Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

Raven and Elani looked at each other unhappily.

“Friend Pel,” Raven began.

“ Stop calling me that! ” Pel shouted, his anger sounding weak and futile in the thin air. “Elani, right ? You can send us home?”

Silently, Elani shook her head.

“Messire Brown,” Valadrakul said, “we are in another realm now, an alternate reality. In this place, our magic cannot work.”

“I wanna go home!” Rachel cried.

Pel glared angrily.

“We’re stuck here?” he said.

Amy, Nancy, and Susan had inched closer during the conversation; now all the Earth people but Ted were facing Raven, Donald, Stoddard, and the two wizards across a few feet of sand.

Raven nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “I fear you are.”

Pel looked about desperately, and saw the crew of the Ruthless , gathering to one side.

“They got to Earth, didn’t they?” he said. “There’s some way to get back!”

Raven looked at Cahn, who nodded. “If we can get back to Base One,” he agreed, “there’s the equipment there necessary to open a space warp back to your Earth.”

“So how do we get there?” Pel asked. “Where’s this Base One? Is it in this area?” A dreadful thought struck him. “Is it… is it even on this planet ?”

“No,” Cahn answered. “I don’t know where the hell we are, but I know that much.”

“We’re on Psi Cassiopeia Two, Captain,” Prossie Thorpe called from atop a distant outcropping.

Startled, everyone turned.

“I’ve made contact,” she said happily. “Locally, I mean.” She pointed eastward. “There’s a small colony town about four hundred miles that way-Imperial, of course. If I can convince the governor there that I’m real, and not just a figment of his imagination, he can send a car or a hopper for us.”

“Psi Cassiopeia Two?” Smith asked quietly.

Drummond shrugged. “I never heard of it,” he muttered. “Must be way out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Oh, it is!” Prossie called.

“Thorpe,” Cahn called back, “watch it!”

“Sorry, Captain,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “It’s so wonderful to have my talent back, though-I can’t help it!”

Peabody saw Pel’s puzzled look, and explained, “She can’t possibly hear us talking, when she’s all the way over there-not in this thin air, she can’t. So she must be listening telepathically, and that’s seriously against regulations, spying on your own people without orders.”

Pel nodded, and asked, “What was that about convincing someone she’s real?”

Peabody shrugged, then winced at what the motion did to his slashed arm. “I guess she’s been calling someone,” he said, “and the local brass never heard a telepath before and isn’t sure he’s hearing one now.”

“Why wouldn’t he have ever heard one before?” Nancy asked. “I thought you people used them all the time.”

“Hey, there are three thousand inhabited planets in the Empire, and only four hundred telepaths,” Peabody explained, “and more than half of those four hundred are serving communications duty in the Imperial Fleet. Hardly anybody outside the fleet’s ever heard a telepath.”

“Why are there so few?” Pel asked. “I mean, can’t you train more?”

Peabody blinked in surprise, and threw Prossie a quick glance. Her attention was focused entirely on the eastern horizon; her crewmate leaned forward and raised his uninjured hand to shield his mouth as he whispered, “’Course you can’t train more! It’s something they’re born with-you either have it or you don’t.” He threw Prossie another glance. “I mean, they’re all mutants, really.”

“Oh,” Pel said.

Peabody nodded, and continued, “In fact, they’re all one family-all descended from one woman. Prossie’s great-great grandmother.”

“Oh,” Pel said. He considered, and then pointed out, “Well, then, they aren’t really mutants-I mean, she was, but her kids weren’t. The trait bred true, that’s all.”

Peabody pulled away slightly. “You making excuses for mutants, Mr. Brown?”

“No,” Pel said, confused, “I don’t think so.”

“Good,” Peabody said.

* * * *

Amy looked about her, then settled down and sat cross-legged on the sands.

That five-minute look at another world had gone wrong, just as she had feared it would. Now they needed to find this space warp thing.

Something would probably go wrong there, too.

Still, if everybody else could handle this, so could she. Her world had been snatched away from her, in an incredibly literal way, but she would just have to deal with it. She was still alive; that poor man Cartwright wasn’t, she’d seen him fall with that thing ripping at his back, tearing away skin and cloth, but she herself was unhurt except for the little scratches that other horrid flying creature had given her-she hoped the scratches wouldn’t get infected. Her skirt was torn up, but the scrapes on her leg hadn’t even broken the skin.

All that blood, those monsters, that was gruesome, traumatic stuff, but she could handle it. She was a healthy, intelligent woman, and she was not going to let all this mess her up.

She’d been through all that. She could take anything the universe-or universes-cared to throw at her.

She glanced at Susan, who was sitting curled up, almost in foetal position.

Susan was Vietnamese, and hadn’t she said something about already having seen enough war? Amy guessed that she must have been through hell as a girl, seen things that made those black monsters look like nothing.

She’d survived, though.

Well, maybe there were some things Amy wouldn’t be able to handle, but she intended to try. She intended to be, like Susan, a survivor.

No matter what path her life was dragged down.

* * * *

“See you, friend Pel,” Raven said, interrupting Pel’s talk with Spaceman Peabody, “think you not, ‘tis just as well that we found ourselves here, and not in your world?”

Pel glared at him. “How do you figure that?” he said.

“Because hence we can go, by means of the ‘space-warp,’ and all of us be sent safely home again. Had we reached your world, then I and mine would be trapped there.”

“Would that be so bad?” Pel asked. “I mean, how can you go back? Those monsters were all over everything!” He kicked at a dead one that lay near his feet.

“Oh, I think they’ll not stay,” Raven said with an airy wave. “Shadow saw us fled, and will surely summon home its creatures, so that they might be dispatched elsewhere as needed.”

“Maybe,” Pel said, unconvinced.

“Where was that, anyway?” Nancy asked. “I mean, that place where we came out. It wasn’t your castle, because we saw that across the valley.”

“Certes, madam,” Raven agreed. “We made our lodgings in the forester’s cot of my ancestral lands, for my brother holds Stormcrack as vassal to Shadow, and in disgrace of our family’s honor.”

“Your brother ?” Nancy threw Pel a worried glance.

“Aye,” Raven said.

Pel decided that a change of subject was called for. “Those monsters that got through, before the portal closed,” he said. “What’s going to happen to them? Should we hunt them down and kill them?”

Peabody shook his head. “Don’t need to,” he said. “They’ll die on their own.”

“Will they?”

“Oh, sure-just ask Soorn. He was on the clean-up crew on Lambda Ceti Four. Those things can’t live for long in normal space.”

Pel glanced around, not at Soorn, but at Grummetty and the little woman. They were sitting side by side on the sand, arms around each other’s shoulders. They looked pale; Pel wasn’t certain whether that might be partly due to the abnormally-white light.