Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “Let’s go,” Karl said sharply. He put his hand on my shoulder to force me down into the driver seat—definitely not the act of a gentleman—then hurried around to the passenger side, threw his backpack into the back seat, and got in. I put the car into gear. As we drove onto the road, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw our provider-of-transportation staring after us . . . but my last glimpse of him showed him turning his camera once more toward the view.

  I rolled the shoulder by which Karl had painfully pushed me into the seat. “What was that all about?” I said irritably.

  “Every detail matters,” he said. “You Shaped him to believe a very simple narrative, but it had holes in it because it was so simple. He has no memories of spending time with us, of making friends with us, of ever knowing us before this moment. If he thinks too hard, he will remember owning this car. As it is, he will be horribly confused when he gets to town and the narrative you imposed runs out. But your unnecessary comment to him almost brought him to that point of cognitive dissonance right then and there . . . which would have resulted in an ugly scene, and would also have ensured he reported us for stealing his car, which would immediately point the Adversary once more in our direction.”

  “It would help,” I grumbled, “If Shapers were given an instruction manual.”

  “They are,” Karl said. “You were. Several years of training. All wasted, since you do not remember any of it.”

  “I didn’t forget on purpose.”

  “How do you know, since you cannot remember?” he said.

  A perfectly logical question, and I didn’t have a good answer for it, which annoyed me no end. I drove in silence for a minute or two. “Can we get food in Elkjaw?” I said at last.

  “Better not,” Karl said. “Someone might recognize the car and wonder why we are driving it. We’ll go on.” He pulled the road map out of his coat pocket again, and opened it up. “This road takes us to the Interstate,” he said after studying it a moment. “Much too dangerous. But look here.”

  He pointed. I shot a quick look at the map, but couldn’t decipher it from that angle. “What is it?”

  “A small airport.”

  “How does that help?” I said. “I can’t fly a plane. Can you?”

  He shook his head. “No. But if we can find someone who can . . . we could transport ourselves far out of the area where the Adversary’s efforts are likely to be concentrated. The bigger the area he has to search, the less likely he is to find us.”

  A thought struck me. “We could fly directly to where you can make a new Portal!” I said excitedly.

  “Possibly,” Karl said. “Though I cannot tell yet. I only know it is west of here. How far, I do not know.”

  My momentary excitement died. “Too far west, and we hit the Pacific Ocean. What if it’s underwater?”

  “It won’t be,” Karl said. “It will be on dry ground. It always is. But it could be on an island, which we might not be able to land a plane on even if we find a pilot to take us however far it is. And if it proved to be out of range of the aircraft, we would have to return to the mainland. By that time, the Adversary might be waiting for us.”

  “If it’s offshore, and we can’t fly, we’ll need a boat,” I said. “I can’t drive one of those, either.”

  “I can,” Karl said. “Or sail one, at least.” He nodded down the road ahead of us. “We are nearing the town.”

  I slowed to a sedate twenty miles per hour as I drove through the little community of Elkjaw. All of its businesses . . . a couple of restaurants, a gas station, three bars, a small grocery store, a few others . . . were strung along the road, with houses mostly perched on the hillside to our left, since to our right the ground fell away sharply. Fortress Mountain rose in the distance, angled now so that its distinctive cliff faces weren’t as visible, which must have been why our photographer friend had headed out of town to take pictures of it.

  It suddenly struck me he might not live here, that he might be a tourist. What if his luggage was in the trunk, and we’d just stranded him with nothing but the clothes on his back?

  I’d liked my world better before I knew I could Shape it.

  If the photographer was from the town, and if anyone recognized the car and the fact there were strangers in it, they didn’t react visibly—as far as I could tell, none of the handful of people on the streets gave us a second look. But that didn’t mean someone behind one of those shop windows wasn’t calling the sheriff right that minute.

  No sirens pursued us in town or out of town, though, and we drove on in serene isolation for another twenty minutes before we saw a sign, with a small graphic of an airplane on it, pointing right down a side road, indicating that Marshall Field was two miles thataway.

  “Marshall Field?” I muttered as I turned. “Really?”

  Karl glanced at me.

  “Famous Chicago department store,” I said. “I never noticed before just how many puns there are on road signs.”

  “Based on what I have noted of your sense of humor,” Karl said dryly, “I rather suspect that is a side effect of your initial shaping of the world.”

  “You mean I’m the one who named this Marshall Field?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Karl said. “Your personality seeped into the Shaping, which means lot of what you wrought was purely subconscious. Anything that is in this world that isn’t in the original reality is indeed something you Shaped, but that does not necessarily mean you did it deliberately.”

  “I’m going to have to have a talk with my subconscious.”

  The road took us through the woods to a big, airfield-sized clearing. There was only one (grass) runway, half a dozen small hangars, and a two-story building with glass windows on the second floor that hardly qualified as a “tower.” A tiny community field like that could very well have been deserted at that time of the day—or pretty much any time of the day—but either we were in luck, or the world was still ordering itself to help me out, even when I wasn’t conscious of it: someone was fueling a small plane from a big aboveground tank, located well away from the hangars. I turned off the road into the field, and we bumped across the grass until we were maybe twenty yards from the plane.

  “Keep it simple,” Karl said quietly to me. “No need for him to change his destination. He has offered us a ride, that’s all. Suggest that he forget all about us after we land. That should mean no trail for anyone to follow. And no chance of bad consequences . . . for him, or for us.”

  I nodded, and we got out of the car, Karl trailing me by a few feet. The man watched us warily. “That’s close enough!” he called when we were about ten yards away. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  I took a deep breath, and once more reached for my Shaping ability. Every time it became easier. I crafted this Shaping with even greater care than the last, released it, feeling that strange pressure in my head, but again escaping a headache, then took a deep, shaking breath. The pilot’s hostile expression blanked for a moment, a disconcerting sight, as though he had literally lost his mind. Then he smiled with genuine warmth. “Great to see you! Beautiful day for a flight, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t say anything, afraid I’d confuse this . . . “victim” was such an unpleasant word, but it was the one that came to mind all the same . . . the way I had the photographer.

  “It is,” Karl said. “Can we put the car in your hangar for safekeeping before we take off?”

  “Sure,” said the pilot. He pointed at the row of hangars. “The blue one. Here.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a key hanging from a rabbit’s-foot fob (although no rabbit that ever lived had had fur that particular shade of fuchsia), and tossed it to me.

  I nodded, still not speaking, got back into the car, and drove it to the hangar. The key opened the padlock on the sliding double doors; I pulled them open, drove into the hangar, got out, to
ssed the car keys into the driver’s seat, went back out, closed and locked the hangar doors, and then trudged back to the waiting airplane.

  The pilot was already inside; Karl and I climbed in together, him in the front, me in the back. The pilot started the engine, the propeller whirled fiercely, and a few bumpy minutes later we lifted off from the grass runway into the blue late-morning sky.

  I didn’t have a clue where we were headed, and didn’t dare ask the pilot, in case I triggered more “cognitive dissonance,” which seemed like it would be an even worse thing in someone flying an airplane than in someone driving a car.

  Especially when I was in the airplane.

  Karl didn’t ask, either. Nor did he make small talk. The pilot seemed almost to have forgotten we were there. He hummed to himself as we winged our way westward, avoiding the highest peaks to fly along the valley and over the passes the Interstate traveled: I could see it far below, a string of cars, windows reflecting the sun.

  Fortunately, the pilot had to check in with air traffic control along the way, which was how I found out we were headed to somewhere in Oregon. Air traffic control was in Portland, but our destination was—my breath caught—Wing and a Prayer Field.

  Wing and a Prayer? That meant . . .

  I glanced at Karl. Not yet. After we’ve landed.

  My stomach growled as we flew, though I was the only one who could possibly have known over the buzz of the engine. The food situation was getting critical. I had a little cash, so we could buy something if we ever got to a store or restaurant—using plastic was obviously out of the question—but so far, the only places we’d seen had been in Elkjaw, where we hadn’t dared to stop.

  Since no one on the airplane was offering me lunch (or even a diminutive bag of pretzels and a tiny glass of pop), I rested my slightly aching head against the window, stared down at the valley and up at the snowy peaks, and wondered what the Adversary was doing. By now he must know what had happened at Snakebite Mine, that two of his cadre members and the caretaker were dead, and that his Portal had been destroyed. The two sheriff’s deputies whose SUV we’d taken had probably been picked up by now, too.

  We’d disposed of the SUV in the quarry I had Shaped, but that bit of cleverness, Karl had said, had probably been sensed by the Adversary, and in any event had been thoroughly negated by the disaster at the horse ranch. There we’d left two dead men, bringing our Bonnie-and-Clyde-like total to six, in what had turned into a bloody rampage across the state. I winced at that thought, but I could not deny it. Karl had shot three: in self-defense, you could argue, but he had shot them, nonetheless. The other three . . . I had not killed them in cold blood, but their deaths were my fault, all the same. As, too, if I were honest, was that of the third man Karl had shot, at the ranch, since my bungled Shaping had led to that disaster.

  I tried to put that out of my mind and concentrate on how the Adversary would view things. At the ranch, it would be obvious one man had shot the other, but then had been shot by someone else, no longer to be found. One dead horse, cause of death unknown. Two horses missing (if there were records our pursuers could check, which there must be). They would follow the horses: a dead end, but how much time would it buy us? Once the horses turned up they’d understand what we’d done, and then they’d be searching and questioning everyone along the road we had taken, in both directions from where the horse trail crossed it.

  It all hinged on the photographer. How well had I Shaped him? Would he eventually report his car stolen? Someone would remember us driving through town. But no one had seen us turn down to the airstrip, and the car was hidden in a locked hangar.

  There, if nowhere else, we might have shaken any pursuit. For the moment.

  The trouble was, the Adversary was Shaping people, too, at much higher levels than I was. Our pictures . . . or mine, anyway; Karl had not existed in my world until a few days ago . . . must be plastered everywhere by now, in every police database. Every branch of law enforcement must be looking for me.

  The view through the airplane window was breathtaking, but in reality, this whole beautiful world, the world that had once been my own, the world I had loved, and had a place in, and in which I had expected to live out my quiet, settled life, was no longer safe. Was no longer home.

  I knew that. After all that had happened, denial no longer had the slightest bit of wiggle room in my mind. But if we really were landing at Wing and a Prayer Field, there was one more place I had to go before I left this world forever.

  The day slipped away. The sun crossed over our heads and began to sink in front of us, lower and lower as the hours droned past. My stomach kept growling. “Getting close,” the pilot said at last, although it seemed as much to himself as to us.

  I leaned over a little so I could look between him and Karl and out through the whirling propeller. In the far distance, I glimpsed the flat expanse of the ocean, glittering in the lowering sun. Just as I saw it, we banked right. I glanced at my watch: a little after four o’clock.

  Karl spoke for the first time in hours, twisting in his seat to look at me. “It’s out there somewhere,” he said. “West, over the water. I’m sure of it. Can you feel anything?”

  I looked out over that immense body of water, endless and empty. “No,” I said, although that wasn’t quite true. I could feel one thing very, very well: hunger.

  The ocean wasn’t the only thing that was empty. The sooner we were on the ground, the better. And then, I would be choosing our next destination—not Karl Yatsar.

  FIFTEEN

  THE ADVERSARY STARED out the rain-spattered window of his NBI-issued room at a wet, windswept parking lot, bordered by tossing trees. Two cadre members were dead, as well as the mine caretaker, who had, most unexpectedly, blown himself up—apparently the man had been some kind of explosive expert during past military service, which was why he had interpreted “protect” to mean “booby-trap.”

  His death had accomplished nothing. The Adversary had wakened in the night to a feeling akin to amputation, as his connections to his own Shaped world, and the Shakespearean world he had Shaped next, were severed. The Adversary had known instantly that he would not be able to restore them. Had Yatsar merely closed the Portal, he would still have been able to sense it through the nanomites in his body, the same technology that allowed him to force a closed Portal open. But the Portal through which he had entered Shawna Keys’ world had not merely been closed: it had ceased to exist. Unless Yatsar created a new one—which he certainly would not—there would be no returning to the Shakespearean world, or his own.

  That meant he could summon no replacements for the two cadre members slain at the mine, a married pair. That left him with only ten of his elite, superloyal followers. At least their weapons had been copied from the First World, and thus ammunition was readily available here.

  From the mine, it seemed clear Yatsar and Keys had fled in a stolen sheriff’s SUV. Two deputies had been discovered making their way downstream from a bridge not far from the mine. They had tried to evade their own colleagues, but had been captured. Then, early this morning, two bodies had been found at a place called Bow and Arrow Ranch. There’d been no sign of the SUV, but horses were missing. Investigators were following the horse trail. Others were spreading out from the ranch, questioning everyone they could find.

  One thing was clear, from the cases of the helicopter pilot and his deceased partner, the wandering deputies, and the bodies at the ranch: Shawna Keys had begun Shaping humans to her own ends (or really, Karl Yatsar’s ends), just as the Adversary was Shaping them to his.

  The destruction of the Portal had also clearly been accomplished with her power, though undoubtedly fed through the Shurak technology in Yatsar’s body. And there had been other powerful Shapings by her. The time displacement after he stole her hokhmah had been the most astonishing and impressive, but several times he had sensed the world shifting. Some
of those Shapings on her part must be deliberate; others might not have been. He could not pinpoint their location, but he had a general sense of where they had happened. She seemed to be heading west.

  He had to find her: find her, and kill her. Not Yatsar, of course: he needed Yatsar alive. The blood-borne nanomites that gave Yatsar the ability to open Portals would cease to function if Yatsar were killed. But if he could capture Yatsar, or get a large enough sample of his blood or tissue while he still lived, he could claim those nanomites for himself. Then he could open Portals as he wished, and in short order, he would find Ygrair and make her pay for her crimes.

  It was possible he could recover the nanomites even from Yatsar’s corpse, examine them, reverse-engineer them, and make them work within himself, but that would take a great deal of time: years, even decades, perhaps, depending on the technological capability of the world in which found himself—and during those years, Ygrair would have time to pursue her own ends, replacing Yatsar with a new envoy, seeking out a new Shaper powerful enough to hold the hokhmah of multiple worlds and deliver that knowledge to Ygrair, enhancing her power and putting those worlds out of his reach.

  The destruction of the Portal through which he had come was almost certainly a one-off, possible only because Shawna Keys was such a powerful Shaper. Only the Shaper of a world could possibly provide the specialized energy necessary to destroy a Portal into that world. He did not believe she could do it in any world she had not Shaped. And if he were wrong . . . well, she certainly wouldn’t be able to do it in any world she had not Shaped if he killed her in this one.

  A knock. “Mr. Gegner, sir?” a woman’s voice called through the door from the hallway. “The car is here to take you to the airport.”

  “Coming.” He turned his back on the window. Law enforcement had disseminated photos of Keys, and a description of Yatsar, far and wide. The remaining members of his cadre, except for two serving as his personal bodyguards, were operating independently, conducting their own search and tracking efforts, their orders specific: shoot Keys, take Yatsar alive.