Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  Hoon’s contempt for these same concepts was obviously so great that it exceeded polite articulation: she merely expelled a derisive snort. Then she added, “Well, good riddance to Bloc sanctions and antitrust restrictions.”

  Elnessa delicately swept her wire brush up, up, up, all along the first furrowed row of clay she had set before the city walls, imparting to it an impression of young wheat or corn, just as it sprang from the ground toward the sun. And as she did so, she listened to the unfolding plans for the cool, calculated, and above all profitable, betrayal of her species.

  Once again responding to the gum wrapper Elnessa had inserted into the dead-drop crevice, Reuben approached her hurriedly. He had his mouth open to ask something—

  Elnessa preempted him. “Have you heard?”

  “You mean, about the aliens?”

  “Exosapients,” Elnessa corrected him.

  “Whatever. Yeah, I heard. It’s got to be the worst-kept secret there’s ever been. No one seems to be able to shut up about it, even in the military. The word has been leaking out of navy comshacks, out of the commercial transmission offices, everywhere.”

  “And you know they’re planning on coming here, evidently?”

  Reuben frowned. “Well, amidst all the rest of the panic talk, I’ve heard that rumour, too. But the evidence for it seems pretty vague, pretty much hearsay.”

  “Well, it’s not. These exosapients are apparently Indi Group’s newest preferred customers. And they want the kids. For research.”

  She thought Reuben would goggle. But like her, his capacity for shock was almost exhausted. All Reuben did was shrug. “Figures. Which makes our mission all the more imperative.” His expression became eager, more focused. “So, how did it go when you went in today? Is everything there, ready and waiting?”

  Elnessa shook her head. “I got the payload in, but nothing else.”

  Reuben’s jaw dropped open. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that they wouldn’t let me take anything electronic into the office: no independent power supply, and no remote activators of any kind. Like I told you. But even so, I think I’ve found a way to—”

  But Reuben was shaking his head. “No, El. It’s finished. Our guy on the inside is strip-searched every day: they’ve got all the usual means of access covered. Without power and a way to trigger the device, it’s no good.”

  “I understand your problem. But actually, there’s a pretty simple alternative: you can—”

  Reuben stood abruptly. “No, El: I don’t want to know. The less I know, the less I can tell if they eventually root up some pieces of this plot and then try to discover who was involved. I’ve got—we’ve got—to forget about this. Right now. As if it never happened.”

  Elnessa looked up at him. “I’m not sure I can forget it, Reuben. Particularly not with what’s at stake, now.”

  Reuben looked at her. “Don’t make trouble, El. And don’t make me warn you about coming near the kids again. Vas told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That you made him dinner last night, let him stay until it was way too late—”

  “Feeling guilty you didn’t even notice he was missing, ‘Daddy’?’” The moment she said it, Elnessa was sorry: no one knew better than she how hard it was to keep track of almost a dozen kids between the ages of five and thirteen. “Look, Reuben; I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “El, just—just leave it alone. Leave it all alone. And I mean both the mission and Vas. And that’s an order.” His utterance of the word “order” was, laughably, a half-whining appeal, rather than a command.

  “Sure,” El answered. “Whatever.”

  Reuben turned and walked stiffly into the deepening gloom. About ten metres away, he reached down into a cluster of bushes and gently extracted its hidden occupant—Vas—before resuming his steady march away from Elnessa. Vas looked back, eyes troubled. He waved and was gone.

  Elnessa waved, sighed, wiped her eyes, and went home in the dark.

  It was only midmorning of January 2, 2120, when Elnessa stepped back to examine the frieze, in all its finished glory. All that remained now was to put in the prism-projecting Cheops eye, just over the watchtower light, and complete the light fixture itself. Behind her, Simovic and Hoon continued their plotting, as though they had been at it ever since she had left yesterday. And who knew? Maybe they had.

  Hoon continued with her seemingly inexhaustible list of questions. “Our personnel—the ones who will gather the children, and the ones who will convey them to the rendezvous point—do any of them, well . . . know what’s really going on?”

  Simovic shook his head. “No. They have the necessary timetable, coordinates, and orders, but no knowledge of who our clients are or why we are engaging in this trade.”

  “Which is scheduled for when?”

  Simovic looked at the digital timecode embedded in the ticker bar of his media-monitoring flatscreen. “Two hours.”

  “Short notice,” Hoon commented.

  “True. But it’s really quite logical. Even if our new customers trusted us—which they have no reason to do at this point—they have no way of knowing if our communications are secure. Maybe Bloc naval forces have hacked our cipher, know when and where to expect our clients, and will set up an ambush. No, our clients’ prudence is a good sign. It means they are not rash, and, after all, we will need these new partners to be very discreet indeed.”

  Elnessa looked over toward the two of them. “Mr. Simovic,” she called.

  “Yes, Ms. Clare?”

  “Could you please have your security people pull the fuse for the power conduits all along this wall?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I need to finish wiring the lights.”

  “Can’t you leave the power on while you do it?”

  “Only if I want to take the risk of electrocuting myself.”

  Elnessa noted Simovic’s hesitation. It didn’t arise from any sense of suspicion—that was manifestly clear—but rather from the inconvenience of her request. Her safety was almost beneath his concern, especially at this particular moment. However, he ultimately signalled his annoyed acquiescence to the guard at the rear of the room, who left to comply with the request.

  A moment later, the lights glaring down upon the frieze, along with the rest of the devices which drew their power from outlets along that wall, shut down.

  Elnessa nodded her thanks and limped over to the watchtower, the Cheops eye in hand. She emplaced the round, vaguely Pharaohic piece of multi-hued crystal just above the pointed roof of the watchtower.

  Then, picking up the bulb that was to be the watchtower’s lamp, she set it down on the section of the clay “wall” next to the tower, and inspected the two small alligator clips grinning toothily up at her from just beneath the rim of the passage she had bored lengthwise in the tower. She stuck her finger in between the leads, widening the hole slightly, and then buried the two clips side by side into the dense matter surrounding them.

  She went to check the switch that provided the manual control for all the lights in the frieze. It was, as she had left it, in the “off” position.

  She turned to face Simovic. “It is finished,” she announced.

  “Hmmmm . . . what?”

  “I said, ‘It is finished.’ Can you please have the power restored to this wall?”

  Simovic and Hoon looked up: he surprised, she bored and impatient. He nodded for the guard to go restore the power, and then stood straighter, scanning the length of the frieze. Elnessa detected surprise and gratification: despite the fact that she had spent the last two months crafting it literally under his nose, he had never truly examined it until now. Simovic cleared his throat. “That is really . . . ”

  “ . . . really quite good,” Hoon finished, with an approving nod-and-pout, and a tone of voice that sounded like a grudging concession. Then she was turning back to her documents and data-feeds.

  “But you have not seen it all,
” Elnessa said.

  Hoon looked back up, Simovic smiled faintly. “No?” he asked.

  “No. Several elements light up and can be set to show different times of the day. The sun light is here, and small spotlights are embedded here and here to make the city roofs gleam during the day mode. These other lights—inside the blue acrylic—make the water seem to ripple and churn.”

  “And at night?”

  Elnessa turned on the switch. “The city’s watchtower burns a faint, but steady amber, guiding lost travellers to shelter on dark nights and in dark times. And all the while, the great prismatic eye of Cheops judges the worthiness of those within the city, and without.”

  Simovic seemed to suppress a flinch at the mention of judgment. Elnessa wondered if perhaps he had enough vestigial soul left in him to feel a faint pulse of guilt. Hoon simply frowned, as though slightly suspicious that they had funded the creation of radical art. She asked, “And just what do you call this piece of art? And why doesn’t the tower’s light work?”

  Elnessa smiled. “I call this frieze Jericho Falls Outward. Or, if you prefer a less metaphorical title, you can call it, I Will Not Let You Assholes Kill My Children.”

  Simovic did flinch now. Hoon’s head snapped back as if she had been struck—and then her eyes went wide with comprehension. She turned toward one of the guards, mouth open to scream a command—just as Elnessa finished her silent count to ten.

  As Elnessa reached “ten,” the current from the wall had spent that many seconds both illuminating the lights of the frieze and coursing through the alligator clips that were buried in the side of the hole Elnessa had bored through the length of the watchtower. However, the electricity directed into that substance was neither wasted nor idle.

  Concealed inside the block of clay, down where the leads were embedded, was a core comprised of an identically coloured, but somewhat denser, malleable material. With every passing second, the complex nanytes which pervaded that substance had been changing their chemical composition and aligning to follow (and thereby offer less resistance to) the electric current. However, unlike the aligning of atoms in an electromagnet, when the nanytes of this complex compound were all finally aligned, they began to work like a battery—which rapidly soared toward overload.

  As Elnessa Clare realized that her ten-count had come and gone, she thought about continuing on to “eleven,” and felt a pulse of worry shoot through her. According to Reuben, the substance that had been embedded at the core of each of the clay blocks—Selftex—could only absorb ten seconds of standard outlet current from the watchtower’s diverted leads. But then Elnessa realized that this one extra second was a gift, time with which she could recall Vas’s steady, warm brown eyes—

  The Selftex—a recent, self-actuating evolution of the plastic explosive Semtex—had been developed to do away with the need for blasting caps or other explosive initiators. Hooked up to a low electric current, it gave miners and construction workers a long, precise interval in which to evacuate a blast site. However, when the current was as powerful as that running through a standard electrical outlet—

  From almost two kilometres away, Vas not only heard, but felt, the blast. A few nearby windows shattered, people stared around wildly, a few—probably the ones who had heard the rumours of approaching exosapients—looked skyward.

  But Vas straightened and looked toward the roiling mass of thick black smoke rising up over the Indi Group’s corporate headquarters like a fist of angry defiance. And, through his tears, he smiled. That was the work of El, his El. He had heard Reuben’s injudicious radio talk, had seen some incoming messages foolishly left unpurged from the house computer, and so knew that El had been helping to resist the Indi Group—and as of yesterday, was the only one still actively doing so.

  Vas looked over toward the headquarters again, wondered about the frieze Elnessa had spoken of working on for so long, yearned to have seen it. He knew that, since she had crafted it, the frieze had been, without doubt, a thing of beauty—every bit as much as she herself had been. Then he stared up at the crest of the ugly black plume that marked its destruction, and reflected: this was her gift to him, to all the children.

  And therefore, it, too, was a thing of beauty.

  Home Is Where the Heart Is

  By David Weber

  The first hint something might be wrong was that I was flying through the air. The second came a second or so later, when I landed face-first on the asphalt.

  The third came when I sat up shakily . . . and realized I didn’t have a clue who I was.

  I shoved myself into a sitting position and looked around. It was dark, the alley illuminated only by the fringe wash of the streetlamp just beyond its mouth. It smelled of garbage—not surprisingly, given the dumpsters on either side of me and the back door of the Chinese restaurant opposite me. And it was raining.

  Of course.

  I sat on the wet pavement, feeling cold water soak through my trousers and run down into my eyes, and waited for the world to stop spinning beneath me. It took a while, but eventually a sense of stability oozed back into me and I used one of those convenient dumpsters to pull myself to my feet.

  The icy rain fell a little harder. I swiped water from my face with the palm of my hand and poked at the strange blankness deep inside where memories of self were supposed to live. Nothing. Just . . . nothing at all. There was plenty of other information, like a pavement with a single me-shaped brick missing in the middle of it. I knew the name of the city, who was president, the date, what day it was—Wednesday, as a matter of fact—but not who I was.

  I looked down at myself in the feeble light and was . . . unimpressed by what I found. I wore a pair of ratty running shoes with mismatched laces, my cargo pants had seen much better days, and my T-shirt had a hole under the left armpit. I checked my pockets and found exactly twenty-seven cents and a mostly empty butane lighter. No keys, no wallet, and—obviously—no helpful ID that might have told me who I was.

  I wasn’t surprised when my rubbing hand discovered well-grown stubble on my cheeks. I might not know who I was, but it was depressingly clear what I was, in at least one sense.

  I poked at that blank spot again, harder, and wondered why I didn’t feel more panicked. Worried as hell, yeah. Even more confused. Perplexed, check. But not really panicked, which I supposed said something about the personality of whoever it was I couldn’t remember.

  I sighed, swiped more rainwater from my face, and headed for the alley mouth. I might not know where “home” was—assuming I had one—but getting out of the unpleasantly cold rain seemed like a reasonable first objective.

  “Hey, Laz! Got somebody here who needs some yardwork done. Interested?”

  “Yeah—sure.”

  I turned from the sink full of dirty dishes I’d been washing as Samantha Dellinger waved a message slip at me from the kitchen door.

  She and her husband, George, ran the Tannerman Shelter, where I’d been living for the last five weeks. “Call me Sam” was short, stout, plain-faced, and grey-haired, and like anyone else who’d ever been one of their “guests,” I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She and George had not only gotten me out of the rain that first night, they’d fed me, and they’d gotten me to the clinic the next day, as well.

  The clinic docs were surprisingly good, but there wasn’t much they could do. They’d seen a lot of memory loss, but not like mine. No obvious drug use, no physical trauma, no . . . anything that could point to its cause.

  Without any ID, there was no way to figure out who I might have been, which obviously ruled out any sort of detailed medical history, even if the clinic had possessed the resources to hunt one down. And the fact that I was apparently in perfect health, aside from my memory loss—not even a filled tooth—understandably put me a little lower on public health’s emergency medical services queue.

  No ID also ruled out most steady sources of work, too. George and Sam found me things to do around t
he shelter to earn my keep, and after a week or so, they’d put me on their “A” list. Lots of people who needed temporary workers knew the Dellingers and trusted them if they recommended someone. A lot of those “someones” were undocumented, although few of them were quite as undocumented as I was. But George and Sam were picky about who they put on the A List. Employers who turned to the two of them for recommendations knew they’d get hard workers who didn’t steal, and a lot of those employers were known to throw in free meals.

  “Yardwork, you said?” I asked, drying my hands on my apron before I took it off and hung it by the sink.

  “Yeah.” Sam handed me the message slip once my hands were dry. “Out on the west side. The Number Seven bus’ll get you there. He says he’ll spring for lunch, too, so at least we won’t have to feed you this afternoon!”

  She chuckled, but she had a point, and I grinned.

  “He may change his mind after he sees me,” I replied. I stood five inches over six feet, and my appetite was as healthy as the rest of me. I went through a lot of their groceries.

  “I warned him—I warned him!” She shook her head, and I glanced at the slip to memorize the name and address. For someone with amnesia, I had a damned good memory for things like that.

  “Ninazu?” I said, looking at her. “Odd name.”

  “Odder than ‘Lazarus Boyd’?” she challenged with a grin, and I snorted. Among the many things I couldn’t remember was when I’d seen a production of the musical Damn Yankees, but I did remember how much I’d always loved the character Joe Boyd. As for Lazarus, well . . .

  “This is the first time he’s called us,” she said, “but he got the number from Jolene Sampson.”

  “Hey, if he’s okay with Jolene, he’s okay with me,” I told her with a grin of my own.