Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “Really?” Mom frowned. “What about Brent?”

  “We . . . broke up. And Karl isn’t . . . he’s just a friend.” Is he? I wondered.

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” Mom hugged me again. “It will get better,” she whispered in my ear. “I promise.”

  She thinks I’m upset because of Brent, I thought, holding on to her for another long moment—though it could never again be long enough. And in a way, I was. Upset about losing Brent, and Aesha, and everything else I loved. Soon I would lose my whole world . . . or if things went really badly, my whole life.

  But first . . . another loss.

  I pulled free. “Mom, could you leave us . . . just for a minute?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I need to talk to Karl. Alone.” That sounded awkward and awful, and I could tell Mom was puzzled, but all she said was, “Of course, dear. Come in when you’re ready. I’ll make some tea.” She went in and closed the door behind her.

  “Shawna,” Karl said. “This is still—”

  “Shut up,” I said, and rather to my surprise, he did.

  I turned back to the house. I closed my eyes. I reached for my Shaping ability. I took a deep breath.

  I Shaped.

  No mere pressure this time. It hurt, a stab of agony like an icepick between my eyes. I had to reach out a shaking hand and lean against the doorjamb for support. I breathed deep until the pain receded enough I thought I could speak. Then I rang the doorbell again.

  Footsteps. Mom opened the door. “Yes?” she said, looking at me with no recognition at all. Her eyes flicked to Karl. She frowned. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” I said, though it was hard to speak through my constricted throat. “I think we’ve taken a wrong turn. Which way is the Lake Tanim trailhead?”

  Mom’s face cleared. She gave me a sunny smile. “Oh, you’re not too far away,” she said. She pointed down the road, in the direction of town. “Just around the next bend, there’s a parking lot and a sign. I’m surprised you missed it.”

  “Me, too,” I said. I gave Karl a look. “I told you that was it.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He still had his hand in his pocket.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said to Mom.

  “Can I offer you a cup of tea?” she said. “I’m just making some for . . .” She blinked. “For some reason.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Thanks again.”

  “You’re welcome.” She looked up at the sky. Clouds were beginning to drift across it from the west. “Not sure it’s going to be a very nice afternoon for a hike, though. Could rain.”

  “We like rain,” I said. I tried to smile. My lips curled up, but the expression felt like a dead thing stapled to my face. “Thank you again. Good-bye.”

  “Bye,” Mom said.

  I turned and descended the steps. I heard the door of the house I had grown up in close behind me with a finality that made my knees go weak, so suddenly I stumbled. Karl caught me.

  “Why?” he said. “Why risk this?”

  I straightened and pushed him away. “Because now she won’t hurt when I disappear, or die, or when she hears about some woman who happens to share her last name being called a terrorist.”

  “She will hear her own name mentioned in news reports as your mother.”

  “I am the Shaper of this world,” I said. “No, she won’t.” I said it with as much conviction as I could. I thought I had already done that, but I had made it certain with this Shaping, just as I had made certain my beloved room on the second floor, and every other nook and cranny of the house, no longer bore any trace of me, or any other child.

  “It was a foolish risk,” he said. “A risk for us, and a risk for her. If she had been Shaped by the Adversary to kill you, I would have been forced to shoot her in front of you.”

  “It was a risk worth taking,” I said.

  He shook his head stubbornly. “I disagree. The fate of the whole of the Labyrinth, an unknown number of Shaped worlds, may well depend on you. Why risk all that for one woman?”

  I stared at him, at the pale blue eyes in the dark, mustached face, and wondered, not for the first time, what Karl Yatsar had become over his long years of life. “Because of love,” I said. “Something I’m guessing you know nothing about.”

  I pushed past him, striding down the driveway of my childhood home. My eyes blurred again with unshed tears, but I didn’t look back.

  SEVENTEEN

  WE WALKED ALONG the road in rather surly silence, Karl following several steps behind me, clearly no more interested in talking to me than I was in talking to him. The promised sign for the trailhead for Lake Tanim came into sight, the turnoff into the parking lot opening on our left. I came even with it, and kept walking.

  That finally brought a comment from Karl. “Aren’t we taking the trail?”

  “No,” I said, and kept walking.

  After a few more feet, I heard him quicken his pace. He came up beside me. “Why did you ask where it was, then?”

  “To make sure Mom had been . . .” My throat constricted; I had to swallow hard to resume talking. “Shaped.”

  “It goes in the right direction. West. Why not take it?”

  “Because it’s a dead end,” I said. “It leads up to the lake, but the only way down again is along the same trail. If we took it, we’d be trapped.”

  “Then why choose it for your . . . examination question?”

  “So that if someone on our trail asks Mom if she’s seen us, she’ll tell them we were headed to Lake Tanim. It’s a half-day hike. It buys us time.”

  Karl didn’t say anything for a moment. “Logical,” he finally commented.

  “Thank you, Mr. Spock,” I said sourly.

  Another moment of silence. “I apologize for my anger,” he said next, surprising me. “Passing through so many worlds, I have become focused on my goal, which at times has seemed impossibly out of reach, to the exclusion of all other considerations. It has made me selfish. It was kind of you to think of trying to protect a woman you love from the pain this changing world will bring her.”

  Some of my own simmering anger cooled at that. “Thank you,” I said. “Apology accepted.”

  We trudged on a few more yards.

  “Who is Mr. Spock?” he said at last.

  That made me laugh, which felt good. “He’s a half-Vulcan,” I said. “An alien.” Like Ygrair, I guess, which was a seriously weird thought. “Pointy ears. Emotionless. Logical.”

  “I am only one of those things,” Karl said. “I am logical, or try to be. But I am not emotionless. Nor do I have pointy ears. And I am human.”

  “One out of five is close enough.”

  Another moment of silence.

  “So where are we going?” he said then.

  “The trail we really want, the one that takes us west, begins on the other side of town,” I said. “It’s called the Sky-to-Sea. It crosses those mountains in the west, then leads all the way down to the coast—a two-day hike from here. Probably two nights’ camping, considering how late it’s getting.” I glanced at my watch. Well after five o’clock. “It will be dark almost as soon we are on it.”

  “Two more days on foot,” Karl said. “We’ll be vulnerable.”

  “Appleville is even smaller than Elkjaw. Too small to risk taking someone’s car,” I said. “Even if I Shaped someone to give it to us, somebody would notice strangers were driving it. Or worse, would recognize me.” Recognize me. I suddenly realized that even though I’d Shaped my mom to forget me, there were dozens of people in Appleville who knew me—people I’d gone to school with, business owners, friends of my mother’s. They’d talk to my mom. She’d be confused . . .

  . . . unless my Shaping had covered even that? Again, I remembered how relieved I had b
een after my dream at the resort.

  I hope, I thought. Oh, I hope.

  “Horses?” Karl said, oblivious to my sudden internal turmoil.

  “Same problem. Also, I prefer breathing.”

  We walked on.

  “Perhaps we need a stealthier option,” Karl said after a few more steps. “Does anyone travel regularly from . . . what is the name of the town, again?”

  “Appleville,” I said.

  “Appleville?” He looked around at the valley. At that very moment, we were passing between giant orchards; in the distance, several people on ladders were picking fruit. “Not very original.”

  “Don’t blame me, I didn’t . . .” My voice trailed off. “Or maybe I did?”

  He shrugged. “You would know better than I if there is a town named Appleville in Oregon in the First World.”

  I sighed. “I really hope there is,” I said, “because I’d hate to think I was that lacking in creativity.”

  Karl actually smiled. “I think it is safe to say,” he said, “that there is no such thing as a Shaper lacking in creativity. Creativity is pretty much the primary distinguishing characteristic of such individuals.”

  I let myself smile back. “You didn’t finish your question.”

  “Does anyone . . . or anything . . . travel regularly from Appleville to the coast?”

  “Why?” I said, and then suddenly understood. “Yes!” I said in sudden excitement. “Apple trucks! It’s right in the middle of the harvest. There’ll be trucks driving west every day—there’s a big processing plant on the coast. I should have thought of that!”

  “That’s our ride, then,” Karl said.

  “I love apples,” I said, mouth watering . . . which, come to think of it, probably wasn’t surprising, since I’d chosen to Shape my world so my hometown was, literally, Appleville, USA.

  By the time we reached town it was past five-thirty. If we had really been going to set off west on foot, it would have been dark almost before we began the journey. But now we had a different plan. Now darkness would serve us.

  Whether I had really grown up in Appleville or conjured it entirely out of thin air, I knew every inch of the town. The local apple growers had banded together to form the Appleville Growers’ Cooperative. All of the AGC’s fruit went to the Pacific Breeze Fruit Company, which maintained a state-of-the-art processing facility on the coast, convenient to rail lines and the Interstate for shipping around the country, and with its own harbor for overseas shipping. Some apples went out in bulk, while others were sliced, diced, mashed, or juiced.

  I would have loved to have gone into the tiny downtown and bought a hamburger at either Burger Baron or Sandwich Sultan, two locally owned restaurants which had been locked in friendly rivalry my whole life. But since I couldn’t be certain I wouldn’t be recognized, I didn’t dare.

  Instead we lurked in a copse of trees within sight of the AGC warehouse, waiting for the sun to go down and the traffic—such as it was—to lessen. I was so hungry I actually wished we still had trail mix.

  A little after six o’clock, a guard appeared at the gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the warehouse, a hundred-year-old wooden rectangular structure two stories high, with big windows on all sides and skylights in the ceiling. It was in dire need of painting, but the faded logo of a stylized apple, with a banner floating in front of it bearing the co-op’s name in old-fashioned letters, could still be made out in the fading light.

  The guard stepped out through the gate, swung it closed behind him, locked it with a padlock on a chain, and walked down the street, whistling.

  Except I was quite certain the padlock had failed to latch properly.

  Which meant, of course, it was true.

  I’d been leery of even that much Shaping, after the agony of my effort to protect Mom, but it didn’t hurt, although it did seem to take more effort than I thought it should. Well, I thought, that last Shaping was a doozy.

  We waited another hour, while the sun vanished and darkness gathered, hastened by the thickening cloud Mom had noted rolling in from the west. The warehouse stood on the very edge of town, so the nearest houses were a couple of blocks away. There were no motion sensors or security cameras—it was, after all, just a big building filled with apples—and once it seemed clear no one remained in the compound, we went to the gate, swung it open, and walked in.

  I closed the gate behind us and made sure that this time the padlock really did lock, with a loud click. Then we hurried out of the pool of illumination cast by a light near the gate and into the concealing shadows.

  There were six loading docks, three marked Receiving, three marked Shipping. Semitrailers were parked at two of the latter. One, we saw when we opened it up, was packed solid with flats of apples. The other, though, was only half full. It was easy enough to rearrange things so that there was empty space at the front, with a wall of fruit behind it to conceal us.

  The workers wouldn’t notice that anything had been moved. I was sure of it.

  We took our sleeping bags from our packs and made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the wooden floor. I sat in the darkness, munching an apple. It was a Red Delicious, the most popular variety grown in the state. I’d never cared for the variety myself, but that night, I thought it was the most wonderful thing I’d ever tasted.

  I guess I could have tried to Shape it into a Honeycrisp—my personal favorite—but it didn’t seem worth the effort. And it was an effort: I’d done so much Shaping today that the last couple of times I’d consciously Shaped something—like the padlock—I’d I had to . . . I guess “push” is the word . . . harder than I had before. Though it least it hadn’t hurt like my erasure of Mom’s memory . . .

  My apple suddenly tasted like sawdust. I had to wait a moment before I could continue eating, but I did keep eating: I’d barely made a dent in my hunger. I finished the first apple, put it aside, and grabbed another.

  A steak would be better, I thought as I bit into it, and despite my concern a moment before about wasting energy, was suddenly sorely tempted to try to Shape one into existence, right there in the dark, medium rare, maybe with blue cheese or mushrooms . . .

  . . . and then thought better of it, remembering how badly things had gone when I got a Shaping wrong. Unintended consequences could be disastrous, and if I couldn’t quite figure out why conjuring up a nice steak would be disastrous, that probably only meant, Karl’s reassurance to the contrary, that I lacked imagination.

  I’d probably end up with a whole cow, I thought. And there’s barely room enough in here for both of us.

  I thought about asking Karl what he thought, but then I heard his breathing, slow and steady, and realized he’d already fallen asleep.

  I put my second apple core to one side and stretched out in my own sleeping bag, using the backpack as a lumpy but better-than-nothing pillow. I felt utterly exhausted, mentally and physically, but my mind kept racing.

  I thought about Aesha.

  I thought about Brent.

  I thought about Mom.

  I thought about everything I’d thought I’d had, and would never have again.

  And finally, for the first time in a long time, I cried myself to sleep.

  * * *

  I woke with a start to the crash of the trailer doors being flung open. Gray light and cold air flooded around us, filtered through the pallets of apples. Male voices joked and laughed and cursed. The trailer shifted, and shadows moved over the slits of light as workers continued the loading, half-completed the day before.

  “They’ll block us in completely if we’re not careful,” Karl whispered.

  “No, they won’t,” I whispered back, because I’d thought of that and made sure it wouldn’t happen. A night’s sleep had rejuvenated me somewhat: the minor Shaping hardly fazed me.

  Just a few minutes after the
loading began, someone called, “That’s it! Close her up!” The doors slammed shut, plunging us into darkness. I heard the door of the cab open. The truck swayed as someone climbed aboard. The cab door slammed shut. The engine started. Gears clunked.

  We began to roll.

  Relief flooded me. We’d done it! Nobody could possibly know we were aboard this truck. Our trail was as dead as a doornail. (Whatever that means. I’ve never understood why a doornail should be considered deader than any other kind of nail. Or any other inanimate object, for that matter.) I took a deep, apple-scented breath, and celebrated by grabbing another Red Delicious from the nearest pallet and biting into it.

  Beside me, I heard Karl’s teeth crunching into an apple of his own. “How long?” he said after a moment to chew and swallow.

  “A couple of hours to the coast road,” I said. “Another hour north along it to the processing facility.”

  “Will the truck stop before it reaches the processing facility?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Let me rephrase that,” he said. “We need the truck to stop before that, as soon as we have reached the coast, in fact. We will need a boat, and it should be easier to obtain one unobtrusively in a small town than a city.”

  I sighed. “Yay. A boat. That’s worse than a horse.”

  “You cannot be allergic to boats.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Seasickness isn’t an allergy.”

  Karl sighed in turn.

  “Also,” I said, “I don’ know nothin’ ’bout berthin’ no boats.”

  The joke, proud though I was of it, was of course wasted on Karl. “We don’t want to berth it,” he said. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was frowning at me again. “We want to sail it away from its berth.”

  “Well,” I said, “as I told you once before, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout sailin’ one, neither.”

  “And as I told you,” he said, “I do.” He paused. “Provided, of course, it is an actual sailboat. I am less experienced with motorized vessels.”