Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“Okay, Lieutenant.” Pel tried to smile in response, but the result was only a weak grimace.

“I’m going back to the woodshed, see if they’ve got the gateway set to send us home yet. I’ll see you, Mr. Brown.” He pushed away from the tree, saluted, ducked past Pel, and marched on.

Pel watched him go.

So they were setting up a portal to send the Imperials back to their own universe? That was quick work.

He didn’t blame Godwin for wanting to hurry, though. This place of Raven’s was uncomfortable. It was cold and damp and the light was wrong, and if Godwin was to be believed, the gravity was wrong.

Just then the forest and path and cabin all darkened, and Pel looked up.

A cloud had hidden the sun. More clouds seemed to be gathering.

What a nasty, unpleasant place. How could people want to live here? He shivered and walked on.

* * * *

Prossie was not really surprised to discover that her telepathic talent was just as dead in Shadow’s realm as it had been on Earth; her head still felt as if it were stuffed with wool that blocked out all the thoughts she would normally have heard.

It was a good thing she would not be here long; she hadn’t had a chance to warn Carrie. If the poor girl tried to make contact, she’d be unable to find anyone, and would probably worry.

As soon as she got back into Imperial space-assuming that the wizards could really open the portal they had promised-she would call Carrie, let her know what had happened.

For now, though, she was looking over Shadow’s native world; her superiors in Imperial Intelligence would want to know as much as possible about it. Not that she was particularly fond of her superiors, but every telepath worked either in Intelligence or the Signal Corps, or both-that was the price the Empire demanded for letting a bunch of subhuman mutants live-and the better she did her job, the better she would be treated, and the more respect her entire clan would receive.

The gravity was higher than she had expected, maybe a gee and a third. The air was thick and damp, so while the primary’s light appeared to be further toward the blue end of the spectrum than average, that might partly be due to the atmospheric conditions.

The trees looked Terran, as far as she could tell, but she was no botanist. Some certainly looked, even to her untrained eye, like oaks, but she supposed that might be a result of parallel evolution of some sort.

The soil seemed to be rich enough.

The only locals she had seen so far were the ones who had been on Earth, three little people, and the “wizard” Elani. The little people were definitely alive and intelligent, unlike the remains she had seen in Imperial space; and whatever mechanisms the wizard used to create her effects, Prossie had been unable to spot them.

And Stormcrack Keep was a rudimentary fortress, too far away for any serious look at its defenses.

She had gotten that far in her work as an agent of Imperial Intelligence when someone said, “It’s like a storybook castle-only it’s real, isn’t it?”

Prossie turned and found Mrs. Brown standing there, holding her little girl.

“Of course it’s real,” she said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

* * * *

Amy watched the others traipse off for their look at Stormcrack, but for her own part, she couldn’t yet bring herself to move that far away from the gateway home.

And she couldn’t leave Susan, who was even more frightened than she was herself.

And why shouldn’t they be frightened? It was all real.

Even though Amy didn’t want it to be, even though she had desperately hoped it would all turn out to be some incredibly complex fraud, it was all real.

She did want to look at the castle, to see it all-but it would take her a few moments to work up the nerve. She had to adjust.

Her safe little world had come apart at the seams.

Again.

* * * *

Pel could hear voices ahead; he turned a corner, around a huge oak, and found the rest of the party gathered in an open, grassy area, looking out across a wooded valley.

Nancy was holding Rachel in her arms as she spoke to Prossie; Ted was standing nearby, talking to Mervyn. Drummond was arguing with Soorn and Cartwright. Smith, Lampert, and Peabody were sitting on the grass, not talking to anyone, facing away from the path where Pel stood.

Pel stepped forward; Peabody turned and looked at him, and Pel realized he had missed someone.

Grummetty, or someone very much like him, was standing just in front of Peabody. So was somebody even smaller-another gnome, a young one.

“Hi,” Pel said.

Several voices returned his greeting.

“See the castle, Daddy?” Rachel asked.

Pel looked out across the valley.

The land dropped away steeply from the clearing, in a slope that was almost a cliff, too steep for large trees to grow on; that provided the first real view of a broad area that Pel had seen since stepping through his basement wall. Up until now, everything had been bounded by trees and walls.

Here, though, he could see.

Below, at the foot of the steep slope, the forest continued, deep green and extending to either side, as endless as a river.

On the other side of the valley-or perhaps canyon-rose another cliff, symmetrical to the one on which they stood, perhaps a half-mile distant.

And atop that cliff stood Stormcrack Keep-such as it was.

The main body of the structure was of windowless stone, at least on the visible side; it was simply a solid, flat-faced mass of masonry. Pel had trouble judging the scale at such a distance, particularly since there were no other referents handy except the outsize trees, but he judged it to be perhaps a hundred feet across and forty feet high.

At one side rose the remains of a round tower, built of the same featureless grey stone. About ten or fifteen feet above the top of the keep wall it was pierced by several tall, narrow windows.

And about ten feet above that, it ended in jagged ruin, roof gone, walls shattered, a few blackened beam ends projecting from the rubble.

The whole thing was in the shadow of a cloud, as was the clearing where the new arrivals were; patches of light and shadow were gliding across the surrounding forests.

Most of the world seemed to be in shadow; the clouds were spreading.

All in all, Pel thought, the castle didn’t look like much. He had seen far more interesting and elaborate ones when he toured Europe as a young man.

But Europe wasn’t in his basement.

And, obviously, neither was this place, whatever it really was.

Up until now, he thought, he might eventually have been able to convince himself that the whole thing was an underground soundstage, or some sort of illusion done with mirrors and tapes, but that valley, and the castle on the far side-that was no illusion.

A hawk was gliding above the valley; a smaller bird, too far away for identification, vanished behind the ruined tower before the predator could spot it.

It was almost as if they had fallen into a fantasy novel-except that when he read fantasy novels he never had so many of the details, the leaves on the trees, the chill in the air, the slippery spot of mud under one foot, the fibers frayed from that tree root catching the pale sunlight. Fiction never had this solid reality.

“Can we go home now, Daddy?” Rachel asked.

“We figured you’d want to see the castle,” Nancy explained, “so we waited…”

“It’s cold,” Rachel interrupted.

Nancy smiled. “But it’s cold, and Rachel’s tired-it must be about her bedtime, back home.”

Pel nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I just wanted to see.” He put out a hand to the trunk of a nearby oak, and felt the cold, rough bark. “I guess it’s all real.”