Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “That,” Karl said, pointing at it, “I can sail.”

  I looked out to sea, toward the setting sun, now slipping behind a long, low bank of clouds, limning the leading edge bright orange. “In the dark?”

  “A boat sails the same in the dark as in the light,” Karl said.

  “Unless it runs into something,” I pointed.

  “What is there to run into in the middle of the ocean?”

  “Other boats. Buoys. Gulls. Buoys and gulls together. Rocks. I don’t know, I’m a landlubber.”

  “The risk is not great,” Karl said. “And darkness is better than light if we wish to remain undetected.”

  “Doesn’t stop radar.”

  “We are not going to find a better option,” Karl said stubbornly.

  I sighed, but I couldn’t deny it. The hiking trail ran past a wooden staircase leading down into the parking lot; as we approached the top landing, we finally saw a sign: SEABREEZE YACHT CLUB. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING.

  I blinked at it, then started down the stairs. “If this is really my world,” I said, “it’s not really trespassing, is it?”

  “An intriguing legal question whose answer would be of absolutely no practical use,” he said. “I suggest you instead focus on how you are going to Shape the owner of that yacht.”

  “Um . . . I thought just . . . you know . . . sail out to sea, don’t tell anyone we’re on board?”

  “If we are stopped, the skipper will need to have a reason in mind as to why he is sailing straight out to sea. A destination. Where might a small boat sail from here?”

  “How should I know?” I said.

  “Exactly. We must figure that out before we approach the boat.” We reached the parking lot and set out across it. The encroaching clouds had swallowed the sun, and the breeze that had been blowing all day from the sea had died away to almost nothing. Lights had sprung to life inside the yacht club, shining through the big glass windows, revealing an elegant dining room, but no one sat at any of the white-clothed tables or sipped wine from the glittering glassware. I tried to think what day it was. Tuesday had been the attack on the Human Bean, and that night we’d been in the resort. Wednesday we’d commandeered a helicopter. That night we’d camped. Thursday, we’d been visited by a grizzly, reached the mine, destroyed the Portal, driven off, ridden horses, finally camped. Friday we’d seen Mom. We’d spent last night in the apple truck. Which made this Saturday.

  Saturday. So why wasn’t anyone using this fancy yacht club’s dining room? The club looked like a place that would ordinarily be busy every night . . . the kind of establishment you’d pay big bucks to join, and so would want to get more use out of than just as a place to berth your boat.

  I wondered if the strange emptiness had anything to do with all the helicopters and police cars and fighter jets. If the Adversary really had gotten to the President . . . what if the whole country was under martial law?

  Or just scared?

  And all because of me. It was horrifying—no, infuriating—to think that the world I had thought was the world, the only one there was, might soon turn into some kind of authoritarian dystopia, like North Korea had been before reunification ten years ago . . .

  My mind stumbled over that thought. Karl said I’d really only been in this world about ten years. The Koreas had unified ten years ago. Peace in the Middle East had followed in short order. The world wasn’t a paradise, but it was far better than it had been when I was a kid . . . had I done all that? Had that been part of my Shaping of the world?

  Whoa.

  And then the fury rose up again. The Adversary was going to undo it all, was already undoing it. He would abolish freedom, individuality, the rough-and-tumble interaction among individuals that, yes, produced conflict, but also inspired creativity, innovation, and diversity of thought. He would destroy my world and plunge everyone in it into slavery.

  I stopped dead in the middle of the parking lot. Karl took two more steps, realized I wasn’t following, and turned to face me.

  “How can I do this?” I said to him. “How can I just let the Adversary take my world? Why should I? If he can Shape the President, so can I. We could fight back.”

  Karl opened his mouth, but I rushed on.

  “I know you told me he’s too experienced, too knowledgeable about Shaping. But I’ve done a lot of Shaping myself since then. I’m learning fast. And he doesn’t expect me to fight back. He’ll think I can’t fight back. Just like you do.” A bloodthirsty thought once more reared up in my mind, like a movie monster rising from the grave. “If I could take him by surprise, kill him . . .”

  “If you could do that—I do not believe such an attempt could possibly succeed, but assuming it did—this world would remain yours, yes,” Karl said. He stepped closer, his eyes locked on mine. “But think what that would really mean. He has Shaped the President, it seems clear. That means he has had access to other world leaders. Perhaps you could reach some of them, turn them back to your side. But not fast enough to prevent open conflict. War would be inevitable. Millions might die, and the world be devastated.”

  “I’d Shape it. I’d fix it.”

  “You already know your power is not unlimited. You would have to husband it, let it regenerate . . . if it can: many Shapers, if they completely deplete their power, never regain it to the same degree. It would take a very long time to repair the damage—and even then, the millions who died would still be dead, just as your friend Aesha is still dead.

  “And that is the best-case scenario—if, somehow, you managed to kill the Adversary. But if you failed . . . and you would . . . then you would be dead, and not only would your world be his, but potentially every remaining world in the Labyrinth, because although I will continue my quest, there is no guarantee that I will find anyone more capable than you, or even as capable as you, of capturing the hokhmah of all the worlds for Ygrair. I understand your anger and your desire to fight for your creation. But it is misplaced and ultimately selfish.”

  My nails were digging into the palms of my clenched fists, my body shaking. I wanted to Shape him, right then, into something small and slimy that I could crush underfoot. But he was immune to my power, and remained unchanged, and my own anger and desire for revenge and destruction shocked me.

  I forced myself to step back from the precipice of my rage and try to think dispassionately. And dispassionately . . . he was right. God help me, he was right. If I tried to fight the Adversary, the world . . . my world . . . and its people would suffer. Including my friends . . . Brent, Policeman Phil, so many others. Whereas if I fled, followed Karl out of the world . . . well, their new lives would not be their old lives, but they wouldn’t remember their old lives, would they? At least they’d be alive.

  They wouldn’t remember me, either, I suspected; the Adversary would surely blot all traces of me from the world, just as I had blotted all traces of me from my mother’s memory, and all connections linking me to her, erasing myself from her life. They would not know that there could be, that there had been, a better world.

  Unless, some day, I returned.

  I swore there and then, silently, that once I became strong enough and knowledgeable enough, I would return to this world, my world, and make right everything the Adversary was making wrong. It might not be an oath I could fulfill. But I would keep it close to my heart through whatever might still be to come.

  I took a deep breath. I unclenched my fists. “Fine,” I growled. “Then let’s find a fucking chart and steal this fucking boat and get the hell out of this fucking world.”

  Karl gave me a narrow look. “That is an unusual amount of profanity, for you.”

  “I’m feeling unusually fucking profane.” I brushed past him.

  He followed me across the parking lot and up the steps of the yacht club. Neither of us was dressed well enough to even pretend to bel
ong to such an establishment, but no one seemed to notice we had entered. I heard the muffled sound of a television in some back room, the kitchen, maybe. I wondered if everyone were glued to the news, trying to make sense of whatever lies the Adversary was using to begin the process of overwriting their reality.

  I looked around. We were in a lobby of sorts, dark wood, green carpet. Ahead of us were open doors leading into the brightly lit, but empty, dining room. A corridor went left; another went right. “Where would we find a chart?”

  Karl stepped over to the wall on our right, where, between two photos of racing yachts at full sail, a framed map of the building hung. He pointed to it. “How about the Chart Room?”

  I looked: sure enough, there was a room down the corridor to our right, at the north end of the building, labeled “Chart Room.”

  “It’s a long shot, but okay,” I said.

  We found the Chart Room exactly where advertised, four doors down on the right, just before the door at the end of the corridor labeled, “Emergency Exit Only: Alarm Will Sound.” Inside the Chart Room we found a dark wood table surrounded by chairs, shelves on two walls laden with books, a big window looking out over the marina, a door next to it opening onto the deck (this one without any warnings about sounding alarms), and, on the fourth wall, a giant flat-screen monitor, a wireless keyboard waiting in a niche just below it. Below the shelves of books, wide, flat, narrow slots held (I guessed) charts. “Now what?” I said.

  “The destination you will implant in our yacht skipper’s mind needs to be a reasonable distance away, something he . . .”

  “. . . or she,” I noted.

  “Or she,” Karl granted, “could reach in a day or two.” He bent over to scan the embossed labels beneath each of the chart slots. “Ah.” He pulled out a stack of paper from the second from the top. I leaned over to see the label: ONE- TO TWO-DAY TRIPS.

  Karl spread the charts, four in all, across the table’s shining brown wood. They didn’t look anything like the road maps I was used to: although the land portion wasn’t too dissimilar, the water part was white, not blue, and covered with dotted lines and small numbers. “Depths?” I guessed.

  Karl nodded. He pointed to a blob of land about . . . I glanced at the scale . . . a hundred nautical miles off the coast. “We need a closer look at this.” He bent over it. “‘Dead Seal Island.’”

  “Lovely name.” I looked at the ranks of books on the shelf, and didn’t know where to start; then I remembered the monitor and the keyboard. A remote control rested beside the keyboard. I turned on the monitor, and as I’d hoped, it lit not with, say, the Bargain Channel, but the familiar Goggle search engine screen. I pulled the keyboard from the niche, swung one of the chairs around to face the monitor, sat down, typed in, “Dead Seal Island,” and clicked SEARCH.

  It turned out there were two islands by that unappetizing name: a bunch of rocks somewhere off of Antarctica, and the one we were interested in, which didn’t look much more promising. “Nobody lives there,” I said to Karl, “but it does have an unimproved campground, an old lighthouse—automated, these days—and a place to tie up boats.”

  “That sounds ideal,” Karl said. “That is where you will tell the skipper he . . . or she . . . is going.”

  “Dead Seal Island,” I said. I looked at the barren bit of land in the photo on the screen. “You don’t suppose that’s the spot where you can create the Portal?”

  Karl didn’t bother looking at the photo: he stared at the chart. “No,” he said at last. “It is not in quite the right direction, and far too close. No, we will be going farther afield than that, I fear.”

  “I wish it was a field,” I muttered. “Instead of the fricking Pacific Ocean.” I stood up and shoved the keyboard back into its place. “All right, then. Let’s—”

  “Who are you?” said a voice from the doorway. “And what are you doing in the Chart Room?”

  It’s amazing how an unexpected voice can set your heart racing. Not to mention trying to jump up your throat to flop wetly around on top of the chart table. I gulped to push it back into its place, and turned toward the hallway.

  The owner of the voice proved to be a pimply faced youth in an ill-fitting waiter’s uniform (white shirt, black vest, bow tie, black pants), who looked like he might graduate from high school in a year or two if he were lucky: not exactly a threatening presence, but I still felt like I’d been caught doing something illegal, immoral, or both.

  “We are meeting our friend out on the slip,” Karl said smoothly, “and were asked to check some depth soundings on the charts.”

  “You can’t take them out of the room, you know,” the boy said severely. “If you need a chart you have to ask for a copy in advance, and it gets charged to your membership account. Or Julia’s account, I guess.” He scratched behind his ear. “She’s a friend of yours?”

  Ha! I thought. The yacht skipper is a she. “From college,” I said, and then realized that for all I knew Julia was seventy years old, but the kid either figured everyone older than twenty was equally ancient, or I’d lucked out on our relative ages, because he didn’t even blink.

  “You know your way out to her boat?”

  “Of course,” Karl said.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Be sure to put the chart back in its drawer before you go.” He went back into the hallway, closing the door behind him.

  “Didn’t even have to Shape him,” I said.

  “Not the curious type,” Karl said. “Fortunately.” He nodded at the door onto the deck. “Perhaps we should go join our ‘friend.’”

  I took a deep breath. “Right.” Feeling guilty, because, after all, we’d just been told we couldn’t do it, I rolled up the chart showing Dead Seal Island, then pushed open the door.

  We stepped out onto the planking. It had grown quite dark while we were in the clubhouse, and a cool wind now blew from the land out to sea. “A good wind for sailing,” Karl said.

  “If you say so.”

  Pole lights illuminated the piers every few yards. Of the eight docked boats, only Julia’s yacht showed lights: one at the mast, a green one on the side facing us, and a cozy glow through the portholes. “Her running lights are lit,” Karl said. “That means she is close to sailing. We must hurry.”

  Even as he said it, I heard the putt-putt-putt of an inboard engine starting up. Julia (presumably) emerged from the cockpit and stepped onto the pier. Silhouetted against the light at pier’s end, she bent over to lift a loop of rope from the short, thick wooden post to which the yacht’s stern was tethered . . . a bollard, my mind supplied, again from my childhood reading.

  Karl broke into a trot, and I followed a second later. The sound of our footsteps on the planks of the pier made Julia look up from the second bollard to which the boat was tied, at the bow. “Who’s there?” she called, voice tense.

  Karl slowed. “Sorry to alarm you,” he said. “We’re friends of yours.”

  “What? I’m not expecting anybody. Who are you?” She stepped closer, peering through the darkness. “I’ve never seen you before in my life!”

  Karl shot me a look, and I nodded. I closed my eyes. I Shaped. Friends . . . night sail to Dead Seal Island . . . It was harder than it should have been; again, I felt a strange resistance I had to push my way through.

  But it worked. “Glad you could make it!” Julia said, her voice now infused with delight. “I was getting worried.”

  “Held up by traffic,” I said. “A truck had turned over on the highway.”

  Karl gave me another look, of mild disapproval, this time, but I didn’t care, because, once I’d overcome the resistance, I’d felt a rush of . . . “pleasure,” was the only word that seemed to fit . . . as I once again used the power I hadn’t known I’d had until a few days ago.

  Whoa, I thought. That’s new. I like it.

  And then I thought,
That could be dangerous. But that second thought seemed unimportant. “Hi, Julia,” I said.

  Now that we were standing right in front of her, I could finally make out her features. A short, wiry black woman with short curly hair, Julia wore blue jeans, sneakers, and a white windbreaker beneath a bright-orange lifejacket. She grinned at me. “Hi . . .” she began. Then she faltered. A look of confusion flitted across her face.

  “Shawna,” I said, with just a soupçon of Shaping thrown in. “And Karl.” You’ve always known that.

  She blinked, then laughed. “Good grief, couldn’t think of your name for a second. Weird, since we’ve known each other forever.” She turned her smile on Karl. “I’d never forget you, of course.”

  “Of course,” Karl said. “Nor I you.”

  “Well,” Julia said, indicating the bollard, “as you can see, I’m all set to pull away. Clamber aboard! Lifejackets in the locker under the stairs. You can put your stuff in the forward cabin. I like the aft berth so I’m handy for the cockpit. Not that I’ll be sleeping while we sail out to Dead Seal Island.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  She shrugged. “I like sailing at night. And I like sailing solo. And Amazon is a sweet vessel.”

  “Amazon?” I looked at her, eyes wide in sudden delight. “From the Arthur Ransome books?” The very books from which my knowledge of things like port and starboard and bow and stern and bollards had been obtained!

  Her grin grew even wider. “I forgot you loved those, too!”

  “Why not Swallow?”

  “Nancy Blackett, of course,” Julia said. “Shiver my timbers, you galloping galoot!”

  I laughed—but an instant later the laugh died on my lips, and all the joy I’d felt from Shaping drained from me like beer from the bunghole of an upside-down barrel. We could have been friends for real. But I forced her to be my friend. She’s not really a friend at all.

  Or is she? It’s real for her, isn’t it? She’ll never know it wasn’t real, unless I Shape her again.