Eternity's Wheel by Neil Gaiman

the mechanisms that stillworked. Such as activating the solar panels.
    â€œAt least we’ll have some power once the sun rises overhead,” I said, flipping a long line of switches that activated the panels all over the roof of the main building.
    â€œSo this is both a ship and a town, sort of,” Josephine observed, carefully watching what I was doing.
    â€œYeah. The whole thing is a ship—it just doesn’t look like one. It doesn’t look enclosed, but it is. At least, it is when the shields are working, so we can phase to worlds that don’t have the right kind of air for us.”
    â€œBut this world does, right?”
    â€œObviously, or we wouldn’t be breathing.”
    â€œHow did you know it would?”
    â€œI’ve been here before. The ship can’t phase without the engines, and the engines don’t run without power. I knew it’d be in the same place.”
    â€œSo we can phase again if we get power?”
    â€œMaybe. I know power makes the ship run, but I don’t know exactly how we make it phase. I know how HEX and Binary do it with their ships, but . . .” I shook my head. That wasn’t on the table.
    â€œHow?” I should have seen that question coming.
    â€œThey use us,” I said as bluntly as I could to keep from discussing it further. “They take our ability to Walk and use it for their own ships.”
    She pressed her lips together, looking away. Even as newto this as she was, she knew what it was like to Walk, and I think she already couldn’t imagine having that taken away. I knew how she felt.
    â€œCome on,” I said, flipping one final switch. “It’s time for a lesson.”
    I hadn’t really bothered looking out any windows the last time I was here. I’d been in too much of a hurry, too desperate to get back to where I belonged. Back then, I’d assumed the ship was still floating above the ground, cruising along at about five thousand feet as usual.
    I’d realized it slowly as we made our way through the ship this time, but we were actually docked: completely and utterly still. We were sitting on the ground in a wide-open field, nothing but grassy plains visible as far as the eye could see. There might have been a sparkle of water in the distance, but it could just as easily have been a trick of the light.
    â€œAre we alone on the planet, too?” Josephine asked, once she’d taken in the size of InterWorld itself. We weren’t talking the size of New York or anything, but it certainly would have taken a while to walk all the way around it.
    â€œDepends on your definition,” I said, pointing to a group of butterflies collecting around some flowers. “We’re the only people. This is a prehistoric world.”
    â€œBut I thought we were in the future.”
    I paused. Oh, boy. This is about to get complicated . “We are. But InterWorld operates on a broad spectrum of locations.Not just back and forth”—I moved my hand from side to side—“but forward and backward. There are thousands of different dimensions programmed into the soliton array engines, but only three basic Earths. The ship moves—or moved—forward and backward in time over a certain period, as well as sideways into different dimensions on those three Earths. Even though the ship can move further into the future, we tend to stay in prehistoric times and move sideways. Less chance of startling the locals that way.”
    She was glaring at me. “Did you actually answer my question, or did you just spout a bunch of bull—”
    â€œSorry, sorry. I got carried away. Basically, we are not in the future. We’re in the past, because that was the last place this InterWorld docked. But this InterWorld came here, to the past of this world, from the future.”
    She frowned, considering. “But . . . we went into the future. Sort of. I mean, that’s what it felt