Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Ah, she could put up with a hundred Teferis as long as she had her escape route, her paper birds, and her wild, secret love.

  Monologue

  What does Urza see in Teferi? The little monster is nothing like Urza at any age. For one thing, Teferi has a sense of humor. That is perhaps his only redeeming trait—aside from his undeniable brilliance. Still, Teferi uses his brilliance only to tear things apart, not to build them up. Urza has always been a builder and a serious one.

  On the other hand, Urza’s creations—his clockwork men, his war towers, his powder bombs and power armor—have always been used to destroy. The sum of Urza’s constant creation is always destruction. Ironic, isn’t it?

  Do I dare to hope that, in the end, Teferi’s constant destruction will bring about a new creation?

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  Karn stood in the whirling red beam. Overhead, Malzra’s machine turned back the tide of time. It was Karn’s third trial in as many months. Each test reached only hours farther back in time. Each produced greater temporal stress across his frame. The current envelope was a regression of eighteen hours, beyond which lay almost certain meltdown.

  Karn told himself he should be getting used to the vertiginous moment when the gear-work of the universe ground to a halt and then began slowly to turn backward. There was an instant of spinning wheels and whines of protest before time’s conveyor reversed. Then came a sudden acceleration: Barrin and Malzra were freed from their immobility. An alien physics took hold. Effect became cause, memories became prophecies, and silver men were disassembled to gulping laughter.

  Now as the spool of time rewound, space shifted as well. Within his red cone of light, Karn slid slowly sideways. He jittered through steel engines and furnace casings, his physical form out of phase with the atomic synchronicity around him. In moments, he slipped past the laboratory wall and out into the corridor. He saw himself strolling backward down the hall beside Jhoira. She had accompanied him to the lab, talking of her volcanic home island and how she missed her tribe.

  Jhoira and Karn had become fast friends in the last months. She was a mental giant, and he a metal one. Whenever Karn was not in the lab and Jhoira was not studying or sleeping, the two were together. She had taught him to skip stones, which he could do with rocks the size of bread loaves. He had let her ride on his back as he climbed the eastern pinnacles. From the top of the jutting stones, they had seen ships so distant that only their topsails showed above the horizon. Jhoira had shared with Karn her many impressive clockwork inventions—toy birds and frogs and leafhoppers—and fixed a finger servo that had burned out after one of his secret tests. He had borrowed her drafting tools one evening when she fell asleep mid-conversation and had drawn a crudely elegant portrait of her. Best of all, they had made a home for each other, a refuge from the grueling rigors of their posts at the academy—and from the depredations of a certain fourteen-year-old menace.

  Karn and his pool of red light drifted out the other side of the corridor. He moved through a set of tutorial rooms. Some were dark and vacant. Others were crowded with tutors, students, and artifact constructs. Many of these structures were basic forms meant to teach the principles of artifice to young scholars. More advanced devices could make beds, tie bootlaces, or scuttle like cockroaches. The most mobile of these creations were used by some of the senior students in elaborate off-hours stakes races. Some elite machines were designed to slither into the cells of opposite-sex students to spy for their makers. For every such offensive device, there were three defensive ones that could detect, disable, or outright destroy the offender. The highest-level creations, though—the sort Jhoira spent her days designing and building—were complex components for Master Malzra’s time-travel device. He had dozens of his oldest and most promising students working on the project, though none of them knew the ultimate end of the devices they designed.

  Onward went the time traveler in his vessel of light. He saw into lecture halls, slid through a sleeping student lying sick and alone in her cell, tore past a pyrotechnic display on the properties of coal dust, and drifted through Malzra’s private study. Books and models lined the walls, diagrams and studies hung on stands. In their midst, across a table piled with ancient manuscripts, Barrin and Malzra argued heatedly.

  Karn drifted beyond those walls as well. He emerged into early morning in the academy’s gardens and passed the twelve-foot-thick outer wall, then he moved through forests. Leaves twirled in odd backward spirals to sucking winds. The sun retreated to disappear below the horizon. Through a vast and settling darkness, Karn glided out toward the distant western shore. It was a place he and Jhoira never explored on their rambles, keeping themselves to the pinnacles and the east. Karn slid through tree trunks and boulders, even long low shoulders of earth at the edge of the island. Afterward, the ground fell away. A series of rough steppes rambled down to the sea.

  In what seemed mere moments, the foamy verge of ocean passed some fifty feet beneath Karn’s dangling feet. The water seemed to boil, ever receding from the toothy shore. He floated outward. Morning deepened into night. The Glimmer Moon quit the sky. Black midnight shimmered with twilight.

  He was hot. He was nearing the edge of the envelope, eighteen hours back and five miles in space. The plan had been for Malzra and Barrin to monitor the temporal stresses on the portal device and recall Karn before he reached meltdown. That wasn’t happening. Already his silver chest plates ground against each other in feverish expansion.

  Still he drifted outward—

  The red pool of light suddenly shimmered out of existence around him. Flailing to stay upright, Karn plunged, as massive and hot as a meteor. Overhead, the sky was starry but moonless. The ocean below was black with night and deep. It roared up to meet him. Flecked waves seized his legs, sent jets of steam from the golem’s sizzling hide, and dragged him under. For several long moments Karn was enveloped in a fine cloud of steam bubbles, and then he slipped down out of the foamy stuff and sank through cold, viscous dark. Sandy silt sifted up around him, and then his feet struck the benthos at the bottom.

  For a few moments he simply stood there feeling salt water wriggling past all his plates and into the interior spaces of his being. Surely they would recall him now. He needed only to wait. Still, with each creeping moment, he felt his temporal displacement draining away. He would soon be in phase with the particles of this time continuum, solid and seeable to anyone who might look. Best not to give anyone a chance. He would remain where he was until recalled.

  An hour passed. The last pockets of air in him had seeped out and escaped to the surface some fifty feet above. He’d been bumped three times by an inquisitive serpent and had given up hope of being automatically recalled. Perhaps he was out of range. He would have to find his own way out.

  Luckily, among his capacities were an internal clock, compass, and sextant—not that he could see any stars. Even so, with the various improvements Malzra had made to all these systems, Karn had an almost foolproof direction sense. He set out, slogging toward the island.

  It took longer than he had anticipated. There were numerous submerged sandbars to climb and other pits to descend into. There was also a coral reef that was too fragile to climb over and too extensive to circumnavigate. He ended up having to smash through, the sharp animal accretions scarring his silvery knuckles.

  It was midnight when his head finally cleared the water. Constellations spangled the sky over the black island. In the extreme distance, the academy glowed, a collection of ivory jewel boxes. Within those walls, his other self, his historic self, would be spending the night in voluntary deactivation. Within those walls, Jhoira and Teferi slept, and Malzra and Barrin no doubt pondered the upcoming spatial-temporal trial. The wrapping walls of that school held everything in the world to Karn, and the rest of the island was dark—

  Save for that one dim glint near the brow of the sea cliff. The
light was so small he had first taken it to be a distant star. Marking its position, Karn emerged from the water and strode up the sloping shore. Water disgorged itself by the gallon from his sloshing innards. He stood and let the purge continue.

  What about that light? No one was allowed beyond the walls after dark. Who could be in that niche?

  Karn climbed. The rocky cliff side before him was all too easy to ascend after the dragging depths of the sea. In sliding, scraping moments, he had reached the peak. Ahead, in a deep, narrow cleft of stone, the light shone tepidly forth. Karn strode toward it.

  It suddenly went out.

  He paused, allowing his eyes to adjust to the starry darkness. Something moved in that space—something warm. Karn made out a peering, squinting face and the glint of stars from a small, steel blade. The figure withdrew again into the cave. Karn started forward, his massive feet grinding quietly over the gravel-covered ground.

  The person in the cave reappeared, hoisting a curved stick. There came a thrumming sound. Something—a crude arrow—darted swiftly out to strike Karn’s hide. Metal rang with the sound of stone cracking. A shattered shaft tumbled away to one side.

  A hostile act. A caveman living on the edge of Tolaria. An intruder.

  Karn set his jaw and marched toward the cave. Two more arrows struck the golem and cracked off into the rocks. He came on, furious. The man abandoned his bow for a large, stone-tipped club. He bounced it in his hand, growled out a wordless warning, and squinted into the night.

  Karn strode to the figure and swiped out to capture him, but the man was too fast, spinning from his grasp. The club descended. Its stone tip shattered and sprayed outward. The hardwood handle jangled in the man’s grasp. Karn whirled. He caught the man with the back of one hand and flung him to the ground. The body sprawled against an outcrop of rock and lay still.

  Light flared to Karn’s side. He spun. Flames roared over him. Fire sizzled away the water in his joints. He lunged past the flame at the second attacker. Arms limned in flame, Karn surged into the cave.

  “Karn!” came a shout of surprise and relief. “What are you doing here?”

  “Jhoira?” Karn asked. His eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness.

  Jhoira trembled in her nightclothes, a smoldering torch butt held in her hand. She must have used the brand to ignite airborne coal-dust, as the students were taught at the academy.

  Karn blurted, “What are you doing here?”

  Jhoira’s face grew resentful and desperate. “You followed me. I can’t believe you followed me.”

  “I didn’t follow you,” Karn protested.

  “Why did you leave the school grounds at night then? What about the curfew?” Jhoira challenged.

  “I could ask the same of you,” countered Karn.

  “Where is Kerrick? What have you done?” she demanded suddenly, and stumbled past Karn to the mouth of the cave. She felt around blindly in the dark until her hand settled on the leg of the man. She shook him. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?” The man did not move.

  Karn approached. “I’ll carry him inside—”

  “No,” insisted Jhoira, shoving past him and clambering into the cave. “His neck might be broken. Moving him might kill him.” She lit the lantern, gathered gauze and supplies from a shelf, and hurried back out. Kneeling beside the fallen man, she let out a moan of worry. One hand reached to stroke his curly golden hair. “No blood, and he’s breathing.” She gritted her teeth as her fingers encountered a large lump on his forehead. “You banged him up pretty good.”

  “Who is he?” Karn asked suspiciously. “What’s he doing here?”

  “He is Kerrick,” said Jhoira with a sigh. She probed his neck to check for injury or swelling. “He was trying to protect me.”

  “He’s not a student,” Karn observed.

  “No. He’s a castaway, and he’s my friend.” She slipped her arms under the man, lifted him, and carried him inside. “Get the lantern, will you, Karn?”

  The golem complied, following like a dejected dog. “You never told me about him.”

  Jhoira settled the man onto the pallet in one corner of the niche. “I never told anyone. Master Malzra would have him killed.”

  “But we are friends. We have no secrets from each other,” Karn said. He set the lantern on the makeshift table.

  “We have secrets. You won’t tell me what experiments you are involved with.”

  “Master Malzra forbade me.”

  Jhoira smiled grimly, dipping a cloth in a pitcher of water and applying it to the lump on Kerrick’s head. “Master Malzra forbade me—or anyone—from harboring castaways, too, so it all comes down to Master Malzra. I keep secrets from you because of him, and you keep secrets from me because of him. That’s just the way he wants it. He doesn’t want any of us to have friends, to have lives.”

  Karn felt a wave of sick dread move through him. He remembered what his existence had been like before meeting Jhoira, caught between the quiet apathy of Malzra and the loud antipathy of Teferi. This moment could ruin things between him and Jhoira. This moment could cost Karn the only friend he had and turn him back into Arty Shovelhead.

  “Time travel,” Karn blurted, his voice anguished. “That’s what Master Malzra is testing. That is why I am here. He is testing a device that will send me back centuries or millennia, that will transport me anywhere across the planet.”

  Jhoira stopped her ministrations and stared in amazed wonder at the golem. “That’s why he called you a probe….”

  “It is the whole reason I have been created,” Karn said soberly. “He instructed me to tell no one about this on pain of being dismantled.”

  “If he can do this, he can change history—”

  “He doesn’t want me to change history.” Karn suddenly realized he might be changing history even at that moment.

  “There’s much more to Master Malzra than meets the eye,” Jhoira noted, amazed.

  “Well,” said Karn, kneeling before Jhoira in the wan light of the lantern. “That is the only secret I have kept from you. You know everything else about me. You have studied all my plans. You have watched Malzra assemble me. You even gave me my name, my life. Can you forgive me? Can we still be friends?”

  A smile that was one part joy and one part pity broke across her face. “Of course, Karn. You know my greatest secret now, too. I’ve always trusted you, and I still trust you. Karn, you’re my only real friend in the world.”

  “What is he?” Karn asked, indicating the unconscious man.

  “He is my love.”

  She had no sooner spoken these words than the shimmering tug of temporal displacement laid hold of Karn. He shuddered, shifted out of phase, turned incorporeal, and felt the sudden swift sliding of the red light.

  Just before he spun away through the stone wall of the niche, he glimpsed, behind the wondering face of Jhoira, one of Kerrick’s fingers draw inward and his eye slit open.

  * * *

  “It’s worth the effort,” Urza insisted where he sat in his high study. “The Thran became the Phyrexians. If we can divert them from that course, keep them on the path of artifice rather than mutation, we can save the whole world.”

  Barrin held his hand out and paused, seeming to sniff the air. “What was that? Did you feel that?”

  “A temporal anomaly,” Urza said. “They have been occurring since we first sent the probe through the time-travel portal. That one was stronger than most.”

  “A temporal anomaly,” Barrin repeated, stunned. “This is what I am talking about. We get anomalies like this when sending someone back eighteen hours. What will happen beyond that?”

  “We must stop the Thran from becoming the Phyrexians.”

  “But millennia? If we could reach that far back in time, you could take a few side trips and rectify all your own past mistakes—leading
the Phyrexians to Serra’s plane, attacking Phyrexia, blowing up Argoth, killing your brother…why, you could even decide to undiscover the powerstone at Koilos and keep the Phyrexians from reentering Dominaria at all.”

  Urza’s look was sober. “That is what my life’s accomplishment amounts to in your eyes? One grand failure after another?”

  “Of course not,” assured Barrin. “You have done much good, and I do not begrudge you your mistakes. Mages also learn through trial and error. What I begrudge you is the fact that you never take responsiblity for your errors. You don’t learn from your mistakes. You never clean up after yourself.”

  “That’s what I am trying to do now. I brought the Phyrexians back into the world. Now I am doing all, I can to find out how to drive them from it forever,” Urza said. “I have learned, but I have much more to learn before I can right this greatest wrong.”

  “Yes,” agreed Barrin, “you have much more to learn.”

  Missing the intent of this comment, Urza said, “I have seen one piece of the puzzle, but I don’t know where it fits yet. Have you noticed the pendant Karn wears?”

  Barrin gave a wave of his hand. “A little lizard on a chain.”

  “Have you noticed how hard the metal is? I tested its hardness. It scratched steel and adamantine and diamond. What’s more, it doesn’t heat up at all from temporal stress.”

  Barrin blinked, considering. “What are you saying? That we should build another probe made of this metal?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps,” Urza’s eyes glinted with possibilities. “I’ll have to ask Karn where he got it. If we could forge a probe of it—”

  “Should we work out a treaty with the makers of the metal,” Barrin asked sarcastically, “or just take over their homeland and drive them out?”

  “Start with a treaty, of course. There’s always time for conquest later.”

  Barrin was grim. Under his breath, he said, “Yes, you have much to learn.”