Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“No, you don’t,” Pel said. “Magic doesn’t work any better here than the captain’s raygun.”

Raven gave a Hollywood villain’s laugh and called, “Valadrakul!”

The wizard’s fingers moved in odd, twitching patterns.

For a moment, the room was silent; no one else moved. Then Rachel began crying.

“Rachel!” Nancy cried; she hurried to her daughter’s side.

The momentary distraction did not break the tension; after a quick glance, everyone returned to the frozen tableau of a moment before.

Everyone, that is, except Pel, who was standing in the middle of the room grinning.

“Come on, Raven,” he said. “Magic doesn’t work here.”

“Ah… my lord,” Valadrakul said softly, lowering his hands, “I fear he speaks the truth.”

Raven turned to glare at his wizard. “Canst do nothing ?” he demanded.

“Naught, my lord,” Valadrakul said. “Not the merest spell can I bring to fruit.”

“As I was saying,” Pel said, “three swords against a dozen steak knives isn’t anything I’d care to see.”

“I understood,” Raven said, “that this realm was different, and that magic was not the same here-but to find that a mage can do nothing ‘gainst armed men?”

“Raven, we have no magic here,” Pel said. “It’s not that magic is different here, it’s that there isn’t any. None . It isn’t possible. People have been trying to work magic here for five thousand years, and it can’t. Be. Done.”

“Aaah!” Raven flung his hand from the grip of his sword in disgust. “Stoddard, sheathe your blade.”

Stoddard obeyed. Squire Donald dropped his hands. Ted giggled inanely again.

“Now,” Pel said, exasperated, “can we get on with it?”

No one objected.

“Good,” Pel said. “Now, let me see if I have this straight. You people are not from other planets, in the usual sense of planets that orbit stars that you could fly to if you had a working spaceship. You’re from alternate realities-places that are in entirely different universes that occupy the same space as ours. Right?” He looked at Raven.

“I cannot gainsay that,” Raven said. “Though I’d not swear it be true.”

Pel looked at Cahn.

“Sounds right to me, allowing for some minor variations in terminology,” the captain said.

“Good,” Pel said. “Raven, you and your people came here through an opening in the wall of our basement, right?”

Raven nodded.

“Now, how’d you make that opening?”

“’Twas conjured for us, by the sorceress Elani,” Raven said.

“Fine. Now, Captain Cahn, how did you and your people get here?”

Cahn blinked, took a second to consider, and replied, “We flew our ship through a spatial continuum discontuity-a space warp, we call it.”

“And how’d that warp happen?”

Cahn tightened his lips for a moment, glanced at Prossie and then at Drummond, and answered, “It was deliberately created by a process developed by the Empire’s Department of Science; I don’t know the details.”

“But it was done by science, and not magic?”

“Oh, yes; magic works no better in Imperial space than it appears to here,” Cahn agreed.

“But it seems some of your science doesn’t work here either, right?”

“That’s right,” Cahn admitted. “Though I’d be interested in knowing just how you learned that. It appears that certain physical laws are different here, including some that form the basis for much of our machinery.”

“So your ship doesn’t fly.”

“At the moment, that’s correct.”

“But if it did ,” Pel asked, “could you fly it back through the warp and go back where you came from?”

Prossie coughed.

“In theory,” Cahn said. “It hasn’t been done, however.”

“Ah. And in any case, your ship doesn’t fly-so the ten of you are stranded here, right?”

Cahn did not answer that; instead he stared calmly back at Pel.

Pel waved the question aside. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m just trying to make sure everyone sees as much of the situation as possible.”

“Keep it up, Mr. Brown,” Amy called from the hallway step. “You’re doing fine so far; it almost makes sense.”

Several people, from all three worlds, smiled.

“Thank you,” Pel replied. He paused, rubbed at a cheek with his forefinger, and considered, while everyone else waited expectantly.

“All right,” he said. “Now let’s consider why all you people are here. Raven tells me that something he calls Shadow has… um… conquered?” Raven nodded. “Conquered. Something called Shadow has conquered most of his home world-I guess he just means his own planet, and not whatever others there are in his universe…”

Valadrakul cleared his throat. Pel turned his gaze on the wizard. “Yes?”

“Your pardon,” the wizard said, “but you misunderstand the nature of our reality. There is but one world; we have no planets in our cosmos, as you would use the term. I would take it that your own cosmos resembles that of the Empire, with a myriad of worldly globes circling many thousands of stars, but our realm is not like that; rather, we have but a single globe, and the sun and moons and stars, and the wanderers that we call by the name ‘planet,’ all travel about it.”

“We used to think that, too…” Pel began.

Valadrakul cut him off with a shake of his head. “Still you do not understand,” he said. “Wizards have been to the stars, long ago, and flown behind the sun. We have seen all our universe from afar, hanging alone in a black and empty cosmos. We know its nature.”

“All right,” Pel said, “I won’t argue about it. At any rate, this Shadow thing has conquered most of the world, right?”

“Aye,” said three of the four-Stoddard did not speak, but Raven, Donald, and Valadrakul all responded. “May Shadow be eternally damned,” Donald added.

“It’s conquered all the World,” Raven said.

Pel nodded. “Right,” he said. “And now it’s looking for somewhere new, right?”

“Aye,” said Raven.

“And that brings us to the Empire,” Pel said, turning to Captain Cahn. “Captain?”

“Yes, Mr. Brown?” Cahn said, raising an eyebrow. The gesture was something Leonard Nimoy might have done playing Mr. Spock, but Cahn, with his close-cropped blond hair and square jaw, didn’t look anything at all like Spock. He looked more like someone’s idea of the all-American boy.

“This Shadow thing discovered your universe, right?”

“So it appears,” Cahn said. “I believe that Telepath Thorpe can probably tell you more about that than I can.”

All eyes turned to Prossie. She shrank back against the cushions of the couch.

“Report, Thorpe,” Cahn told her.

“Yes, sir,” Prossie said, standing quickly and snapping to attention. “About seven years ago,” she began, “Imperial Intelligence started getting reports of oddities-strange creatures turning up in places they shouldn’t, most often. The creatures in question either vanished or died before any Intelligence personnel or any telepath reached them, and the dead ones didn’t explain much-the Department of Science couldn’t figure out where they came from, or any conditions under which they could have survived naturally. Some of them seemed to lack vital organs, for example. A few were miniature humans, but most were montrosities.”

Cahn nodded; Pel blinked.

“Hellbeasts and homunculi, most likely,” Raven said.

“The Empire investigated,” Prossie continued, “and located certain people who were not what they pretended to be. Telepathic interrogation, carried out without the subject being aware of it, revealed that these people, and all of the anomalies, were the products of an extra-universal entity that they knew as ‘Shadow.’ This entity had sent its creatures to scout out Imperial space, explore it, and to send back reports. Shadow’s reasons and long- term intentions were not known to any of its creations.”