Out of This World

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  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.

  “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.”

  Ted snorted; startled, Pel turned to face him.

  “It’s all a dream,” Ted said. “And this place proves it.”

  Pel blinked. “What?”

  “I’m dreaming, all of this and all of you—I mean, come on, you think this is real? Castles on cliffs? Fairies, or whatever those little guys are?”

  Grummetty and the other one turned to glare angrily at Ted.

  “Ted,” Pel said, “if you’re dreaming, what am I doing here? We can’t be having the same dream!”

  “Of course not,” Ted agreed. “You aren’t here at all; I’m just arguing with my subconscious. It doesn’t like it when I know I’m dreaming.”

  “Come on,” Nancy said, taking Pel’s arm. “Let him think it’s a dream if he likes.”

  With Nancy carrying Rachel on one arm and pressing Pel along with the other, they started back around the cabin. Ted’s words nagged at Pel as he walked, and he turned for one more final look at the castle.

  A beam of sunlight, breaking through the thickening clouds for a moment, sprayed color across the gray stone, and then vanished.

  If they had fallen into a story, now they were about to climb back out. They had just been bit players, spear-carriers, part of the background.

  “We should take a souvenir,” Pel said. “Something to prove we were really here.”

  “Did you bring the camera?” Nancy asked, just as Pel remembered it.

  He pulled it out of his pocket. “Hang on,” he said. “Let me get a picture of the castle.”

  “Hurry up, Daddy,” Rachel said, as Nancy stopped and turned.

  Pel hurried; after all, he didn’t want to be inside a story. He was quite sure that they always looked like a lot more fun from the outside, curled up reading somewhere, rather than living them. He took a quick snapshot of Stormcrack Keep and the surrounding greenery, then turned back toward the woodshed. “Let’s go,” he said.

  He kept the camera ready in his hand, though.

  Half a dozen paces down the path he paused and took a picture of the front of the cabin, with its two shuttered windows and leather-hung doorway and the huge trees to either side.

  Then he snapped a quick shot of Nancy and Rachel on the path, the woodshed just barely visible through the trees.

  Amy appeared as he did.

  “I hope I didn’t ru
in your picture,” she said. “I wanted to see the castle.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s no problem,” Pel assured her. He stepped aside, as did Nancy, to let Amy squeeze by on the narrow path.

  “Where’s Susan?” Nancy asked.

  “She wouldn’t come,” Amy said. “This whole thing has her really scared; she said she didn’t want to get out of sight of that shed we came out of.”

  Nancy just nodded.

  Before she and Pel could continue they heard another set of approaching footsteps; they glanced at each other and stayed where they were.

  Lieutenant Godwin was returning. He said nothing, but threw them a quick salute as he strode past.

  Pel and Nancy waited for a second or two, but no one else appeared; they turned and walked on, Pel snapping a picture every few steps.

  Raven was standing at the end of the path, at the edge of the clearing, when they arrived. He smiled at them and stepped back.

  “Saw you the Keep?” he asked.

  “We saw it,” Pel said.

  Rachel, curled in her mother’s arms, made a noise, but didn’t say anything intelligible; Pel realized she was sucking her thumb. It was obviously time to get her home to bed.

  “My home, once,” Raven said. “’Tis in the hands of the foe now, and I dare not show my face there.”

  “Yeah,” Pel said. He hesitated, then added, “I’m sorry, Raven. I can’t think of any way to help.”

  “Ah, but you’ve seen naught as yet but this forester’s holdings!”

  “That’s all we’re going to see,” Nancy announced. “Rachel’s worn out, I’m tired, and we’ve seen enough. We’re going home now.”

  “Ah? Oh, but...” Raven glanced at the shed, then uneasily at Pel.

  “What’s wrong?” Pel asked, suddenly nervous. He felt the muscles in his back tightening.

  “Oh, ‘tis naught,” Raven said. “Save that... that man Godwin, and the Captain Cahn.”

  “What about them?” Nancy asked.

  “They were here, and you were not, and they spoke fair—I fear Elani is conjuring the portal to their realm.”