Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  Yatsar was clever, and with Keys now actively Shaping those they met, the duo might yet slip through the fingers of the local law. Which meant it was time to up the ante. He still could not effect change globally with the ease he would be able to once Keys was dead. But he would Shape what he could. The meeting in Washington, D.C. he had arranged for that afternoon, through judicious Shaping of the people he had been able to meet or talk to in his guise as Gegner, would make it much, much harder for Yatsar and Keys to escape apprehension for very much longer.

  He opened the door and smiled at the young NBI agent waiting nervously outside. “We’d best be off,” he said to the woman. “Mustn’t keep the President waiting.”

  * * *

  Shaping a world, I’d already decided, was a lot like writing a story. This world of mine . . . or at least which had been mine . . . reflected my personality in a lot of ways, as Karl had made clear. Perhaps that was why, whenever I had some deep and meaningful insight, or thought of a nice metaphor, or a clever turn of phrase went through my mind, the world had a way of promptly turning it on its side and throwing it in my face, like a pulp author trying to make every chapter end in a cliff-hanger.

  The sooner we’re on the ground the better, I’d thought, and okay, that’s not exactly a clever turn of phrase, just a rather clichéd way of saying something needed to happen soon. But not two minutes later the pilot straightened in his seat. “Say again?”

  He listened, one hand on his right earpiece, and then said, “Roger.” He glanced at Karl. “I’ve been denied permission to land at Wing and a Prayer. I’m instructed to land at Cross Wind instead.”

  “Did they say why?” Karl said.

  The pilot shook his head.

  “What’s the difference between the two fields?”

  “Cross Wind is on the outskirts of small city,” the pilot said. “Wing and a Prayer is rural—nothing there really. The closest town is five miles away, and it’s a speck of a place.”

  “So why are you going there?” Karl said.

  “Camping,” the pilot said cheerfully. His face fell. “I’ll never get there in time to hike up to the lake and camp tonight if I have to land at Cross Wind.”

  Karl glanced at me. “They’re checking aircraft,” he said. “They will be waiting for us at Cross Wind.”

  “But if they know we’re up here, why not just send men to Wing and a Prayer?”

  “I don’t think they know for certain.”

  “It’s not just me,” the pilot said. He tapped his headset. “Everyone is being diverted to a few larger fields. Everyone’s pissed off about it, too.”

  “See?” Karl said to me.

  I didn’t argue. I reached out to the pilot, very, very carefully, since my previous concerns about Shaping someone responsible for keeping us several thousand feet in the air remained fully operative. I introduced the idea that we were going to land at Wing and a Prayer Field no matter what air traffic control said.

  I risked it not only because Karl wanted me to, but for my own reasons . . . which I suspected he wouldn’t be happy about when he found out, but, hey. Life’s like that sometimes.

  I opened my eyes. “To hell with that,” the pilot muttered. He banked right. He must have gotten an earful from air traffic control a few minutes later, because he jerked off his headset and let it hang loose around his neck. Since presumably that meant he had also cut himself off from any warnings about other aircraft in the vicinity, I developed a whole new interest in staring out the window.

  Bit by bit we slipped down toward the broad valley below, mountains to the right, mountains to the left. Ahead I could see the little V-shape of the runways at Wing and a Prayer Field, and beyond it, the “speck of a town” the pilot had mentioned, with its tiny downtown and a few surrounding blocks of houses.

  My heart skipped a beat.

  With a deft hand on the controls, the pilot dropped us neatly, with barely a bump, onto the end of one of the two runways. We rolled to a halt outside one of three hangars, all closed. The only official building was a small square structure with an antenna on top, also closed: even less of a tower than Marshall Field had had, although at least this field had two runways and both were paved.

  Clearly no one was expecting us.

  “Not a very busy airport,” Karl observed.

  “Barely used,” the pilot said. “Privately owned by a couple of aircraft owners in town, rich enough to keep it in operating condition. I’m friends with one of them, so I get to use it, too.” A look of confusion crossed his face. “But I was supposed to land at Cross Wind. I’ll be in trouble . . .”

  “No, you won’t,” I said, with a hint of Shaping, and his expression cleared again. I resisted the urge to add, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

  An instant after that came the guilt. I was playing with the poor man’s mind, and he would be in trouble with the authorities. “Forget you ever saw us,” I added then. “We’re already gone.”

  His face blanked, then cleared. He turned and, whistling, made his way to the square building, fishing keys out of his pocket as he went. He didn’t look back.

  “That won’t necessarily protect him,” Karl said, watching the pilot go.

  “It might protect us,” I said shortly.

  My guilt returned full-force. Did Obi-Wan feel guilty for clouding the minds of the Imperial Stormtroopers? part of me demanded.

  That’s just a movie, the guilty part rejoined. This is reality.

  Is it? the other part asked.

  Shut up, I told both parts. Out loud, I said, “We need to keep moving.”

  “I agree.” Karl turned back to the plane and hauled our packs out of the back seat. He handed mine to me, then pulled on his own. With a sigh, I hefted the heavy thing up on my shoulders again. I was getting heartily sick of it.

  The pilot had disappeared into the control . . . hut. I wondered if he would see us again for the first time if he came out before we were gone. I didn’t want to find out.

  “That way,” I said, pointing to a fence off to our left. “We can get into the woods again.”

  Karl nodded, and we jogged through the long grass growing alongside the runway, climbed carefully over the low barbed-wire fence, and plunged into the autumnal forest, the red and gold of deciduous trees contrasting sharply with the brooding green of the conifers. It was warmer here than it had been at Marshall Field outside Elkjaw, both because we were much closer to sea level and because we were closer to the ocean. The forest smelled alive in a way the frostier woods of the mountain heights had not.

  I led the way without talking, but that couldn’t last. “You walk,” Karl finally said from behind me, as we followed a barely there track through the woods, “as though you know where we are going.”

  “Just trying to get us to this Portal-making place of yours,” I said.

  “Which is out to sea somewhere, or on the other side of it. And since, as I keep reminding you, you are neither a god nor the offspring of one, walking will take us no farther than the shore.” He quickened his pace, and came up beside me. “Where does this track lead?”

  “Somewhere,” I said evasively.

  “The ‘Portal-making place,’ as you call it, lies to our west. We are not walking west.”

  “We’re walking northwest. Close enough. Besides, it’s faster walking on the track than off of it.” I slowed. “And look, here’s a road.”

  We had indeed come out of the woods alongside a road, paved though potholed, its center stripe badly faded and its crumbling shoulders ranging from narrow to nonexistent. It stretched to our left and right a good two or three miles each way before curving out of sight. No cars moved along it, and I couldn’t hear any, either.

  Which wasn’t too surprising, given how small the town about five miles down the road to our right was, and given that this
road didn’t really go anywhere in particular except to a few resort properties, mainly used on weekends by folks who drove out from Portland to get away from it all.

  I set off to the right. Karl trailed me again. “We need to get to the coast,” he said. “We need a boat. We are not headed to the coast. We are now headed due north.”

  “There’s a town up here, remember?” I said. “Another chance to find transportation.” My stomach growled and cramped. “And food.”

  “Another chance to be reported to authorities, who may very well then descend on us with guns blazing,” Karl said. “Air traffic control will know that our pilot ignored instructions and instead landed at his original destination. There may be law enforcement officials on their way.”

  I kept walking.

  “Shawna,” Karl said.

  I ignored him.

  After that he gave up, following a few feet behind as we trudged along the road. Only once did we have to move into the woods at the sound of an approaching vehicle, and it proved to be nothing but a beat-up blue half-ton flatbed with a hole in its muffler hauling a load of bricks, which passed us in the direction of the town. The blue smoke of its exhaust lingered long after the echoes of its raucous passage had died away.

  Karl coughed as we stepped back onto the road. “I confess,” he said, “there are times I prefer the worlds Shaped into a preindustrial state.”

  I didn’t reply. Up ahead, the road crested a small hill. A distinctive tree grew to the left of the road, a giant spruce that had been damaged in a windstorm at some point in its growth, and as a result had split maybe fifteen feet up its trunk, two fully formed crowns spreading out from that point and fighting for dominance over the decades since. My heart thudded in my chest, more than the exertion of walking could account for. I walked faster.

  Karl jogged to catch up, and then walked beside me, matching my rapid stride. His eyes searched my face in profile. “What have you not told me, Shawna?”

  I ignored him. I looked both ways, then crossed the road, so that we came alongside the forked spruce as we reached the top of the hill.

  A white picket fence began just past the spruce, enclosing an acre of green grass, carefully mowed. A white, wooden, two-story house occupied the center of the acreage, well back from the highway. The gate in the fence was marked by a silver mailbox with an American flag attached to it and some low rosebushes on either side, barren of blooms this late in the year. A driveway, bordered by ground-hugging evergreen shrubs, curved up to the front of the house, where a classic silver Roosevelt town car from the 1970s, roughly the size of RMS Titanic, stretched out in the afternoon sun like a giant cat.

  The house had green shutters and a green roof and a red tiled porch with white pillars on either side. To the left of the house was a detached two-car garage, to which the Roosevelt would be retired once the snow started, but which now would hold the everyday car, a blue Fjord electric, on one side, and, on the other, a small outboard motorboat and other odds and ends, including a sparkly girls’ bicycle, with pink and white vinyl tassels trailing from its handlebars.

  A woman came around the side of the house, carrying a rake. She wore a big straw hat with a yellow flower on it, green overalls, white gardening gloves, and yellow rubber boots. She vanished from my sight even before she entered the house through the front door, because my eyes filled instantly with tears.

  Karl noticed, of course. And also, of course, put two and two together. “Shawna, why are we here?” he said, but as if he already knew the answer.

  “It’s my home,” I said. “It’s the house where I grew up.” I took a deep, shuddering breath. “That woman is my mother.”

  SIXTEEN

  I HAD SEEN Karl slightly irritated, coldly murderous, infuriatingly calm, and even (rarely) joking, but until that moment, I had never seen him truly furious, except for that one flash of rage when I had asked if the laws of the Labyrinth could be changed. “You sentimental fool! She is not your mother. She is at best a copy. More likely she is a complete fabrication, Shaped to be the mother you wished you’d had, rather than the one who gave you birth!”

  I slapped him. I didn’t think about it, I just did it. The sound of my hand against his cheek was so loud I half-expected Mom to come back out of the house. Then I glared at him. “Even if that’s true,” I said, each word cold and sharp as a sliver of ice, “I love her, and nothing you can say will change that. And because I love her, I had to come here. My world understands that, even if you don’t. I didn’t consciously Shape our destination, but the pilot we ‘lucked’ into finding was already headed to the airfield a couple of miles from my house!”

  Karl might have been carved from stone if not for the angry red imprint of my hand on his face. “I do not question your love,” he said, and his words were every bit as icy as mine. “Or the strength of your Shaping ability, conscious or unconscious. I do, however, question your sanity.” He pointed at the house. “This house is almost certainly under surveillance. We may already have been seen. Or, the Adversary may have simply Shaped her to report you if she sees you. Or worse, to kill you on sight.”

  That word-dagger slipped through my guard and slid into my heart so suddenly I gasped. I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Could it be true?

  Of course it could. If Karl had thought of it, the Adversary might have, too.

  But he might not have, either. That night at the resort, before I really knew how to Shape (not that I knew much more now) I had tried so hard to imagine any information connecting Mom to me vanishing. Then, in my dreams, it had seemed that I had succeeded. I remembered the feeling of relief before I woke, the certainty that I didn’t need to worry anymore.

  Just a dream? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe I really had succeeded, my subconscious doing the Shaping while I slept. After all, Karl thought the whole resort might have been a Shaping I had done subconsciously. Our arrival at Wing and a Prayer Field had to have been done subconsciously. (Maybe that was why my hunger had seemed so acute on the plane—I’d used even more Shaping energy than I’d known.) Surely a little erasing of records wasn’t too much to ask . . .

  Either way, I was here. I was willing to take the chance Karl was right. But I forced myself to think, as well as speak, coldly. “You’re still armed,” I said. “If my mother threatens me, do what you have to.”

  I said it, and I meant it, but I could not begin to imagine what it would do to me if he shot the woman I remembered as my mother on the steps of what my heart insisted was my childhood home. Then again, what was it going to do to me to do what I intended to do, the thing I had not shared with Karl, could barely share with myself?

  I couldn’t talk anymore. I turned away from Karl, climbed over the fence, and set off across the yard toward the house.

  My house.

  My room was on the second floor at the back, overlooking the forest. I remembered countless mornings waking up and peering out into the trees. Many times I’d seen deer feeding in the morning mist, just outside the picket fence. Once a bear had wandered by, stopping to sharpen its claws on a fallen pine. I remembered the smell of bacon downstairs as Mom readied breakfast, which I would scarf down just in time to run out to the curb to catch the school bus.

  Dad had died when I was a baby. I didn’t remember him at all. Didn’t that put the lie to Karl’s suggestion I’d made a fake mom when I Shaped the world? Because I would have loved to have had a dad, and I hadn’t. All I’d had was Mom.

  But if I hadn’t made this all up, if I’d just copied it, did that mean that in the First World I had grown up in a house just like this one? Was my mom there, my real mom, still alive, wondering where I’d gone? And if so . . . why had I left her?

  Ten years had passed in the First World, Karl said. Had I just vanished mysteriously? There would have been police searches, news stories, but nothing ever found . . .

  Unless I did somethi
ng, this mom, in this world, would experience something just as horrifying. I would vanish if we succeeded, or die if we didn’t. In this world, I was already a wanted terrorist. Would Mom believe it? Would she be forced to believe it? Or would she believe me innocent, but still have to live with the heartbreaking fact of my disappearance or death?

  I swallowed hard, my stomach churning, as I reached the porch. I climbed the four steps between the white pillars. I reached for the door handle without thinking—it was my home!—then stopped my hand, and instead pressed the doorbell button with a trembling finger.

  The familiar chimes echoed inside. I heard footsteps approaching, and clenched my hands into fists to stop them from shaking.

  The door opened, and there was Mom, eyes widening as she saw me.

  I’d been home just a couple of months ago, and she hadn’t changed a bit since then. Her hair was drawn back in a practical ponytail, and her face was still largely unlined, and those things combined to make her look only a little older than I was, instead of in her mid-50s. My heart pounded in my chest as I waited for her reaction.

  “Shawna!” she said, and her face broke into a huge smile. “Sweetheart, what a wonderful surprise! What are you doing here?”

  Something broke inside me. I burst into tears and flung my arms around her.

  She held me tightly. She smelled like Mom, the slightly spicy, slightly floral scent of her favorite perfume, lightly applied, taking me back to my childhood in an instant, to all the other times Mom had held me and made whatever trauma had ruined my world go away. “Honey, what’s wrong?” The she saw Karl. “Who’s that?”

  I took a deep breath, released her, and wiped my eyes. I tried to smile, but knew I was largely unsuccessful; my lip was trembling too much. I turned. Karl stood at the bottom of the steps. His hand was in his coat pocket. I knew why.

  “He’s . . . a friend,” I said. “We came out here to . . . do some camping.” We were both wearing backpacks, so it seemed as good an excuse as any. “I wanted him to meet you.”