Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  The slope only got steeper, and while the switchbacks of the road we followed mitigated the incline slightly, that’s where “scarily slippery” came into play. My feet slid backward in the snow, until eventually I was climbing almost on all fours, like a singularly inept mountain goat, fingers freezing, snow finding its way inside both my poncho and my jacket and then down the back of my neck, icy water squelching in my shoes.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t go on any longer, we reached a plateau. Karl halted. “I can’t . . . no more,” I gasped out.

  “We are at the top of the pass,” Karl said. I noted with annoyance that he wasn’t breathing nearly as hard as I was.

  “How . . . do you . . . know?”

  He pointed at something I’d taken to be a random pile of rocks, but saw now was too regular: it was a cairn, made of stones cemented together, capped with snow. Karl walked over to it, and I limped in his footsteps. He brushed off the snow, revealing a circular plaque. “U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, COOPERATION WITH THE STATE,” read capital letters curving around the top. Around the bottom ran the message, “250 DOLLARS FINE FOR DISTURBING THIS MARKER.” In the middle was a pyramid with an eye in it, and the words “Elevation Above Sea 4,298 feet.” Below that was a date, 1917, and what looked like someone’s initials, “A.C.”

  I stared at it. “This is what I don’t get,” I said.

  “It’s a survey marker,” Karl said.

  “I can see that. But I’ve never seen one before, I’ve never given them a second thought before, and I didn’t know they’re placed at the top of mountain passes, yet here this one is. According to the date, it’s been here more than a century. It looks like it’s been here more than a century. And yet you told me I made up this whole world just ten years ago. How could I make up something like that,” I pointed at the marker, “when I’ve never known it existed?”

  “As you would already know if your memory had not somehow gone awry,” Karl said, “or if you had listened to me the other times I’ve tried to explain this, the bulk of this world—the bulk of all the Shaped worlds—is copied from the Earth of the First World, from which you and all the other Shapers come. The Labyrinth is like . . . the clay you form into pots. All Shapers start with the same substance, but then make changes to it, so that each of you, like different potters starting with slabs of identical clay, ultimately creates something unique. Your world is close to the original.” He tapped the survey marker. “No doubt in this valley in the First World, this same survey marker stands in this same pass.”

  “But not in the worlds some Shapers make?”

  He nodded. “I have seen others that bear almost no resemblance to the original. Although even then . . . though this marker might not exist in another world, the stone and metal of which it is made are no doubt components of something else.”

  I found that vaguely annoying. I’d always thought of myself as an extremely creative person, and now Karl was telling me I’d only put a thin veneer of change on my world . . . a layer of ordinary brown glaze on a plain stoneware pot, as compared to the glistening metallic glaze other Shapers had lavished on extravagantly abstract ceramic sculptures. Probably raku-fired, at that, I thought sourly. Show-offs.

  Then I shook my head. I’m getting giddy. Shivering shook me. Not to mention cold. In fact, the two things were almost certainly related. “We need shelter,” I said, between teeth showing a definite inclination to chatter. “And heat.”

  “Agreed,” Karl said. “It will be dark soon.” He looked around, then pointed. “Over there.”

  I followed him to a small clearing among the trees. We each carried a two-person tent, but even without Karl saying anything I knew we’d have to share one, cuddling close for body heat purposes (but not for any others, thank you very much). I pulled the orange nylon bag containing the tent out of my pack.

  A laminated sheet of instructions hung from the bag on a loop of fine chain. They weren’t nearly as complicated as I’d feared: put down the “footprint,” a sheet of waterproof fabric, set the tent on top of that, pull out the poles (which made a wire-frame dome onto which the tent itself was attached), spread and attach the water-impervious “rainfly” over top of the tent-proper’s material (which was a fine mesh that would otherwise do nothing to keep out the snow), drive stakes into the ground at each corner, and “guy out” the tent with ropes to additional stakes a few feet away, in case the wind came up. It only took a few minutes, but I was wet and cold and miserable—I mean, wetter and colder and more miserable—by the time it was done.

  We shoved our packs into the tent and crawled inside. We didn’t dare make a fire with potential pursuers somewhere in the woods, and probably wouldn’t have been able to find dry wood anyway, but we started up one of the little camp stoves to provide a little heat, then got out our sleeping bags and wrapped them around our shoulders. The packs included flashlights, but we left them off, sitting in the slight glow of the camp stove, munching trail mix by the handful.

  We didn’t talk. I was acutely aware I was sharing a tent with a strange man—a very strange man—in rather terrifying isolation in the middle of a forest, but at the same time, Karl had shown not the slightest indication he thought of me as an attractive woman. For all I knew he was gay. Or a robot. Or a zombie. Or, for that matter, a gay robot zombie.

  In any event, climbing a snowy mountain is the best sleep aid ever invented. We turned off the camp stove, then lay down side by side in our sleeping bags. If Karl stayed awake or even lay there staring at me creepily, I never knew it: I fell asleep in seconds.

  I jerked awake in the gray light of early morning to a weird coughing roar in the woods, gasped out, “What . . . ?”—and only then saw that Karl had vanished.

  TEN

  I TRIED TO scramble to the door of the tent, but got tangled in my sleeping bag and instead flailed around uselessly for a few seconds. The roaring continued. In my half-asleep state, I wondered if the Adversary had somehow managed to conjure a dragon out of thin air, then wondered whether if I started believing in dragons there really would be a dragon, and tried really hard to stop imagining a dragon, and then finally managed to get my head out through the tent flap.

  A bear the size of an SUV stood at the edge of the clearing, glaring at Karl with its teeth bared, one giant paw pinning his pink poncho to the ground. It repeated the sound I’d heard. The fact it came from a giant bear and not a dragon was less reassuring than you might have thought. Karl held the pistol McNally had given him, but the bear was so huge that shooting it seemed more likely to enrage it than kill it, or even drive it away.

  I’d frozen with only my head showing. I had a feeling attracting the bear’s attention would be a really, really bad idea. But to my surprise, Karl spoke, his voice very calm. “Good morning, Shawna. I am not looking at the bear. You should not look at the bear either. Let us both remain very calm. I am going to back slowly toward you, while still not looking at the bear. You will come out of the tent and we will back up very slowly together, not looking at the bear. We are not threatening the bear. We are not looking at the bear. We have no food for the bear. The bear will go away.” His voice was hypnotic. “If you could, however, perhaps find it within you to believe very, very strongly that the bear will go away, that might help, too.”

  It was not an easy thing to believe, with that mountain of brown-furred flesh glaring at us. I’m not looking at it, I reminded myself, and turned my head so that it was only a furry blur in my peripheral vision. The bear had stopped roaring, but clearly wasn’t going anywhere right away. Leaving his poncho to the bear, Karl backed very slowly toward me while I, even more slowly, got out of the tent. “The bear is still there, Shawna,” Karl said as he came even with me.

  “‘Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief,’” I muttered, the biblical cry of the father whose son had been possessed by an evil spirit surfacing in my mind from years of Sunday School. It
was as close to a prayer as I had said in a long time. Mom would be pleased, I thought. Then I thought, again, Is my mom in this world really my mom? Then I thought, as the bear roared again, This really isn’t the time.

  I closed my eyes. This helped with the whole don’t-look-at-the-bear thing, but it also meant I wouldn’t be able to see the bear galumphing toward us with murder on its mind should it choose to do so. Don’t think about that. Instead I imagined, as hard as I could, that the bear was no longer interested in us, that when I opened my eyes, it would have decided to go away and dig honey out of a tree or catch fish or eat berries or hibernate or whatever.

  I felt . . . something. The huffing and roaring stopped. I opened my eyes cautiously. The bear, Karl’s pink poncho hanging from its jaws, was calmly walking away from us, the hump on its shoulder rolling from side to side with each rocking step. In another minute, it had vanished from sight.

  “Well done,” Karl said. “You’re getting better at this.”

  “Am I?” I stared in the direction the bear had taken, rubbing my right temple. Once again, Shaping had given me a slight headache.

  “It wasn’t struck by lightning or buried in a landslide, either of which might have been expected, based on your previous Shapings.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  I glanced at him. Sure enough, he looked as grim as always. “So why did it take your poncho?”

  “I’m not sure. Although I am glad it took that and not the duster.” He pointed to a bush, and I saw the black coat hung on its branches, along with his cowboy hat. “I left both there while I performed my morning exercises. The bright color of the poncho is probably what attracted the bear’s attention in the first place. When you Shaped it not to be interested in us, perhaps you simply focused its interest more intently on the poncho.”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, because that didn’t sound any crazier than anything else that had happened or been said in my vicinity recently.

  I discovered then that I was shaking. Also, cold. Also, in need of other relief, although going into the woods to do what bears do in the woods seemed like a really bad idea when said woods actually held a bear.

  Karl continued to stare after said bear. “It is also possible our visitor may have been the Adversary’s work. If the Adversary sensed your Shaping of the snowfall, he knows our general vicinity. Perhaps he decided to try to extend a little of his own power in our direction.”

  “You mean—he conjured that grizzly out of nothing?”

  Karl shook his head. “He could not do that. The grizzly certainly already existed. But perhaps our pursuers spotted it from their helicopter, and thus the Adversary knew it was in our vicinity, and chose to make it more aggressive, so it would threaten any humans it found in its territory. To Shape a human, in this world he did not Shape and whose hokhmah he does not fully control, I believe the Adversary must speak to him or her directly. However, it is easier to Shape an animal, so the Adversary might have been able to do it from afar. Conjuring up bears out of nothing, though . . . no, he won’t have that power yet. You might still be able to do it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Not that I want to,” I added hastily.

  “The unintended consequences of making it snow pale in comparison to the potential unintended consequences of conjuring living things,” Karl said. “There is a law. Call it the Law of the Conservation of Life. The Shaped Worlds are closed systems. There is only so much life force available within each, doled out by the Labyrinth according to rules we don’t understand. Normal reproduction increases that life force, normal death decreases it. But if you conjure life out of nothing, its life force must be taken from somewhere else.”

  “So if I create a bear,” I said, hoping I was misunderstanding him but very much afraid I wasn’t, “something else dies?”

  “Or multiple somethings,” Karl said. “Creating a bear out of nothing might claim the lives of a flock of birds, a swamp’s worth of mosquitoes . . . or three or four people.”

  That made me shiver in a way even the cold mountain air had not. “And there’s no way to know which?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I have discovered.”

  “Who created these diabolical rules?” I demanded. “Ygrair?”

  “No,” Karl said. “I told you, they are part of the Labyrinth.”

  “Can’t they be changed?”

  “No,” Karl said.

  “Maybe not by Ygrair,” I persisted. “But if you’re right, and I have the power to take her place, fresh and strong—”

  “They cannot be changed,” Karl said, displaying a flash of fury so sudden and unexpected it left me shaken, like I’d touched a live wire.

  Every time I thought I was beginning to feel like I was on solid ground once more, to accept the absurd situation in which I found myself, the earth shifted beneath my feet. Would my life ever be steady again?

  Careful, I thought. You could cause an earthquake. I rubbed my temple again. “My head hurts,” I complained.

  If Karl heard me, he chose to ignore me. Instead, he turned slowly, surveying the woods. “It is of course possible he has also found other creatures to make more aggressive.”

  “Lions and tigers?” I said. “They traditionally go with bears.”

  Karl looked at me oddly. “Lions and tigers and bears? They don’t go together. Not in North America.”

  “No lions and tigers and bears?” I said. “Oh, my.”

  I had already discovered while in Karl’s company that escaping imminent death—and in this case, dismemberment, too!—made me giddy. It was just a shame so many of my jokes went right over his head.

  Which was funny in its own right—funny odd, not funny ha-ha—when you thought about it, as I just had. If every world starts as a copy of the world everyone came from originally, shouldn’t some of these jokes work in lots of different worlds? After all, I wouldn’t want to live in a world without The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Surely others felt the same. So why doesn’t Karl get them? All the clues pointed to him having left the First World a very long time ago—far longer ago than his apparent age supported. But when, exactly? And how had he survived so long without aging?

  Karl was still frowning at me. “Well, at least we’re up,” I said brightly. “Let’s get packed up and moving.” I hesitated. “I just need to, um . . . you know . . . and with a bear out there . . .”

  Karl jerked his head toward a stand of bushes. “Over there. I’ll turn my back. And keep an eye out for the bear.”

  I nodded, went and did what I really needed to do—an invigorating process in sub-freezing temperatures—washed my hands as best I could by rubbing snow between them, and then helped Karl take down and stow the tent in my backpack. Since it wasn’t snowing anymore, I stowed my poncho, too. A cold breakfast of trail mix (I was getting heartily sick of trail mix) and chocolate alleviated both my hunger and my headache, and then we were on our way again, heading downhill now, which made things easier. Fog shrouded everything. The heavy mist seemed to absorb sound as well as light, so that we moved through the deepest silence I had ever heard (if that’s not a contradiction in terms). At least we saw no bears (or lions or tigers), or, for that matter, dragons. Apparently, I hadn’t accidentally conjured one—yay, me. But . . . could I have?

  I asked Karl about that, too. “So . . . some worlds are more fantastical than others?” I said as we trudged through the snow, through a hush so deep I had to force myself not to whisper. “Not every Shaper copies the original world so closely?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Give me an example,” I said. “Are there worlds where dragons are real?”

  He sighed. “Too many. I don’t know what it is with Shapers and dragons. Also elves. They are always the same: pointy-eared, pale-skinned, inordinately fond of poetry and o
f hearing themselves sing.”

  “Tolkien,” I said.

  He shot me a look, frowning. “Who?” Then his expression cleared. “Oh, yes, the ‘great writer of fantastic tales’ you mentioned once before. He had dragons and elves in his stories?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Also orcs . . . um, goblins. And hobbits.”

  “Hobbits?”

  “Very short people with big furry feet.”

  He sighed. “I ran into those once, too. This . . . Toll King, was it?”

  “Tolkien.”

  “Tolkien. He has a lot to answer for.”

  Another thought struck me. “Does that mean magic is real in those worlds, too? Even though they’re all copied from a real place where there isn’t any magic?”

  “You made it snow yesterday,” Karl pointed out. Not that I needed reminding, since I was currently knee-deep in the product of my own Shaping. “You successfully wished a bear elsewhere this morning. Are you saying magic is not real in this world?”

  That kept me silent for a few minutes, while we continued to trudge through the fog-shrouded forest. Then I said, “But I’m the Shaper. So it isn’t magic. It’s more like . . . a miracle. Like changing water into wine in the Bible.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? You are not a god. Or the offspring of one.”

  Well, I thought. Good to know he postdates the Bible, at least. “Close enough. I guess I’m asking if there are worlds where people other than the Shaper have the ability to do things that appear magical.”

  It was Karl’s turn to walk silently for a few moments. “I have seen a world like that,” he said at last. “I did not stay long.”