Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Barrin watched it all, apprehension knotting the muscles in his neck. If it was Urza’s island and he felt so safe on it, why were mere children being sent out to explore it? The touch of Urza’s hand on his back made the knots redouble.

  “We are home again, Barrin,” Urza said, deep satisfaction in his voice.

  “We are at the door, knocking,” Barrin replied. “We aren’t inside yet.”

  Urza studied his longtime associate and friend. “After all your lectures about owning up to my mistakes, returning to right the wrongs I have done, how can you criticize me today?”

  “They’re only children, Urza—” Barrin began.

  “They are grownups. They have been thoroughly trained. They know what to expect. They know what they risk,” Urza replied evenly.

  “They’re only children. Not grownups, not probes, not machines,” Barrin finished.

  “If anything should go awry, I am linked to them and can reach them at a moment’s notice.” Urza paused, seeming to hear a voice speak to him out of the wheeling blue sky. “In fact, the first party of explorers is summoning us. They have discovered a time rift.” He reached out and grabbed Barrin’s hand, saying simply, “We go.”

  Barrin felt the world fold in around him and Urza. They were planeswalking.

  After complications had arisen with Urza’s trick of turning planeswalking mortals to stone (four of them had been cracked en route and hemorrhaged massively when returned to flesh), he had devised better spells for keeping mortal flesh alive through a planeswalk. The enchantment currently in effect reduced Barrin from a three-dimensional construct to a two-dimensional one. In this compacted form, he was protected against the trials of sudden vacuum, volcanic heat, and absolute cold encountered in a planeswalk. Barrin’s lungs could not explode because they were no more than flat sheaves of paper. Urza hung there beside him, attached and pulling him through to where the world opened up again.

  When it opened, the two scholars stood suddenly on a bald brow of sand. Before them, the land dipped away into a grassy swale. There three students stood, staring in astonishment toward a sharp-edged ravine. The air in the ravine looked dusky and turgid, tiny flecks of dust catching and scattering the rays of the sun. Beyond the deep furrow stood an old-growth forest, but within it, the ground held only short, scrubby plants with tender purple blossoms. Small white rocks lined the base of the valley. At the lip of the ravine crouched the team ensign, a powerfully built blonde woman. Beside her hovered a young man with long black hair. They spoke to each other in hushed tones and gestured into the yawning rift, which emitted a sound like a breathing giant.

  “Let’s see what they have found,” Urza suggested.

  He released Barrin’s hand and started down the hillside. With each step, puffs of dust rose from his feet, making him seem to walk inches above the ground.

  That’s the way he would prefer it, Barrin mused to himself as he followed. The two scholars passed the group of whispering students, who startled back, lost the thread of their conversation, and receded into watchful silence. Urza and Barrin continued until they stood behind the crouching ensign and her comrade.

  “You summoned me?” Urza said by way of introduction.

  The ensign stood and snapped to attention, “Yes, Captain.”

  “What have you found, Ensign Dreva?”

  “A time rift, Captain, just as Master Barrin had indicated in his reports.” Dreva’s eyes were a bit wider than normal, and she stared into space. “A fast-time rift, I would suggest, judging from the apparent darkness and the lack of water. We have conducted a few experiments. I can repeat them. Rehad?”

  She reached out to the young man next to her, gesturing for something, and received a long, leafy branch he had gathered in a nearby forest. Despite her formal demeanor, the affection between ensign and student was obvious in the lingering way the branch was passed, hand to hand.

  Ensign Dreva turned her attention back to the captain. “Watch the foliage on the end of this bough.”

  She raised the branch and swung it slowly into the air above the ravine. Something invisible seemed to take hold of the dangling end, making it jitter and sway, and the ensign dug her feet in and tightened her grip on the bow to keep it from being yanked out of her hand. The leaves quickly grew brown and curled into dry crescents. Next moment, they rushed downward from the branch to the floor of the ravine, where they lulled before turning to dust. Meanwhile, the leafless twigs twisted, their bark peeled away, their wood cracked and grayed, and the entire branch came to resemble the hoary claw of a forest hag. The ensign withdrew the stick and laid it beside two others, similarly transformed.

  Urza’s smile, small and unaccustomed, showed his delight at these findings. “Excellent work. Using a living branch to probe the rift was an insightful innovation.”

  The ensign flushed. “Thank you, Captain Malzra.”

  “There are some who doubted whether you would be equal to the task—” Urza turned his mysterious smile toward Barrin “—but I was confident.”

  “Thank you again, Captain,” Dreva replied. “I suggest we continue probing the edges of this time rift and set warning markers. Though most likely the blast that created the geographic ravine also created the temporal anomaly, we shouldn’t assume the boundary of the one will be the exact boundary of the other.”

  “Well reasoned, Ensign,” Urza said. “Continue. Report in if you discover anything else of note.” He turned, shouldering Barrin toward the privacy of a nearby hilltop as the ensign sent Rehad and the other students to the forest eaves to gather more branches. “It seems to me they are doing quite well, these children you speak of.”

  Barrin stared down at the tangled grass at his feet “The dangers here are your doing and my doing, not theirs.”

  “If they will live here with us, build here and study here, they must inherit all the evils of the past,” Urza replied. “It is the responsibility of every new generation to understand what has come before, if only to decide what to keep and what to discard.”

  The philosophical debate was interrupted by a warning shout from the verge of the forest. Barrin and Urza turned. Ensign Dreva stood at the edge of the wood, grasping something in one arm and urgently summoning her comrades with the other. The students flung down the branches they had chopped loose and ran. Urza and Barrin ran too.

  Dreva pulled savagely on a tree limb. Other students, two young men and a woman, reached her and added their muscle to the task. Moments of shouted orders and position-jockeying gave way to groans as the students hauled hard on the limb.

  Barrin pelted toward them, wondering what could be so urgent about pulling the branch from a tree, and then he saw.

  It was no tree they pulled on, but Rehad, standing just within the forest edge. One hand rested on a fat green bole, just beside a branch he had been intending to cut off. He was trapped in a slow-time rift, one arm extending beyond, and his companions were doing all they could to pull him out.

  “Wait!” Barrin ordered. He struggled to form a spell but was too late.

  Rehad’s arm, bloodless from being trapped beyond the time continuity of his heart, was no match for the pulling might of the ensign and the three others. It dislocated. The tissues caught in the lacerating edge of the time stream tore and gave way. The arm came off in their grasp. Gore dribbled slowly from the ruined shoulder. Ensign Dreva and the students landed in a sloppy heap on the grass, the severed arm among them.

  Barrin and Urza came to a stop just before the temporal rift. Rehad’s face was slowly twisting in pain as the initial shock of the injury gave way to rending agony. Urza lifted a hand and pressed it into the wall of slow time. His fingers trembled as they sank into the hot, thick air. Had he blood in him, that limb might well have become stuck, like Rehad, but the master inhabited a body of focused energy. Even so, the time difference tugged at him, sending crazings of ene
rgy in twisting spirals along the surface of the distortion. With an effort of will, he maintained the forward motion of his hand and slowly gripped the man’s bleeding shoulder.

  All the while, Rehad was turning, eyes wide and mouth dropping open in a scream. He shied instinctively back from Urza’s grasping hand, but the master anticipated the move. He caught the grisly joint and clamped down hard, stanching the killing blood flow, then, with grim deliberation, slowly drawing the young man toward him.

  Behind Urza, Ensign Dreva and the students had risen. The severed arm lay on the ground at their feet. Rehad’s blood painted their leather leggings and canvas cloaks. Two of the students were crying, and the third gaped in terrified disbelief. Dreva herself was closemouthed and dry-eyed, though her face was bone-white. She shook her head in raw regret.

  Barrin moved to comfort her.

  She ducked away, grabbed the fallen arm, and pushed up beside Urza.

  “Put it back, Captain. You have to put it back,” she implored, jabbing the limb toward him.

  Gritting his teeth, Urza gently pushed her aside. He was pivoting Rehad around so the man would emerge with brain and heart aligned, so that he could escape the time trap as gradually as possible.

  Dreva staggered back. She blinked at the sanguine thing in her grip and tenderly kissed the back of the hand. Her lips patted in quiet words: “Oh, Rehad, forgive me.” She laid the limb at her feet and, in a sudden rush like a panicked deer, darted away.

  “Ensign Dreva!” Barrin shouted, seeing where she headed.

  “Come back!”

  She was deaf to it, already hurling herself past the toothy edge of the fast-time ravine. There came a splash of energy as she plunged into the time shift. Rings of temporal flux whirled on the air around her. Waves sank into the ground and rose into the arcing sky. Within their dancing midst, Dreva’s airborne form withered. Flesh wrinkled and dried. It cleaved to atrophying muscle and showed bone beneath. Once she had completely entered the envelope, she fell to earth in a sudden rush and was lost to sight beyond the rim of the ravine.

  Barrin bolted after her, down the grassy swale and to the verge of the fast-time rift. There he staggered to a halt and gaped.

  She was dead already, her dry, deflated skin teeming with vermin.

  Barrin turned away, sickened. When he at last mastered his gut, there was nothing left of Ensign Dreva but scraps of canvas and leather and a bleached skeleton.

  * * *

  They sat aboard New Tolaria that night. Urza had planned a banquet to celebrate the island’s reclamation. Trenchers of salt-pork stew steamed beside vast loaves of marbled bread and mounds of fresh oranges.

  The mood was anything but festive. The day had been a chastening failure.

  Rehad was below-decks, bandaged extensively and lying in a drugged sleep. Rejoining his arm was beyond the skill of the crew’s best healers and beyond the power of even Urza Planeswalker. It lay now in a wooden case within a pocket of extreme slow time in the vain hope it might be rejoined in the future. Meanwhile, Rehad’s leader, his love, lay in a pocket of extreme fast time, her skeleton perhaps even now scattered by the tiny scavengers of the ravine.

  These two were not the only casualties. Each exploratory party lost at least one member, and one party was wiped out entirely. Urza performed two other rescues like the one he did for Rehad, and Karn assisted in shepherding a young woman from the recursion loop she found herself in. The only non-organic members of the crew, Urza and Karn, had the best resistance to time distortions, though their systems were greatly stressed by these operations.

  The crew ate their victory dinner not in Old Tolaria, as Urza had hoped, but on New Tolaria. They ate in near-silence. The waters of the bay lapped, black and thirsty, at the gunwales of the great ship, and beyond the beam of the lanterns, the island and sky were black with night.

  From the darkness came a woman. She was tan, keen-eyed, and mysterious. A savage skein drew her dark hair back sharply over her head. Garbed in ragged but regal clothes, she seemed an avatar of the isle itself—alien, angry, and forbidding. She strode up the gangplank and onto the deck, pushing past the stunned guards.

  Urza stood.

  Barrin rose, his mouth dropping open in recognition.

  It was Karn, the silver man, who first spoke her name, in a voice like a rain-swollen waterfall. “Jhoira!”

  “Master Barrin. Master Malzra,” the woman said in a greeting that combined awe and animosity. “I never thought you would return. I wish you hadn’t. After today, you probably wish you hadn’t, either.”

  Monologue

  I was overjoyed to see Jhoira. Her death had weighed heavily on me and on Karn as well. She was much changed, of course, hard-muscled and hard-eyed. The impulses of wonder and forgiveness had been winnowed out of her. She had ceased to be a student of the academy, becoming a native of the island.

  As the island’s native advocate, Jhoira spoke strongly in its defense. There, before Urza’s new passel of students, she laid out all his past sins, planted like thistles across the island and grown up now into great killing forests. Quite openly, she berated him for his time machine. The tampering that had brought about the blast had riven the tapestry of days on the island and left it a jumbled mess. She talked of the other survivors who had, one by one, perished, leaving her alone.

  Even more powerfully, she spoke of how life here had continued. Fast-time forests had died and fallen away, giving place to new plants and animals, to an arid tundra ecology with its own balance of predator and prey. Slow-time forests had turned into swampy jungles, hot and steamy—refuges for thousands of creatures that could not have survived on the island before. Within all these details, I sensed how the years had changed her too.

  “We are, Master Malzra—” she had said at the end of it all “—we are your children of fury, orphans who have grown up in your absence, no longer yours, no longer beholden to you. Many of us hate you, Master Malzra.”

  He listened through it all. I’ll give him that much. And then, into the unhappy silence that settled, Urza spoke, and what he said filled me with even more admiration.

  “I understand. But I am committed to return, and I don’t want to fight you, my children of fury. I want to be reconciled. It will be a thorny way, I know, charged with the thistles I myself planted. But I am committed to return.”

  “You’ll need an advisor,” I said, “a guide. Jhoira, I can think of no one better than you to help Master Malzra understand the mistakes of the past and avert them in the future.”

  There was one final, anxious moment, and then something in her broke. The mad sheen of defiance cracked, and I saw beneath it a lonely woman fearing but needing to be among others.

  “Only because if I refused, every last one of you would die.”

  I tried to look grimly chastened, but I was elated. Urza was pleased too. The fearful students and scholars were both jangled and relieved. Someone—even this frightening wild woman—had to guide them through the terrors of Old Tolaria.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  When most of the crew awoke the next morning, Jhoira was already on deck. She had drawn aside to trade stories with Karn. Though fierce and formidable around other humans, Jhoira laughed and spoke easily with the golem. They were an impressive pair—the wild woman and the silver man. Her flesh was as smooth and brown as the sandstone shoulders around the bay, and his as mirror-bright as the sea they had crossed.

  Karn told her of all the students and scholars he had rescued, and how he had searched late into the night for her, allowing the refugee ship to leave only as the Glimmer Moon sank in the sea. Jhoira told her own stories of rescue and loss. All of this passed without the long, awkward silences of the night before, as though not a moment had gone by between these long-separated friends. They walked along the shore and reminisced, skipping stones in the choppy waves, until the d
eck was teeming with crew, and the smell of freshly brewed tea drew them back aboard.

  Jhoira drank eagerly, burning her lip with the piping stuff. She smiled at Karn and said, “There are certain drawbacks to being a ‘wild woman’ and among them are forgoing real tea from a porcelain cup.”

  The crew broke their fast with a second feast, those going ashore knowing the meal would have to last them until they made camp at the center of the isle. Jhoira predicted that with a caravan of fifty, it would take the whole day to thread their way past the worst time rifts and through the mildest ones.

  Jhoira’s tone of gloom returned as she described to the crew the temporal distortions of the island. They resembled the physical topography after the blast. At the detonation point was a wide temporal basin like a blast crater, where the explosion uniformly ripped away the natural flow of time. Near the edges of this slow-time crater were a series of concentric rills of time, tightly packed fast-zones. The center would be unreachable except for avenues of force that radiated spoke-like from it and joined the outer island with the inner. Many of these avenues were deep slow-time rents, though others allowed a gradual descent into the crater. Others still had admixed with the fast-time shells nearby to make bridges of normal time. Beyond these concentric fast-time rings were large, irregular regions of extreme time shift, many contiguous square miles of territory unreachable to those outside—sheer time plateaus and deep time canyons. In these areas, whole new ecologies had evolved and cultures with them.

  Bearing only the clothes on her back and a long walking staff, Jhoira led a pack-laden parade of scholars and students up the winding forest paths between temporal canyons and plateaus.

  Urza followed just behind her. He carried a large wooden case with ornate inlays of brass and ivory. It looked terrifically heavy, but his strides were weightless, and his questions came easily despite the panting of others. Perhaps he had cast an enchantment that let his feet glide among the gorse, or perhaps microscopic machines did the walking for him.