Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Jhoira reached down, gently, regally, and took the silver man’s hand. “Let’s go. I have a lot of questions to ask you.”

  The probe rose, as though his half-ton bulk could have been lifted by her one slender hand. Looking back over his shoulder, the silver man followed Jhoira, dejection and confusion in his bowed shoulders.

  * * *

  Barrin was nettled. He let go of the rail that overlooked the great room and paced in front of it. Through a one-way glass enchanted by the mage himself, they had both witnessed the incident with the carrots and biscuits—and hundreds of other pranks Teferi had played on the hapless golem. These occasions seemed only to mildly amuse Urza. They made Barrin furious.

  “I can’t understand why you allow it!” he stormed. “Here is the first truly living artifact creature you have created, and yet you surrender him to the depredations of that…that vulture!”

  “Living things have to live, Barrin,” Urza said calmly. “If Teferi breaks down the probe, we’ll know it needs to be redesigned.”

  “Breaks down? Redesigned?” Barrin raged. “That’s not what you do with living things. They have to live—as you said. This golem of yours is only a month old. Give him time—”

  “Time is all I give him. We’ll attempt another regression at the end of this month,” Urza said, heading toward the chamber door.

  “Meanwhile,” said Barrin grimly, “I’m going to ask Jhoira to look after him, to keep him away from Teferi. I really don’t understand why you refuse to let me expel that troublemaker.”

  Urza turned back in the open doorway. “I keep him here because he is a magical genius—driven and destined to greatness. He may be a social nuisance, yes, but I was one, too.”

  “You still are,” Barrin observed tartly, “but Teferi’s more than a nuisance. Jhoira said it best. He’s selfish. He’s dangerous. He hurts people without thought or apology. He takes no responsibility for his actions. I don’t care about his potential. Until he grows up, he will leave a path of destruction in his wake.”

  “You have said the same of me before.” Urza blinked, considering. “Yes, I keep Teferi here because he reminds me of me.”

  * * *

  Jhoira ushered the silver man into her room. He had to turn sideways to fit through the arched doorway, and once within, merely stood there, as stiff and fearful as an adolescent boy.

  “It’s all right. I’m not going to bite,” Jhoira assured him. She gestured the golem in so that she could swing the door closed behind him.

  The click of the latch made the room feel even smaller. Despite his stooped shoulders and silent demeanor, the probe seemed especially massive in that moment.

  Jhoira skirted around him and busied herself tidying the room. “It’s not much, I know, but it’s all I need and private.” She snatched up a conspicuous undergarment and secreted it within a basket in one corner. “Here’s my bed,” she continued, nervously straightening the slate-gray blanket on it and fluffing the pillow, as though she expected the silver man to lie down on it. “Here’s where I keep my clothes—the student robes hanging in that bone-inlaid wardrobe there, and my knockabout clothes here in this drawer. That’s one drawback to being made of skin. You’ve got to cover it all the time.”

  That felt forced. Jhoira reminded herself this was a man of metal, no more interested in her undergarments than a doorknob would be.

  “Here. Here’s something you’ll like.” She reached up to a low shelf above her drafting desk and drew down a small metal pendant. It was fashioned to resemble a lizard-man dressed in heavy robes. “This is from my homeland, Shiv. It’s metal—not just metal, but Viashino metal. That’s some of the hardest stuff in the world.” Unthinking, she tossed the trinket to the golem.

  One massive hand snatched the item from the air—the first movement the golem had made since settling into stillness. He stared down at it. “It is hard,” he agreed in a voice like the distant rumble of a waterfall. “It scratched me.”

  Jhoira’s brow furrowed. She crossed the floor to look. Two small scratches marked the silver man’s palm. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. Let me get something for—” She broke into laughter, backed up, and slumped onto the bed.

  The silver man leaned forward. “What is it? Did I say something stupid?”

  “No, no,” Jhoira assured. “I did. It’s me. If one of my other friends had gotten scratched, I’d have pressed a rag on it to stop the bleeding, but you can’t bleed. Still, I was going to get a rag.”

  “One of your other friends—?” the golem echoed.

  “Oh, I’m just nervous. I don’t know why.” She sat up soberly on the bed. “I don’t really have a lot of friends. I don’t usually let anybody else in here, and I know you’re just a machine, but you seem so real, so much like a person.”

  “So much like a person—”

  She shook her head and fetched a rag from among her drafting supplies. “Still, you could use one of these. I’ve been going on and on, and there you stand, vinegar dripping from your head.” Flipping the rag in one hand, she walked to the golem and began wiping away the liquid. “You know, in my tribe back home in Shiv, they put oil on somebody’s head to honor him. It’s called anointing. Ghitu do it when you are born, and when you set out on a vision quest, and when you need healing, and when you’ve just been saved from death.” She patiently daubed away the streams of liquid and polished the creature’s shiny pate.

  “Maybe that’s what happened to me,” said the silver man. “Maybe I’ve just been anointed.”

  “You’re lucky it was just oil and vinegar. Knowing Teferi, it could have been something much worse.”

  “It wasn’t Teferi who anointed me,” the silver man rumbled. “It wasn’t Teferi who saw that I needed healing.”

  Jhoira smiled sadly, wiping the last of the oil away. She gestured at the pendant. “You can keep it. They’re supposed to be lucky. They’re good to have with you on a vision quest.” She wiped her hands on another cloth and tossed both into the basket in the corner. “Anyway, I’m doing a treatise on you, and I have some questions—if you don’t mind?”

  The silver man said solemnly, “You are the first person to ask whether I minded anything.”

  Jhoira nodded distractedly. She drew a large folio of sketches from beneath her drafting table and selected a number of rattling sheets from it. She spread them out on the workspace.

  “These are drawings of me,” observed the golem.

  “Yes. This is the final set of plans for you before the powerstone was implanted—front, back, left, right, top, and bottom views. There’s a detail of your torso. You’ve got lots of room in there. And here’s your head,” she said as she pointed to each matrix of gray lines and gear-work.

  “This legend names me only ‘PROBE 1,’” the golem indicated.

  “Yes,” responded Jhoira. “Master Malzra is not very imaginative when it comes to names. Still, it’s a better name than Arty Shovelhead.”

  One of the golem’s massive fingers traced out a bracket that indicated the whole frame of the construct. Beside it was a callout that said simply, “KARN.”

  “I like this name better. What does it mean?”

  Jhoira looked up from the sketch. Her eyes narrowed intently as she studied the golem’s gleaming features. “That’s Old Thran. I don’t know much of the language—even Master Malzra doesn’t know much of it—but I know that word. It means ‘mighty.’”

  “Karn,” the golem repeated thoughtfully.

  Jhoira smiled again. “Yes. That’s a good name. That’s your name. Karn.” She turned back to the table. “Now these sketches on this side show the powerstone and its integration into the superstructure. The point of my treatise is to explain how an automaton becomes a thinking, feeling creature, simply through the addition of a crystal. I haven’t been able to figure it out by looking at these diagrams, even by watching t
he operation. I can’t imagine how a powerstone—especially one that looked dead, like the one inside you—could give a creature thought and life and soul.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t a powerstone,” offered Karn quietly.

  “Not a powerstone?” Jhoira wondered. “Then what would it be?”

  “I don’t know, but without it, I am nothing,” Karn observed. “I’ve seen myself without it. I’m just a pile of metal.”

  “Seen yourself?” Jhoira asked. She turned toward the silver man and took his hand conspiratorially. “Karn, just what is it they have you do in there? I know Master Malzra has been running secret experiments with you at the center of them. He’s been building some kind of big machine—I’ve worked on parts of it—but none of us can guess what it does. And there’s been something strange about the school since you arrived, something about the air. It feels like waves moving through a tidal pool or something. Do these experiments have anything to do with that?”

  An insistent knock came at the door.

  Jhoira’s face hardened. “It’s Teferi, the little rat.” Then, to the door, “Just a moment.”

  The knock came again. “It’s Mage Barrin. I’ve come for the probe. And I have a request to make of you, Jhoira.”

  Jhoira hurried to the door, opened it, and bowed slightly. “We were just in the middle of an interview, but we can talk later. Would you mind, Karn?”

  “Not at all,” replied the silver man, “I would like that.” He turned sideways to slide out the arched doorway.

  Barrin backed up to make room. “Karn?”

  “Yes,” responded Jhoira. “That’s his name. What was your request?’

  * * *

  Night drew down around Tolaria. The dying sun burnished rooftops of blue tile, giving them a bronze patina. The Glimmer Moon peered palely over the treetops. Hot, dense breaks of jungle chittered with the final choruses of day birds, and night birds raised their first ululating songs. White waves along the shore glowed golden over burgundy seas. Throughout the afternoon, a hot, still column of air had stood upon the isle, but now, before evening breezes, it shifted and uncoiled until trees and students and all shivered in relief.

  Jhoira was among them. She crouched in the shadowy lee of the academy’s eastern wall, breathing slowly. The culvert where she lurked had been designed as runoff for garderobes, but the building it served became a lab instead of a dorm. A series of grates fastened into the passage and a main sluice gate were meant to secure the passage against invaders. Jhoira first noticed the unused duct in plans of the buildings; she had quite an eye for details on a page. The prospect of having her own entrance and exit to the academy had been enticing. It would allow her to skirt strict curfews. She didn’t actually remove the bolts until she had devised replacements that would hold the passage secure to all but her. She was not selfish enough to jeopardize the security of the whole school for the sake of her own private amusements.

  Private amusements. She smiled. Kerrick would have been flattered by the title. Their liaison had lasted for two months—surely more than a passing amusement.

  Before she reached him, Jhoira had to slip past the guards, both human and clockwork. They would be more vigilant now in the shifting air than they had been in the hot, still afternoon. She dared not open the grate until she heard her friend above….

  “There it is again!” one of the men shouted overhead. “Look out!”

  “Damned bird!” cursed another.

  “Bird, my eye,” a third yelled. “They make them in there. They’re wind up toys.”

  She heard her shrieking toy bird dive and harry the men on the wall. It was a simple construction, weighing the equal of two pieces of paper, but it was fast and shrill. She’d discovered the plans in some ancient designs by none other than Tawnos, legendary assistant to legendary Urza. It didn’t matter who actually designed the feathery flying machines. It mattered only that she could make them easily and—

  “Arghh! It’s in my hair!”

  “Bash it with a glaive!”

  “No! It’s in my hair, damn it!”

  “Hold still!”

  “They banned the things. They circulated a memo! That’s what they said! Let them guard up here and get these damned things stuck in their—”

  The little mechanical birds were as adept at mischief as Teferi himself. During the next exclamation, Jhoira swung the grate outward, rolled from the sluice, closed the metal, set her special pins, and crawled away into the underbrush. There, breathless, she paused. There was a hammering noise above and the sickly flapping of ruined wings. Someone stomped a final time, and there was silence. Then—

  “See, it’s not a real bird at all. See where the quills are folded into this paper loop? And here, this hard part? That’s what smells your sweat. They make these things to dive on us! The twerps are too young, too pasty-faced and frail, to sweat.”

  “If I ever catch the little prodigy that’s making these—”

  “He’s watching us right now, I’ll wager.”

  “There! There! That’s what I do to your invention, you little twerp!”

  Jhoira tried not to giggle as she made her way through the dense forest. She knew the path perfectly. It was narrow and shaded, exposed only after the hillsides below the western bank. She moved without breaking twigs or tearing leaves. They were her allies in this deception. As long as no one found the forest path, no one would find the rocky niche she kept above the shifting sea. As long as no one discovered the rocky niche, no one would know about Kerrick.

  In an hour’s time, she topped the final shoulder of parched earth above the niche. Already the sun had quit the sky. A russet blanket of clouds covered the world. The hooded lantern she had brought to the spot glinted faintly through a crevice. Peering through the crack, she saw the bookshelf Kerrick had improvised from stones and flat slabs of driftwood. The shelf burgeoned with volumes on loan from the academy: Kerrick was an avid reader. He had little else to do during his days and said he hoped to gain enough knowledge of artifice that he could apply for admittance. He was a good reader, a better trapper, and a superior cook. Even now, Jhoira could smell the savory aroma of salt-marsh hare sizzling on a skillet. Kerrick had dressed the creature with wild spearmint and scallions. Jhoira’s knees melted.

  What the academy served could not even be considered food next to fare like that.

  Drawn by those aromas, Jhoira tiptoed around the corner. Beside the sizzling skillet was a pair of slim, bronzed feet crossed over each other. As she approached, she saw the long, muscular legs attached to those feet, the man’s ragged trousers, his tattered shift, his strong hands, clutching yet another book. Then there was his handsome face, his beautiful golden curls. Jhoira’s knees melted again.

  What the academy had to offer could not even be considered manhood next to fare like this.

  He looked up, saw her, and smiled.

  Jhoira leaped into his lap and wrapped him in eager arms and kisses. “I’ve been waiting all day to see you.”

  Laughter danced in his eyes. “Rotten day?”

  “You have no idea,” she said between kisses. “There’s a little tyrant prig who thinks his job is making everyone miserable—”

  “Yes, Teferi,” Kerrick replied.

  “I’ve mentioned him before?”

  “Often,” Kerrick said. “You’ve said he has a crush on you, but you’re the one always talking about him.”

  “He’s a child!” she replied indignantly. “I talk about him like I would talk about a goblin infestation.”

  Kerrick shrugged. He shifted toward the fire to turn the hare meat, and Jhoira caught a whiff of his musky scent. It was not the reek of worry but the strong animal smell of a man who works beneath the sun.

  Over his shoulder, the man said idly, “Teferi seems one of your only friends.”

  “Oh?” Jhoira repli
ed archly. “I spend too much time out here to have any other friends. And I don’t hear you complaining.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Besides, I have made a new friend. He’s stronger than you, taller than you, younger than you, more polite…definitely more polite.”

  A delicious flash of jealousy showed in Kerrick’s eyes. “Then why are you here?”

  “He’s a machine!” Jhoira said, rolling the man into another embrace. “He’s a thinking, feeling machine, and I think he also has a crush on me.”

  “Really?” Kerrick replied. “Is the feeling mutual?”

  “It is,” Jhoira teased brightly, “and a little jealousy will do you some good. You’ve gotten quite comfortable living here in my secret place.”

  “Stronger than me, taller than me, younger than me? If you want me to be really jealous, bring out the plans so I can obsess over them.”

  “You’ll have them tomorrow—if you return your overdue books,” said Jhoira. “Now, come back over here. Those steaks need another few moments, and so do I.” She dragged him with her onto the pallet and drew the scent of him and sizzling steaks into her chest.