Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  . . . and I could never, ever, ever have it again.

  “So where do we go?” It took me a moment to recognize that tortured whisper as my own, to realize it had slipped out through the fear and sorrow that had my throat in a viselike grip. “How do we escape?”

  Karl got up and sat on the bed beside me. His face, in the dimness of the shabby room, looked understanding, compassionate, caring . . . and every bit as exhausted as I felt, if not more so. He took my hands in his, his touch so warm and human and normal I almost started crying right then. “There’s only one place we can go,” he said.

  I stared into his face. “Where?”

  “A whole new world.”

  SEVEN

  “SUCHERL GEGNER” STOOD in the operations control room of the Montana headquarters of the National Bureau of Investigation, and listened to the chatter of the agents conducting a search for his missing quarry. The storm had dissipated, dwindling to an ordinary rainfall, taking with it the last of the creative energy that had flooded through the Portal from the last world. Without that, he could no longer sense the location of Shawna Keys—or of Karl Yatsar, his unwitting and unwilling accomplice, who had opened the Labyrinth to him and made possible the eventual execution of the arch-criminal Ygrair.

  But though his Shaping ability was limited while Shawna lived, he did have the ability to alter the perceptions and beliefs of the Shaped denizens of this world, simply by speaking with them. He had first Shaped the Eagle River police chief. After that, it had been easy enough to gain access, either in person or over the phone, to increasingly more powerful people, including the Montana bureau chief of the NBI. The national director of that law enforcement agency was now on her way from Washington. Soon all of the United States’ antiterrorism resources would be bent toward locating Shawna and Yatsar.

  She would be found, but the Adversary did not expect to find Yatsar with her, ideal though that would be. Yatsar carried within his body Shurak nanomites, the technology that allowed him to open Portals. The Adversary intended to obtain those nanomites for himself. He did not even need Yatsar’s entire body to do so—just a sufficiently large mass of tissue or blood.

  The Adversary had known the moment Yatsar entered his world, because he, too, carried Shurak nanomites within his body, which had . . . resonated . . . with those in Yatsar’s. Yatsar must have felt it, too, and realized his danger. He had eluded capture, and fled into the next world as soon as possible, no doubt thinking that once he closed the Portal behind him, the Adversary would again be trapped in a single world.

  But he had been wrong. Ygrair’s great crime had been the theft of the forbidden technology that gave access to the Labyrinth, making possible her escape from the Shurak home world in the ancient podship—a literal museum piece—in which she had eventually crashed on Earth. Before she left, she had attempted to destroy the sole, secret datastore that held the knowledge of that technology, but in her frantic haste she had been sloppy. The Elders had been able to re-create portions of the data, enough to design and implant in the Adversary the nanomites he now carried. He could not create a Portal, but he could find and open a closed one.

  That ability had allowed him to follow and find Ygrair. Millennia ago, the ancient Shurak had discovered the Between (what Ygrair now called the Labyrinth), an interstitial space that could be accessed from, and provide access to, any world in the universe—provided that world had intelligent life.

  Within every sentient race existed a few gifted individuals born with an innate connection to the Between: what Ygrair called Shapers. The Shurak had used their own Shapers to enter and travel the Between. They had invaded and conquered many worlds. At first, they had enslaved the Shapers they found among other races, forcing them to serve as pilots. Later they had learned how to strip the alien Shapers’ power from them, what Ygrair called the hokhmah, and feed that power to their own Shapers, making them immensely strong. The universe had been at their mercy.

  But that had been millennia ago. The Shurak Empire had fallen to revolution, its own people rebelling against their leaders’ horrific, rapine abuse of other worlds. The Labyrinth had been closed, and access to it forbidden.

  Ygrair had broken that law, and many others. The Portal she opened into the Between with her stolen technology, she had closed behind her—but with the nanomites the Elders had constructed teeming in his blood, the Adversary had been able to find that Portal, and open it. In a new podship, built from ancient specifications, he had entered the Between. It had been easy, then, to find the Portal to Earth—that one, she had not even closed.

  On that primitive planet, wearing the human form it imposed on his more amorphous natural state, he had learned to fit in, and soon enough discovered Ygrair’s “school.” He of course had the Shaping ability she was cultivating among the humans (he could not have traveled the Between without it) and so he had infiltrated the school. The Elders had carefully crafted his nanomites so they would not resonate with the ones Ygrair carried. She took him for human, and began teaching him the “Lore of the Labyrinth,” as she called it (while he also studied more mundane subjects like history, math, and science).

  As soon as he could, he returned to his stealthed podship and sent a message into the Between.

  He had been astounded to learn of the Shaped Worlds: so far as he knew, the Shurak Empire had never discovered that a Shaper could turn the quantum fog of the Between into a pocket universe of his or her own devising. But he had not seen the point of it, and he still did not understand why Ygrair had made it her life’s work on Earth.

  Several Earth years passed. Time in the Between was fluid, and so the Adversary was not surprised by the delay, since there was no way to be certain how long his message had taken to reach the Shurak home world, nor how long it would take a force to respond. In the interim, he let his human façade subsume his true nature. Shawna Keys did not remember him, for whatever reason, but he remembered her well. They had not been close, but they had socialized on occasion at school functions and with mutual friends. She had never struck him as special in any way, and it surprised him she was so powerful now.

  The Elders’ attack fell on the last day of term before the Christmas holiday. Only the Adversary and Shawna had been on the campus. The Adversary had nowhere else to go, and Shawna, he had noted before, never left for holidays, though he did not know why.

  Ygrair somehow must have sensed the arrival of the podships the moment they exited the Between, high above the Earth. Perhaps the stealthing technology, which had worked so well when he had landed on Earth, failed this time; perhaps there were simply too many podships. However she detected the Shurak approach, she had acted quickly, first opening the Graduation Portal, through which students entered the Labyrinth to claim their worlds—and then doing something the Adversary had not known she could do. Without consultation, without consent, without even being in the same room, she had thrown the Adversary (and, it was now obvious, Shawna) through that Portal.

  One moment he had been standing in his dorm room, looking out over the snow-filled yard toward the setting December sun, eagerly awaiting the impending attack and the summary execution of Ygrair for her unforgivable crimes. The next, he had been standing on a featureless black plain beneath a flat white sky: a blank world, ready for him to Shape.

  He had been furious. He had tried to open a Portal, though he knew he did not have the ability; naturally, to no avail. After a period of useless flailing and fuming, and with no other choice, he had finally settled down to Shape the world he had been given.

  He had begun by copying the First World closely, just as Shawna had: but then he had set to work to turn it into a human version of the perfect and orderly Shurak home world. He had taken some satisfaction in the process, but after ten years, he had begun to fear he was trapped there forever . . .

  . . . and then Yatsar had arrived, opening a Portal, and unexpectedly offering h
im the hope of completing his mission, and finally rendering justice to Ygrair.

  By now, Yatsar had to know what his fate, and the fate of the Labyrinth, would be if he were captured: another reason he would surely abandon Shawna if her apprehension seemed inevitable, and flee into the next world—thus opening the way for the Adversary. Yatsar had no choice: he could not risk capture, and even suicide would not destroy the Portal nanomites within his body, no matter what means he used, short of plunging into the heart of a star. The Adversary had heard a phrase, while he pretended to be a student in Ygrair’s school: “Catch-22.” It seemed to apply to Yatsar’s predicament.

  “We may have something, Mr. Gegner,” a voice said deferentially to his right. He turned his head toward the man in the dark suit who stood there: Edwin Smoak, the Special Agent in Charge of the NBI’s Montana field office. “A farmer spotted a car matching the description on a side road. The lead is several hours’ old, but we’ll dispatch helicopters to the area at first light, weather permitting, to conduct a thorough aerial search, as well as sending out ground forces. There are few roads in the area, so if they are still in the car, there aren’t many places where they might have gone to ground.”

  “Excellent,” said the Adversary. Neither Smoak nor anyone else now remembered that “Sucherl Gegner” had first presented himself as an ordinary citizen offering a helpful tip about suspicious activity. They all now believed—he had made them believe—that he was in fact a senior agent of GloPoSec, the Global Police and Security Initiative, which had a far better record of preventing terrorist attacks in this world than its counterparts in the First World—something Shawna had clearly desired, along with her own pottery shop, a boyfriend, lunar colonies, and, oddly enough, a professional lacrosse league.

  GloPoSec outranked all local police forces, even the NBI, and so all deferred to the Adversary . . . which made his task easier. As did the fact that he could Shape others simply by conversing with them, which was why the national director of the NBI, with whom he had spoken briefly on the phone, was flying to Montana. He intended to use her, once she arrived, to put him in touch with even more exalted authorities. She, after all, had the ear of the President.

  “It sounds like things are well in hand,” he said to Smoak. “I believe I’ll retire. You will of course wake me if anything turns up overnight.”

  “Of course, Mr. Gegner,” said Smoak.

  The Adversary left the control room and took the elevator to the third-floor quarters he had been provided. He was not human, and thus was not plagued by the human proclivity to lie awake worrying about unlikely eventualities. Two minutes after he undressed and lay down, he slept.

  * * *

  “A whole new world?” Visions of musical numbers atop flying carpets danced unhelpfully in my head, although certainly a blue wish-granting genie would have been most welcome at that moment. “But how?”

  “I must open a new Portal.”

  I looked around the shabby cabin. “So . . . what are you waiting for?”

  “It cannot be done here.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Labyrinth will not allow it.”

  “You mean Ygrair won’t allow it?”

  Karl shook his head. “No. She did not invent the Labyrinth, she merely discovered its possibilities. It has . . . laws. As immutable as the natural laws of the First World. And one of those laws is that each Shaped World links to only two other worlds, and the Portals to those worlds can only be created where those worlds . . . touch. One of those locations will always be close to the Shaper, wherever he or she may be. The other is not close. It may well be on the other side of the world.”

  “It may well be? Don’t you know?”

  “No,” Karl said. “Not yet.”

  I felt a flash of irritation. “You don’t seem to know nearly as much as you should.”

  “I can sense it,” Karl said. “I know it lies somewhere west of here. But that is all I know. As we get closer to it, I will sense it more clearly.”

  “So, to escape the Adversary, we have to somehow travel an unknown distance through a world increasingly turned against us and try not to get caught.”

  “Yes.” He paused. “But that is the second thing we should do.”

  “The second . . .” I stared at him. “I would have thought escaping was Job One.”

  “Not quite. I think . . . I believe . . .” He stopped. “I am almost certain,” he said, “that you have the power to enable me to do something else. I believe that, with your help, I can return to the Portal through which I and the Adversary entered this world, and destroy it forever.”

  “What good will that do?” I said, while part of my mind was turning over that unpleasant word “almost,” spoken before the word “certain.”

  “It will keep him from returning to his own world. It will keep him from bringing reinforcements from that world. And it should weaken him.”

  “Should?”

  “I believe that as long as the Portal remains open, he can draw additional energy through it from his own world, and the world he seized before entering this one. If we can close the Portal, we will sever him from that source of power.”

  I felt a sudden surge of hope. “And then we can get to the Portal into the next world, and destroy that one, too, and trap him here!”

  “No,” Karl said. “The Shaper of that world would have to work with me to seal it.”

  “So, if I get that Shaper’s hokhmah . . . ?”

  Karl opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I . . . do not know,” he said. “Yes, you will have the ability to Shape that world, but you did not Shape it to begin with . . . I do not know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am not Ygrair. I have neither her knowledge or her power, and no way to contact her except to find my way back through the Labyrinth to her side.”

  “Find your way back . . .” I stared at him. “My God. You don’t even have a map. You’re going blind, world to world.”

  “The Labyrinth is large. It is not infinite,” Karl said. “Ygrair promised that the Portal through which I exited her world would lead me through all the other Shaped Worlds before I passed through a Portal that would take me back to hers. Hers is the First Shaped World—the keystone, again, or the clasp of a string of pearls.” He paused suddenly. “A better metaphor than a Labyrinth, in truth,” he said. “Each pearl a world, each touching two other pearls. We only have to carry on, world after world, and eventually, inevitably, we will enter Ygrair’s.”

  “Who, I’m guessing, won’t thank you if you come back without a Shaper full of hokhmahs, or with the Adversary in hot pursuit.”

  Karl didn’t answer, instead standing abruptly and going to the window. He peered out through the curtains. “It’s getting dark. If we were going to be found here today, we would have been by now. I think we can risk staying here tonight. We both need proper rest. And at least there is food . . . of a sort.”

  I yawned. Despite my nap, I still felt exhausted, more than ready to lie down again and sleep. But not yet. “If this Adversary is so powerful . . . can’t he just figure out where I am? He found me easily enough in Eagle River.”

  “When he first entered your world, the energy pouring in from the last world helped him find you,” Karl said. “But that energy dissipated with the storm. For now, he can find you no more easily than any other individual can be found by the ordinary efforts of law enforcement.”

  “No more easily than that.”

  “That’s why I asked you if you had ever been here before,” Karl said. “They will begin their search in such places.”

  A horrible thought struck me, a thought that should have struck me before. I sat up straight. “Mom! I’ve got to warn her!”

  “No,” Karl said. “That would only draw attention to her. It will take time for them to trace your connections.”<
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  “But I have to do something!”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Appleville, Oregon. More than seven hundred fifty miles from here.”

  “Then I would say that so far she has been left untroubled. The Adversary still hopes to capture you before you could possibly have traveled that far.”

  “So far” wasn’t much comfort. I pictured NBI agents showing up at her door, demanding to know if she’d heard from me, or seen me. I felt sick. I’m so sorry. “But there must be something I can do.”

  “If you remembered your training . . .” He sighed. “But you do not. The best thing you can do now is rest. We do not know what challenges tomorrow may bring.”

  I stretched out on the bed, but despite my immense fatigue, I didn’t sleep right away. I kept thinking about Mom. It wouldn’t be hard for the authorities to trace me to her. She was listed as my next of kin in all sorts of documents, her phone number was written in the little personal directory I kept beside my bedroom phone, there were letters, emails . . .

  If only I could erase all of that, I thought.

  And then I thought, I’m the Shaper. Maybe I can.

  The trouble was, I didn’t know how to go about it. I could imagine it, I could almost see it, data, documents, everything that could link me to her, even Brent’s memories, vanishing . . . but I didn’t know how to make it happen.

  I was still imagining it when I fell asleep. In my dreams, I kept seeing jumbled images of Mom, Brent, my shop, the police . . . but after a time, my dreams calmed. I dreamed I didn’t need to worry about Mom anymore.