“What?” Prossie could feel Carrie’s astonishment clearly. “But…did you really? You’re serious? How? You’ll have to…Prossie, can you get back to the Empire, then? They’ll want…”
Prossie’s grip tightened on the blaster, and she cut Carrie off.
“Fuck the Empire,” she said. “And fuck you, Carrie Hall.”
* * * *
The throne room was ablaze with color and shadow, and stank of smoke; blackened debris was scattered across a wide area.
And Amy noticed that Susan’s corpse was still lying against a wall, untouched by recent events.
The shape on the throne was a mass of light, too bright to look at; for a moment Amy could not believe that it was poor Pellinore Brown. It had to be Shadow; the whole thing must have been a trick of some kind.
Then it spoke, and the voice was Pel’s.
“I might as well send you all home, I guess,” he said. “If I can, anyway.”
* * * *
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to your own universe?” Pel asked again, for the third time in ten minutes.
Prossie shook her head. “Earth,” she said.
It wasn’t an easy choice, but it was the right one, she was sure.
If she returned to her own universe she would be a criminal, a hunted fugitive, with no way to hide from her hunters-who would be her own family. They were all slaves to the Empire, all bound up in the web of deception and self-deception, shared delusions and identity. They would track her down, steal from her mind everything she knew about Faerie and Shadow and Pel and Earth and all the rest, and then turn her over to the Empire to be hanged.
And if by some miracle they didn’t hunt her down, if they sided with her, or even just let her slip away somehow, then they would be as guilty as she-they would all be risking their lives. The Empire would not hesitate to wipe the filthy mutants out.
She might have disowned them all, cut herself off, rejected them all-but she couldn’t ask that of them.
And besides, she had grown accustomed to the oddly-liberating mental silence of the other realities, and to being her own person; she didn’t think she could fit back in the Empire, didn’t think she could go back to being a communications device instead of a person.
As for Faerie-even with Shadow gone, even with the entire world’s magic in Pel’s hands, it wasn’t for her. The heavy gravity was wearing, the watery light was unpleasant, the sanitation was abysmal, the whole place was depressingly primitive and harsh.
And although she hated to admit it, she didn’t trust Pel any more; she didn’t trust anyone who held that much power. She was not at all certain whether Pel entirely controlled the matrix, or whether the matrix partially controlled Pel, and she also wondered if some part of Shadow might still linger in that great tapestry of magic. Shadow’s original body was dead, yes-but how much of her had been bound up in the matrix?
Not the Empire, not Faerie-that left Earth, which she had only glimpsed, directly and through the Earthpeople’s minds back at Base One-Earth, with its amazing alien machines, its complex history, diverse society, and strange, rich culture-television and movies, cars and airplanes, books, music, so much to explore! The Galactic Empire had been working toward uniformity for a century, trying with mixed success to impose its single central culture on thousands of worlds; Earth, with its fragmented politics and sophisticated communications, seemed to be going to the other extreme, jamming a million different societies together on a single big planet.
Earth looked like far more fun-frightening and alien, but fun.
“Definitely, Earth,” she repeated.
The shifting colors swirled for a moment, and Prossie thought that swirl might have been Pel’s magical equivalent of a shrug.
“It’s your life,” Pel said.
* * * *
Finding Earth was tricky, much more difficult than finding the Empire had been; Pel was not surprised that the Empire’s telepaths and science had found it before Shadow’s magic.
He would have preferred opening another portal to the Empire first, for Prossie’s use-that he could have done in just a few minutes-but she insisted she didn’t want to go home, she wanted to go to Earth.
Which meant only creating a single portal, but it also meant that he had to find Earth.
And finding the right part of Earth was tricky, as well. Nobody had cared where on a particular planet Shadow arrived, so long as it was a reasonably pleasant neighborhood and not too far from civilization, but Pel did not think Amy and Ted would appreciate being dumped in the Australian outback-let alone on Mars.
But then, at last, Pel found a place that the portal wanted to go, and he realized with a start that he had found his own basement, and the lingering traces of Elani’s portal.
His own basement.
He hesitated, momentarily reconsidering his decision to stay.
Then he began the process of prying the portal open.
* * * *
Ted vanished, and Amy took a step toward the portal. Then she paused. “You’re sure?” she asked, staring at the throne, trying to see Pel through the glare.
“I’m sure,” he said.
“But…”
“No, I’m sure, Amy,” Pel said. “It’s a chance to play God. To make everything better for all the people here. I mean, remember what it was like out there, under Shadow’s rule! Those gibbets, the dirt, the squalor-I can do a lot of good. Just teaching these people some basic stuff like indoor plumbing, I’ll accomplish more than I would in a hundred years as a marketing consultant.”
Amy glanced at Prossie, waiting her turn a few feet away, then back at Pel. She knew perfectly well that that wasn’t the sort of “playing God” that Pel was really interested in. Oh, he might do it, and it might be a good thing, but it wasn’t why he wanted to stay in Faerie.
He wanted to learn to raise the dead, so he could bring back his wife and poor little Rachel. Amy knew that.
But it was his business, not hers.
Poor Susan’s body was still lying against the wall; in all the excitement no one had had time yet to do anything for her, or for those dead Imperials out front. Maybe Pel would raise Susan from the dead, too. Maybe he would bring Lieutenant Dibbs and his men back to life, and send them all home.
It seemed vaguely blasphemous and somehow dangerous, but Amy told herself she was being silly. She’d never been devout, and any ideas about it being dangerous came more from horror movies than from logic.
It wasn’t her problem.
Her biggest problem was an unwanted baby, and she needed to get back to Earth to get rid of it safely. And just getting back to a normal life-which she could hardly do in Faerie.
She didn’t want to play God; she just wanted to go home.
So why was she still here, arguing?
“Besides, Amy,” Pel said, “if I leave without turning the matrix over to someone, it’ll come apart, and wild magic will run amok-the sort of magic that cooked all those people, Raven and the fetches and the others.”
“It will?” she asked, startled. “I thought that it sounded like things were pretty good before the matrix wizards got out of hand.” She wondered whether Pel was just making excuses, trying to convince himself.
She wondered, also, if he had any idea what he was talking about. Did he really know any of this stuff? If he’d learned it from Shadow, had she told the truth?
“Well, yeah,” Pel said, “but that was before the magic all got collected. It would disperse out to harmlessness eventually, I think, but if I just turn it loose now it’ll be like an explosion.”
“Are you sure?” Amy asked.
“No,” Pel admitted. “Look, Amy, you go on; I can always open the gate up again and go home. But I can’t ever come back-once I leave, the portal closes and the matrix comes apart. So I want to do whatever I can here first.”