In the Empire of Shadow. Lawrence Watt-Evans

they weren’t going anywhere, she groped her way up the wall and found the porthole. Carefully, she lifted the porthole cover slightly; light spilled in. This was not the incredible eye-scorching glare of the space-warp, however; the light that now shone around the rim seemed quite manageable. In fact, it looked like ordinary daylight—perhaps a bit thin and watery, but daylight.

      Amy swung the cover aside and looked out at Shadow’s world.

      She couldn’t see much. The trunk of a huge tree, standing no more than two yards away, blocked most of her view. Turning slightly, she could see that broken branches and foliage were scattered across the ship’s fin, a few feet aft of the port. The fin itself was bent and battered, its pink paint scratched and scraped, revealing black primer and shining steel. Yellow sunlight slanted down, glittering coolly on the pink paint and green spring leaves—the sun here in Shadow’s realm, in what she and some of the others had taken to calling Faerie, was paler than Earth’s, its light not the warmer hue Amy would have expected back home.

      Although she had no reason to think she could tell the difference, the light seemed to her like morning light, rather than afternoon.

      “What the hell happened?” an unfamiliar male voice demanded of no one in particular.

      Amy turned away from the port and peered into the gray gloom of the main cabin.

      “We landed,” she said. “Hit a few trees on the way down.”

      “Trees?” a timid voice asked.

      “Big plants,” a more confident voice replied. “Some of them get to be a hundred feet tall, or more. They’re what wood comes from.”

      “We know what trees are, idiot!” a new voice snapped.

      “Not all of us, we don’t,” another retorted. “Or at any rate I’ve never seen any!”

      “Well, you’ll see plenty of them here,” Amy called, while wondering how anyone could have grown to adulthood without seeing a tree.

      Then she remembered what she had seen of the Galactic Empire—the backwater world Psi Cassiopeia II, which was mostly lifeless desert and entirely treeless; the rebel colony on Zeta Leo III, where she had been held captive on an immense corn farm where the only trees were a handful of six-foot shrubs near the house, obviously just recently planted; and the hollowed-out asteroid called Base One. She might have seen a tree or two somewhere besides that farm, but there certainly hadn’t been very many. She had to remember that these people weren’t from Earth; most of them weren’t even from the equivalent homeworld of the Empire, Terra.

      Maybe trees had never evolved anywhere in the Galactic Empire’s universe except Terra. Even so, she would have expected the Imperials to have exported them to all their colonies.

      Well, she had expected a lot of things that didn’t seem to have happened.

      “Your pardon, milady,” Raven said from very near behind her, startling Amy. “Might I trouble you to allow me a look?”

      “Of course,” Amy said, getting out of her seat and allowing Raven to lean over and peer out the port. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to see much.”

      “Indeed,” Raven agreed wryly, as he took in the sight of the immense tree-trunk. “’Tis scarcely the broad panorama that one might have hoped for.”

      “Any idea where we are?”

      Raven shook his head. “Marry, milady, though ’tis a grand oak, ’tis hardly one I recognize—for that, how to tell one from the next, an you see but the bole, with no mark upon it save those put there by our craft’s descent? The Empire’s telepaths were consulted in the devising of yon opening ’tween worlds, and our goal was to arrive far enow from Shadow’s demesne for safety, yet close enough to approach it in time, and perchance that’s done, but that scarce names a single spot. Grand oaks such as this might be found in any number of suitable places.”

      Emboldened by Raven’s presence, several of the others were now gathering around the port, trying to see out; poor Susan, in the seat beside Amy’s, was being crowded quite rudely, and was twisted almost into fetal position trying to avoid pressure on her burns.

      A rush of anger swept through Amy at the sight of that. It was bad enough that the lot of them had been sent off on this stupid journey before their injuries were fully healed, but all those big, strong, healthy men crowding around poor wounded Susan…

      “There are other ports you people could open,” Amy pointed out sharply.

      Before anyone could reply, the door to the cockpit swung open and Colonel Carson appeared.

      “Lord Raven,” he called, “we could use you up front.”

      “Your pardon, milady,” Raven said, managing an approximation of a bow despite having his head and shoulders wedged into the narrow space between the back of Amy’s seat and a curving steel rib. He withdrew, made his way past the press of bodies, and strode up the aisle to the cockpit.

      Without waiting for an invitation, Stoddard rose and followed his master.

      * * * *

      Pel took his time unclogging the porthole. After all, the ship wasn’t going anywhere—not unless the Empire had some utterly uncharacteristic surprise up its collective sleeve, some way to get the thing moving in a universe where anti-gravity didn’t work.

      And he didn’t really care all that much about Shadow’s universe, except as a step back to Earth.

      Ted Deranian was sitting beside him, watching as Pel uncovered the port. Ted was smiling foolishly. Looking at him, it was hard for Pel to believe the man had ever gotten through law school; he looked more like a village idiot than like an attorney.

      Still, there was something he had said that tickled at the back of Pel’s mind. It didn’t really make sense unless you accepted Ted’s theory that both Shadow’s universe and the Empire’s universe were all an elaborate dream, but Pel wanted to believe it.

      It had been said back at Base One, when Ted had found Pel sitting alone, on the verge of tears as he thought about Nancy and Rachel.

      “Don’t worry, Pel,” Ted had told him. “They woke up, that’s all—they’re back on Earth. When you get back there they’ll be waiting for you.”

      Then he had caught himself and asked, “But why am I talking to you? You’re not really here.”

      He had wandered off, leaving Pel furious at his insensitivity, but the idea that Nancy and Rachel were alive back on Earth had stayed, no matter how hard Pel tried to suppress it.

      Maybe they were.

      He knew that this wasn’t all just a dream, all these strange things they had been through; he knew that Ted had it wrong, and the Empire and Shadow were real. They weren’t a dream in the usual sense.

      But on the other hand, this was an alien universe; Nancy and Rachel did not belong here. The Empire’s universe was equally alien. Had they really, fully crossed over into these alternate realities?

      What if they were all really doing some sort of astral travel? Wouldn’t Nancy and Rachel snap back into their own world when their astral selves were destroyed?

      Or even if the physical bodies made the transition, was time the same here?

      Pel had read plenty of science fiction and fantasy as a kid; he had seen hundreds of movies over the years. Wasn’t there always something somehow unstable about someone who had been removed from his or her proper place? What if that wasn’t just a literary convention, but a deep subconscious understanding of some fundamental fact about reality?

      Mightn’t there be some way to change the past, to make Nancy and Rachel have never left Earth?

      He and the others were in another dimension, a parallel world, an alternate reality; they were, as Amy put it, in Faerie. The very existence of such a place went against all common sense and previous experience;