Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (21 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “my name is Isif dil’Hemrev. I’ve been assigned by the Elf-King’s Office as one of the Committee’s liaison officers, and I’ll be assisting in escorting you to your various destinations in Alfheim. Would you follow me, please?”

Everybody picked up or poked or kicked their assorted luggage and went after her, slowly, as dil’Hemrev made her way over to the hex cluster that had been flagged for the Alfheim transit. It went transparent as she approached it, without any sign of her having used one of the usual activation keypads that port gating personnel usually carried. Lee gave Gelert a look; together they lined up behind Per Olafsson and a few others and began entering the hex.

A presence to her left and a sudden scent of bitter lime made Lee glance that way. “ExAff,” Mellie Hopkins said under her breath, without looking at Lee.

“Sorry?”

“Alfen Bureau of External Affairs,” Hopkins said softly, amid the rustle of footsteps and jostling luggage, as she stepped into the hex beside Lee and Gelert. “She’s a spook.”

Lee put her eyebrows up. She’d been of the opinion that pretty much everybody they’d see from this point on would have been a government operative of some kind or another. At least Hopkins shared it. “Pretty one, though,” Lee said very softly.

Hopkins snorted. “Pretty is as pretty does, and her heart’s as black as her hair,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Ran into her on an antitrust case a few years ago. I’d like to feed her to a jesh, except it’d give the thing indigestion.”

Lee made a wry expression but said nothing. “Is everybody in?” dil’Hemrev said. “Good, we’ll transit right away then.” The walls opaqued.

Lee swallowed and braced herself for the usual hula, but was surprised when suddenly the wall of the cubicle behind her vanished. 
What happened? They forget somebody?
 was her first thought. 
What
 
went wrong?
 But dil’Hemrev was gesturing them out. “This way, everyone, if you please…”

Another layer of security?
 Lee thought, confused. But she followed dil’Hemrev out with the others, and quickly saw that wherever this was, it wasn’t Kennedy anymore.

She and the others were standing under a dome more like that of LAX’s main terminal than anything else: maybe only a quarter mile or so across, but impressive enough in that it wasn’t Fuller-braced, but used instead a more widely spaced bracing system more reminiscent of Gothic arches than anything else, the ribs as transparent as the glazing between them. Through the dome poured the cool, faint amber light of a sky shrouded in high haze: Lee was strongly reminded of an afternoon during her last visit to San Francisco. But another thought was more to the forefront at the moment. 
I didn’t feel anything! How
 
did they do that?

She followed the others out of the hex cluster, glancing back at it. It was in the center of that big space: there were no other clusters, just that single one of seven cells. 
Somebody’s private ring?
 Lee wondered.

“Interesting,” Gelert said under his breath as he padded along beside her. “No controls. None that we could see, anyway.”

“Not as interesting as completely getting rid of the transit side effects,” Lee said softly. “If they could bottle that and sell it, they’d make nearly as much as they do from FG futures.”

Dil’Hemrev paused in the middle of the space, letting the commission members gather around her. They were all looking around them in slight confusion: there was no one else in all this big space but them. “Do we need to wait for transport?” Olafsson asked dil’Hemrev.

She shook her head, smiled, glanced up. Lee and the others followed her glance. Above them, the quality of the light coming through the dome changed suddenly, subtly, and it took the moment during which the first breeze reached Lee and ruffled her hair for her to understand that the glazing, whatever it was made of, had simply gone away. A second or so later the bracing that had supported that glazing began to slip away, running down the “surface” of where the dome ought to have been like rain running down a windowpane, contracting toward the shining white floor, vanishing. They were standing on a white island in the middle of a placid sea, and off to one side, the westering sun eased itself through fading veils of passing cloud and slowly came out in a splendor of tarnished gold.

“It’s a nice day,” dil’Hemrev said. “I thought we might put the top down.”

Lee was both impressed and faintly annoyed at the staggeringly offhanded display of technology, for to her eye there was a message added: 
Bet you don’t have anything like this.
 Seeing it, though, she had second thoughts about how few hex clusters stood under the dome. 
They probably have a whole
 
battery of matter-handlers in the floor, so that they can manifest clusters on demand, as many as
 
they need.
 But then that kind of matter handling, based on Bose-Einstein condensates, needed huge amounts of fairy gold. 
Which they unquestionably have…

There was the slightest shudder: the floor moved, settled. Everybody shuffled a little, balancing themselves. Dil’Hemrev turned, and most of the other commission members turned to look the way she was looking. There was some low cloud on the horizon: but the wind now ruffling all their hair and clothes was running through it, and it started to break and slip away.

“Suzanne H. Christ,” Gelert said under his breath. “Will you look at that.”

Lee looked at the near horizon, as the island on which they all stood began slowly to move toward it, and thought of all the old stories about the city of Ys, Ys of the bells, which sank beneath the sea. 
But which
 
sea?
 Lee thought. The old stories got so tangled over and through one another, even in the same universe—let alone with stories from other universes. Which world had had a king intent on building a city so splendid that all the men of his time would call it parYs, “like Ys” or equal to it?

Now, looking at that city’s towers as they gazed down at themselves in a sea all brazen-blazing with afternoon, Lee thought that the poor king would have had his work cut out for him, if this was the city he meant. Described broadly, the place wouldn’t have sounded all that special. A bay, the city following the line of the bay around, the spires of its greatest buildings centered on the center of the bay, dwindling in height as they spread around the crescent: handsomely designed, yes, the shapes of the towers sleek, varied and elegant, the colors and materials varied, too. It all looked planned, even studied. There was nothing haphazard or spontaneous about it, and it was unquestionably a work of art—nothing “extra” there, everything building necessary to the design, everything contributing to the effect as a whole.

Yet all your breath was taken away, not by the size of the buildings or the ambition of the design: nothing so heartless. Somehow this skyline said to you, not “I am great, I am powerful,” but “I am fragile, I am temporary.” Some immortal architect or planner, had looked on the passing things of the world and felt sorry for them—all the common, mortal, material elements of life, the things that crumble and fade and are outlived. That builder or designer had found a way to make the stone and the steel and glass themselves express that sorrow. And somehow the feeling came to you, across the water: it struck you about the heart, so that you gasped with the immediacy of it, and with the feeling that you and that city were kindred somehow.

“Welcome to Alfheim,” dil’Hemrev said. “Welcome to Ys.”

Lee blinked back the tears without being particularly concerned who might notice, for nearly everyone else in the commission party was either wiping their eyes furtively or looking for some way to turn to avoid having others see them doing it. One or two of them were actually crying on other commission members’ shoulders, overcome, and plainly mortified by it.

Dil’Hemrev looked around at them, grave. “The… distress… will pass shortly,” she said. “I apologize for not having mentioned it earlier, but some guests don’t experience it, and we’ve found that mentioning the effect can actually induce it. The phenomenon seems to have something to do with the angle of orientation of the transit between our home universe and Earth’s: it’s much greater than usual. Please accept our apologies.”

There was no immediate answer but some subdued snuffling. “The accelerator ring,” Lee said after a moment to dil’Hemrev, for she gathered that it would be a few moments before any of the others were ready to speak, “it was right under us, wasn’t it? It follows the arms of the bay around…”

Dil’Hemrev nodded. “It was installed under the seabed here, about forty years ago, around the same time the city was expanded and redesigned. It’s not our biggest access ring, but probably the most powerful.”

Lee nodded and gazed at the city again, and past it. Behind it, maybe fifty miles to the east, a range of massive, spiky, jagged peaks rose up and up behind it, matching the towers in symmetry, but rendered indistinct by distance and low cloud—an insubstantial barrier, half airbrushed-out in the pale gold of misty afternoon. They made the composition complete, for they were the permanence against which that fragility had to be balanced to make sense. Beautiful though they were, Lee found herself ever so slightly irked not to know what to call them. 
It’s amazing how little we know about this place
, she thought, 
even though it’s been part of the Five-Geneva Pact for ninety years. Most of their maps are
 
classified, and even the ones that aren’t have big empty spaces all over them. Paranoia?…

Lee blinked again, starting to be annoyed at the irrational tears, and paused to fumble through her bag for a hanky. Still, even paranoiacs have real enemies. 
They probably have their reasons, l just wish we
 
knew more about them.

The target platform kept on progressing across the water, heading for the city. Lee was surprised by how little it rocked as it went. 
Either they’ve got really wonderful stabilizing systems on this thing
, she thought, 
or it’s absolutely massive.
 It occurred to her that the ring’s whole actuating apparatus could well be stowed away in this structure, making the gating complex even more secure. Moving it would be like removing the key from a door: without the gate targets and the actuator in place, the whole accelerator circle would be useless. 
More paranoia? Or just clever design? Or both?

Slowly they slid closer to the city, between the arms of the bay, and finally headed over toward its right-hand side, where there were some docks for boats—hovercraft and hydrofoils, as well as yachts of all sizes, and more mundane sailcraft, in about equal proportions, with the lower skyscrapers of the city towering over them all. “Looks like a millionaires’ convention,” Mellie muttered just behind Lee.

Lee nodded, feeling the whole platform slow as they approached what looked like a curving glass wall jutting out into the water. The circle of the platform slid ever so slowly up against it, then snugged, softly but very solidly, into something far below. Lee could feel several different sets of vibrations, each terminating in a gentle “closing” shock that came up through the floor. 
This has to be the whole
 
actuator array
, she thought. 
If one of us has to leave here in a hurry for some reason, this isn’t
 
going to be the way to do it.

The glass wall before them slipped down to ground level and vanished as the dome had done. “This way, please,” dil’Hemrev said, leading them off the island and onto a long white marble jetty that joined what looked like a wide curved promenade paralleling the shoreline. The commission members followed her, gazing up and around at the buildings by the shore.

“We won’t be needing ground transport,” dil’Hemrev said; “all your accommodations are a few minutes’ walk from here, and they back right up against the three buildings that make up Ys’s ‘financial district.’ ”

“Very convenient,” Olafsson said. Lee could just hear him thinking what she was sure some of the others were thinking too:
how convenient that we’ll see as little as possible of the city without Alfen guides hanging around.
She glanced at Gelert, who was innocently doing a good imitation of a tourist, gaping at everything: the look of witless wonder he threw her was as clear a comment as Lee needed.

After just a couple of minutes the group came up to a tall and graceful building with a cafe terrace in front of it As dil’Hemrev led them up the walk that bisected the cafe and toward the main doors of the building, Lee began to twitch a little at the looks from the Alfen who sat in the cafe, drinking their wine, or eating their meals, and who now paused to stare, coolly, at the new arrivals. 
The shoe’s on the other foot now
, Lee thought 
Here we’re the exotica… and we’re not entirely welcome.

The group made their way in through doors that vanished to admit them, and saw from the logo on the far wall of the entry hall that this was a hotel. “I didn’t know Hilton operated here,” Olafsson said to dil’Hemrev.

“We run it for them under license,” said dil’Hemrev. “The same kind of arrangement they have with their properties in Midgarth. Come on over this way, we’ll get you checked in.”

Lee followed the others to the reception desk, meanwhile thinking that this kind of setup was “convenient” for the Alfen, too: it meant that only local people would be running the hotel. 
I really have
 
to watch this blanket paranoia…
 she thought, as a smiling Alfen woman took Lee’s SlipCase to wave it over the registration reader, then handed it back to her. “Suite 312,” she said, taking the SlipCase that Gelert proffered her in his jaws, “enjoy your stay. Good afternoon, sir…”

Lee looked over the case, which was now showing her directions to the room and a thumbnail layout: the suite had a common living area and two bedrooms. Olafsson and several others who had already finished checking in had gathered around dil’Hemrev and were looking up from the reservations gallery into the center of the hotel atrium, in which a huge stylized fabric sculpture of some kind of winged creature hung, all done in flame-colors and seemingly caught in the act of soaring toward the roof and the starry stained glass ceiling at the top of the atrium. Lee joined the others, looking up at it.