I didn't get into this story, though I've liked some of Gary's other stories strongly.
I think the reason that I didn't like the story is that the focus of the story seemed to be on the least interesting parts of the story. The part that I thought was the most interesting was Evie's desperate and successful effort to save everyone on the ship, but which had some unintended consequences. That set of events where Evie is trying to salvage a situation gone horribly horribly wrong was my main point of interest in the story. That was badass, but happened entirely off-stage, and instead we are left with only the dull and uninteresting consequences of the ship swap.
The consequences of the ship swap could be summed up as: "If you unexpectedly find yourself in possession of a bunch of crap you don't care about, it would be a good idea to research whether someone else cares about it enough to pay you monies for it." Which isn't all that novel of a concept--that's what shows like "Antiques Roadshow" are all about, finding huge money in crap you've got lying around. Which, in both universes, they are traveling merchants, so they bloody well ought to have known that already. Traveling merchants aren't producers, they are movers of goods, and they add value to their goods by moving them from a place which values them less to a place that values them more--basically it is the potential difference in cash value that powers their ship. The only thing that defines value is whether someone is willing to pay for it, so you're a really poor traveling merchant if you don't do a little research when you get a load of junk.
The fact that Evie was from a booze-hounding planet wasn't really all that important, apart from the fact that her prior knowledge would minimize the amount of research needed to find a potential buyer, but that information could've been found by Alejandro with a little effort if he didn't spend all of his time playing Angry Lazy Eeyore. I would say that Evie's origins were a convenient plot contrivance to make her seem valuable to Alejandro, but one could reasonably say the presence of rare booze was a consequence of her counterpart having similar origins, so the plot details justify that reasonably well.
I want a story that focuses around the important and novel part of the story--accidentally colliding with your parallel universe counterparts and having to jury-rig a solution to allow everyone to survive.
