"I'm not familiar with 'science fiction writers,' Kenneth Houghton," Wencit replied. "But to call our universes 'parallel,' might actually be a good way to describe it. Or, at least, as good a way as I've ever heard anyone else suggest."

"You can call me Ken, not Kenneth," Houghton said. His voice was harsher than he'd intended as a familiar stab of remembered loss went through him. He'd always disliked his first name. In fact, Gwynn was the only one who had ever been able to call him "Kenneth" without making him feel like some sort of dweeb.

"Ken?" Wencit repeated, then made a sound suspiciously like a chuckle.

"Well,Ken," he said after a moment, "as I was saying, our universes may not precisely be 'parallel,' but time is proceeding at the same rate and in the same direction in both of them. I suppose the best way to describe the differences between them is to say that each of our universes was formed out of the many differing possible outcomes of an inconceivable number of separate events. Judging from your appearance, your equipment, and the fact that sorcery is obviously as strange to you as your equipment appears to me, our universes must have diverged long, long ago.

"Which," he continued in a more serious tone, "leaves me even more puzzled about how my spell could have reached so far afield from its intended destination. And how you could have arrived in the flesh, as it were. Usually, when you try to move people between universes, all you actually manage to summon is a shadowman, a sort of . . . doppelganger, I suppose you'd call it, rather than the actual individual. I'm almost beginning to wonder if someone else didn't have a finger in this particular pie."

"You know . . . Wencit," Houghton said, "the thing that worries me most right this minute is that I'm starting to feel like you're actually making sense."

Wencit chuckled at Houghton's desert-dry tone. Then he shook his head again.