Free This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

either practice with the assagai he had bartered from a big Nubian, or he would strip to the waist and wrestle for hours with his tireless golem.
    A worthy opponent was the golem. Hasan had it programmed at twice the statistically-averaged strength of a man and had upped its reflex-time by fifty percent. Its "memory" contained hundreds of wrestling holds, and its governor theoretically prevented it from killing or maiming its opponent-all through a series of chemelectrical afferent nerve-analogues which permitted it to gauge to an ounce the amount of pressure necessary to snap a bone or tear a tendon. Rolem was about five feet, six inches in height and weighed around two hundred fifty pounds; manufactured on Bakab, he was quite ex-70 ROGER ZELAZNY
    pensive, was dough-colored and caricature-featured, and his brains were located somewhere below where his navel would be-if golems had navels-to protect his think stuff from Greco-Roman shocks. Even as it is, accidents can happen.
    People have been killed by the things, when something goes amok in the brains or some afferents, or just because the people themselves slipped or tried to jerk away, supplying the necessary extra ounces.
    I'd had one once, for almost a year, programmed for boxing. I used to spend fifteen minutes or so with it every afternoon. Got to thinking of it as a person, almost. Then one day it fouled me and I pounded it for over an hour and finally knocked its head off. The thing kept right on boxing, and I stopped thinking of it as a friendly sparring partner right then. It's a weird feeling, boxing with a headless golem, you know? Sort of like waking from a pleasant dream and finding a nightmare crouched at the foot of your bed. It doesn't really "see" its opponent with those eye-things it has; it's all sheathed about with piezo-electric radar mesentery, and it "watches" from all its surfaces. Still, the death of an illusion tends to disconcert. I turned mine off and never turned it back on again. Sold it to a camel trader for a pretty good price. Don't know if he ever got the head back on. But he was a Turk, so who cares?
    Anyway-Hasan would tangle with Rolem, both of them gleaming in the firelight, and we'd all sit on blankets and watch, and bats would swoop low occasionally, like big, fast ashes, and emaciated clouds would cover the moon, veil-like, and then move on again. It was that way on the third night, when I went mad.
    THIS IMMORTAL 71
    I remember it only in the way you remember a passing countryside you might have seen through a late summer evening storm-as a series of isolated, lightning-filled stillshots. . . .
    Having spoken with Cassandra for the better part of ah hour, I concluded the transmission with a promise to cop a Skimmer the following afternoon and spend the next night on Kos-I recall our last words.
    "Take care, Konstantin. I have been dreaming bad dreams."
    "Bosh, Cassandra. Good night."
    And who knows but that her dreams might have been the result of a temporal shockwave moving backwards from a 9.6 Richter reading?
    A certain cruel gleam filling his eyes, DOS Santos applauded as Hasan hurled Rolem to the ground with a thunderous crash. That particular earthshaker continued, however, long after the golem had climbed back to his feet and gotten into another crouch, his arms doing serpent-things in the Arab's direction. The ground shook and shook.
    "What power! Still do I feel it!" cried DOS Santos. "Ole!"
    "It is a seismic disturbance," said George. "Even though I'm not a geologist-"
    "Earthquake!" yelled his wife, dropping an un-pasturized date she had been feeding Myshtigo.
    There was no reason to run, no place to run to.
    There was nothing nearby that could fall on us. The ground was level and pretty barren. So we just sat there and were thrown about, even knocked flat a few times. The fires did amazing things.
    Rolem's time was up and he went stiff then, and Hasan came and sat with George and me. The 72 ROGER ZELAZNY
    tremors lasted