Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  Nicole poured her past into him with an intensity he did not understand for almost a year, until she needed someone to bring her home from a medical appointment. She knew she’d been edited from her family. She understood the transient forgetfulness of the society she’d kept. And she feared vanishing, feared slipping beneath the surface without anyone noticing.

  Pablo began haunting Brian three years after Nicole died. Brian had been sharing a house with his college friends, shifting from a life of temporariness to the working world. Pablo came during a hockey game. At first, the distant scritching metal on stone sounded like a squirrel in the attic. The whispering came next, quiet against the game. At the end of the first period, his friends checked the cable connections, switched channels, and finally muted the TV.

  His friends were fascinated, irritated, and wary. Hauntings were not dangerous. They were inconvenient. Hauntings were never perfectly on target, so neighbours looked on a haunting in a building as they would the upstairs tenants getting a big puppy, something to wake them up at odd hours and something to drive down property values.

  Brian wondered if he’d done something to deserve this. By rights, his mother or one of his aunts should have been haunted. Ghosts haunted families. Informational patterns in DNA attracted them. Had the time Brian spent with Nicole predisposed Pablo to seek him out? In some cases, ghosts just vanished with those they haunted.

  In the end, Brian accepted Pablo like an awkward roommate, someone easily ignored most of the time, and who, in the end, he could live with and even become fond of. Nicole had protected the ghost as if he were someone who needed protecting. He did. Just like Nicole. For all her worldly flaws, Nicole had been an innocent, as terribly vulnerable as Pablo, holding out for a great love in a world of thorns. She had hidden that hope, not telling the girls she employed, the men who visited her, nor the family she embarrassed. But she had told Brian, with the trust given to children, who rarely care. And taking care of lonely Pablo was the last gift he could give to Nicole.

  About six months after his marriage went south, on a lark he went to a gala at an art gallery that was raising money for gene counselling and gene therapy for poor families that were haunted. Dating was not going smoothly. It was depressing to start at zero again, to meet new people without the innocence that once made trusting so easy. And he was self-conscious about Pablo. Maybe dating someone else with a ghost would make things easier.

  Vanessa was the wine-toting, fast-talking machine behind the evening. She appeared twice as large as she really was, and was everywhere at once, introducing speakers, artists, and haunted families. She took money from the rich like a conman. She stopped beside him twice in that first evening, leaning in with sly comments and smiles as if they’d known one another for years. She made trust.

  And she wanted to trust.

  She was looking for something honest and transparent, not because she knew she needed it, but because she felt something missing. Brian was not glittery like the guests, nor luminary like the artists, nor courageous like the haunted. He just was.

  The evening wound down. The luminaries were done with their glow. The haunted were finished showcasing their need. The rich left their money and guilt. Brian and Vanessa sat side by side on the stairs to the stage, wine glasses in hand. She’d just teased him about dating and the world today, and had said, “I would never date a haunted guy,” like the open hand of a handshake, waiting for the responding grip.

  “I’m haunted,” Brian said.

  She looked at him over her shoulder, sobriety creeping back upon her. “What kind of haunting?” she asked.

  “Small,” he said. “Quiet. Easily dismissed.”

  She looked at him for a long time, long enough for the evening’s hope to begin to whither.

  “Maybe that’s not so bad,” she said.

  Vanessa picked him up that afternoon to drive him to the clinic. She greeted him with a kiss, a latte, and a bubbly laugh. They drove. Although somatic-cell gene therapy had come a long way, changing the DNA in most of the cells of his body, secreted away in so many different tissues and gene-expression environments, was complicated. Retroviruses could be tailored to attach to receptors in dozens of different tissue systems, and relatively non-invasive surgery could even put them past the blood-brain barrier. Technological advances had made the risks vanishingly small. Insertions of provirus into junk DNA and genes that were known not to be needed in adulthood would change Brian enough that Pablo would have a hard time recognizing him. Pablo would eventually go.

  His old junk was boxed and ready to go. He understood why Vanessa wanted a clean slate. It was not because she often said, “You get over a relationship by deleting it. They’re all practices for the big one that works.” That was part of it, but it was too facile. Moving in together was a big step. They were conscious of the magnitude of their decisions right now. Vanessa loved him and would not share him, even with the past.

  She found a spot in the parking lot of the clinic and turned off the car. Brian didn’t take off his seatbelt. She looked at him and put her hand on his. “Are you scared, Brian?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are you having second thoughts?” she asked, more quietly.

  He nodded.

  “Do you think it’s important to know what colour the dinosaurs were?” he asked.

  One Million Lira

  By Thoraiya Dyer

  They might send the old woman, Sophia thought. If she is still alive.

  Draped in light-bending cloth, stretched out along the nacelle of the monstrous, 120-metre-tall wind turbine, she swept the crosshairs of her .50-cal sniper rifle’s scope over Ehden’s gaping, ruined restaurants and shattered, snow-blanketed hotels.

  Seemed like nobody was left alive here.

  But according to the aircraft’s computer, seven passengers of seven hundred were left alive in the wreck of the skycruiser Beirut II, which had crashed into the side of the mountain during yesterday’s snowstorm and now rested at the foot of the wind farm’s twenty-one towers. Its delicate, mile-wide wings were reduced to fragments of solar panel glittering in the midday sun. Beirut itself was over the border, roughly eighty kilometres away.

  It would take two days for the Beirutis to equip a mission to reclaim the fallen cruiser from its poorer neighbour and rival, the city-state of Tripoli; until then, Sophia’s instructions were to defend it from Tripoli’s Maghaweer commander, Amr ibn-Amr, called Amr the Unbeautiful by the sniggering, glamorous inhabitants of the Beiruti Sky Collective.

  Patience is everything.

  Sophia took a sip of melted snow from a pouch she’d filled with fresh flakes piled by the wind against the vanes. The great blades of Turbine Two turned in front of her, transforming the powerful and constant westerly into current that ran, like the Kadisha River, all the way west to Tripoli on the Mediterranean Sea. She didn’t dwell on the artillery that could potentially be brought to bear against her. Instead, she watched replays of her mother’s famous Egyptian films in her mind’s eye.

  I am forbidden to leave the house, Badr said serenely on-screen in tortured voice-over as she dipped her pen in the ink, dark eyes shining with unshed tears. I am a caged bird.

  Interviewers begged the actress to repeat those lines at age forty, even though Badr had been in The Broken Wings at seventeen. A hundred times she’d smiled and shaken her head while her long, gold earrings danced. She’d said the lines again, in the end, to Sophia, when her oncologist denied her a discharge from hospital.

  This bird will stay truthful and virtuous to the very end.

  Sophia’s mother had starred in more than two hundred romantic roles, many of them ending in death. None of them featured leaky breast implants, the cause of her true death. It was why Sophia shot her victims through the left side of the chest, always.

  The left breast, the one the Amazons had removed, the one that Badr had removed, to no avail.

  You have one, too, Old Woman, saggy as it must be these
days. You mocked me because I couldn’t look them in the eye. You’d better stay by the fire. I will shoot you through the left breast, if you come.

  The sunset over the sea attempted to blind her. Sophia was not so distracted by the movie replay that she failed to spot the scouts of the Mountain Combat Company when they arrived, white-swathed and carrying their skis.

  They were twelve hundred metres away and poorly equipped. Some of their helmets were damaged. None carried cases of the current standard insectoid nanobots that could have infiltrated the wreck and given them the information they needed without having to directly approach it.

  Sophia scrutinized each face, in search of Amr the Unbeautiful, but there was no sign of him. She flipped through a series of faces, directed to her left eye by her own highly advanced helmet’s HUD, while her right eye tried to match them with the men on the slopes below.

  No. None of you are valuable. None of you are important.

  To keep them out of the invisible perimeter around the wind farm and crumpled skycruiser, she waited for the turbine blade to pass before shooting the closest one through the self-healing cloth.

  They went to ground, but it wasn’t going to ground as the well-financed Beiruti troops might have known it; there was no fading into nothingness provided by light-bending cloth, no approaching ball of flame from an auto-laser-triangulation retaliation device, just hunkering behind walls and debris. They had to know she would be on one of the towers, but with the wind too strong to place spying nanobots, even if they did have them, and with both distance and the vibration of the blades interfering with the detection of sound and shockwave signatures, they had no hope of knowing which one.

  Now choose, Sophia thought coldly. How badly did Amr the Unbeautiful wish to seize the Beirut II? Badly enough to bombard the wind farm with rockets? He could destroy her, but not without destroying Tripoli’s main source of power; not without plunging his city into darkness.

  And perhaps the turbines could never be rebuilt. Perhaps the city would go into eternal darkness, as so many cities and countries across the world had done, with no more fossil fuels to burn and anyone with money gone to join the sky collectives.

  A skylife wasn’t completely free of danger. The continuously flying, solar-powered, high-altitude townships must land once a month or so to replenish their supply of water. Accidents could happen. The Beirut II was proof of that. Still, a skylife was better than a landlife, even if Beirut had been forced to appropriate billions of dollars that technically belonged to Tripoli so that all of its wealthy citizens and their families could become airbound.

  A decade later, the rage of those who were left behind was undiminished. The enemy was within reach, at last; on the ground, like a bird with a broken wing. Sophia would permit them no hostages.

  Two more men crossed Sophia’s invisible line. She shot them, too. Killing was easy, when you accepted it was the only way to survive. She had been a killer since birth. In the summer when the heatwave had come and the crops failed, when Beirut and Tripoli were one country, she had patrolled the border against bread-thieving black-market incursions; learned to kill twice with one shot, to kill the men who came and the families who now would not eat.

  She killed, too, by being wealthy, by reaping the world’s inequality to pay for chemotherapy developed by a global corporatocracy. Was that different from a bullet through the heart?

  Bullets were cleaner than starvation and the horrors of lawlessness. She hadn’t always been so wise. The old woman, who fought for money and had no scruples, had tutored her. One, Khadija had whispered in her smoke-ravaged voice, gnarled feet bare on the pine bark, like a perched owl. One is five hundred thousand lira. Nine more and I can go home. Ten is enough to pay my bills today.

  You fill your quota like you have a bag to be filled with geese, Sophia had accused from the lateral branch below, lowering her spotter’s scope. She’d signed up to defy her father, who wanted her married and safely out of the police force. Despite the jeers of young men who had failed to complete the commando course, she’d earned her sword-and-tiger badge in just a few months. This was her first deployment, and she was uncomfortable with the intimacy of the stalking phase. She could never be so intimate with men at home; see the sweat beading in their chest hair or the smoothness of skin over breastbone, the movement of their Adam’s apples as they took long swallows of purified river water.

  If you can look in a wild animal’s eye as you take its life, Khadija said, you can look into the eyes of a man.

  But Sophia couldn’t. Khadija told her to aim for the chest. To pretend it was empty jackets on a clothesline. Even a weepy girl could shoot an empty jacket, couldn’t she?

  Her mother’s empty jackets had filled three walk-in wardrobes. Sophia had wept over those jackets. The first and last time she had wept as an adult.

  Now she scanned for the sniper that belonged to the combat platoon. She had the superior position. The only ridgeline that offered a comparable elevation was two kilometres away, too far away for backwards Tripoli to threaten her in these high winds. The sniper must position himself closer, in the ruins of Ehden.

  There.

  Sophia killed him and continued to search for the arriving support platoon. Most likely they would stay in the shelter offered by the mountainside, but if they were malnourished, or exhausted by the climb in the cold and the snow, who knew what mistakes they might make?

  Her helmet told her that six skycruisers had landed in Beirut port. Troops had disembarked. Snowmobiles were being charged. New estimated time of arrival was noon the following day.

  She didn’t get another opportunity to thin the enemy’s numbers. An hour before sunset, however, the small figure of a child was pushed by a rifle butt out into the snow from behind a concrete wall.

  The child struggled with something square and presumably heavy. Snot and tears dribbled down his red face. Sophia wanted to shoot through the wall, to kill the unseen man who must be threatening him, but such solid evidence of trajectory could only end in her death. Calming herself, setting her emotions aside, like burying the bones of a meal in the snow, she watched the child wade through whiteness toward the Beirut II.

  She couldn’t allow an unidentified device to be brought any closer.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  With her lungs half-emptied, in the millisecond before the blade of the wind turbine obscured the shot, she squeezed the trigger and the rifle kicked.

  The small body fell.

  Nobody moved to retrieve him.

  Sophia switched the movie back on in her head.

  Husband, I am leaving you, said the beautiful actress, her head bowed. Her bosom heaved, distress made manifest. The jilted husband stared at her flimsily clad breasts, no doubt thinking they would soon belong to another man.

  The sun went down, and spotlights came to life around Turbine Two, maintaining the snowy surroundings as bright as daylight. She had counted on the constant illumination. Her invisibility cloth permitted enough visible light to pass unidirectionally through it for her targeting to be unimpeded, but infrared radiation did not pass through at all. Unless she removed the drapes, revealing her location, her thermal imaging components were useless.

  Sophia ate a small bar of chocolate and switched her insulation suit to its nighttime setting. She hadn’t washed her hands. Her fingers, when she licked the chocolate from them, tasted of gunpowder residue and light machine oil.

  Patience was everything, and her gut told her that the old woman would come.

  “You did what with an orphan boy?” demanded the president of the City-State of Tripoli.

  The meeting room, a shadow of its former glory, showed plaster where the solid gold embellishments had been chipped away, melted, and sold, but the two dozen men around the polished table were well-enough accoutred to heavily distort the mean atomic mass back in the direction of 197 amu.

  Yet not enough wealth to buy even one skycruiser, the president thought, despa
iring.

  Prayer beads slipped through the fingers of the man he confronted across the table, Amr ibn-Amr, Commander of the Maghaweer.

  “The cedar forest below Ehden,” the commander said as though the president had not spoken. “We must set fire to it. You will give permission, of course.”

  The president, who in his youth had led the Lebanese soccer team to statistically improbable World Cup glory in the year before the first Beiruti skycruiser launched and the country was divided forever, recalled a hundred thousand flags flying in the great stadium, each one stamped with a green, stylized cedar.

  “No,” he said.

  He still heard the drums in his dreams. The ululation of the women. The people had voted for his familiar face, jug-eared and broken-nosed. His was the dented forehead that had scored. His were the teeth whose kicking earned that vital penalty.

  “We need a smokescreen,” argued Amr, whose teeth had a gap suited to pulling grenade pins or imprisoning small birds. “Without smoke, we can’t get past the snipers to approach the cruiser. The Beirut II is non-military. The passengers won’t resist.”

  “The Beirutis will be here for their passengers very soon. And from your reports, I would guess there is only one sniper.”

  The commander snatched the beads up into his palm. He drained the dregs of his coffee and stood up as if to leave.

  “One sniper? It is an insult to suggest that is all they would send against our elite forces. Listen. Ordinary agents and canisters cannot obscure the area around the turbines where the skycruiser has crashed. The wind in the mountains is strong and constant. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. It is why we built them there!”

  The others watched in silence. The military men mocked the president for his inexperience in combat and the religious leaders mocked him for his so-called spinelessness; he had once bowed to his European sponsors, who wanted him cleanshaven. But he knew something, now, that they didn’t, and he paused to enjoy it.