually, it provides travel through time and space both. Tonight we plan to test only the temporal components.”

  “You wish me to operate this machine?” the probe guessed.

  “We wish you to travel in it,” Master Malzra replied. “The current design plays havoc with biological creatures. Any organism with a heartbeat, respiration, a sequential digestive tract, and a network of neural pathways that rely on chemical reactions is ill-adapted to time-field distortions.”

  “They die,” Barrin explained. “Metals are much less susceptible to temporal stresses. Silver, of all metals, showed the least resistance. That is why you are made of silver. That is why you were made—to travel through the portal and report back what you have discovered.”

  The silver man approached the dangling device. His eyes traced out a circle on the floor beneath the massive machine. “Teferi told me about this. Every machine is made for a specific purpose. Every machine is made to defend you and the academy against…external foes.”

  Master Malzra’s eyebrows rose. “Teferi knows that much?”

  “Everyone seems to,” the silver man said.

  “Well, then—yes,” the artificer said. “This is part of that defense. You must not divulge the information we are relating to you—”

  “Of course not—”

  “We intend, in time, to send you or another probe or perhaps eventually a person back to the time of the Thran, to divert them from the path that led to these—external foes.”

  “Send me or another probe…” echoed the silver man, thinking of the fiery furnace, heaps of scrap metal, and workers with shovels.

  “This is all utterly secret, of course,” Malzra said.

  “Yes,” replied the silver man.

  “Tonight’s regression will be nothing so grand,” assured Barrin, apparently sensing the probe’s hesitancy. “If things go well, you will return in time perhaps as far back as this morning.”

  “What must I do?” the probe asked.

  “You must stand here, within the circle,” said Master Malzra. “That is all. You will stand and wait while the machine does its work. When the time regression slows, you must step from the circle to arrive in the former time. You will remain somewhat out of phase in the former time—you will be able to see your surroundings, but no one will be able to see you. This is to protect the time continuity. As the particles of your being gradually align themselves with your surroundings, this out-of-phase effect will lessen, and you will become visible. Whether in phase or out, you will be able to affect your environment, but we ask that you make no significant alterations, again for sake of temporal integrity. We will control your return trip from this end. When you are drawn back to the present, you will make a report of what you have discovered. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” the silver man said flatly. “It is my purpose. It is why I was made.”

  Barrin eyed the silver golem narrowly and shook his head. He turned to Malzra and spoke quietly in his ear. “I don’t like it. He’s been traumatized by Teferi.”

  Malzra laughed quietly. “You are traumatized by Teferi.”

  “His emotional cortex is too new.”

  “He exhibits the correct emotional response to Teferi.”

  “I tell you, I don’t like it.”

  “He understands. He knows this is the reason he was made.”

  “What if he meddles in the time stream?”

  “Then we’ll draw him back through, and we’ll know he isn’t sufficient to the task.”

  The silver man stood silent while the men spoke, his acute senses picking up every word.

  “I understand you are eager, Malzra, but we have time. If our experiments work, we’ll have all the time in the world. Testing a living creature is not like testing a machine. You can’t just dismantle a creature, insert new parts, and start him up again—”

  “On the contrary, that’s what we did just this morning,” Malzra finished, turning away from his associate. With a curt gesture, he said to the silver man, “Into the circle then. The power-up phase will take us a few moments.”

  Wordless, the probe stepped into the circle and stood. He could feel the silent, magnificent weight of the time machine hanging above his head. From the precise center of the floor, he watched Malzra and Barrin.

  Barrin used the same hooked pole to trigger a hidden panel in the floor. A trefoil section of stone shifted aside, and an array of consoles rose into the room. Copper coils and pulsing tubes spilled from beneath the control panels. Barrin checked the various conduits where they connected with the floor. Malzra meanwhile worked adjustments to levers and switches.

  Fluids began to move through the tubes. A low hum started among the great glass cylinders. Brass fittings buzzed. Even the dome itself rumbled with the mounting sound.

  A high-pitched whine rose to echo through the lab, and a thin red beam stabbed from the base of the machine. It lanced through the charged air, just past the silver man’s shoulder, and neatly struck the circle scribed on the floor. The ray fluttered a moment before sweeping in an arc. It looped the golem once and sped in its course. In moments, the single spinning beam had widened into a crimson cone that enveloped him.

  The silver man stood there, bathed in lurid light, watching his creators. The men were busy at their consoles, drawing up one energy source and leveling off another, directing the beam in its spiraling crescendo, configuring the coordinates of space and time….Light intensified. The artificers’ endeavors slowed. The whining hum reached a peak. Master Malzra and Barrin soon moved not at all, frozen in space…or time.

  The probe understood. The roaring machine and its whirring cone of light had teased the cord of time down to a frayed nub, and then to nothing. With rising fury, the device plucked at the packed skein of past moments. They too began to unravel. No longer motionless, Master Malzra and Barrin moved backward, undoing all they had done. Their arms darted with strange jabs like scorpion tails. More than that, the silver man also moved, or his past self moved. It trudged backward out of the circle just as he had trudged forward into it, only minutes before.

  Within the cone of regression, the present-time silver man watched in amazement. His doppelganger conferred with Malzra and Barrin. Their words were lost to the hum of the machine, but the sense of them was clear—reversed syllables that did not inform or enlighten but rather disinformed and obscured. All the while they spoke, the ghost golem knew less and less, and the ghost time machine retracted into the dome above. When the brief conference was done, the past-time golem staggered backward toward the door, ignorant of the hidden machine and all that had been said.

  The regression accelerated. Barrin and Malzra scuttled backward about the room, dismantling things, forgetting conversations, reducing conclusions to hypotheses, surrendering step by step the whole march of time. Soon they moved too quickly to seem anything but man-shaped blurs, then were gone entirely. The lab was dark and empty for some time, except the occasional jag of a mouse backing fitfully across the floor.

  Eventually the two scholars returned, drawing after them a backwash of assistants and tutors. The galleries abo
ve flooded with eager, watchful eyes. The past-time golem trudged backward into the midst of it all. His return was heralded by nodding heads and hands coming sharply away from each other, drawing a brittle ovation from the air. The artificers themselves formed a retreating pocket of space into which the golem walked. He reached a designated spot and settled into immense inertia. There was another time of questions.

  Malzra, with a suddenness that seemed almost savage, reached toward the probe’s neck, performed some quick manipulation, and shoved the creature’s head back on its shoulders. In a moment more, he lifted the metal skull-piece cleanly away.

  Within the time machine, the silver man stared, stunned to see his own being so quickly and easily dismantled. The body yet stood, though the casing of the head lay now, as if discarded, on a side table. The inner workings of the golem’s head were laid bare. Cogs and cables gleamed beneath a low set of struts. Light leaked through the whole mass. Malzra was busy tugging at a central silver case, the movements of his fingers awakening twitches in the creature’s vivisected frame. Another two jiggles and Malzra drew forth the case. He opened it. Inside lay a dark stone the size of a child’s fist. He removed the crystal. All final signs of life fled the creature.

  The silver man watched in amazed dread as Malzra held high the stone. Gulping backward laughter came from the gallery. Malzra shouted something that ended the jollity and retreated to a table where he positioned the stone in a metal case.

  The students in the gallery began to move. Malzra and Barrin busied themselves setting tools into cases and rubbing smears of oil from rags onto their hands. As the room slowly emptied, the dissected golem merely stood, lifeless and headless in the midst of it all.

  The regression slowed. The time-traveling silver man’s hulk smoldered—heat from temporal stress. He stepped from the coruscating beam. Around him time resumed its forward march. The students headed back into the gallery. The scholars unpacked their tools and wiped their hands clean.

  Out of phase and unnoticed by them all, the silver man approached his headless predecessor. He stared into the vacant silver case jutting from the golem’s neck. He reached up to his own neck, wondering where the catch was that would allow his skull-piece to be lifted away. His mind, his emotion, his very essence could be hauled up like a hunk of coal and displayed. He was a mere amusement for children. They had called him friend, but in truth he was only Shovelhead. Without that dark stone, he was not even that. The silver man stared into the undeniable image of his own death.

  The regression was done. He was suddenly yanked from the time stream and back again, bathed in that rapacious red glow. Master Malzra summoned him to the present.

  The silver man arrived. The beam skittered and danced away, withdrawing into the machine overhead. It too withdrew, trailing gray tendrils of smoke from the temporal stress it had endured.

  Barrin and Malzra stood, blinking, at their consoles. Tentative, the two scholars released the controls beneath their fingers and approached the probe.

  Barrin spoke first. “Are you well—?”

  “Are you capable of rendering a report?” Malzra interrupted.

  “My frame is quite hot,” the silver man responded, “but I am capable, yes.”

  “How far back did you go?” Malzra asked.

  “Back to this morning, to the time of my awakening.”

  “Excellent,” Malzra said as Barrin noted the response on a sheet of paper. “And did you touch or move anything in that time?”

  “I touched only the floor, with my feet, and moved only myself.”

  “Were you approached by anyone, or was there any other indication that your presence was noted?”

  “No.”

  “What did you observe?”

  This answer would not come as readily as the others.

  “I observed myself dismantled. I observed the core of my being removed. I observed the small, dark, fragile thing that is my mind and self and soul.”

  Monologue

  The first day of life is always the hardest, to be dragged from whatever warm, safe womb in which one is conceived and then thrust into the cold glare of the world. There is much to adjust to—breathing air instead of liquid, for one; being naked and prodded and scrubbed, for another. Worst of all, there is that moment when the cord is cut, and one is suddenly and irrevocably alone.

  It is in recognition of such traumas that mothers’ arms are made.

  You have no mother. You have no father, either. You have a pair of creators, but that is not the same. Neither of us knows how to comfort and protect you. If you need too much nurturing, we may even consider you defective. Perhaps it is because you were designed to be a tool, a weapon—not a person. Perhaps it is because we have not expected to have to save you. We were hoping you would save us.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  It had been nearly a month since Jhoira had observed the lab session in which the silver man awoke. She could remember each detail of Master Malzra’s technique. She’d spent the intervening time studying powerstones, like the one placed in the golem’s head, and poring over the artifact’s design sketches. All of it was preparation for the design debrief she would be required to give. It was the price paid by all the elite students invited to observe the procedure. There remained only one more task before she was ready to write her report—actually interviewing the machine.

  She sighed with dread and tapped her fingers idly on the plans. She had hoped to derive a satisfactory description of the golem’s intellectual and emotional performance from these plans, her research on Thran powerstones, and first-hand observation of the refit. None of these things explained its—his—apparent logical and affective capacities though. She would have to interview him.

  Jhoira glanced in surrender at the ceiling of her dormitory cell. Interviewing the machine meant winning past his self-appointed wrangler, Teferi. The boy—and at fourteen, he was only a boy—was one part prodigy, one part prankster, and one part pervert. Unfortunately all three parts were madly infatuated with Jhoira. She had done her best to discourage his advances, but he didn’t notice subtle rebukes, and he considered unsubtle ones only affectionate horseplay. If she told him she wasn’t interested, he would pledge to make her interested. If she said she hated him, he would respond that hate and love were only a hair’s breadth apart—and speaking of hair’s breadths, could he have a breadth of hers? She had the inkling that he had made several attempts to devise a magical love potion to win her over.

  Just thinking about the young man—the boy, he was only a boy—exasperated Jhoira. She stood up from her desk and paced the small, spare room she occupied in the academy. If only Teferi could glimpse a real man, could glimpse the man she had found at the seaside and had provisioned and kept secret in her stony hideaway…No. Nobody could know about Kerrick except for her. That’s the way it was and the way it should be. Jhoira sat down on her cot and stared out the window of her cell. Beyond the pitching treetops and the tumbled boulders lay the shore and her secret love.

  She shook her head to clear it. The sooner she interviewed the silver man, the sooner she could finish her report, and the sooner she could rejoin Kerrick. Snatching up a sheaf of paper and a lead nib, Jhoira made her way through the door and out into the academy to hunt down the silver man.

  She found him in the great hall, crouching to sit on a stump that had been hauled in specifically for him after he had broken three of the academy’s benches. He looked dejected, hunkered down at the end of a table. Teferi held court beside him, and a passel of the prodigy’s devotees clustered in a laughing bunch around. Carrots were on the menu today, and Teferi had discovered that by levitating them into various holes in the golem’s skull, he could create comical ears and a long twisted nose. To these alterations came others—oily lettuce in an improvised head of hair, and large, bulging eyes made of hard biscuits rammed into the machine’
s eye sockets.

  Jhoira shook her head as she approached. If reports were right, this machine was fully aware. He knew what was being done to him, and he cared.

  “Does Master Malzra know what you are doing, Teferi?”

  The boy looked up, his impish features lighting up when he caught sight of her. “Hello, Jhoira! Have you met Arty Shovelhead?”

  “Does Master Malzra know what you are doing?” she repeated angrily.

  The fourteen-year-old affected a smug superiority. He nodded toward the mirrored loft where Malzra and Barrin often took their lunch. “Master Malzra is keenly interested in all of my adventures. I’m Barrin’s magical prodigy. Of course they know what I am doing.”

  “This artifact creature is self-aware, Teferi. He thinks. He has feelings. You can’t just toy with him like this.”

  “I can, and I do,” replied Teferi. He levitated a pair of radishes to make them hover like earrings on either side of the golem’s head. “What fun is it to toy with someone who doesn’t have thoughts and feelings?”

  Exasperated, Jhoira flung out her hands. “Anyway, I need to interview him.”

  Teferi smiled. “Go right ahead. I’m his interpreter—right, Shovelhead?”

  Behind his mask of biscuits and carrots, the silver man remained silent.

  Reaching out distastefully, Jhoira drew a dripping leaf of lettuce from the creature’s head, slug-trails of salad oil glistening across his shiny brow. “Did you ever think you might be damaging him, might be destroying him? This is sensitive machinery.”

  “Master Malzra wants it tested,” Teferi replied glibly. He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back on the bench. “I’m just giving it a rigorous exam. If you’re jealous, I could arrange a rigorous exam for you, back in my cell.” His friends chorused a thrilled oooh at the suggestion.

  Jhoira flushed. “I’m not interested in little boys—” she countered, savagely knocking the biscuits from the silver man’s face. The golem sent her a look of lost misery. “—not interested in tiny, mean, little boys who cut the eyes out of sparrows and stomp roses into the ground and empty their bladders on anything beautiful and good. That’s what you are, Teferi—you’re not even a nasty little boy, but an infant who can’t control his own body, can’t recognize anybody else as real, can’t do anything but whine and cry and soil yourself and everybody around you. You’re going to have to do lots of growing up before you’ll be anything more than a squalling baby.” Jhoira punctuated this tirade by yanking forth the variously placed carrots. Teferi was silent. His face grew pale, as though the flush of Jhoira’s features sucked the color out of his. By the time she was finished, his lip was quivering. His eyes were as wide and staring as the biscuits on the floor.