"03.Time Streams" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

are made.
You have no mother. You have no father, either. You have
a pair of creators, but that is not the same. Neither of us
knows how to comfort and protect you. If you need too much
nurturing, we may even consider you defective. Perhaps it is
because you were designed to be a tool, a weapon-not a
person. Perhaps it is because we have not expected to have
to save you. We were hoping you would save us.

- Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

Chapter 3

It had been nearly a month since Jhoira had observed the
lab session in which the silver man awoke. She could
remember each detail of Master Malzra's technique. She'd
spent the intervening time studying powerstones, like the
one placed in the golem's head, and poring over the
artifact's design sketches. All of it was preparation for
the design debrief she would be required to give. It was the
price paid by all the elite students invited to observe the
procedure. There remained only one more task before she was
ready to write her report-actually interviewing the machine.
She sighed with dread and tapped her fingers idly on the
plans. She had hoped to derive a satisfactory description of
the golem's intellectual and emotional performance from
these plans, her research on Thran powerstones, and first
hand observation of the refit. None of these things
explained its-his-apparent logical and affective capacities
though. She would have to interview him.
Jhoira glanced in surrender at the ceiling of her
dormitory cell. Interviewing the machine meant winning past
his self-appointed wrangler, Teferi. The boy-and at
fourteen, he was only a boy-was one part prodigy, one part
prankster, and one part pervert. Unfortunately all three
parts were madly infatuated with Jhoira. She had done her
best to discourage his advances, but he didn't notice subtle
rebukes, and he considered unsubtle ones only affectionate
horseplay.
If she told him she wasn't interested, he would pledge
to make her interested. If she said she hated him, he would
respond that hate and love were only a hair's breadth apart-
and speaking of hair's breadths, could he have a breadth of
hers? She had the inkling that he had made several attempts
to devise a magical love potion to win her over.
Just thinking about the young man-the boy, he was only a
boy-exasperated Jhoira. She stood from her desk and paced
the small, spare room she occupied in the academy. If only
Teferi could glimpse a real man, could glimpse the man she
had found at the seaside and had provisioned and kept secret