Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

“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.”

  “If you’re so smart and I’m so predictable, what have I been waiting for?”

  “You’re waiting for an interplanar gate to open down the beach.”

  The dragon jerked as though he’d been stung. His long sinuous neck practically put a kink in itself to bring his huge yellow eyes back around to stare down at the human. He made no effort to conceal his surprise; on the contrary, he fixed his gaze on Tezzeret with predatory focus. “And why do I expect it?”

  “For the same reason you knew Baltrice and Jace were planeswalking in. You’ve learned some clockworking.”

  “I dabble, I dabble. As a hobby,” the dragon admitted. “How did you know?”

  “You’re seeing the future—what, a few minutes out? Something like that. Silas Renn could to that trick—see the quantum smear of possible futures and watch events develop as they become more and more likely.”

  “And so it’s possible,” the dragon purred, “that I am what I eat, after all.”

  “It was probably the last thing he taught you.”

  “Oh, please. In twenty-five thousand years, you think I never learned clockworking?”

  “I’m sure you did,” Tezzeret said. “Funny that you needed to learn it again, isn’t it?”

  Nicol Bolas went very, very still.

  “You’re not the dragon you used to be, old worm,” Tezzeret said with an odd note in his voice, one almost of sympathy. “You’re not even the dragon you were twelve years ago, when I stole the Infinite Consortium out from under your tail. You put a good face on it, but the cracks in your mask have begun to show. Someone who knows how to look can see right into you.”

  “Oh?” The dragon’s voice sounded like the early notes of a distant volcanic eruption. “Then what am I thinking right now?”

  Tezzeret smiled again. “You’re remembering how you had thought my declared intention to kill you had been merely a vain boast. Now you’re reflecting that suddenly you’re not so sure, and you’re wondering if perhaps you should kill me before you find out.”

  The dragon’s response was to turn fully to face Tezzeret, to spread his wings and draw mana from throughout the Multiverse until the air around him blazed with power.

  Tezzeret said, “You’re not going to like how this ends.”

  Nicol Bolas lifted one enormous fist. “I’ll regret it in the morning, right?”

  “In the morning you’ll be decomposing on this beach.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “You can see futures. In how many of them am I dead?”

  The dragon’s fleshy brow ridges drew together, and his fist lowered, just a bit.

  “Look into the futures that arise from you assaulting me now,” Tezzeret said. “In how many of them are you alive?”

  Bolas’s eyes widened, and his fist fell forgotten to his side. “It’s not …” His voice was no
more than a strangled whisper. “How can you … it … just isn’t possible.…”

  “You need to understand that our relationship has turned a corner,” Tezzeret said, and walked out of the Web of Restraint as if it wasn’t even there.

  Bolas stared. “You can’t do that!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “You might want to take a seat. We should talk.”

  “It’s a trick,” the dragon snarled. “It’s some kind of illusion—once you’re dead, it’ll be—”

  Tezzeret sighed and lifted his right hand above his head, then clenched his fist with a yank as if plucking unripe fruit from a tree. As though animated by the gesture, the leading edge of the right wing of the Metal Sphinx—a single vast girder of etherium, by itself larger and heavier than Nicol Bolas’s whole body—shrieked through the air and slammed into the dragon just below his wing joint with crushing force.

  Bolas folded around the impact, and went skidding helplessly back to sprawl in the sand. His roar of sudden rage sounded a bit thin and wheezy, but thoroughly sincere as he scrambled to rise and gathered power to strike back.

  Tezzeret said, “Think about the future.”

  Bolas hesitated.

  “Look around you,” he went on. “Think about where you are, and what this place is made of. Think about who I am and what you have made of me.”

  The dragon cast his gaze toward the etherium trees, at the etherium sphinx and the etherium plinth, the etherium rocks and the etherium sand on which he rested. Then very slowly, very cautiously, he adjusted his posture to a feline seated position, wings folded and tail curled around himself, and he looked upon Tezzeret with a decidedly more guarded expression. “So.”

  “I know it’s a shock,” Tezzeret said. “But at your age, you should have learned that many truths we regard as immutable are, in fact, surprisingly context dependent. For example, when I acknowledged earlier that you are the most powerful being in the Multiverse, it would have been more precise to say: in the rest of the Multiverse.”

  “I see I have underestimated you.”

  “You always did.”

  “You could have killed me at any time. From the very first instant I arrived.”

  Tezzeret spread his hands. “Surprise.”

  “You can kill me right now. Why don’t you?”

  “You may as well ask why we haven’t played Intimidate the Naked Prisoner. Or why I haven’t insisted on calling you Nicky, or perpetrated any of the various indignities with which you have amused yourself at my expense,” Tezzeret said. “The answer to all three is an aspect of character that I value; one which you, I might add, conspicuously lack.”

  “And that is?”

  “Manners.”

  The dragon’s response was a contemptuous snort.

  Tezzeret shrugged. “Manners are commonly derided by those who have none, just as education is derided by the ignorant, refinement by the coarse, and intellect,” he said with a tiny sigh of apology, “by the stupid.”

  The dragon’s growl, low in his throat, had much the same brick-grinding quality as had his earlier chuckle. “Who in the hells cares about your manners?”

  “My manners, for better or worse, are keeping you alive.”

  “This is a joke, right? Some kind of a put-on. You’re just yanking my tail.”

  “I would never taunt someone in my power,” he replied. “To mock those who have power over you is a valid occupation of anyone with the wit to do so; witness satirists, jesters, and court fools across every plane of creation. Rulers who mock their subjects, on the other hand, only advertise their unfitness for the position they hold. Taunting the helpless is the province of scumbags, assholes, and doltish thugs like you.”

  He lifted a hand before Bolas could respond. “No disrespect intended; I use doltish thug in its technical sense: a violently criminal blockhead.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  “Now that I think of it,” he mused, “I may owe you an apology for my earlier use of the word stupid; blockhead is a more apt term. It’s not that you can’t think; it’s just that you don’t like to.”

  “You’re enjoying this.”

  “No more than is appropriate, I hope,” Tezzeret said with a thin smile. “When I allow the gate to open, it is very important that you make no sudden move, and that you make no attempt to exert power of any kind. Either will be dangerous for you. Possibly fatal.”

  The dragon blinked. “When you allow—?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are yanking my tail.”

  “Bolas,” Tezzeret said patiently, “weren’t you at all curious about why you kept seeing an interplanar gate in your immediate future, while none ever appeared? Every time you looked for it, I delayed its opening—which is to say, I moved the gate farther along our time line. I couldn’t risk allowing our visitor to arrive before you and I had our little talk.”

  “Who is this visitor you’re so worried about?”

  “One of three. We’re about to find out,” Tezzeret said. “Before you arrived, I had determined that there were four candidates, but the fourth was Silas Renn, so unless he was a great deal more skilled a clockworker than I gave him credit for, we can rule him out. Another candidate is Crucius himself.”

  “Now I’m interested,” Bolas said. “Is that what you were talking about when you said, ‘There is no secret’?”

  “No,” he said simply. “Another possible candidate is me.”

  “Really? You? I mean, another you? Using a gate?”

  “How do you think I got here in the first place?”

  “Huh. Were we here when you got here in the first place?”

  Tezzeret smiled. “I’m not telling.”

  “Wouldn’t that be some kind of paradox—put you in two places at the same time, something like that?”

  “Where we are is all one place,” Tezzeret said, “and time, old worm, is a slippery concept. Especially here and now. Because here, it’s always now.”

  The dragon snorted a gust of greasy smoke. “The next time I bring you back to life, it’ll be without a mouth.”

  “Once our visitor—whoever it turns out to be—has come and gone, you will be free to leave.”

  “Sure I will.”

  “Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant,” Tezzeret said. “I am inviting you, however, to stay yet awhile.”

  “Just to be friendly?”

  The human shrugged. “We have known each other for well over a decade. An eyeblink to you, of course, but a substantial fraction of my life. In that time, we have never achieved a real understanding; our relationship has been a structure of your domination set against my resistance. I would prefer not to simply reverse that dynamic.”

  “Not to mention that any reversing of that dynamic is over as soon as I get the hell out of your fantasy playground here.”

  “Which is why you will be free to leave.”

  “You sound like you actually mean that.”

  “I am done with taking from you, Bolas. I have no more interest in your freedom than I have in your life. But I wish to share with you the progress of the journey you set me on. I have some hope that when you understand what I have experienced—what I have done, and not least, what you have made of me—you will realize that you have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, by simply letting me go my way.”

  “Live and let live.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why not?” Bolas said. “It’s not as though either of us has ever been known to hold a grudge.”

  Tezzeret displayed just enough thin smile to signal that he’d registered the sarcasm. “If our visitor proves to be the individual I regard as most probable, she will be elderly, and likely quite frail. I tell you this by way of warning. Do not make any movement that I might interpret as hostile. As she will be unable to defend herself, I will defend her. Aggressively.”

  The dragon’s brow ridge arched again. “She must be something special.”

  “I’ll introduce you
,” Tezzeret said, and gestured toward the sand directly in front of the plinth, where presently a shimmer in the air gathered itself into a broadly arching span of silvery plane. This plane was vertical and freestanding, and it showed the very faintest of ripples chasing one another across it, as if perhaps some current of the Blind Eternities stirred the surfaces of the two universes.

  “There?” Bolas said in mild surprise. “When I was seeing it, the gate—”

  “Was several hundred meters down the beach, yes,” Tezzeret said. “I’ve shifted the gate so that she won’t have quite so far to walk.”

  “You are a wealth of surprises today.”

  “The measure of character lies not in how powerful you are, but in how you use the power you have.”

  “And you’re just full of half-nifty aphorisms, too. I bet you’ve been saving them up.”

  “I’ve been preparing this conversation for a long time,” he admitted with a fractional widening of his thin smile. “I’d hate to leave anything out.”

  “Is that the Good Manners version of gloating?”

  “Hush now. Here she comes.”

  Out from the far side of the shimmering plane hobbled the wreckage of an ancient sphinx.

  Even at her obviously advanced age, she was huge, much larger than an ordinary sphinx, very little smaller than Bolas himself. Her wings hung in tatters, her feathers showing iridescent azure only in patches, as though most of them were dying or dead, little more than naked quills hanging from perished follicles. The joints of her enormous legs were swollen, and her toes were knobbed with arthritis. Her shield-shaped head swung uncertainly, as though seeking an angle that would allow her cataract-webbed eyes to focus, and her skin was everywhere crosshatched with striated scars that once had held etherium filigree of extraordinary complexity and grace.

  Facing away from the Metal Sphinx, she spoke to the only figure her ancient eyes could discern. “Dragon. I am no threat to you, and what remains of meat on these old bones will be stringy and tough.” Her voice was thin, a breathy rasp, as though her vocal cords had shredded from age. “Let us be civil with each other, though our lands be at war. I do not come here for battle.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Bolas said. “I’m not from Jund—and even if I was, I wouldn’t exactly go to war for them. And looking at you, no offense, I just lost my appetite.”