Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “There is nothing you can hit out here,” Karl said. He looked around. “Probably,” he amended. “But keep a weather eye out, just the same. If you do see anything, roust me with a shout.”

  Was it just me, or was he even talking a bit like a pirate? “Aye, aye, sir,” I said. Then, “Julia’s sound asleep.”

  “As she should be,” Karl said. “She is an excellent seaman . . . woman.” He yawned and stretched. “When I wake up, we will see about something to eat.” He turned to go below.

  “Wait!” I said.

  He glanced back, eyebrow raised. “Now what?”

  “Where’s Dead Seal Island?”

  “No doubt we blew past it in the storm. It must be miles astern by now.”

  “But that’s where we were going to leave Julia.”

  “Yes . . . but circumstances, obviously, have changed. In any event, she is likely to sleep for hours now that the danger has passed.” He yawned again. “As I wish I could. But two hours, no more.”

  I nodded, and he went below at last, leaving me at the wheel of a sailboat out on the Pacific Ocean (perhaps the most unlikely place I could ever have imagined finding myself), alone with my thoughts—and the gaping hole in my memory.

  I’d created a “bubble,” Karl had said, a bit of stability in the howling storm I’d inadvertently formed by calling up fog to hide us from the Coast Guard. Once again, the unintended consequences of my Shaping of the world had almost killed us.

  It suddenly occurred to me, like a blow to the stomach, that it might have really killed others, who had been sailing blithely through a lovely night, expecting nothing worse than a squall or two from the line of thunderstorms we had seen in the distance.

  Thinking that, I would have wished I’d never met Karl—if not for two facts: first, if I hadn’t, the Adversary would have killed me by now; and second, wishing seemed a really dangerous thing for me to do.

  Keeping my eyes on the compass, I tried to call up my Shaping ability, to see if it felt different after the previous night . . .

  . . . tried, and failed.

  I knew I had done it before, but I couldn’t do it now. In fact, I could barely imagine doing it. It was as though some other person entirely had done the things I knew I had done: altered minds, erased my mother’s memory, conjured a quarry, demolished a Portal, killed a horse, summoned a snowfall, formed a fog (which transformed into a typhoon), and delivered us from drowning.

  The hole in my memory wasn’t the only hole inside me, I realized. My Shaping ability had vanished.

  I had a sudden sinking feeling, not a pleasant thing to have on a boat. I thought about calling Karl, but bit my lip and carried on steering, too far one way, then too far the other, but generally keeping the course he had set, though I didn’t know why he had set it. The time slipped away. I saw nothing except water, heard nothing but the rush of it along the boat’s hull, miscellaneous creaks and groans, the slapping of a rope against the mast.

  My watch still worked, apparently as waterproof as it claimed to be. As the two hours Karl had specified ticked to their end . . . about 10:30 in the morning, unless we’d traveled far enough west to change time zones . . . I leaned down to call into the cabin, only to pull up short as Julia appeared in the shadows at the bottom of the companionway steps. “Where are we?” she said sharply, without so much as a good morning. She climbed up into the cockpit

  “I haven’t got a clue,” I said honestly. “Karl told me to keep sailing . . . um, west by south . . . and wake him in two hours. Which are just about up.”

  Julia leaned down into the cabin. “Karl!” she shouted. “Get up!” Then she turned back to me. “Give me the wheel,” she snapped. “You’re yawing all over the place.”

  Feeling a little miffed, even though I hadn’t really wanted to steer in the first place, I surrendered the helm to her. She was, after all, both skipper and owner of Amazon.

  “What the hell’s going on, Shawna?” she said, sounding a little less angry with the wheel in her hands. “First the Coast Guard, then the fog, then the storm . . .”

  I didn’t answer.

  She shook her head, leaned over, and looked at the compass. “I’ve got a GPS navigation/sonar system on order. Always resisted getting one. Don’t know why. Seemed like cheating. Wish I had one now. Then we’d know where we are.” She raised her head again. “Don’t want to radio, not with the Coast Guard looking for us . . . for you.” She blinked. “What the hell, Shawna?” she said again. “After all we’ve . . .” Confusion drifted across her face. “I mean, I’ve known you since . . .”

  Uh-oh, I thought. “Since grade school,” I said, trying to put conviction into it, to Shape her as I had before, but she only looked more confused.

  “No,” she said. “Why would you say that? You didn’t go to school with me. Neither did Karl . . .” The confusion grew. “We met . . . last night . . . on the pier . . . that was the first time.” Her eyes went wide. “I don’t know you at all! Who are you? What did you do to me?”

  “Julia . . .” I tried again, but I had nothing, no Shaping ability left. It was as though I’d used myself up completely quieting the storm.

  Maybe I had. Maybe I wasn’t a Shaper anymore. Hadn’t Karl said that happened sometimes?

  Maybe if that was the case, the Adversary wouldn’t want me dead. I could go back to my old life . . .

  Except Aesha was dead.

  Except my mother no longer remembered me.

  Except the Adversary would reshape the world into a close approximation of how North Korea used to be, if Karl were telling the truth.

  As if on cue, he appeared. “Julia,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?” she snarled at him. “Why did I let you on my boat? And where have you taken her?”

  Karl looked at me. “Shawna?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve . . . lost it,” I said. “I can’t do anything.”

  “Lost it?” Julia stared at me. “Lost what? Your mind?” She snorted. “That’s what I lost, letting you on, letting you convince me we knew each . . .” Her voice faded away. “But we do. Don’t we? I have memories . . . but I have other memories . . . they’re different . . .”

  “Julia,” Karl said. “It’s all right. You’re just exhausted. Your mind’s playing tricks. You should go back to bed.”

  “No,” Julia said, fire returning to her voice. “Amazon is mine, and I’ll damn well stay at the wheel.” She glared at him. “Why are we sailing south by west? Why aren’t we heading back to port?”

  “Heading back to port would take us through whatever’s left of that storm,” Karl said. “At the least, we need to recuperate.”

  “But we’re heading farther and farther out to sea.”

  Karl hesitated. “There’s a . . . place . . . I need to get to. This course will get us there.”

  “When?”

  “Eventually.”

  Julia gave him a scornful look. “Eventually? This course will also take us to Asia ‘eventually.’ But we don’t have the provisions or nearly enough fresh water. And another storm could put us under.” She shook her head. “We’re going back.” She started to turn the wheel.

  Karl put his hand on it. “No,” he said.

  I gaped at him. Julia glared at him. “I’m skipper of this boat!”

  Karl released the wheel. “So you are,” he said. He turned and went back down into the cabin.

  “We’re heading back to the coast,” Julia said. She looked at the compass again, then glanced up at the sails. “We’ll have to tack . . .”

  “I’m very sorry,” Karl said, emerging from the cabin again. He held a pistol in his hand, either the one from the helicopter or one of those belonging to the sheriff’s deputies; I couldn’t tell. He pointed it at Julia. “Please release the wheel. Shawna, take it.”

  Julia looked f
urious. “This is piracy!”

  Arrrr, I thought irreverently. I should have been shocked . . . but I wasn’t. Karl had already shown he’d do whatever he had to do to get us where we needed to get. There were already dead people in our wake. Some were my fault, but some were his.

  “Do what he says, Julia,” I said. “He’s . . . we’re . . . serious about this.”

  “Dead serious,” Karl said quietly.

  “But you’re my . . .” Her worldviews must have been colliding in her head with as much force as the storm we’d fled. “I thought . . . no, we’ve never . . .”

  “Julia,” Karl said, almost gently now. He kept the pistol aimed at her with his right hand, but held out his left. “Come below.”

  Her fingers tightened on the wheel for a moment—I saw them turn white—but then the fight went out of her. Whether due to the confusion I’d engendered in her through my Shaping or the exhaustion she had to be feeling after a night’s hard sailing, or both, her shoulders slumped, and she let Karl take her hand and lead her into the cabin.

  She’d only turned us a little more south; I steered us back onto our previous course and waited for Karl to emerge again, which he did minutes later. “I locked her in her cabin,” he said. He’d shoved the pistol into his pocket; the grip was just visible below his lifejacket.

  “Would you really have shot her if she hadn’t given up the wheel?” I said.

  “I have killed many people in many Shaped worlds,” Karl said flatly. “Reluctantly, but when necessary. They’re not . . .” His voice cut off. After a pause, he said, “I do not enjoy it. And fortunately, it was not necessary this time.”

  “They’re not what?” I said. “Real?”

  “I will take the wheel,” he said, instead of answering me. “Go below. Get something to eat.” He came around the wheel, almost shouldering me out of the way. I let him have the helm, but I didn’t go below right away. Instead I sat down in my accustomed spot to starboard. Karl didn’t look at me: his eyes were on the horizon. Mist was gathering again beneath the low overcast—whether my doing, left over from my previous Shapings intended to conceal us, or natural, I couldn’t tell.

  Had that really been what he’d been about to say? They’re not real? Was that how he saw everyone in the worlds he visited, except for the Shapers?

  My blood ran a little cold at that thought. If he considered the citizens of the many Shaped worlds as little more than characters in a video game . . . what atrocities would he be willing to commit, so long as they moved him closer to his ultimate goal?

  But I didn’t confront him about it then. After all, he hadn’t shot Julia out of hand. He had to have some compunction about how he treated the people of the worlds he traversed. “What went wrong with her?” I said instead. “With Julia. She’d been completely convinced we were friends and she had to help us . . .”

  “Once again, your Shaping of her was incomplete,” Karl said. “Again, because you have forgotten your training, no doubt. She is suffering from an internal conflict. Her new reality is at war with her old reality. She will not help us willingly again. She thinks we have fooled her somehow, though she does not understand how we did it.”

  “We have,” I pointed out.

  “We had no choice.”

  I felt anger then, an unfocused anger, partly directed at Karl for criticizing me, partly directed at Julia for failing to accept the reality I’d Shaped for her, partly directed at myself for having lost my ability to Shape her again, and this time get it right. “Okay, then, what’s gone wrong with me? Why couldn’t I Shape her again?”

  “I think,” Karl said slowly, “that you have burned out.”

  My anger fizzled away into dismay. “Burned out?”

  Karl nodded. “The amount of creative energy you had to expend to create our bubble of safety within the storm was . . . immense. You have at last reached the limit of your power to Shape, great though it is—at least, with the Adversary sharing your hokhmah. As a result, you can no longer access your ability.”

  “Forever?” The word burst out of me with more terror behind it than I would have expected. Wasn’t that what I’d wanted? To be a normal woman again?

  Not anymore! Not in a world the Adversary is taking over piece by piece!

  “No,” Karl said. “Only for now. If you remain in this world long enough, your ability will return. But I sincerely hope we will have left this world before that happens, because it may take several days.”

  I felt relief . . . then worry. “So, whatever we have to do now, we have to do it without my being able to Shape. We’re defenseless.”

  “It won’t matter as long as we do not let the Adversary find us.” Karl looked up at the overcast sky. “The gathering mist, and that low layer of cloud, I believe are still part of your original Shaping to hide us from the Coast Guard. Aerial searches will achieve nothing. I would not be surprised if you have somehow made this boat invisible to radar, as well. Even if you have not, she has a very small radar footprint, and the ocean is very big. I believe we have some breathing room.”

  “We also have the skipper of this boat locked in her cabin. Are we just going to keep her prisoner?”

  “It’s either that,” Karl said, “or we put her in the dinghy and set her adrift. She might survive.”

  I sighed. “No. We can’t do that.”

  “We will not harm her.”

  “More than we already have, you mean. She may survive, but she’ll never have her old life back.”

  “No one in this world will have their old lives for much longer,” Karl said grimly. “The Adversary will see to that. But at least she will have her boat back once we reach . . . wherever we’re going. Though she will not enjoy it for long. Those who live in the world the Adversary Shaped for himself, as I saw firsthand, do not have much time for frivolous pleasures, and their personal belongings are rigorously limited. I suspect Amazon will end up in government service. As will Julia. But she won’t mind, because once this world is Shaped, she will forget she ever owned a boat called Amazon, or sailed her freely wherever she wished.”

  “But the Adversary can’t rewrite time. You said even what I did in the coffee shop after the attack was only an illusion of time winding back.”

  “He will not be rewriting time. He will merely be rewriting people’s memories. The past will still be the past, but no one will remember it.”

  “And the dead will still be dead.” Aesha, I thought.

  Karl inclined his head. “Yes. Death is forever. Even for the Shaped beings inhabiting the worlds of the Labyrinth.”

  Again, I wondered if he even saw those people, dead or alive, as real. It doesn’t matter how he sees them, I thought fiercely. They’re real to me. Aesha. Brent. Mom. Julia . . .

  A thought struck me. “We could take her with us!”

  “Who?”

  “Julia,” I said impatiently. “Into the next world. She’s clearly a highly competent woman, and not just at sailing. She could be useful.”

  Karl shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s impossible.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Because it would kill her,” Karl snapped. “As you would know if you hadn’t managed to discard all memories of your education. She was Shaped into existence when you Shaped this world into existence. She exists only in this world. She can exist only in this world. She could not pass through the Portal into another world. She would be . . . unmade.”

  “The Adversary’s cadre passes through Portals,” I pointed out.

  “The Adversary . . . has achieved a number of things I thought impossible,” Karl said. “I cannot explain it. All I know is that you cannot take a person Shaped in this world into the next.”

  I subsided, but still felt awful, thinking about Julia. Another life screwed up by Shawna, the Great and Powerful.

  I’d alw
ays thought individuals mattered, that anyone could change their life and their future through hard work and hard choices. But day by day I seemed to be losing control, not gaining it, all my work wasted, all my decisions disastrous, the consequences of all my choices either bad, or worse.

  I had to follow Karl. That had not changed. I had to get out of this world, the world I had Shaped to be my own, or the Adversary would kill me. And then, apparently, I had to somehow save a whole bunch of other worlds, and deliver myself to Ygrair so she could use the knowledge I had gathered to . . . save the Labyrinth. That was the impossible future stretching out in front of me. I had no choice but to accept it.

  I snorted. Not quite true. I still had one other choice: I could die.

  Nope. Still doesn’t appeal to me.

  “Fine,” I said. “So how much farther do we have to sail to reach the place where you can make a Portal?”

  Karl looked away from me again, over the bow to the endless tossing sea, gray beneath the gloomy sky. “I wish I knew,” he said. “I really wish I knew.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE ADVERSARY, AT the President’s insistence, had moved his operations into the official Emerald Palace Situation Room, which was long and narrow, dominated by a conference table surrounded by black leather chairs, with video monitors, it seemed, everywhere: some built into the walls, others freestanding on the table.

  A flood of information poured from those screens. The Adversary had now spoken to enough world leaders that the world was reshaping itself: in nation after nation, there had been mass arrests of dissidents, crackdowns on protests, confiscation of property . . . a start toward a more orderly world, though the messy implementation was not ideal: a function of the regrettable fact he still shared the world’s hokhmah with Shawna Keys and thus could not Shape it directly.

  The President, at the Adversary’s insistence, had absented herself from the Situation Room. He could now issue whatever directives he needed to in the President’s name, so her presence was only a distraction. She would not hold office much longer, in any event: he had chosen an otherwise obscure (though remarkably ruthless) prime minister from a failing African state as the person he would elevate to Supreme Leader of the entire world, once he could Shape things properly.