Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“Ted, I’m not a figment. You’re not dreaming. This is real.” Pel hesitated, then added, “At least, I think it is.”

“Well, if you’re not a figment, what are you doing in my dream?” He smiled a humorless, challenging smile. “Are you a telepath, Brown? Sending psychic messages to me while I sleep? Is that why there are telepaths in this dream? I never thought about telepathy much before, that I can recall. So are you sending this to me?”

Pel glanced uneasily about; everyone else in the room, save the steward and the bartender at the far end, was staring at the two of them. The steward was carefully not looking anywhere; the bartender was polishing glasses.

“No, Ted,” Pel said. “This is real . You are not dreaming. I swear you aren’t. You’re making a fool of yourself.”

Ted shook his head vigorously and held up his hands as if pushing the very thought away.

“No, no, Pel,” he said, “or figment, or alter ego, or whatever the hell you really are. This is a dream. It has to be.”

Desperately, Pel said, “ No , Ted! I know it’s all strange, but it’s real !”

“Nope,” Ted replied. “Can’t be. You think I don’t know a dream when I see it? A bunch of bad swipes from Tolkien and Buck Rogers, all twisted around? Gotta be a dream.”

“It isn’t , Ted…”

“Pel, look,” Ted interrupted, “I’m open-minded and all that, and if a spaceship landed on the White House lawn tomorrow I’d accept that-though I’d be amazed as hell, believe me. But this stuff is all too much. I mean, you hire me to bail a bunch of spacemen out on behalf of some guy out of Shakespeare by way of Brooklyn, and then we all eat pizza together and walk through your basement wall into somebody’s back yard in Appalachia, except there’s a castle on the next ridge, and then a bunch of El Greco monsters jump out at us and chase us through the wall into a bleached-out desert where the horizon’s too close so it looks like a cheap Hollywood set, and we sit around for a few minutes except that dream time can stretch all out of shape so it seems like hours, and we get picked up by a flying Oldsmobile…”

“Buick,” Pel corrected him. “I thought it looked more like a Buick.”

“No,” Ted said, shaking his head. “ You went in the Buick. I was in the other one, the little one. But you’re right, it wasn’t much like an Oldsmobile. Reminded me a little of this primer-black Camaro my nephew has, actually.”

“Ted…”

“ Anyway . So I fly off in this car with the Shakespearean guy and the spaceship captain and a driver who thinks he’s CIA, and halfway there the captain starts getting psychic flashes or something and talking to the air and telling us stuff, and none of it makes any sense, so then we land at what looks like the Pittsburgh Greyhound station and eat a dinner that all tastes like tofu, and then we get aboard a spaceship that looks like the Emerald City turned sideways on the outside, and like a French whorehouse inside, and here we are.”

“That’s right, here we…” Pel began, soothingly.

Ted paid no attention to Pel’s interruption; he demanded, “And you’re trying to tell me all this crap is real ?”

“ Yes , dammit!” Pel glared at Ted. “Yes, it’s real, and I’m telling you that!”

Ted stared back, his expression merely mild surprise-no anger, no doubt at all.

“But, figment,” he said, “it’s silly .”

“ Life is silly, Ted,” Pel told him. “I mean, think about it-isn’t it all a bit ridiculous? But it’s real. And all this is real, too.”

Ted simply grinned foolishly at him.

“Sir,” the steward suggested quietly, “if you want to see Psi Cassiopeia Two…”

“Right,” Pel said, turning away from the silent Ted. “Lead the way.”

The steward led the way to the curved rear wall, where a window, perhaps two feet high and six feet wide, was centered.

This gave a view looking back over the tail assembly; Pel stretched up, peering out the topmost part of the glass, trying to see the planet. The tail of the ship was apparently hiding it.

All he could see was stars.

And the stars were mostly various shades of orange; they covered a range from pale yellow to deep red. Pel supposed the glass was tinted, though the green paint on the ship’s tail looked its natural color.

“Where is it?” he asked.

The steward pointed. “Right there,” he said. “That big faint one.”

“Big one?” Pel followed the pointing finger, and found a pale orange dot of light, virtually indistinguishable from all the others, save that it seemed marginally larger and not very bright.

It did have one odd feature, he realized after staring for a few seconds. It was shrinking, while all the other stars remained constant.

“I didn’t realize we’d come so far,” he said at last.

“Oh, yes, sir,” the steward said, beaming modestly. “ Emerald Princess is a very fast ship.”

“How fast?” Pel asked, looking away from the window. “Nine days to Base One-how fast is that?”

“Oh, our top speed is around point three.”

“Of C?”

“No, sir-I don’t know that term. I mean, point three light-years per hour.”

Pel turned to stare at him. “Light-years per hour? It’s faster than light?”

The steward smiled at him, almost smirking. “Well, of course it is, sir,” he said. “How else is interstellar travel possible?”

“You don’t use space warps or something like that?” Pel asked.

The steward looked puzzled. “No, sir,” he said.

Pel turned back to the glass. “Is that… the color out there…”

The steward glanced at the window. “Yes, sir, the red shift is quite visible now, isn’t it? You’ll see a bit more of that, but then in a little while, when we pass the speed of light, you won’t be able to see anything at all looking out in this direction.”

“So what happens then, do we pop into hyperspace or something?”

“Hyperspace?”

Pel turned, exasperated. “Look, I don’t know your terminology! I mean, you can’t go faster than light in normal space, right?”

“You can’t?” The steward looked baffled. “Why not? What other kind of space is there?”

“ I don’t know,” Pel snarled. His grasp of the theory of relativity was sufficiently weak that he had no intention of trying to explain it to someone-and most particularly, someone who worked on a spaceship and ought to know all that stuff. He glanced out the window again, and an unpleasant thought struck him.

Maybe this wasn’t normal space, as he understood the term. It certainly wasn’t his space.

Maybe this universe had entirely different rules.

Maybe here, everything he knew was wrong. Everything he had learned in a lifetime of dealing with his own world was open to question.

He had been thinking of his situation in terms of having stumbled into a science fiction story of some sort-something with spaceships and rayguns and monsters, but still grounded in logic and common sense. But if the laws of physics were different, then anything might be possible.

It wasn’t science fiction at all, it was fantasy. He might as well be in the twilight zone.

Or in a dream.

He backed away, then turned, all his confusion and frustration boiling up in him at once.

He found the elegant redhead standing there waiting for him. “Mr. Brown, is it?” she asked.

“Excuse me,” he said, pushing past her. Right now he did not want to talk to some stranger from another universe, no matter what she looked like.

She turned to stare, and the other strangers made way for him as he stamped across the room to Ted.