Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  We continued to soar across the landscape, and I saw what could only have been distant towns on promontories surrounded by those glowing seas of molten rock. They rose against the background glow, lifting spires far above the ground, and tiny bat-winged shapes circled some of them. I glanced at Ninazu, half-expecting to see the hand I held turned into a taloned claw, the exquisite tailoring into bat wings and a barbed tail. Nothing had changed, and he smiled at me, almost mischievously, as if he’d read my mind.

  I looked down again as we slowed still further, and it occurred to me that I didn’t see anyone undergoing “eternal torment.” Surely all of those lakes of lava should have been filled with unwilling swimmers, shouldn’t they?

  I started to ask Ninazu about it, but he pointed ahead, and I swallowed as the castle loomed before us. It towered upward, raising crenellated battlements high into the windy dark. Banners flew from tall staffs—black, and if they bore any device, I couldn’t make it out—but there was something about the architecture. Something . . . grand to its sweep, to its proportions. It crowned a mountaintop, the tallest point I’d yet seen, looking down upon those fiery lakes, those distant towns, as if to proclaim its authority. There was something arrogant about it, but not . . . malevolent.

  It was an odd thought, but I didn’t have long to reflect upon it.

  We landed in a courtyard. The magnificent marble structure at its centre reminded me of Ninazu’s gazebo all those years ago, and the courtyard was gorgeously landscaped, although I didn’t recall having ever seen roses whose petals were living, dancing flames, or fountains whose spray was literally liquid light.

  Ninazu didn’t release my hand, and I found myself walking down long corridors at his side. The floors were polished marble, inset with mosaics in bright colours, not the unyielding obsidian I might have guessed from outside the castle’s walls. The torches burning in wall sconces gave off no soot, no sense of heat, and a lot more light than I would have expected from simple combustion.

  The long, straight sweep of the corridors—they were obviously longer than the outer dimensions of the castle—appealed to me, and some of the wall art we passed was magnificent. I didn’t have much time to study it, but a lot of it looked Renaissance, and I wondered how many “lost masters” had found their way here.

  We came, finally, to a pair of massive wooden doors, at least eight or nine feet tall. They were as black as I would have anticipated, carved from single, enormous slabs of gleaming ebony and marked in a flowing silver script. I didn’t recognize any of the glyphs or letters or whatever formed that script, yet something stirred within me—something both frightened and eager—as I saw them.

  Ninazu waved one hand, and the doors opened smoothly before us. We stepped through them into an immense chamber. Chandeliers of polished iron hung from its high, vaulted ceiling, and a dais against its rear wall held a high-backed throne.

  We strode across a polished floor of glittering black marble, adorned with more of that same strange script, until we reached the dais. We climbed the steps and halted before the throne.

  I looked around nervously. I could think of only one person who might own a throne at the heart of a castle at the heart of Hell, and however calm I might have thought I was, the notion of meeting the King of Hell personally was . . . mildly alarming.

  All right, maybe a little more than mildly.

  I waited for Ninazu to do or say something, but he only glanced at the golden watch on his left wrist, and I swallowed.

  “Should I—” I began, but he shook his head sharply.

  “It’s not time yet,” he said.

  I shut my mouth. Not time yet?

  I decided it didn’t matter what he meant, and kept my mouth shut while I looked around that stupendous throne room. Its architect had captured the same arrogance—or maybe the same confidence—as the castle in which it was located, I thought. Yet, there was a sense of abandonment about it. As if it was seldom actually used anymore.

  I looked back at the throne. It was canopied, and the canopy was of gleaming black, embroidered with silver. The throne itself had a richness that seemed at odds with the plain, unadorned crown of what looked like iron resting on its cushioned seat.

  Minutes trickled past, and I stirred. “Not time yet” or not, just standing around was—

  “And now,” Ninazu said in a voice that was suddenly deeper and far more powerful, “it is time.”

  I flinched as he released my hand at last. Then he reached forward, lifted the crown in both hands, and wheeled back toward me.

  In that moment, in a way that I couldn’t have described, he was still as short as he had ever been and yet towered above me. That awareness whipped through me, and then his hands descended in a flashing arc and slammed that iron crown down upon my head.

  I staggered back, my own hands rising to the sudden heavy weight, and my eyes flared wide. A meteor seemed to streak directly into them and erupt in the centre of my brain, and a wall I’d always known was there but never been able to breach exploded into splinters.

  Memory roared through me. Lost memory, surging like the sea, vaster and far greater than I could ever have imagined.

  Memory of the backlash. The blocked communication attempt from my journey to Earth. The energy surging through me, wiping memory, locking ability. Leaving me so much less than I had been . . . and yet, in some ways, so much more.

  I looked at Ninazu and recognized him then.

  “Welcome home, My Lord,” he said, falling to one knee before me.

  “Asmodeus.” It was my voice, yet deeper, more reverberating, then I’d ever heard it, and I laid one hand on his shoulder. “Well done,” I said.

  “I thought it would be what you wanted,” he said, looking up at me, and I saw a flicker of Ninazu’s mischief in his eyes as we both remembered what he’d told me that long-ago day . . . exactly one hundred years ago, to the minute.

  He’d been right about that, just as he’d been right that I had, indeed, become a pristine soul. One that very well might not have ended up here, where it belonged, left to its own devices.

  “That was . . . an unexpected side excursion,” I said.

  “An unwelcome one, My Lord?”

  “No.” My voice softened. “Not unwelcome at all, my friend.”

  “I’m glad,” my oldest confidant, my most trusted lieutenant, said to me.

  “Yes,” I replied, and hid a sharp, unexpected stab of pain.

  It wasn’t unwelcome, that pain, but pain it was. The pain that is the other side of joy. The loss that memory only makes more precious. Emily. The person who’d loved me solely for who I was, not what.

  “My Lord?” Asmodeus said quietly, and I looked at him.

  “Yours was not the only pristine soul in play,” he told me. “And there’s always choice for a pristine soul.”

  I frowned down at him, and then froze as another voice spoke from behind me.

  “Lazarus?” it said, and I whirled in disbelief.

  Emily! Emily, as young, as straight and tall and beautiful, as the day we first met. Emily—Emily herself, not the apparition of her I might have summoned with merely a thought—standing before me in the throne room of Hell.

  “Emily?” I whispered. “I can’t . . .”

  “You’re the King of Hell,” that familiar, beloved voice said. “You’re telling me there’s something you can’t do? Here? After everything I saw you do back on Earth?”

  The laughter was in her eyes, the laughter I remembered so well, and she opened her arms wide. I wrapped mine around her, tucking her under my chin as I had so many times before, holding her like the most precious thing in the universe, and closed my eyes.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered. “Not in Hell, love. You should be—”

  “Exactly where I am,” she interrupted, hugging me tightly. “Asmodeus explained everything when he came for me. He gave me my options, and days to think them over. How could you ever think I would have chosen som
ething else?”

  “But now you’re trapped here, forever,” I told her, shaking my head slowly. “I chose to be here, but I knew exactly what I was choosing. Exactly why. You couldn’t have—”

  “Oh, yes I could have.” I’d never heard such assurance in a human voice before, and I knew now just how many, many human voices I had heard over the millennia. “I told you, he explained everything. And he didn’t have to tell me that no one was getting tortured here—not if you were in charge of it. Besides, it doesn’t matter.”

  She put her hands against my chest, pushing, and I loosened my embrace until she could lean back far enough to look up into my eyes.

  “They say ‘home is where the heart is,’ Laz.” Her own eyes gleamed with unshed tears. “Well, in that case—” she laid the palm of one hand on the centre of my chest “—I’m home, sweetheart. I’m home.”

  Tricentennial

  By Joe Haldeman

  December 1975

  Scientists pointed out that the Sun could be part of a double star system. For its companion to have gone undetected, of course, it would have to be small and dim, and thousands of astronomical units distant.

  They would find it eventually; “it” would turn out to be “them”; they would come in handy.

  January 2075

  The office was opulent even by the extravagant standards of twenty-first century Washington. Senator Connors had a passion for antiques. One wall was lined with leather-bound books; a large brass telescope symbolized his role as Liaison to the Science Guild. An intricately woven Navajo rug from his home state covered most of the parquet floor. A grandfather clock. Paintings, old maps.

  The computer terminal was discreetly hidden in the top drawer of his heavy teak desk. On the desk: a blotter, a precisely centred fountain-pen set, and a century-old sound-only black Bell telephone. It chimed.

  His secretary said that Dr. Leventhal was waiting to see him. “Keep answering me for thirty seconds,” the Senator said. “Then hang it and send him right in.”

  He cradled the phone and went to a wall mirror. Straightened his tie and cape; then, with a fingernail, evened out the bottom line of his lip pomade. Ran a hand through long, thinning white hair and returned to stand by the desk, one hand on the phone.

  The heavy door whispered open. A short, thin man bowed slightly. “Sire.”

  The Senator crossed to him with both hands out. “Oh, blow that, Charlie. Give ten.” The man took both his hands, only for an instant. “When was I ever ‘Sire’ to you, heyfool?”

  “Since last week,” Leventhal said. “Guild members have been calling you worse names than ‘Sire.’”

  The Senator bobbed his head twice. “True, and true. And I sympathize. Will of the People, though.”

  “Sure.” Leventhal pronounced it as one word: “Willathapeeble.”

  Connors went to the bookcase and opened a chased panel. “Drink?”

  “Yeah, Bo.” Charlie sighed and lowered himself into a deep sofa. “Hit me. Sherry or something.”

  The Senator brought the drinks and sat down beside Charlie. “You shoulda listened to me. Shoulda got the Ad Guild to write your proposal.”

  “We have good writers.”

  “Begging to differ. Less than two percent of the electorate bothered to vote; most of them for the administration advocate. Now you take the Engineering Guild—”

  “You take the engineers. And—”

  “They used the Ad Guild.” Connors shrugged. “They got their budget.”

  “It’s easy to sell bridges and power plants and shuttles. Hard to sell pure science.”

  “The more reason for you to—”

  “Yeah, sure. Ask for double and give half to the Ad boys. Maybe next year. That’s not what I came to talk about.”

  “That radio stuff?”

  “Right. Did you read the report?”

  Connors looked into his glass. “Charlie, you know I don’t have time to—”

  “Somebody read it, though.”

  “Oh, righty-o. Good astronomy boy on my staff; he gave me a boil-down. Mighty interesting, that.”

  “There’s an intelligent civilization eleven light-years away—that’s ‘mighty interesting’?”

  “Sure. Real breakthrough.” Uncomfortable silence. “Uh, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Two things. First, we’re trying to figure out what they’re saying. That’s hard. Second, we want to send a message back. That’s easy. And that’s where you come in.”

  The Senator nodded and looked somewhat wary.

  “Let me explain. We’ve sent messages to this star, 61 Cygni, before. It’s a double star, actually, with a dark companion.”

  “Like us.”

  “Sort of. Anyhow, they never answered. They aren’t listening, evidently; they aren’t sending.”

  “But we got—”

  “What we’re picking up is about what you’d pick up eleven light-years from Earth. A confused jumble of broadcasts, eleven years old. Very faint. But obviously not generated by any sort of natural source.”

  “Then we’re already sending a message back. The same kind they’re sending us.”

  “That’s right, but—”

  “So what does all this have to do with me?”

  “Bo, we don’t want to whisper at them—we want to shout! Get their attention.” Leventhal sipped his wine and leaned back. “For that, we’ll need one hell of a lot of power.”

  “Uh, righty-o. Charlie, power’s money. How much are you talking about?”

  “The whole show. I want to shut down Death Valley for twelve hours.”

  The Senator’s mouth made a silent O. “Charlie, you’ve been working too hard. Another Blackout? On purpose?”

  “There won’t be any Blackout. Death Valley has emergency storage for fourteen hours.”

  “At half capacity.” He drained his glass and walked back to the bar, shaking his head. “First you say you want power. Then you say you want to turn off the power.” He came back with the burlap-covered bottle. “You aren’t making sense, boy.”

  “Not turn it off, really. Turn it around.”

  “Is that a riddle?”

  “No, look. You know the power doesn’t really come from the Death Valley grid; it’s just a way station and accumulator. Power comes from the orbital—”

  “I know all that, Charlie. I’ve got a Science Certificate.”

  “Sure. So, what we’ve got is a big microwave laser in orbit that shoots down a tight beam of power. Enough to keep North America running. Enough—”

  “That’s what I mean. You can’t just—”

  “So we turn it around and shoot it at a power grid on the Moon. Relay the power around to the big radio dish at Farside. Turn it into radio waves and point it at 61 Cygni. Give ’em a blast that’ll fry their fillings.”

  “Doesn’t sound neighbourly.”

  “It wouldn’t actually be that powerful—but it would be a hell of a lot more powerful than any natural twenty-one-centimetre source.”

  “I don’t know, boy.” He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “I could maybe do it on the sly, only tell a few people what’s on. But that’d only work for a few minutes . . . what do you need twelve hours for, anyway?”

  “Well, the thing won’t aim itself at the Moon automatically, the way it does at Death Valley. Figure as much as an hour to get the thing turned around and aimed.

  “Then, we don’t want to just send a blast of radio waves at them. We’ve got a five-hour program that first builds up a mutual language, then tells them about us, and finally asks them some questions. We want to send it twice.”

  Connors refilled both glasses. “How old were you in ’47, Charlie?”

  “I was born in ’45.”

  “You don’t remember the Blackout. Ten thousand people died . . . and you want me to suggest—”

  “Come on, Bo, it’s not the same thing. We know the accumulators work now—besides, the ones who died, most of them had
faulty fail-safes on their cars. If we warn them the power’s going to drop, they’ll check their fail-safes or damn well stay out of the air.”

  “And the media? They’d have to take turns broadcasting. Are you going to tell the People what they can watch?”

  “Fuzz the media. They’ll be getting the biggest story since the Crucifixion.”

  “Maybe.” Connors took a cigarette and pushed the box toward Charlie. “You don’t remember what happened to the Senators from California in ’47, do you?”

  “Nothing good, I suppose.”

  “No, indeed. They were impeached. Lucky they weren’t lynched. Even though the real trouble was way up in orbit.

  “Like you say; people pay a grid tax to California. They think the power comes from California. If something fuzzes up, they get pissed at California. I’m the Lib Senator from California, Charlie; ask me for the Moon, maybe I can do something. Don’t ask me to fuzz around with Death Valley.”

  “All right, all right. It’s not like I was asking you to wire it for me, Bo. Just get it on the ballot. We’ll do everything we can to educate—”

  “Won’t work. You barely got the Scylla probe voted in—and that was no skin off nobody, not with L-5 picking up the tab.”

  “Just get it on the ballot.”

  “We’ll see. I’ve got a quota, you know that. And with the Tricentennial coming up, hell, everybody wants on the ballot.”

  “Please, Bo. This is bigger than that. This is bigger than anything. Get it on the ballot.”

  “Maybe as a rider. No promises.”

  March 1992

  From Fax & Pix, 12 March 1992:

  ANTIQUE SPACEPROBE

  ZAPPED BY NEW STARS

  1. Pioneer 10 sent first Jupiter pix Earthward in 1973 (see pix upleft, upright).