Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

Why should the sandwiches be the same, for that matter?

He didn’t know, and right now he didn’t much care. He handed one foil-wrapped sandwich to Nancy and one to Rachel, then handed one back to Lampert and unwrapped his own.

It was edible, but unexciting-there was no mayonnaise or other condiment, just bread, meat, and cheese, and the meat was bland-some sort of ham loaf, Pel decided.

A jug of lukewarm water was passed around, as well, and at the driver’s request the used foil was collected and passed back to the front.

“The stuff isn’t cheap, out here,” the driver explained. “We re- use the metal.”

Food and water improved Pel’s condition considerably. However, once the last crumb was gone, the ride was, as Pel had expected, very dull indeed.

Rachel was fascinated for perhaps six or seven minutes by the fact that they were flying, and stared intently out the window as she chewed on her sandwich. She climbed on Nancy’s lap for a better view, watching the sand and stone rush by below.

Around the eighth minute, the sandwich gone, she climbed back into her own seat and asked, for the first of what seemed like several hundred times, “When will we get there, Mommy?”

Pel sighed, and tried to ignore her.

He wished he had made a last visit to the impromptu latrine that had been established behind a rock. That particular discomfort at least served to distract him from Rachel’s restlessness.

She shifted, squirmed, leaned this way and that, climbed from her seat onto first her mother’s lap, and then her father’s, before being forcibly placed back where she belonged, with her seatbelt fastened securely.

(The seatbelts, Pel noticed with something approaching astonishment, had actual buckles -metal rings with a hinged central prong that went through a hole in the strap, just like the belt he happened to be wearing. He wondered why a civilization that had interstellar travel made do with anything so primitive.)

Perhaps an hour after they were picked up, Rachel announced, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Pel, secretly relieved, passed this information forward to Lampert, who passed it on to the driver.

A moment later the vehicle settled to the ground-a stretch of empty sand indistinguishable from where they had started, save that the outcroppings were more scattered, and veined with something grayish, instead of being entirely pure white.

“Five minutes,” the driver announced. “Stretch, do your business, whatever, but just five minutes and then we get airborne again.”

Five minutes was plenty. The bleak surroundings were hardly an invitation to do anything beyond the necessary. That out of the way, when they were moving once again Rachel curled up quietly and went to sleep.

Pel found himself with no distractions at all, now. He stared out the windows.

The other two aircars were out of sight, presumably gone on ahead, and Pel wondered how the things navigated. The desert below all looked the same, to him.

Just as he thought that, of course, they sailed over a canyon, by far the most distinctive feature he had seen yet. That didn’t explain how the driver-or was he a pilot?-knew where to go, though. Pel regretted sitting in back, where he could see nothing of the controls.

This whole new world-whole new universe -was all so strange…

Pel paused, blinked, and looked down at the upholstery.

There wasn’t anything strange about that at all, he corrected himself. The brass-plated door handle and window crank were completely, utterly ordinary, if old- fashioned. Rachel was curled up asleep, fingers tangled in her hair, looking just as sweet as ever; Nancy, on the other side, was leaning against the glass, lost in her own thoughts, and she, too, was familiar.

But outside the car the sun was white, the horizon too near, the ground seven feet away, and instead of rolling over asphalt they were flying over an endless wilderness of lifeless sand.

It was the contrast of the strange and the familiar that was most troublesome, somehow.

For one thing, it made it all seem real. It wasn’t a dream, where everything was odd, nor a theme park, where everything was clean and plastic, nor any other sort of fantasy. It was like a visit to a foreign country, in a way-like his trip to Mexico a few years back, where the strange and the familiar had been mixed, where he had bought Coca-Cola with thousand-peso notes, where Mayan ruins had been built of stones no different from those in his own back yard, where the tropic light had been clear and golden, shining on Volkswagens and concrete-block walls as well as palm trees and sandy beaches.

Here the light was wrong, the air was wrong, the gravity itself was wrong; cars flew, and monsters emerged from the earth, but still the door-handles were cheap brass, probably plate, and there were little flip-top ashtrays in the armrests.

He didn’t like it at all. It was too real. In all his dreams, he had never once imagined cars with flip-top ashtrays in the armrests. In the science fiction books and stories he read no one ever mentioned flip-top ashtrays. If they mentioned ashtrays at all they were exotic devices of some sort, sucking away smoke and ash or evaporating cigarette butts in atomic disintegrators, not just dirty little metal dishes with chintzy lids that clicked open at the flick of a thumbnail.

Ashtrays-did that mean that the Galactic Empire had tobacco? There were no butts or ashes, so Pel could not be sure they actually were ashtrays at all, but that was certainly what they looked like.

How closely parallel to Earth was the Empire’s homeworld, anyway?

And did he really want to know?

No, he decided, he just wanted to get home . Silly Cat (originally Sylvester, but long since shortened) would be seriously upset by now, his food supply probably exhausted, though he could still get water from the toilet-if no one had put the seat down or closed the bathroom door tight.

That mundane little worry somehow made the whole thing worse.

Pel wished he could just dismiss this entire adventure as a dream, as his imagination running amok, even as outright insanity accompanied by hallucinations, but it all felt too real, too solid and detailed. He never worried about toilet seats in his dreams.

He stared out at the sand and rocks sliding by.

* * * *

It might be, Raven bethought himself, that he was become accustomed to the uncanny. Else, it might likewise be that this aircar, as it was, rode higher and more smoothly than the groundcar at Earth, and thus removed from him the worst of the sensations.

He watched the bare sands that flashed beneath, and listened warily to the mutterings of Captain Cahn, in the forward right-hand seat, as he spoke, seemingly to some familiar spirit. The driver of the vehicle said naught, but paid all his heed to his craft-and that as it should be, minding the speed at which they flew.

Beside him, the man called Ted Deranian, the advocate for hire, dozed fitfully, twitching occasionally. Raven glanced at him.

That poor fool still thought the waking world to be a dream; did he then take his dreams for truth? Was he now, perhaps, back in his home, his strange and frightening life untroubled by the common affairs of empires?

Raven smiled to himself at the thought.

* * * *

Pel only realized he had dozed off when he woke up; the whine of the aircar’s engine had changed.

They were descending, sinking down into a sort of open-topped box, comprised of four concrete walls painted battleship gray. Pel could see two doors in the wall directly ahead. They were already below the tops of the walls by the time he was awake enough to understand what was happening, so he saw nothing of the surrounding structures except a quick glimpse of black and gray rooftops.