Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

Chastened, Angie said, “All right, Mommy.” She turned and made her way slowly back to bed.

And on her own bed, Carrie was fighting back tears. She had only been searching for a few minutes, really, perhaps twenty in all, but that was enough. She was certain. Prossie was not on Earth. And she wasn’t back in the Empire, or she’d have made contact herself.

Carrie knew then that her cousin Proserpine, her childhood playmate, was dead. She had to be. What other explanation could there be?

And dying in that hostile other universe, where her mind could not speak, she had died in telepathic silence, in the sort of loneliness that ordinary people lived with every day, but which telepaths contemplated only with dread.

Cut off by that hideous silence, her family hadn’t even heard the death-cry.

“Hey,” Pel said as he emerged, “it’s daylight!”

“Aye,” Raven said. “’Tis an hour or so past dawn, here.”

“But it’s after seven!”

“Not here, it isn’t,” Captain Cahn told him.

Pel turned, startled.

Cahn and Valadrakul were standing to one side; to the other side, he realized, were Stoddard, Donald, Susan, and Amy.

“The others went on ahead,” Susan told him. “Your little girl was pretty excited.”

“Oh,” Pel said. “Thanks.”

He looked around.

He was standing in a small clearing of bare black dirt. Behind him stood the woodshed. In the center of the clearing was a great flat-topped stump-the tree that had once grown there must have been huge.

Ahead and to the left was a cabin, built of rough-hewn logs and chinked with something greyish; there were no windows on the near side, but a fieldstone chimney bisected it, and to the left of the chimney a brown drape of soft leather hung from a gray wood bar. From the way the drape hung and what he could see below its lower edge, Pel guessed it covered a door.

Between the cabin and the shed, to the left, was a sunny little garden-though it didn’t look particularly inviting just now. Most of it consisted of neat, fresh-tilled furrows in the black earth; a few had new green shoots springing up.

Beyond the garden was a steep embankment covered with a tangle of dead weeds, old vines, and fresh growth.

Atop the embankment, and ahead and to the right, was forest-old-growth forest, trees that seemed to soar up almost out of sight before ending in a maze of bud-speckled, criss-crossing branches, brown vines layered onto the black trunks like threadbare carpet, dark green moss spilling down from the crotches and smeared like jam on one side of each trunk-the north, was it? Pel seemed to remember that moss grew thickest on the north sides of trees, sheltered from sun and storm.

To the left the sky, visible through the greys and browns of the lower forest and the green and gold of budding leaves high above, was a rich blue streaked with high, thin clouds; to the right it washed out to uneasy off-white surrounding a pale, almost colorless sun, low in the sky, that seemed dimmer and smaller than natural.

The light of that sun was thin and watery and seemed to spill between trees as if running down sheets of glass, giving the entire landscape a cool, unfriendly appearance.

The air smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke and something faint and unpleasant. It chilled his face and hands, and he could feel his nose preparing to drip. His breath rose in thin white swirls.

He shivered, and not entirely from the cold.

There was no one thing that Pel could point to as being out of place, but the scene seemed subtly wrong. The air in his lungs felt thick and heavy, the ground pulled at his feet, the colors and even the light itself jarred somehow.

Then he realized one thing that was wrong-it was the wrong time of year, as well as the wrong time of day. It was spring, yes, but back home the leaves were out and the azaleas in bloom; here, the trees were still just budding.

If the details had been right, he might have taken a place like this for a rustic retreat, or perhaps a historical re-creation intended to give tourists a glimpse of a bygone life; in that moist chill, the pale light, the heavy air, it didn’t seem right.

“If you go around the cabin,” someone said, in a high-pitched voice that reminded Pel of Bernadette Peters, “you can get a look at Stormcrack Keep.”

Pel turned and saw no one; he looked down, following the voice, and found a tiny person, like the one who had appeared in his basement, the one Raven had called Grummetty.

This one was not Grummetty; it was a woman, even smaller than Grummetty. She came no higher than the middle of Pel’s shin. She wore a simple white cotton dress with a thick blue sweater over it for warmth, and had a knitted woolen cap pulled down over her ears. A thick black braid trailed down her back. She was sitting on a rock the size of Pel’s fist.

“Oh,” Pel said. “Is that where Nancy and Rachel went?”

“The lady with the little girl?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where they went. Also all those men in the silly purple outfits.” She pointed.

“Thank you,” Pel said. He followed the pointing finger around the right side of the cabin.

There was a well-worn path consisting of a strip of bare earth between mounds of rotting dead leaves, beaten down until it was too hard to show footprints. Pel followed it.

Every step seemed to take an inordinate amount of effort; he stopped and looked down at his shoes, trying to figure it out.

“Heavier gravity than you’re used to,” a voice said.

He looked up to find Lieutenant Godwin up ahead, leaning against a tree and grinning at him.

“Heavier gravity?” Pel asked.

Godwin nodded. “I’d judge your planet at, oh, maybe 1.2 gees, tops,” he said. “This place has to be at least 1.3. Not a big difference, but if you aren’t used to it, I guess it must be pretty disconcerting.”

“Earth’s one gee,” Pel said.

“Well, of course it is, on your scale,” Godwin agreed. “ Our scale uses Terra as a standard. I’d say Earth’s at least 1.1, probably closer to 1.2.”

“But Terra and Earth are the same thing…” Pel began.

He stopped, confused.

“No, no,” Godwin said. “Your planet’s Earth, right? Back home, nobody’s called Terra Earth for a century or so. It’s Terra.”

“But we call Earth Terra…”

“You do? I thought you called it Earth.”

“Well, we do, mostly.” Pel stopped again.

“Then why don’t we just leave it at that? We probably both have a dozen names for the old home planet, right? But you people said Earth, when we asked, and we call ours Terra. Seems convenient.”

“I guess,” Pel agreed, reluctantly. Godwin smiled patronizingly.

Pel did not care to be patronized, and resolved to carry on the conversation as if he talked to people from other universes regularly. “So your home planet has lower gravity than this?” he asked.

“Mine? Hard to say-about the same, I’d guess.”

“But you just said…” Pel began, feeling his resolve vanish.

“No, no, Mr. Brown- I’m not from Terra. I’m from Pennington, also known as Kappa Orionis Two. My grandparents came from Terra.”

“Ah, I see,” Pel said.

Lieutenant Godwin did not look like a Martian; with his blond crewcut and broad shoulders and round face he looked like a farmboy from Minnesota. His accent even sounded about right for a farmboy from Minnesota. Still, he was claiming to be from another planet.

“Pennington, huh?” Pel asked.

“Yeah. Grew up on the South Continent, near New Salisbury-and don’t pretend you know what I’m talking about, okay?” The patronizing expression became an outright grin.