Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  Just thinking about setting blindly out to sea in an unfamiliar boat was beginning to make me feel a little seasick already. “Just how far do you think we’ll have to sail to find this . . . weak spot between the worlds?”

  “I still cannot tell,” Karl said.

  “That’s the Pacific Ocean over there to the west. You do realize it goes on a very, very long way.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “Could this Portal-making place be as far away as Japan, or China?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, you’re proposing that, if necessary, we will sail across the Pacific Ocean in a small stolen sailboat.”

  “It would make us difficult to trace,” he pointed out.

  “It would make us dead,” I pointedly pointed back.

  “I have sailed the Pacific, or versions of it, on other worlds. On one watery world, I sailed an ocean that makes the Pacific look like a duck pond. In any event, we have no choice.”

  “Better steal some Dramamine along with the boat,” I muttered.

  For the next several minutes we rode in silence, the pallets of apples swaying and creaking in the darkness around us. Then Karl said, “You said the truck will turn north when it reaches the road along the coast, to head toward the processing plant?”

  “Yes.”

  “We should feel it, when that happens. That is when we’ll want the driver to stop.”

  “Sure,” I said. I knew he was right. We had to stop the truck, and that meant I would have to Shape the driver. And for once, Karl didn’t even say anything about unintended consequences.

  He should have.

  Almost exactly two hours after we started to roll, the truck slowed—but it didn’t stop. It swung sharply right—north—and then accelerated.

  I thrust my thoughts at the driver, pushing hard, harder than I should have had to, I thought again. Stop. The truck needs to stop. You need to stop.

  I guess I thought he would pull over, in a rest stop, maybe, or at least on a wide part of the shoulder. But once again, my Shaping went awry.

  He stopped, all right. Suddenly, by slamming on the brakes. Tires squealed. Pallets of apples overbalanced, pelting us with fruit. The trailer fishtailed violently. It tilted, teetered . . .

  . . . and fell over.

  EIGHTEEN

  HAVING ALREADY MET the President once, the Adversary no longer had to wait to see her. He walked into the Oval Office, and she rose to greet him. “All federal law enforcement agencies, and the armed forces, are on high alert, Mr. Gegner,” she said. “What else can I do?”

  “I need to start talking to other world leaders,” the Adversary said. “Can you arrange that?”

  “Of course, Mr. Gegner,” the President said. “I’m the President of the United States. Which ones do you need to talk to?”

  “All of them, eventually,” the Adversary said. “But let’s start with the major ones and work our way down.”

  The President nodded. “Very well. Where would you like to make the calls?”

  The Adversary looked around the office. For some reason, in Shawna Keys’ world the President lived in pale-green mansion called the Emerald Palace, rather than a White House, but the Oval Office looked much the same as it had in pictures of it he had seen in the First World. “This will do nicely. If you don’t mind.”

  She didn’t, of course.

  Two hours later, the Adversary said, “Thank you, Prime Minister,” to the Canadian leader, and hung up the phone. There were still many world leaders to Shape, and of course different leaders had different measures of effective control over their countries—one of the annoying things about this world being so close to First World—but nevertheless each call made it that much more difficult for the Enemy and the Shaper to move around the planet undetected.

  Ultimately, of course, all this unruly nationalism, independence, dissent, and diversity of thought and governance would vanish. It would not take long, once the Shaper was dead, and her world was solely his, to make it perfectly ordered, peaceful, and submissive, like both the world he had Shaped and the Shurak home world. But for now, this would have to do.

  The trail had gone cold in Oregon. Members of his cadre, monitoring law enforcement efforts, had noted that a private plane had refused instructions to land at a designated airstrip. It seemed likely Yatsar and Keys had been on that plane, but they’d been unable to track them past that point. Yatsar and Keys had been trending generally west, but of course they could have turned north toward Canada (where the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were on high alert, as Prime Minister Sawyer had just assured him). They might have turned south toward Mexico, though that was much farther away. They could have doubled back east. They might be headed for the coast, which was why the Coast Guard was now heavily patrolling the Oregon and Washington shorelines.

  Wherever they were, he was slowly tightening the noose, drawing more and more resources into the search for them. It was only a matter of time.

  He stretched. The intercom buzzed; he pressed a button.

  “Mr. Gegner, the President of Ukraine is on the line,” said a disembodied male voice.

  “Thank you,” he said. He picked up the phone. “Mr. President. Thank you for taking my call . . .”

  * * *

  Karl slammed into me so hard it drove the breath from my lungs, but even as I lay there, gasping for air, the thought crossed my mind that the fact we’d managed to capsize a truck on dry land did not bode well for our upcoming ocean voyage, if we ever reached the water.

  Karl groaned and rolled off of me, but I was still half-buried in apples. Light had flooded the trailer: the crash had jolted open the doors. When I could breathe, I struggled through the welter of fruit and broken pallets, dragging my backpack behind me, and a moment later tumbled out into long weedy grass. Sore, and still a little breathless, I struggled to my feet and stared around.

  At some point we had crossed the Interstate, but fortunately we hadn’t turned onto it. As I had expected, we were in fact on a much narrower, more rural road, the old highway that ran along the coast west of the Interstate. That made sense: fruit from Appleville had been shipped to the Pacific Breeze Fruit Company plant for decades, since long before there was an Interstate . . .

  Since long before this world existed. I shoved that always-unsettling thought aside.

  Good thing: if the driver had slammed on his brakes on the Interstate, he would have caused a multicar pile-up . . .

  The driver. I hadn’t thought of him until then. While Karl crawled out of the truck behind me, I limped around to the front, hoping I hadn’t just killed another man.

  I was relieved to see him sitting on the grass at the front of the truck, knees pulled up, massaging the back of his neck. He had his back to me, and I didn’t see any point in introducing myself. Hi, my name’s Shawna, and I used to run this world. I just made you crash by making you think you absolutely had to stop. No need to thank me.

  No need at all. I hurried back to Karl. “He doesn’t know we were on the truck,” I said. “And nobody else has come along. If we move fast . . .”

  “I am not entirely sure I can,” Karl said, but he picked up his pack, and I shouldered mine, and together we limped into the nearby woods. We had just entered the cool shadows of the trees when a helicopter pounded overhead, so low the wash of its rotors showered us with pine needles.

  I tensed, expecting the helicopter to land to investigate the toppled truck, but it roared away without slowing or hovering. “Nothing to do with us, maybe?” I said to Karl.

  “Maybe,” he said, but not as if he believed it.

  We’d only gone another hundred yards or so when another aircraft streaked overhead: not a helicopter this time, but a fighter jet. A second followed. Then a third.

  We were out of
sight of the road, but still far too near for comfort, so we redoubled our efforts to lose ourselves in the woods—which wasn’t hard, since we didn’t have a clue where we were or where we were going, except, of course, west.

  The forest wasn’t wilderness; definitely second or even third growth, perhaps reclaiming former farmland. I knew we weren’t far from the coast. The old highway was now a designated scenic route, for those more interested in seeing assorted oceanic vistas than getting quickly from A to B. The fact no one had come by in all the time that had passed between the toppling of the trailer and our escaping into the forest was mostly a function of the season: there weren’t that many tourists around this late in the fall, and the local residents had seen all they needed to of the sea and sky and forest. When you’re local, getting where you want to go as quickly as possible is your definition of a good time on the road.

  Once we had climbed almost to the top of the next hill, we discovered we could see the Interstate behind us, over a lower ridge to the east. Though the cars on it were little more than glittering specks, I could clearly make out the lights of police cars, weaving through the traffic. “What’s going on?” I said. “Helicopters? Jets? Multiple police cars? Are they all looking for us?”

  “No way to be certain,” Karl said. He turned the other way. “Will we see the ocean once we are over this hill?”

  “Probably,” I said. Suddenly feeling very exposed, I turned and hurried up to the windswept, rocky, barren hilltop.

  Not only did I see the ocean when I reached the crest, I almost fell into it: the other side of the hill ended in an abrupt precipice. Maybe a hundred feet below, the ocean surged.

  Karl came up beside me. “The Pacific Ocean,” he said, entirely unnecessarily. “A formidable barrier. It is too bad you decided to keep it.”

  “Sorry. I’ll remember for next time.”

  Karl stared north and south along the coast. “Now we must find a boat.”

  Even as he said it, one came nosing around the headland to our left: a big one, white, with a prominent bow and a much lower stern, gunwales encircled by a bright-red bumper. Antennae bristled above a glassed-in bridge, and a very large and serious-looking machine gun poked up in the bow. Four men in orange lifejackets stood in the stern behind a metal rail, from which hung a bright red life preserver, above the words painted on the hull: U.S. COAST GUARD.

  Two of the men scanned the shore with binoculars; the others stared just as intently. I hastily grabbed Karl’s arm and pulled him back over the crest of the hill. “If they’re looking for us,” I said to Karl, “and it sure looks like they are, then why are they looking for us here? The Adversary can’t possibly know we got on an apple truck headed for the coast!”

  Karl looked troubled. “I think it means the Adversary’s claws have sunk far deeper into this world far faster than I hoped.”

  “You think all this activity is related to us?”

  He nodded.

  “Even the fighter jets? Isn’t that overkill?”

  “They might just be a side effect of whatever Shaping the Adversary has done to make it likelier we will be caught,” Karl said. “Not tasked specifically with finding us. Though I am glad we are no longer in the air.”

  “But how could the Adversary muster that much firepower?” I protested. “He hasn’t even been in my world for a week!”

  “All he has to do is Shape people,” Karl said. “The right people. One after the other. Each leads him to someone with greater authority still. How many such steps would he have to take before he was within Shaping distance of the highest authority of all?”

  Six degrees of separation, I thought. But the target isn’t Kevin Bacon. Who totally existed in my world, because I clearly hadn’t been that stupid. “The President?” I said. “You think he’s Shaped the President?”

  “You’ve kept the President? Then yes.”

  “But why would she even talk to the Adversary?”

  “He planted the idea with regional law enforcement officials that you are a terrorist,” Karl said. “National security issues get elevated quickly within governments of any kind. Does it really seem so impossible that he might have reached the highest levels of your government with his concerns in just a couple of days? Especially when he can Shape everyone along the way to facilitate it?”

  “I guess not,” I said slowly, my heart sinking. I’d thought once we were well away from my old haunts, we could simply vanish. But now the whole country might be looking for us. Good thing we’re leaving the country, then, isn’t it? I thought. That’s why we’re on the coast.

  But . . . fighter jets. Helicopters. Coast Guard boats with radar . . . not to mention machine guns. Trying to escape out to sea might only get us caught quicker.

  The rumble of the Coast Guard vessel’s engine had died away. I clambered back up to the cliff top and took a look. “All clear,” I said. “No ships in sight. At sea, or handily waiting for us to grab them.”

  “Stealing a vessel may be more fraught with risk than I anticipated,” Karl said.

  “You think?” I said. “The Coast Guard is going to be checking every small craft they find.”

  “The key, then, will be to remain undetected.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. “Ever heard of radar?” Karl being Karl, I wasn’t entirely sure he would have, but he nodded.

  “Of course. But I do not mean that the boat we are on must remain undetected, I mean that we must remain undetected on the boat.”

  “Stow away? Like we did on the truck?”

  He nodded. “Precisely.”

  “Which capsized.”

  “We will endeavor not to repeat that aspect of our previous journey,” he said.

  I looked out at the ocean. It seemed pacific enough today to live up to its name—not exactly glassy smooth, but not storm-tossed, either. But there was no guarantee that would continue, and while I’d been on a few boats on a few lakes, I’d never been to sea. Yet it seemed, as with so much else that had happened in such an extraordinarily short amount of time, I had no choice. Apparently, the only place Karl could make the Portal that offered my only hope of escape from certain death at the hands of the Adversary lay out across the water somewhere, and so out across the water we would go.

  “So where do we look for this boat?” I said. “North or south along the coast?”

  “The processing plant is to the north? And presumably a sizable town as well?”

  I nodded.

  “Then south,” Karl said. “We want a very small town or private marina, where we will be far less likely to attract attention. The amount of control the Adversary now has in your world suggests he will also have access to surveillance devices. Those are most likely to be found in population centers, as are law-enforcement forces, of course.”

  “South,” I said. I looked down the slope toward the coastline. “There’s a trail of some sort down there,” I said, pointing. “A hiking trail, maybe. Looks like it goes the way we want it to.”

  “I am not surprised,” Karl said. “Let’s go, then.” He set off along the cliff top.

  “I didn’t Shape it,” I said to his back. Which was true as far as I knew. And I didn’t feel any strange fatigue or headache to make me think perhaps I had Shaped it unconsciously. On the other hand, if there was one thing I’d begun to realize as these preposterous adventures unfolded, it was that nothing in this world was as real and solid as I had always believed it to be.

  We set off in search of a boat.

  And hopefully, I thought uneasily, imagining tossing on the blue water stretching out to the horizon, Dramamine.

  NINETEEN

  THE HIKING TRAIL, whether or not it had been there before we needed it, led us down to the beach. We hadn’t gone far along it before we saw a boat.

  “How about that one?” I said, pointing out to sea. A gi
ant cruise ship, her bow improbably marked with giant mascaraed eyes and luscious hot-pink lips (how embarrassing for her, I thought) was steaming . . . dieseling? . . . steadily north. “Those things have stabilizers. I might not get sick.”

  “My nautical abilities do not extend to either steering or navigating something the size of an island,” Karl said dryly. “Also, were such a ship to go off course, it would attract a great deal of unwanted attention. Also, how do you propose we get to it. Swim?”

  “You need to learn to tell when I’m joking,” I said.

  “You were joking?”

  “Of course I was joking.”

  “I was under the impression,” Karl said, “that things which are jokes are funny.”

  “Hey!” I paused. “Wait, was that a joke?”

  Karl only smiled slightly in response.

  The sun hung low over the ocean, and I had eaten the last of the apples I had stuffed in my backpack the night before (and was almost as sick of apples as trail mix, much as I liked them) when we crested a small hill and at last saw a few boats of more appropriate size: eight, to be specific, bobbing alongside two piers.

  The piers stretched out from a dock, which ran alongside a long, low building. The dock seemed to double as a deck, since close to the building, like a troop of mushrooms, sprouted white-and-red umbrellas bearing the familiar logo of Rebellion Ale. No one sat at the tables beneath them, though.

  The big parking lot inland of the building had spots for maybe forty cars. Only five were occupied, by the kinds of cars I’d never be able to afford, including a bright-red Peneveloce and a silver Limburger Countessa, which I’d only ever seen in movies: the giant rear wing was unmistakable.

  Canvas covered all but one of the berthed boats, an alarmingly small sailing vessel with a single mast. Someone moved in the cockpit, man or woman, I couldn’t tell at that distance: he or she disappeared belowdecks almost the moment I noticed him/her.