Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  “You don’t need a wildfire. To counter this sniper, you need another female sniper.”

  “You heap insult upon insult.”

  Everyone has her signature shot, his father’s sister had told him. Not only because she has pride in her work. But she must be paid, also, yes? Getting paid is very important.

  “Look at the images again. They are all shot in the left side of the chest.”

  “Respected President. Remind me when you served.”

  The president had avoided conscription. He had flown on the wings of a sports scholarship into the distant arms of elite coaches, but he knew patterns when he saw them, and now that he had seen this one, his thoughts raced. Was she still alive? What if she was living from the land, in the abandoned wilds? Would he have time to find her?

  “We are all taught to aim for the larger target, sir,” the crisply turned-out subcommander said from the commander’s right side.

  “Why don’t we do that, then?”

  “Sir?”

  “Why don’t we all aim for the larger target? Use artillery to shoot down the wind turbines, like whacking the heads off wildflowers?”

  Nobody answered. It was too high a price to pay. Better to swallow the humiliation of allowing the Beirutis to trespass across their borders at will.

  The president had played unwinnable games before. He did not think this was one.

  “If, by sunrise tomorrow morning, I have not solved your sniper problem,” he said, “you can set fire to the oldest forest in the world.”

  “What are you going to do?” the commander asked incredulously. “Walk up there and offer to sign autographs?”

  The president smiled. “I won’t be walking. My bodyguards and I will be taking the underground train. Oh, and I require every man here to give up his gold. Place your cufflinks and everything else into this ashtray, please. I have no time for budgetary wrangling.”

  The mountain railway tunnels and the limestone caves that they intersected were closed at various junctions by criminal gangs; by religious cults; by the homeless, dying to the sound of dripping stalactites, out of reach of sunlight.

  Every time the train was stopped and armed boys came aboard, the president faced them calmly. They were overjoyed to recognize him.

  “Goal for Liban!” they cried happily, and, sometimes, “The scent of a modern man!” which was one of several foreign product endorsements routinely mistaken for a nationalistic jingo. His hosts offered pine-bark tea, pistachios, and cigars. The president patiently endured their hospitality, trying not to check his watch. After a final cheek-slap from an angry sheik who told him to grow a beard, the train was permitted to complete its journey. He ascended the wet, slippery stair to the surface.

  “To the Ain,” he told a farmer at the station entrance, and with the press of a gold earring into a wrinkled palm, the president and his two bodyguards secured three saddled, skinny horses that put their royal Arabian bloodstock to shame. However, the roads were fallen into such neglect that, in the absence of functional helicopters, only horses would do.

  It was late evening. He had only one hope of finding Aunty Khadija. She would have no electronic devices on her person, no phone: nothing to hack and no way to track her.

  The horses knew the way, even without the eerie glow of the chemical lamps carried by the bodyguards through the desolate winterscape. They passed the Ain, the archway that sheltered a freshwater spring.

  The forest will not burn, the president told himself, and also the fans who had waved the flags.

  She stood outside her square stone farmhouse, letting blood from a goat whose throat she’d recently cut.

  “Hajji!” he cried, instantly ashamed by his boyish relief at what he saw as his rescue from an impossible situation. The smell of blood made his horse shy, and he almost lost control of it.

  Khadija put stained fists on her apron-sheathed hips.

  “My sins have been forgiven,” she scowled, blinking in the dimness, “and here you are to beg me to sin again. Get down from there, you ball-kicking fool. Let me see you. My eyes are not what they were.”

  My eyes are not what they were, Khadija thought, but that is why Allah created 25X-zoom, longer eye relief, and a smaller exit pupil.

  She would not think of the weapon she’d taken as a trophy, although she now hoped to turn it against its arrogant manufacturers. It was the unknown, the unexpected, that must be brought to bear if she were to have a hope of outwitting a younger, better-equipped opponent, if Trabelsi was to triumph over Beiruti.

  Sophia.

  She had seen the captured images. The president’s murky memory of the legend of Khadija’s protégé, the blonde actress’s daughter who wanted revenge on her mother’s cancer, had led him to her home, with a wish and a deadline: daybreak.

  In the blue-white light of her hand-held, rechargeable lantern, the posters in the stairwell were mouldy and torn. Black slush covered the marble floor, and a half-bald dog snarled from a side room, hackles rising.

  “This is the place,” Khadija said, smoothing one of the rips, reuniting half the ringmaster’s moustache with the other half.

  Najib’s Travelling Tent of Wonders.

  “Please,” the president told one of his bodyguards. “Go upstairs. Wake him up and bring him down.”

  Once a wizard of the Trabelsi hologram theatre, Najib appeared in the bodyguard’s keeping with no flourishes and no defences. His neat, dark hair was brittle, his singlet worn, and his neck unshaven.

  “Do not eat my dog,” he begged, before he saw who it was. “Sir! I am humbled. Why have you . . . How did you . . . ?”

  “You sent my daughter one letter too many, Najib,” Khadija said. “Now you must help me save Tripoli, for her.”

  “Is she here?” Najib stumbled in his eagerness.

  “Of course not! Do you think I would let her, or any of her sisters, come back from the schools that I sent them to? Do you think I shot those poor boys at the border because I wanted a rifle of solid gold? She’s married to a French doctor, raising her family in a well-off country, far from here.”

  Najib sagged.

  “Then why—”

  “I have dreamed that the children of my children’s children returned to stand beneath the ancient trees. The idiot commander of the Maghaweer says he will burn them at daybreak if we do not flush out the sniper on the wind turbine.”

  “We?”

  “You have your old recordings, I hope, Najib. And your laser projection boxes. Even though your licence was taken away. The night club, the people that died from ozone poisoning? You should never have promised them a full-length feature in such a poorly ventilated space.”

  “I am tired, old woman. Tell me what you want.”

  “An open-air screening. With as many holograms as you can. Tonight, in Ehden.”

  “Are you mad? The recordings are degraded, and there is no portable power source that can run even one such projection anymore.”

  “There is a transformer underneath Ehden,” the president said softly. “The power cables from all the wind turbines pass through it. Our men can get access to it without exposing themselves to sniper fire.”

  Najib licked his lips.

  “It has been a long time since I saw my beauties,” he admitted at last. “Far too long.”

  Khadija had no cloth to hide behind on the ridge.

  She murmured a quick and blasphemous prayer to the God of Snow, whose temple had once stood where she stood. In 850 BC, the Aramean King raised a great statue of Baal Loubnan at Ehden.

  A hundred and fifty years later, the Assyrian King had the temple torn down and the statue overturned.

  They come and they go, she thought. Christianity had come to Ehden in the sixth century. Now the little churches and abandoned monasteries were deathly silent. So, too, the crashed skycruiser that gleamed at the foot of the towering, spotlit turbines. Was there even anyone alive inside? Was all this for nothing?

  “It is do
ne, Hajji,” said the Maghaweer subcommander. She had hand-picked him to accompany her and had already forgotten his name. He was polite, which could have been misread as insipidness, but Khadija recognized it as unflappability, which he would need if her plan failed and Sophia shot her through her left breast.

  In the piercing cold and whistling darkness, her body heat should have shone out like a beacon to anyone with thermal sensors. Khadija was operating on the information, several years old, that infrared detection was not possible through light-bending cloth. If she was wrong, if improvements had been made to the technology, even the tiny peephole in the wall of snow that the Subcommander had constructed for them would be instantly obvious to the enemy.

  But why should the Beirutis have made advances in military technology? They were safe in their sky-cities, protected by international treaty from satellite-based weapons, their cruising altitude too great for them to be vulnerable to attack from below.

  Khadija searched the nacelle of each turbine for any sign of life. When she found nothing, she searched each ponderously swinging blade for the shadows of ropes or a discrepancy in rotation, which might have indicated the weight of a human being dragging asymmetrically on the structure.

  Nothing.

  On Khadija’s advice, dogs had been sent to sniff for urine around the bases of the towers, but had been shot before they could come close. They must rely on Sophia revealing herself, perhaps only for a fraction of a second. Khadija must not miss.

  She had no targeting computer to help her. That section of rail on her monstrous, white-anodized, stolen StraightLine 20mm sat empty. But these peaks were her brothers and sisters, and her calculating ability had not wasted away like her muscles and bones.

  Her body was brittle, she knew. She could not lie full-length in the snow for very long, even in the insulating suit the subcommander had found for her, too big in the shoulders and too tight in the hips.

  “Tell me,” she said as he settled alongside her.

  “Yes, Hajji. Manual readings verify westerly winds of thirty-seven kilometres per hour, deformed around the turbines in the expected pattern, blade to blade interval a uniform three point two seconds, humidity sixty percent, temperature minus four degrees Celsius, altitude one thousand, five hundred and five metres.”

  Khadija did not respond verbally to this information, absorbing it into herself, willing herself to become one with the mountain, with the skies and the whispering forest below, even as she made the physical adjustments.

  A moment later, beautiful women sprang up in the pristine snow field between the turbines and the ruins of Ehden.

  Seven widely spaced holographic images of seventeen-year-old Egyptian actress Badr raised swan-like arms, imploringly. There was no sound, but the moment was famous, the words immortal.

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

  More of the images moved in from the wings. Men and women. Some frozen. Others distorted. Najib had told the truth when he said the recordings were degraded, but the strength of the broadcast was enough that many of the images could not be differentiated in the visible light spectrum from real human beings.

  Khadija flicked her sight to its thermo-optical setting. There, the figures blazed. Where the beams of the lasers intersected and the air became ionized, voxels exploded like suns. She could not waste precious time enjoying the show, however.

  There.

  High atop Turbine Two, the lens of a telescopic sight reflected the light.

  Khadija zoomed in. Only the weapon’s sight had been uncovered by the enemy. Seeing her young, doomed mother move across the snow had confounded but not flustered Sophia. She had quickly realized that to distinguish human from hologram, she must discard the cloth. Her body remained hidden by the cloth, but the eye, the eye would be a hand’s-breadth behind the sight.

  Khadija lined up her crosshairs. She’d never had a problem looking her victims in the eye, but in that instant she was grateful to Sophia for hiding her face behind the invisible cloth. Without a face, she was an un-person. Even a dog had a face.

  She took the shot. The StraightLine was deafening. Her ears rang. The brass casing melted itself a cradle in the snow, and an old, familiar litany of grief and victory whispered between heartbeats, just as the trigger had been pulled between heartbeats: Thank you for the gift of your life.

  It was too far for her to hear the body strike the ground, but she didn’t need to glimpse the glitter of the scope falling from the turbine tower to know that it was done.

  One. One is five hundred thousand lira.

  One was enough. She should stand down now. The subcommander beside her murmured, “Casualty confirmed,” and moved to pack up his gear, but Khadija said sharply:

  “Wait.”

  Her shoulder felt like it was on fire. She no longer had the brute strength to manage the kick of such a weapon. She sensed that once she took it apart, she would never assemble it again.

  Then she saw a terrified Najib being forced out into the open.

  “He is worse than an animal!” Khadija exclaimed. The order for such an outrage could only have come from the commander, Amr ibn-Amr. The same man who trained his soldiers to use orphan boys to test an enemy sniper’s resolve, the same man who had threatened to burn the cedar forest that was the last thing of splendour and grace left behind when the country was stripped and consigned to the skies.

  “You did say there was only one, Hajji,” the subcommander said quietly.

  “And what will an animal like that do with the Beiruti women and children who are inside the wreck of the cruiser?”

  “That is not for me to guess, Hajji.”

  Khadija watched the Mountain Combat Company come out into the open. With increasing confidence, they moved to secure a perimeter around the unprotected craft. The commander himself went to find Sophia’s body.

  He wants the light-bending cloth for himself, Khadija realized. Once he has it, nobody will be able to punish him for treating his own allies like paper targets.

  Before the subcommander could protest, she shot his superior in the back, placing the bullet where it would emerge from his left breast. The soldiers in formation around their leader dropped into the snow.

  “No!” the subcommander breathed, too late.

  Two, Khadija thought. Two is one million lira.

  She would not be paid this time. Who cared?

  “Congratulations on your promotion,” she said to the shocked subcommander, patting the stock of the StraightLine. “This is yours, now. Use it wisely, and always remember. If you can look in a wild animal’s eye as you take its life, you can look into the eyes of a man. If not, you had better shoot for the chest.”

  Rubbing her sore shoulder, she packed up her survival gear. Her water and her dried goat meat. Her explosives and her wire snares.

  “If I let you go, I am a traitor, Hajji.”

  “Then you had better come along.”

  He had carried the weapon in for her. Only he could carry it out, and only its absence would deter pursuit. For a moment, it seemed he would stay there, frozen in the snow, until the men who had been his brothers up until one minute ago came to drag him away.

  “I have nothing else,” he said calmly. “I have nothing else but this.”

  “I have an unmarried youngest daughter,” Khadija said. “The ball-kicking fool gave me enough gold that we could easily go to visit her. She likes skinny men.”

  Snow began to fall as the subcommander helped her with her skis. It was powdery and perfect, hiding them as they swished, silent as wild things, down the sloping side of the mountain.

  Pod Dreams of Tuckertown

  By Gareth L. Powell

  1.

  All Pod wants to do is hang with his friends, Erik and Kai. But he can’t, not anymore. Not since the Clampdown. Not since the Elite looked down from their high orbit and decided to rationalize human society, to make it ordered and safe. Not since they sent him here, to the b
ridge, to work off his criminal debt.

  He hates the bridge. He hates the stinging wind and the crashing waves. He hates the tedious, backbreaking work. But most of all, he hates his foreman, Fergus.

  He hates Fergus for hurting Kai. Kai bungled a weld on one of the support girders, and so Fergus stamped on her spine until she couldn’t walk. Now all Pod wants to do is kill Fergus. He lies in his bunk at night and dreams of smashing Fergus’s head with a wrench or pushing him over the railings into the sea. But deep down, he knows he won’t. They’ve got him pumped so full of sedatives that he can’t even get an erection, let alone pick a fight.

  So, day after day, he works on the bridge. The wind burns his skin, the sun makes him squint. But he gets through it by thinking of Kai and remembering how good things used to be—how great it was when they used to hang out together at the diner by the docks in Tuckertown, where they could see the lights of the trawlers and laugh at the stink of the last of the day’s fish guts being hosed off the quay.

  They weren’t into anything heavy back then, just stealing cars and joyrides. There were some fights, and some cars got burned, but no one ever got killed. There were no knives or guns—it was all just for laughs, something to do when the rain came down and the markets closed for the night.

  But then—on Pod’s eighteenth birthday—the Elite came down in their shining silver saucers, and everything changed, once and for all.

  Erik says Fergus has a girl back in Tuckertown.

  “So what?” Pod says. “Everybody says they’ve got someone waiting for them.”

  “It just shows he’s human, is all,” Erik says. He looks thin. He’s not eating. Fergus kicked him in the stomach a week ago, and he hasn’t been right since.