The Stone Forest (Short Story)

1

They were waiting in the silence and darkness. He felt their cold, smooth lifelessness and thought of gargoyles, although they were not gargoyles. Gargoyles, at least, were made by human hands. What waited for him in the dark had known no human craft, human compassion, human love or none that could be discerned. Where they came from was a mystery, as was their method of selection. Even the way the mark found its way onto the hands of the selected was unknown. It simply appeared between the closing of eyes and break of dawn.

Shawn had been chosen, marked, in whatever inscrutable way it was done. He opened his eyes, reached out for his shirt and saw the mark. It was red, a complicated pattern of swirls and scrollwork as indelibly sealed into the skin on the back of his hand as a tattoo. He stared at it disbelief and then in growing terror. No one knew what became of the chosen, save that none returned from the stone forest into which the chosen walked or, more often, were driven.

He sat on the edge of his bed and stared down at that mark, the almost certain doom it heralded, and he wondered for the first time what had become of a brother he never knew. His parents had other children years before. Those children were adults when his mother, to her great shock, found herself pregnant at an age when grandchildren were more probable. His parents doted on Shawn in a way they had not dared to dote on his siblings. Those other children had been prepared, as best as the elders knew how, for the possibility of selection. But Shawn, they had all believed, was safe.

His oldest brother, Patrick, had been chosen before Shawn was born. He had never been a person to Shawn, merely a story told on the anniversary of the day Patrick disappeared into the stone forest forever. In that agonizing moment when Shawn realized he would walk the same steps Patrick had walked, he wished he had asked more questions. Uncertain what else he could do, Shawn got dressed and walked out to face his parents. They met the sight of the mark on his hand with the stunned disbelief of those who found the unthinkable become a reality.

His mother leaned against the table. “No. They didn’t. They can’t. They never take two!”

Shawn’s father, a grizzled man well past his prime glared down at that mark. For a moment, there was a wild, dangerous fire in the man’s eyes. Shawn knew his father had fought in a war, long ago, but never understood how his kind, gentle father could have fought. The sight of that fire in his father’s eyes gave Shawn a glimpse into the past. That fire could kill. Then the fire went out and all that was left was Shawn’s father, an old man who could do nothing.

“Do you understand what this means?” Shawn’s father asked.

“Yes, father.”

The old man nodded and, before Shawn’s eyes, seemed to bend beneath a weight that he could not bear. “Sit and eat your breakfast.”

His mother found her voice. “He can’t. The edicts forbid it.”

“Damn the edicts. Our son will eat with us!”

There was stone in the man’s words and Shawn’s mother swept away the porridge they usually ate. Shawn sat at the table, lost in his thoughts, while his mother set to work in the kitchen. He heard meat sizzling. His father poured him a cup of coffee. Shawn stared down at it.

“You should taste it once. You won’t get the chance to do too many other things. You should have this. You’ll want sugar and cream. I brew it strong.”

Shawn did as he was told and then sipped at the drink. It was earthy and bitter against his tongue, but he drank it anyways.

“I’m sorry, Shawn. We never imagined they would select you. If we had known, we might have…” The old man shuddered and fell silent.

Shawn made a vain attempt to comfort his father. “It’s alright.”

“It’s not.”

The old man might have said more, but Shawn’s mother came back into the room. She put a plate in front of him that was piled high with sausage, eggs and potatoes browned in the sausage grease. It was more than he could possibly eat. In truth, he had no appetite, but he understood that this was all that his mother could do for him. So he picked up his fork and knife. Shawn ate while his parents stared at him over plates of untouched food.

2

Shawn’s mother pushed a stray hair off his forehead. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” said Shawn.

Shawn’s father coughed softly. “Best to go.”

His parents traded a wordless glance filled with things Shawn did not understand, but he saw their pain and averted his eyes. He followed his father out the door and, although he promised himself he wouldn’t, Shawn looked back. His mother stood in the doorway and tried to give him a brave smile. He closed his eyes and then turned to follow his father.

It was still early and the streets were empty. Shawn looked up at the iridescent dome overhead. It had been erected thousands of years before, when human beings first settled on the world. The dome was a mystery to Shawn, though others in the village understood its nature. He knew it was permeable enough to allow wind and rain through, but when the meteors fell, as they often did, the dome hardened beneath the impact, sparing the buildings and lives below.

The science of it never interested Shawn. He was a child of imagination and dreams whose eyes saw the infinite possibilities of maybe. Until the mark appeared on his hand, he believed he would become a painter. His imagination, so praised by his teachers, turned against Shawn. It plagued him with visions of shadows flitting through the stone forest, hungry for his life. He felt the tears well up in his eyes and brushed them away with his hand. His fear made him angry and ashamed.

“Where are we going?”

His father drew up short and half-turned to Shawn. “To see the elders. It’s how things are done.”

“I have to go into the forest, don’t I?”

Shawn’s father closed his eyes. “Yes.”

The old man started walking again. Shawn shadowed him in silence, lost in thoughts of what waited for him in the petrified trees that surrounded the domed city. Tales of the abrupt appearance of the forest were recorded in the archives. The seeming impossibility of a half-mile of stone trees springing into existence overnight did not negate the fact of their presence. Scientists studied the forest, hard-pressed to provide answers that never appeared. It was ten years before the first mark appeared on Abigail Bramson’s hand. Everyone knew her name, were required to learn it in fact.

How it became clear that the mark meant the girl needed to be given to the stone trees was absent from the archives. Shawn had wondered about that more than once. Were they too ashamed of what they did to record it? Did she simply vanish one night? His curiosity, like the appearance of the forest, had gone without answer. Anyone who might have known was a thousand years dead, and death, always inscrutable, refused to be denied or cured.

They stepped into the central square. Later in the day, it would be filled to capacity with busy people, bustling to and fro on official business or stopping to pass a few words with friends between errands. It was the central hub of activity in the city. At that hour, though, it was all but empty. Shawn had never been there in the early morning and was surprised by cleanness of the smooth, white marble that paved the square. His father moved across the square, making eye contact with no one, taking them toward the Elder’s Hall.

As they reached the steps, Shawn saw a woman move down the steps toward them. He felt a moment of anger and then checked it. The quarrel between his father and Lucia Garver was just that, a quarrel between them. The tradition was sacrosanct. Individual rivalries were tolerated, but family rivalries were not. Shawn had crossed paths with Lucia occasionally and, if the woman was not precisely friendly, she was never unkind.

Lucia and his father were another matter. Stories told of their arguments descending nearly into physical blows. Lucia came down the steps with a sneer across her face. As one of the elders, she held a great deal of power. Then again, Shawn’s father had been offered a seat as an elder on several occasions. His refusal to join made him something of a folk hero. The scales balanced.

“William,” said Lucia.

Shawn’s father said nothing. He didn’t even seem to register his enemy’s presence. After a very long moment, William came to himself. “Lucia.”

“Well, what fool’s errand brings you here…” Lucia trailed off.

She stared at Shawn’s hand, disbelief on her face. She looked back to Shawn’s father. William stared at Lucia, his expression daring her to mock him. Lucia looked back at Shawn’s hand and her disbelieving expression faded into one of nausea. Her eyes drifted up to meet Shawn’s.

Shawn fell back on custom. “Miss Garver.”

“Shawn.” Lucia’s voice was weak.

She reached out and gave Shawn’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “You gave him breakfast.”

“I did.” Shawn’s father seemed to shed the weight that had bent him earlier and he stood straight.

Lucia nodded. “Did the same when they called for my Elsa. Bad enough to send our children into those damned stone trees alone. To send them hungry is plain cruelty.”

“I always thought so,” said William.

Lucia reached into her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. She handed it to Shawn, who took it in confusion. “Wipe your mouth. Bit of grease there. No reason to give the rest of these old fools a reason to panic.”

Shawn rubbed the handkerchief across his mouth a few times. The white cloth came away tinged brown with sausage grease. Shawn folded the cloth so the soiled portion was tucked inside. He handed it back to Lucia, who pushed it down into her coat pocket.

“Thank you, Miss Garver.”

“I think you should call me Lucia now, Shawn. Given what you’re about to face.”

Shawn blinked. He’d never called an adult by their given name before. “Thank you, Lucia.”

Saying the woman’s name left Shawn feeling off balance, as if reality was at an odd angle and he could neither right it, nor bend himself to meet it.

“Are they in there?” William peered up at the Elder’s Hall.

“Enough of them,” muttered Lucia. “Truth told, I wish I wasn’t here.”

Shawn looked up in surprise at Lucia. His father had a great many things to say about Lucia, none of them flattering. Shawn looked at his father, who was bent beneath that weight again.

“God,” said William. “What sane person would want to participate in this?”

Lucia’s eye sparked with dawning comprehension. “So that’s why you always say no.”

William jerked his head in a nod. Shawn did the math and found a different kind of respect for his father. He’d always assumed his father turned down a position as an Elder out of same native contrariness. He’d never imagined it was a refusal to be a party to sending the chosen into the stone forest. William took a shuddering breath and looked to Shawn. “I’m sorry, son.”

3

The elders took the appearance of the mark on Shawn’s hand in stride. To Shawn’s surprise, Lucia did not take her seat with the other elders. She stood to Shawn’s left, while his father stood to Shawn’s right. One by one, the elders came down and examined the mark on the back of his hand. They pressed and prodded the mark, as though it might be a sham, though why anyone would fake such a mark was beyond Shawn’s understanding.

As Shawn looked at the faces of the elders, faces marked with deep lines, he found that a few struck him as wise. The rest looked old and afraid. He would have been surprised to discover that his youthful judgment reflected the judgment of his father. None of the elders looked at or spoke to William, who glared at them with impotent hatred.

The oldest of the Elders, at least to Shawn’s eyes, hobbled toward them. He peered at Shawn with rheumy eyes. Shawn held out his marked hand and the man took it in his own gnarled hand. The old man’s hand felt cold to Shawn’s. The elder gave the mark a cursory glance and released Shawn’s hand.

The old man in front of Shawn wheezed. “The mark is real. Who will accompany them?”

Lucia took a half step forward. “I will.”

Shawn glanced at the woman. Her eyes were fixed on the far wall.

“Lucia will accompany them. The prayers of the elders travel with you all.”

For a moment, Shawn thought his father might hit the old man. William’s hands were clenched into tight fists that trembled violently and the tendons in his neck stood out. Not knowing what else to do, Shawn reached out and put a hand on his father’s arm. William closed his eyes and bowed his head. Without a word, William turned and walked out of the hall, the stooped shuffle of man who struggles to carry a weight beyond his strength. Shawn and Lucia followed.

They walked in silence. William never raised his eyes, carried forward by momentum alone. As the streets began to fill, Shawn’s fear grew. Mothers saw the mark on his hand and pulled their children close to them. Men saw the mark on his hand and stood aside with grim, stoic expressions. The finality of the situation began to weigh on Shawn. Visions, fueled by his extraordinary imagination, played through his mind.

He saw himself impaled by stone branches, his blood lapped up by the dead, hungry trees. He saw himself wandering in the stone forest, without food for water, until he starved to death. He saw his bones on the ground, bleached white by time and sun and weather, and then turned the gray of stone. He saw himself stalked by a silent, stone predator. He saw its stone teeth cutting through him. He tried to banish the visions, but they would not go. He shook and when he looked to father for some kind of strength, there was none to be found in the bent, anguished form that met Shawn’s eyes.

The closer they got to the city wall, a desperate urge to flee tried to claw its way out of Shawn’s chest. He began to look for somewhere to go, anywhere but the stone forest. His heart pounded inside him, painful and fast. His teeth started to chatter and he clenched his jaw. His palms felt cold and wet and wiped them against his shirt, leaving dark, damp trails on the cloth. Every shadowed corner beckoned to him. Every house promised shelter, but Shawn knew that promise was false. If he ran, he would be found.

Others who received the mark had tried to run and hide. They all failed. If they would not go willingly, they were bound and carried to the trees. He knew the stories. When all other sources of strength failed him, Shawn thought of Patrick. His brother had made this walk. Where had Patrick found the strength? Shawn wondered if it had been strength, or bravado, or simply a lie meant to spare their father.

They passed out of the city proper and stepped onto one of the Great Roads that connected the domed cities that dotted the continent. Like the domes, the technology of the Great Roads was lost on Shawn. They endured the brutal abuse of meteor showers with no apparent ill-effect and sped up the travel between cities. Shawn, his father, and Luca walked for the better part of a mile. Shawn did not look up from the road, did not want to see the approach of the stone forest.

All too quickly, though, Lucia and Shawn’s father stopped walking. Shawn looked up. The Great Road, impervious to the impact of rocks hurtling into the ground from the cold depths of space, had been swallowed by the forest. The one time Shawn traveled to another city, the Great Road passed unobstructed through the forest. Shawn understood now why those who ran and hid were forced into the forest. So long as they hid, the city was cut off from the outside world.

Shawn wanted to be brave, to walk without fear into the trees that seemed to claw at the sky with skeletal, stone fingers. “What’s in the forest?”

Shawn’s father tried to speak, but it came out a choked noise. Lucia kept her face turned toward the ghastly parody of a forest, but she answered.

“For most of us, it’s just petrified trees. At least, that’s all we can tell. For the marked, it must be something else. We don’t know what that could be or how that could be, any more than we know how the trees can block the Great Road. They tell tales of haunted places on Old Earth. Perhaps, all worlds have such places.”

“Why haven’t you destroyed it?”

Lucia shook her head and said, “We tried once, long ago. It was a disaster. We shattered the trees and plagues swept through the first city. We started new cities, but the stone forests rose around them. This is the price we pay for living here. The price we pay for humanity’s survival.”

“You mean the price I have to pay!”

Lucia gave Shawn’s father a pained look. “We all pay the price.”

Shawn looked at his father, who stood hunched, as if in physical pain. Shawn knew he would have to go into the forest. He knew that, if he didn’t go by choice, he would be made to go. Knowing that didn’t change his impulse to run away. As he watched his father, though, Shawn realized that bringing him here had taken all of the strength his father had left. If he ran, if they brought him back here and forced him into the forest, it would destroy his father.

Shawn didn’t know what would happen to him in the forest, only that he wouldn’t come back. He would never see his parents again, never see his nephews and nieces grow up, he would vanish from the world. His parents would remember him, would speak of him once a year, as they did for Patrick, but he’d be a ghost that haunted them. He did not want to become a ghost. He thought of all the things that he would never paint. His body begged to run away, but Shawn imagined being tied up and carried to the forest. The helplessness of that terrified him even more than the dead trees in front of him.

Shawn gathered up what courage he had, clenched his hands hard against the fear, and walked into the forest. He kept his eyes fixed forward, not daring to look back. If he did look back, he was afraid he would not be able to take the final step. Not looking back spared Shawn the sight of his father collapsing against Lucia and weeping.

4

There was a moment of resistance as Shawn stepped into the forest. Then it felt to Shawn as if he passed through a curtain of cool water. There was a moment of disorientation. Although he knew it was morning and the sun had just begun its climb into the sky, it was twilight in the forest. His strength failed him and Shawn finally turned back to look at his father. His eyes met only endless acres of stone trees.

Shawn panicked, racing back toward the place his father should have been. Unyielding stone branches caught and tore at his shirt. Shawn stumbled and grabbed at one of the trees. His hand scraped against the stone bark and he fell hard against the ground. He lay in daze for a minute. Then he just lay there. He had never felt so isolated, so far from safety and warmth of home. Shawn pushed himself up and leaned his back against one of the trees. His palm ached and burned. He held it up and squinted at it in the pale light. The skin was raw, but it wasn’t bleeding.

The longer Shawn sat there, the harder it was to stay afraid. The gloom and silence around him wasn’t oppressive. Nothing moved. It was, as near as he could tell, just a dead place. He stood and peered in every direction. The low light made it impossible to see clearly for more than thirty feet. Shawn took a deep breath.

“Hello!”

The word echoed. It sounded hollow to Shawn, as though the trees drained the life from the word before sending it back. He waited.

He shouted again. “Is anyone here?”

The words echoed back a second time, once more hollowed out, but no one answered. Shawn shivered. It had been warm on the walk and his panicked run had kept his temperature up, but the twilight air around him was chilly. He rubbed his arms and, with no better plan, he picked a direction and started walking in a straight line. He knew the forest was only a half-mile across and circular. Any straight line would take him to its edge, sooner or later. He hoped for sooner, before the strange twilight become strange night and he was forced to sleep among the dead trees.

After an hour or two or three, the twilight had not become night and he had not found any evidence that there was any end to the trees. His stomach, which felt so full after his breakfast, started to nag at Shawn. At first, the hunger was imperceptible, and then it was an increasing demand that became harder to ignore. His throat was scratchy and he wished he had some water, but he had seen no water. No springs, nor streams, no sign that water had ever invaded the forest. That idea bothered Shawn. It rained a few days before. There should have been water in the forest, even if it was stagnant. He may as well have been walking through a desert.

As the hours wore on in the endless twilight, the hunger pangs turned to hunger pains that stabbed at Shawn’s gut. His head started to ache and then to pound. His mouth was dry and he considered putting a pebble in his mouth, just to encourage saliva to flow. The idea of putting any stone from that forest into his mouth made him shudder and gag. The pounding in his head started to make Shawn feel ill. He sat down, crossed his arms over his knees, and rested his head against his forearms.

The cold air, the hunger, the thirst, the semi-darkness, they all tried to convince Shawn to sleep. He drifted on the edge of sleep. A noise brought Shawn out of his daze. He wasn’t sure if he imagined the noise and he strained to listen. He heard it again, the sound of footsteps moving toward him. He almost shouted. His father had come for him, somehow found a way into the empty forest, but Shawn hesitated. He continued to listen and he heard not one set of steps, but several. They were the slow, cautious steps of stalking, not of searching.

The vision of some nameless stone predator came back to Shawn. Bile rose in his throat and Shawn got to his feet. He swayed for a moment, but the noise of those approaching footsteps jarred him into action. Shawn ran, wildly, blindly through the stone trees. He was certain that, however dangerous the stone creatures that lived in the cursed woods might be, they would slow and cumbersome. He ran full out, his breaths came in sharp gasps, he could hear his heart pounding in his ears. Even when he started to stumble, he kept moving. It was only when his vision went dark around the edges and he crashed against one of trees hard enough to hurt his shoulder, that Shawn finally stopped. He dropped to his knees, unable to catch his breath, and swayed in loose circle.

Shawn’s heart was still pounding when he heard the footsteps again, closer than before. He cast his eyes around and saw them moving. They were waiting for him, had been waiting for him, in the silence and the darkness. He lurched to his feet, stumbled and tried to run again, but his head pulsed and throbbed in a way that made Shawn want to scream with every step, his legs were rubbery, and even fear could only do so much to overcome the fact that he hadn’t eaten for some time. Shawn careened and stumbled away from the things around him. He could feel their cold, smooth lifelessness and he pushed his body to run faster.

He did not see the fallen stone branch on the ground and his foot caught it. Shawn’s overtaxed body couldn’t adjust and he flew forward. He struck his head and the world spun around him. The sound of his own screaming mixed with the sound of heavy footsteps around him and the sound of his heart. Something fleshless, hard and unnatural lifted him from the ground. Shawn thrashed feebly against the thing holding him, battered his hands bloody against obdurate stone, before unconsciousness closed around him.

Shawn couldn’t remember the transition between sleeping and waking. By the time he registered that he had been asleep and wasn’t anymore, he was sitting up in bed. His head hurt. He pressed a hand to his temple and his fingertips brushed against a bandage. He registered a dull, throbbing ache in his hands. He held them out. Both of his hands were wrapped in clean white bandages, from the knuckles to the middle of his forearms.

He looked around the room. There were no windows, but there was a small table with water, bread and fruit. He fell on the food with a savage abandon, swallowing huge chunks of apple and gulping water. He broke the bread in half and tore at the thick crust with his teeth, desperate to quell the hunger that threatened to consume him. He ate until his stomach ached with the pressure. He dropped the remnant of the loaf back onto the table.

He gave the room a second look, but it was no more revealing than his first had been. There were four blank walls. The bed was a cot, though more padded than the cots Shawn was familiar with. There was the now mostly empty table and there was a door. Shawn approach the door cautiously, not sure what to expect. With his stomach full, some of the fear was creeping back in around the edges. He had to push away images of the desperate flight through the stone trees and flashes of stone figures crowding around him.

He expected to find the door locked and jerked his hand back in surprise when the knob turned easily. He waited for someone or some thing to come through the door. When nothing did, Shawn turned the knob and swung the door open. He stepped out into a corridor. The walls were white, smooth and clean. When he stepped into the corridor, a diffuse light sprang up, coming from nowhere and everywhere. He turned right and walked. The floor was cool beneath his bare feet. He came on an open door and looked inside.

A hulking stone form dominated the space. Shawn stumbled back against the opposite wall. The stone figure turned its featureless head toward him, regarded Shawn for a moment, and turned its head back to where it started. Shawn stared at the stone figure, waiting for it to charge at him. After a full minute, he slid sideways down the corridor. The stone figure did not follow. Shawn crept down the hall past dozens of rooms. Each room housed a stone figure that regarded him with an eyeless gaze, but none moved to stop him.

The corridor intersected with a second hall that gently curved in both directions. He turned right again and walked down the curved hall. He passed the entrances to dozens of corridors that stuck out, spoke-like, from the curved hallway he haunted. The interior wall to his left was unbroken by doors or windows. By the time Shawn was convinced he must have started a second pass around the massive curved hallway, he found a single door on the interior wall. He stood and stared at that door for a long time.

He intuited that, sooner or later, he would go through that door. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go through it, or that he would want to find whatever waited on the other side. He also suspected that his only hope for getting home lay beyond that door. The thought of going home, of seeing his parents, summoned a yearning inside Shawn that was so intense he gasped. He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed away the image of his parents, of his room, of all his half-finished paintings.

He reached out a hand and steadied himself against the wall. He had always encouraged his imagination to take him as far as it dared. Denying that imagination left him drained, physically and emotionally. Shawn gritted his teeth and opened the door on the interior wall. He stepped into a vast, empty dome made of the same smooth, white material as the hallways. Despite its appearance, the room felt different, insubstantial, as if the room was an idea, rather than a place. It was empty, save for something that struck Shawn as a strange hybrid of a bed and a chair. The odd bit of furniture sat in the center of the room.

Shawn walked toward the hybrid chair and tried to ignore the feeling of being watched. The closer he got to the chair, the more certain he became that he was not alone in the room, despite the evidence of his eyes. He half-saw movement in the periphery of his vision. There was a murmur in the air, more pressure than sound, which his ears refused to identify or dismiss. When he reached the chair, the presence of those watching, whispering others grew unbearable.

They wanted him to sit in it, to do something, but he didn’t know what. He stood next to the chair and found it almost impossible to resist the pressure to climb into it. The same fire that had burned so briefly in his father’s eyes when he saw the mark on his son’s hand, boiled up in Shawn. “No!”

The pressure assaulting his mind and body vanished, as did the overwhelming urge to sit. Shawn’s own thoughts reasserted themselves. He looked around the empty room and his intuition told him the truth.

“I know you’re here.”

He crossed his arms and waited. First seconds and then minutes ticked away. Shawn heard a series of telltale pops and, one by one, figures materialized around the room. They were slim and androgynous, with dark eyes and dark hair. They looked at Shawn with expressions that couldn’t seem to settle on hope or fear.

He glared at them. “Who are you?”

The people, if they were people, said nothing at first. One of them stepped forward and spoke in a voice that could have been male or female.

“We lived here, before you came, before your people sailed the empty places between worlds.”

Shawn had a question, but it was so utterly painful and complicated that he couldn’t form the thought, let alone the words. He did the best he could do.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

The words were barely coherent, laced with horror and pain, and the androgynous figures fell back from him as though his words were whips.

The one who had spoken to Shawn reached up a shaking hand and wiped a trickle of blood from its nose. “We need you to dream. To dream waking dreams. We built the machine to bring us here, to escape death. We were afraid. We dreamed our way here, but we lost something. We lost something you have. You dream the waking dreams, you have,” the androgynous creature seemed lost.

“Imagination,” said another. “You can dream us back to the world.”

Shawn gaped around at the creatures. He thought of his father and the brother he never knew. He thought of all the pain these frail things caused. “Why should I? My brother came here. How many others? How many people did you kill?”

The androgynous creatures looked to each other in confusion and horror.

“We do not kill.”

“Where are they then? They never came back.”

“They sleep. They could not dream the waking dreams. We could not send them back. They sleep in the stone. They will wake when we return.”

Shawn tried to make sense of the words and then it became clear. The corridors filled the stone figures, generations of lost souls, sleeping in the stone. Shawn knew that he didn’t fully understand what was happening. He couldn’t guess what would happen if he did what they asked, if he even could. He also knew that if he didn’t, they would lock him in stone. The creatures would take more people to try to escape. All Shawn knew was that he wanted to go home and, maybe, their machine would take him.

He turned to the strange chair and, before he could second guess himself, he climbed into it. He sank into the chair or it molded around he, he never knew for sure, and something warm slid up around his head. He closed his eyes and felt something. He would have called it a touch, but it was a touch inside his mind. He felt the presence of something not him. He resisted for a moment, shocked at the invasion, but then made himself relax. There was a second touch and, then, the universe exploded around him.

The part of Shawn that was still Shawn realized that he hadn’t understood. The androgynous creatures called it a machine, but the machine was sentient, alive, and lonely. As it explored Shawn’s mind and his boundless imagination, it exulted. The creatures that had made it were dull, the ones that came after, stunted. Shawn read the machine’s frustration at all the aborted attempts to connect, to be, to create.

That was the machine’s purpose and meaning. It existed to serve as the focal point for creation and, in Shawn’s mind, it found the dreamer it had always sought. A mind unbounded and filled with unlimited creativity, endless vistas of potential, worlds upon worlds that it could build for no other reason than the mind would be pleased. The artist in Shawn screamed in victory. There would be no more almost right paintings, sketches that did not measure up, made less than perfect by the imperfect actions of his hands. With the machine, the perfection in his thought would be the perfection around him.

A troubled thought nagged at Shawn, some vague sense that he had left something undone. There was somewhere he needed to go. When the thought rose, the thought of home, of taking the others back, the machine sang its song and the veil between dimensions parted. Between one moment and the next, the stone forest, all of the stone forests, vanished and were replaced by a circular hub that surrounded the cities, corridors, some of them miles long, stretched out into the countryside. Shawn had been right, the dome, even the chair, were ideas sustained by the creatures.

At the very periphery of his consciousness, or perhaps it was the machine’s consciousness, Shawn felt the dull excitement of the androgynous creatures. They had made the crossing, had come back to the world. They worried Shawn and, because they worried Shawn, they worried the machine. The glorious machine that could, at Shawn’s whim, do anything, create anything he could dream. Young as he was, Shawn realized that he would not be allowed to keep the machine. He knew others would want it, would want to use it. He remembered the old, frightened faces of the elders. What would they use the machine for, he wondered.

The androgynous creatures could build another machine. They lacked imagination, which meant they did not understand what such a machine could do. Because Shawn felt the danger, the machine felt the danger and, perhaps because it was ancient, in its way, understood the danger better than Shawn. The machine had a thought, about itself, and shared the thought with Shawn.

Godmaker.

The word frightened Shawn and so, it frightened the machine. Shawn remembered that there were still those who slept in stone. The machine unmade the stone suits, released the thousands who had been taken across the world from their stasis, and set them free. It opened doors in the corridors to let them make their way into the cities. Shawn wanted to go home, but the androgynous creatures still worried him. The machine made a suggestion, but Shawn could not stomach it. Nor, the machine realized, could Shawn’s conscience bear it.

The machine made a decision. It removed itself from the minds of the androgynous creatures, all traces of the knowledge they required to build another machine like itself, anything that might lead them back to that knowledge, the machine took; but it left them life. It shared what it had done with Shawn. Shawn did not know precisely what to feel about it, but his conscience, and therefore the machine’s conscience, remained unperturbed.

There was still the problem of the machine itself. Shawn and the machine discussed the problem and, because Shawn’s imagination was not constrained by the limits of what was supposedly possible, struck on a solution.

Shawn opened his eyes and looked up at his parents. He was lying on the ground and his head hurt, where he had struck it in the stone forest. It was a small enough price to pay. There were hundreds of people his own age standing around. Some were hanging onto parents, crying and joyful, others looked lost. Someone had the forethought to take down names and connected the lost teens with their great-great grandnephews and great-great-great grandnieces. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was solution enough.

Shawn’s parents hurried him away, certain that someone would soon put two-and-two together and realize that, in some strange way, the disappearance of the stone forest and the reappearance of so many thought dead were his doing. Shawn saw Lucia fiercely hugging a pale, blonde girl. Lucia saw Shawn and gave him a conspiratorial wink.

Word eventually spread that somehow, someway, Shawn had played a part. He did his best to keep a low profile and, when asked what had happened, feigned ignorance. The androgynous creatures were imprisoned for a time, mostly at the quick-thinking of Lucia and Shawn’s father, who had recognized the very real possibility of a mass killing. The creatures were eventually relocated to an uninhabited region in the very far south, there to live out their lives in whatever ways seemed best to them. If the androgynous creatures took offense, no one was able to tell.

Months later, when the furor had died down and Shawn was able to move in the open without being mobbed, he went to look at the complex around the city. The walls were sounds and the Elders were debating whether to use it as city storage or allow citizens to purchase space in it. Shawn just wanted to look at it.

“You’re him, aren’t you?”

Shawn turned away from the smooth white structure and came face-to-face with a very pretty blonde girl. “Him?”

“The one who got us all out of there. Shawn?”

“I’m Shawn. No idea about the rest of it.”

“You’re sticking with that story?” She gave him a knowing smile.

Shawn shrugged. “It’s easy to remember.”

“My mother thinks pretty highly of you.”

“Your mother?”

“Lucia Garver.”

Shawn smiled. “You’re Elsa.”

“That’s me.”

“It’s easy to like someone you think saved your daughter.”

“Maybe. I don’t think that’s why she likes you, though. She says you’re the bravest human being she’s ever seen. She said you walked into the stone forest. Did you?”

Shawn nodded.

Elsa shuddered. “I couldn’t. No one I ever heard of did, either. Well, except you.”

“It wasn’t bravery. Trust me.”

She looked at him then with an expression that Shawn didn’t understand, but it made him feel a little lightheaded.

“Brave enough for me,” she said.

For the first time in his life, Shawn entertained the idea that it might be time to give a flower to a pretty girl. Shawn felt something in his hand. He glanced down and half-smiled at the lily in his hand. He offered it to Elsa. She blinked at the flower and then took it. “Where did that come from?”

Shawn offered her a sly grin. “Magic.”

The machine, which now lived in the limitless spaces of Shawn’s imagination, exulted.