She made a face sour as old vinegar. “Do we really have to bring all that up again?”
“She went toe to toe with Liliana Vess. What Liliana did to her-well, never mind. She suffered a lot for being loyal to you, that’s all.”
“And?”
“I just hope you won’t make her suffer for being loyal to me.”
The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes deepened a bit. “She won’t be the one who suffers.”
“I guessed that part already,” I told him. “I don’t expect to get out of this alive. I thought-I knew-that if I ever saw you again, you were gonna snuff me like a candle.”
“I considered it,” he said. “It would have been an inelegant solution.”
“What?”
“And… well, not to grind too fine an edge on it, but it seemed rather foolish for me, alive, to kill you in revenge for my murder.”
“That wasn’t your attitude at the time.”
“I recall. I also recall that I was, at the time, hmmm, a bit emotional. If my eyes had been knives, I would have yanked them both out of my face to throw them at you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was there.”
“Perhaps returning from the dead has altered my perspective. All I know is how I feel now, and what I think now-which is at some considerable remove from what I felt and thought then.”
“So-what, you’re forgiving me?”
“I do not forgive,” he said with a level stare. “But a blood vendetta between us is of no use to anyone but our enemies.”
“We have enemies?” I said. “We as in you and me? Really?”
“Dead, you would be nothing more than an excuse for Baltrice to kill me.”
“That decision isn’t made yet,” she growled.
“You see?” He opened a hand toward her, as a conjuror might invite his audience to observe a nifty trick. “You’re an excellent hostage, a fact that has saved my life already tonight. As for you, Baltrice, well… you have your own reasons to hate me, and I’m sorry for that. I can only plead exigent circumstances, and ask that you accept my apology.”
She blinked up at him, her face slack in surprise-which was pretty much how I felt, too. “Are you yanking my chain?”
“I am not the man who cut you with the mana knife, Baltrice. I am not the man who ordered you into that last battle. Whether I am a better man, or a worse one, is not yet determined. Meanwhile, I am truly sorry for what I-the man I was then-did to you.”
Color was rising in Baltrice’s cheeks-never a good thing. “You think that gets you off the hook?”
“I don’t expect it to,” he said. “I wish only to express my regret. What to do with that knowledge is a decision you’ll have to face on your own.”
“I got a decision you can face in the seat of my pants.”
Tezzeret stepped over another body part or three to squat down in front of me, close enough that if I’d had a dagger I could have stabbed him. His face still displayed nothing beyond that eerie calm. “Please believe me when I tell you that I do not desire your death. I have done this to you because I have been saddled with a fiendishly difficult task, and I can’t risk any interference. Especially from you. You need to understand your situation, Jace-may I call you Jace?”
“I guess not killing me lets you call me whatever you want.”
“Thank you. You have some idea already of the gross parameters of what I’ve done. To make sure you don’t inadvertently take your own life, I must share with you some of the subtleties that underlie your condition.”
“As long as it doesn’t involve any more demonstrations,” I said. “Tell, don’t show, all right?”
“See this?” He held out the coil of wire that he’d used to tourniquet his hand. “This is a metal called etherium.”
“It’s what that arm of yours was made of, right?”
“Very similar. It is also what the device is made of, the one that is currently inhabiting your central nervous system. The salient feature of etherium is that it doesn’t wholly exist in this universe. Or in any. In ways that can’t be precisely explained in words, etherium simultaneously exists in the Blind Eternities; it is an alloy of?ther itself. Etherium, in a very real sense, has a, oh, I suppose you’d say, an inanimate version of a Planeswalker’s Spark. Understanding this is essential for your survival. Are you following me so far?”
“I guess…”
“I know that you will try to remove my device, or deactivate it. You will fail, and the attempt may kill you.”
Well, of course he’d say so. Didn’t make it true. “Go on.”
“First, the device cannot be drained of power, or choked off from its source of mana; etherium, by virtue of its special nature, is a source of mana. Or it channels mana from the Blind Eternities, or carries with it the energy that is reality. As I said, words are imprecise.
“You have experienced already the sort of pain that attempting magical operations can cause. You need to understand that even worse effects will be created by someone using magic on you. You also need to know that analgesic treatment, up to and including magically deactivating your brain’s pain center, will only hasten your death. It would be a death you wouldn’t want me to even describe. Trust that it will be torment that transcends description.
“The special nature of etherium also means that it cannot-I repeat, cannot-be fully manipulated by anyone who is not a Planeswalker. My own Spark-my own connection to the Blind Eternities-enables me to do things with etherium that cannot be matched by any plane-bound mage, no matter how powerful.”
“So I’d have to find a Planeswalker to turn this thing off.”
“One particular Planeswalker,” he said. “Me. Unless you know of another Planeswalker who is a mechanist of my ability. To the best of my knowledge, there has ever been only one other being with the requisite abilities, and he has been lost in the infinite reach of the Blind Eternities for decades. Nicol Bolas himself can’t find this being. Nothing that can be done by you or anyone you can find will work, and any serious attempt will likely kill you. Your best course is to resign yourself to your situation, and console yourself that it is temporary.”
“Is it?” I said. “Temporary?”
“Unless I am slain or incapacitated,” he said. “Think of it as a vacation.”
I wasn’t worried. Not really. Not yet. Though I had a feeling that after a try or two demonstrated Tezzeret wasn’t lying, I might start getting a little anxious.
Baltrice found the words that I didn’t even really want to think, let alone say. “This ‘fiendish task’ of yours-just how dangerous is it?”
He turned to her with a decidedly pensive look. “I do not expect to succeed,” he said evenly. “Nor do I expect to survive the attempt.”
“Then why in the hells are you gonna try it in the first place?”
He sighed. “I have never been a notably original thinker,” he said. “My gifts lie in the realms of attention to detail, and-I believe the phrase is-an infinite capacity for taking pains. The device I inflicted upon you, Jace, is a slight elaboration of one that has recently been inflicted on me.”
“You?” I blinked at him while I tried to figure out how I felt about that. “I kind of think that should make me feel better.”
“But it doesn’t,” he said, again frank and almost friendly. “I know.”
“So when you don’t survive the experience,” Baltrice said heavily, “what happens to him?”
“Eventually? Insanity,” he said with a half-apologetic shrug in my direction, “and a horrible death.”
“If he’s gonna go that way anyway-” She stood up, and flames gathered around her head and shoulders. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t roast you right here.”
“Because,” he said seriously, still squatting, showing no slightest sign of worry, “that prediction was based on my working alone.”
She looked at him, then she looked at me, and I looked back at her, and that flush on her cheeks got
brighter. So did the flames. “Oh, come on, not really, no way…” she said. “You are not expecting me to-no way!”
Tezzeret shrugged. “I have never been a great fighter, even when I had my arm and all the resources of the Infinite Consortium to back me. You, though-Baltrice, you are more than a great fighter. You’re a one-woman bloody damned army.”
Her flush spread up around her eyes, replacing some of the white-hot anger she’d been carrying there a second before. “You took me easily enough.”
“I took him. You?” He still had that open but serious look on his face. “If I’d had to fight you, I’d be dead already. You surrendered to save Jace’s life.”
“And you’re asking me to do it all over again.”
“His life isn’t actually saved yet,” he pointed out. “And if what you really want is a clear shot at me, where’s better for you to stand than right at my back?”
She looked at me, and again I looked back at her, and I could see that somehow both our lives hung on what I said next.
“I… I can’t ask you to do this for me,” I told her, and if I had even a whisper of a chance to undo the spell, I wouldn’t have to make the speech. “I sure as hell won’t order you to. Do what you think is best. Not for me. For you.”
She sighed and chuckled ruefully. “You little turd,” she said to me, shaking her head. “Like I’m gonna say no after a speech like that.”
Tezzeret’s gaze flicked back and forth between her face and mine, and he had a distinctive steely glint in his eyes-a lot like he used to look when one of his inventions had performed exactly as designed.
Baltrice said, “So what’s this fiendish task?”
Tezzeret stood. “I am to find a Planeswalker known as Crucius the Mad Sphinx, who was last seen here on Esper, some decades ago,” he said. “By literally no coincidence at all, he is that other Planeswalker I spoke of just now-the one being in the Multiverse who is better at handling etherium than I am. At least, I believe him to be superior, and I think I am justified in my belief by the fact that it was Crucius who invented etherium in the first place, and that Crucius is to this day the only being who ever has had the ability to create it.”
“Oh, I get it,” Baltrice said. “A little extra incentive, right? So you want me to think that if you and I can find him, he’ll be able to take care of Beleren… and I won’t need you anymore.”
“That is an accurate summary of the situation.”
“You expect me to believe it? You can’t smell the giant pile of Way Too Convenient heaped on top of that story?”
Tezzeret’s lips compressed briefly, and after a moment he nodded. “There are a number of features of my new life that seem to be, well… overly contrived is, I think, the best description,” he said slowly. “As though I had set about to create an entirely new machine, then found the parts already manufactured and laid out precisely in order on my workbench. Having been conscious for less than twenty-four hours, I have been too busy trying to survive to spare any time for deep analysis of my situation. I surmise that there is an underlying teleology here, but I have not yet been able to verify it.”
“Sucks to be you, huh?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “The pertinent detail is that I have been forced into a role very like the one I had originally intended for you, Jace. I discover that I don’t like it any better than you did, and I have decided-not being a notably original thinker, after all-to employ the same solution you did.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Nicol Bolas,” he said. “You remember Nicol Bolas.”
“Only in bad dreams.”
“I’m going to kill him,” he said as though he was commenting it looked like rain.
It was a good thing I was already sitting down. I could only stare. Baltrice spluttered like a balky skyrocket. “You… you what? Are you completely frappin’ cracked?”
“Very likely. But cracked or not, the fact remains,” he said. “I am going to kill Nicol Bolas.”
“Oh, sure,” I said when I found my voice. “And while you’re off burning down three-quarters of the Multiverse, I’m supposed to sit here in Vectis with my thumb up my butt?”
“Not at all. You,” said Tezzeret with that eerie calm that was starting to look more and more like crazy every time I saw it, “are going to look after my father.”
THE METAL ISLAND
PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN
A curious feature of human memory,” Bolas murmured as he disengaged his brilliant blue memory siphon from Jace Beleren’s brain, and returned the mind-ripper’s unconscious body to the plinth with oddly gentle care. “You remember being in pain, but you don’t remember the pain itself.”
Nearby, Tezzeret still hung in a Web of Restraint, though a less uncomfortable one. “I suspect,” he said, “that it’s an artifact of construction.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The human brain is largely a signal-processing apparatus. As such, it is divided into specialized sectors. Pain is a product of specific neural activity in a specific sector of the brain. Memory arises of neural activity in a different sector. The pain sector is not activated in the process, except in pathological cases. If it hurt as much to remember pain as it had to experience it, there would be little disincentive to repeat the experience. Which would defeat the design function of pain in the first place.”
“Of course-the lecture on mechanics. You’re so predictable.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Tezzeret replied. “Reliability is the most useful objective measure of superior design.”
The dragon’s brows arched to a comically skeptical height. “Am I to believe that your personal design is supposedly superior? And if it weren’t, am I to believe that you would actually admit it?”
“My design,” Tezzeret replied imperturbably, “is a work in progress. I find myself more interested in what you’re not talking about. And why.”
“Tezzie, Tezzie, come on. Do you actually expect me to waste breath discussing your preposterous vanity? It’s just you and me here, Tezzie. You don’t have to pretend that you really believe you can kill me. How about we just stipulate the truth and move on, shall we?”
Tezzeret said, “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not prepared to stipulate. It’s not the truth.”
The dragon belched a gust of incredulous laughter. “Are you prepared to stipulate that you’re batshit insane?” he said.
“And which of us is the more predictable, after all?” Tezzeret said. “Whenever confronted with something you do not understand, you dismiss it as irrelevant, misconstructed, or damaged.”
“Does being completely staggering cracked count as a design flaw?”
“Not necessarily,” Tezzeret said. “What if I am insane, but also right? Perhaps being completely staggering cracked is not so much a design flaw as it is a fillip of stylistic excess-baroque filigree on a headsman’s axe, if you see what I mean.”
“Were you always this nuts? Did I just not notice?”
“I can’t say,” he replied. “However, you should bear in mind that whatever I am now-how well or poorly I function-is largely the result of your own talents, or lack thereof, as a designer; the result of your presumed gifts as an artificer of human flesh. It seems clear to me that you were less than wholly satisfied with who I was previously. When you restored my consciousness and functionality, I can only assume that you made certain alterations. You would not be the first artificer to discover that his device exhibits unexpected-perhaps unwelcome, even actively dangerous-features, as a result of insufficient foresight, skill, and preparation.”
Bolas chuckled. “So whatever’s wrong with you is all my fault, eh? Because you’re just a machine.”
“Hardly,” Tezzeret said. “No competent artificer would design humans as we are: so limited an array of operating environments; so many useless parts; vital systems so inefficient and prone to breakdown that the vast bulk of the energy we expend is
wasted in mere maintenance-maintenance which, even if performed perfectly, is still insufficient to materially lengthen productive life span. Not to mention that we are difficult to repair, and prohibitively expensive to replace.”
Bolas exposed jagged teeth within a curl of a grin. “It was my understanding that, mm, human replacements, to use your term, are not only free, but that, ah, their construction is considered an enjoyable recreation.”
“Think of it in machine terms,” Tezzeret said. “Preliminary assembly puts the constructing unit-the mother-on reduced service for, on average, one third of the gestational period, while consuming even more resources than she had before. Once born, a human is not functional; primary assembly requires, on average, seven years, during which the child is literally nothing but an energy sink, consuming time, attention, and food without any return except dung. To achieve full physical function requires, on average, about sixteen years. And this leaves aside questions of training and education, emotional stability, and the disciplined intellect necessary for self-direction, all of which require even more time and energy to inculcate. If people had any idea just how expensive a human being actually is, they’d take better care of themselves.”
“You’re awfully chatty, all of a sudden.”
“With less than one thousandth the energy expenditure that creating a fully functional human being requires,” Tezzeret went on, “I could design and build a device capable of everything a human can do, including creative problem solving, singing, writing poetry, whatever you like-not to mention creating its own replacements-and do it for a thousand years.”
“How is it,” Nicol Bolas said distantly, once more frowning down the beach beyond the captive Planeswalkers, “that every time I talk to you, I end up getting a speech about how smart you are?”
“Our whole relationship is about how smart I am,” Tezzeret said. “It goes back to your predictability.”
“Good liar, too.”
Tezzeret smiled. “When I have to be.”
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