Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (38 page)

“But they’re not holding anymore,” Gelert said.

The Elf-King shook his head. “It was never more than a stopgap measure. Terra is as much a part of the sheaf as we are, horrible thought though that might be. And even if some other world didn’t find them, they were likely enough to find us, eventually. They’ve got their own MacIlwains, working in high-energy physics right this minute. Fortunately, most of their research in physics is crippled by penny-pinching governments who have no inkling of what it’s good for.” He looked grim. “But it doesn’t matter now. Your own people, and then the Tierrans, found Terra. By doing so they’ve pulled open a door that we can no longer keep closed, though we did our best. Now that they know Terra exists, the leakage of conditions there has begun. It’ll get much worse when actual commerce begins between Terra and the other worlds; a matter of no more than a couple of years now, I’d guess. This world’s ways, and ideas, and maybe even its ethical constant, will start to seep into yours. Eventually it will seep into Alfheim, too. And what happens in our world—”

Laurin broke off, like a man trying to avoid making a vision real by not giving voice to it. “And you can see it starting already, the pattern…repeating, spreading and growing in violence since Terra was rediscovered. Our people are being killed in ever-increasing numbers, though there always seem to be other reasons behind the killings. Politics, always; our people are too political. Those who oppose me, those who support me, those who think they can do without me—they’ve been savaging one another, using Alfen abroad as their tools, killing each other’s tools more and more often. The factions think they see their way clearly…”

“But they’re being played off against each other by those with another set of agendas,” Lee said. “The multinationals. The national powers and supranational in every world, who see that the Elves control all the fairy gold, and it costs them too much. At least that’s their excuse; it’s bad for business. But the truth is that they want that control for themselves. And it’s easy to hate the Alfen. They’re not really people, are they…” The joke began repeating itself in her head. 
What do you call a thousand dead Alfen? Ten
 
thousand? A hundred thousand? A start…

Slowly, Laurin nodded. “They’ve seized on this idea as the perfect way to maximize their bottom lines,” he said. “They have their private armies; they even have nuclear weapons. Those have never been used before… not like in poor Terra. But they will be now, as that possibility also occurs to the multinationals, who aren’t territorial and have least to lose. They’ll come to Alfheim, and my people—wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, unwilling to compromise or empathize with ephemerals—will be wiped out without mercy. Humankind will take possession. But they won’t know how to manage our world’s centrality, or contain the damage they’ve done by killing us.”

Another long silence followed. Lee gulped. “If Alfheim is so central that what happens there eventually happens to every other world…”

The Elf-King looked at Lee, and nodded. “Within decades or less, all our worlds will lie empty of everything but corpses. That’s the nightmare that’s chased me from universe to universe, these last three centuries, these last five years…and now it’s starting to happen at last.”

They walked in silence for a while. “Where are we heading, exactly?” Lee said.

“East, and a little farther downtown,” the Elf-King said. “There’s another potential ‘rogue’ access nearby; we can use it to get out of here, and slow down the pursuit a little more.”

He waited until they came to the next corner, gazed up at the sign. “This is it,” Laurin said. “East from here.”

They crossed Sixth Avenue. “It’s weird,” Lee said absently, while her mind was turning over the awful things the Elf-King had told them. “Except for the vehicles, the place looks normal.” She glanced down Sixth Avenue. “But where’s the World Trade Center gone?”

Gelert glanced down the way she was looking, shrugged his ears, winced. “Other side of the island, maybe? This 
is
 an alternate universe…”

They went on down Ninth Street, past the brownstones, mostly ignored by passersby who saw nothing but a man, a woman and a very big white dog, possibly some kind of wolfhound. Lee, for her own part, was finding it increasingly difficult just to be in this space; it itched, burning on her skin, and she wondered how the people here bore it. This was not a world that was kind to life. Her lungs were burning, too, not just with smog. The air here was full of something unfriendlier still, the presence of a universe that didn’t care anymore, if it ever had. 
How do you make a universe stop paying attention to
 
what happens in it? How badly do you have to hurt it that it turns its back on what’s living in it and just lies there, passive, unwilling to get involved?
 For she couldn’t shake the feeling that this place hadn’t always been this way; its ethical constant hadn’t always been this low, couldn’t have been. Something had to have happened.

Or you hope it did
, the colder side of her mind answered her back. 
What if it was always this way? What if this is a perfectly normal way for some universes to be? And what if, when our sheaf
 
rotates again someday, more universes are created like this—or worse?

That was a thought too awful to entertain. 
It has to be possible to heal such places
, Lee thought, 
or to
 
keep them from happening. If there was any way, any way in the worlds—

They went around the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, Laurin leading the way at a steady pace, heading uptown again now, looking always to the left of the street. Every now and then he gazed up at one or another of the buildings he passed. Finally, in front of one, an apartment building, he stopped.

Lee and Gelert caught up with him. The Elf-King looked up at the facade of the building, a golden brick Beaux Arts building shorn of most of its ornament over many years, then walked on again, toward the next corner. “This is the place,” he said.

Lee glanced back at the building. “What place?”

“In New York,” he said, “—the New York in Earth, anyway, this is where our embassy to the UN&ME is located.”

“Doesn’t do us a lot of good here,” Gelert said.

“But it does,” Laurin said. “The Alfen Embassy has a gating ring in it.”

Lee and Gelert exchanged glances. The three of them paused at the corner, looking back the way they’d come, while oblivious passersby avoided them. “That piece of real estate is accustomed to being used for transits between Alfheim and the other worlds many times each day,” the Elf-King said. “Such concentrated use means that the immediate neighborhood acquires resonances to other congruent spots in the neighboring worlds. Like this one.”

“You mean we can get out from here—”

The Elf-King looked down the street, back the way they’d come, a nervous glance. “We should have enough time. I can’t manipulate this world as easily as I can my own, no matter how powerful the local congruences are, but it should still work, thanks to this—” He tossed the pebble in his hand, pocketed it again. “Come on,” Lee said.

They headed back down the block, passing by the frontage of the building again, more slowly this time. The Elf-King gave the front of the building no more than a glance; the building’s doorman, a burly man in a long uniform coat, was standing there, looking at them without any tremendous interest, but noticing them nonetheless. “It’s your fault,” Lee muttered under her breath to Gelert. “You stick out like a white elephant.”

“I was hoping for a gateway,” Laurin said, as they passed a few doors down. “One of those alleys they have beside these buildings, sometimes, for access to utilities…the place where you leave the garbage for pickup.”

It had never occurred to Lee that the King of All the Elves would notice, one way or another, what humans did with their garbage. She smiled, and beside her, Gelert made a couple of the small huffing sounds he used for audible laughter. “Not on an avenue,” Gelert said. “But around the corner, on a side street, maybe. Let’s have a look.”

They headed around the corner again, but that whole side of the street was another large apartment building, and the barred gateway beside it led visibly down a dead-end alley and nowhere else. “We’ll have to go around the block,” Gelert said. He trotted on down the street, and Lee and the Elf-King trotted after him as if in pursuit of some refugee from the local leash laws.

“Will you need help with this gating?” Lee said.

“Probably it’s better you let me handle it,” Laurin said. “It wouldn’t do for this particular transit to become deranged.”

“The problem with you,” Lee said, “is that you’re a control freak.”

The Elf-King grinned, and it was as feral an expression, for just a flash, as anything Lee had ever seen on Gelert. “By definition,” he said. “Control is all a Laurin’s for. One who doesn’t, is dead.” He looked ahead. “Where did he go?”

“Right—”

They went right around the next corner, their pace flagging a little, but Gelert was still trotting strongly ahead of them. Lee saw a few concerned pedestrians shy away from him to either side of the sidewalk as he came running down toward them, tongue lolling out and big jaws wide, a frizzy-coated white shape ten hands high. “Sorry,” Lee called to them as she and the Elf-King ran past, “he gets out like this every day…”

When he stopped at last, and they caught up with him, they were facing a blind black metal gate at least ten feet high that shut away the alley behind it from view. Gelert reared up against it with his forepaws, shaking the gate until it clanged. “Not locked,” he said. “Bolted from the inside, though.”

“Oh, great—” Lee said.

Gelert sat down. Lee gave him a look. “Gel—”

The spring took her completely by surprise. Gelert was tall enough to begin with, and the strength of those powerful haunches sent him a good six feet into the air: he threw his forelegs over the top of the gate like a high jumper trying to clear the bar, hung there in a most undignified position for some moments as his hind feet scrabbled and scratched at the sheer front of the gate for purchase—then found it, tipped himself over the top, and fell to the concrete on the other side. There was a yelp.

“Gelert? Gel, are you all right?” Lee said.

There was a long pause, too long. “Uh,” Gelert said after a moment. “I came down wrong. Might have broken a tooth.”

“Oh, Gel!”

“Might break another one,” Gelert’s voice came from the other side of the gate. “Told you we shouldn’t scrimp on our dental plan. Let’s see what I can do about this bolt.”

They waited. Not far away, horns honked, and all around them life went on; people passed and looked with some slight curiosity at a man and a woman hanging around an alley service door…but it was the man they looked at, and Lee knew all too well the expression that was beginning to grow on their faces.

Some of the people passing paused, then moved on; but the pauses were getting longer. “Come on, we’re getting obvious here,” Lee said softly. “Don’t just stand there looking the way you do.”

The expression in Laurin’s eyes as they flashed sidewise at her was edged “What do you suggest?”

She reached out and took him by the arm and turned him toward the door, bent her head toward his. “The only reason people stop in the middle of the street like this,” she said softly, “is if they’re exchanging sweet nothings, or having a fight. So if you’ll just—”

As he bowed his own head toward hers, Lee found herself looking into his eyes again. It was astonishing how very dark a brown they were, almost black; and how very old. And not just his own two thousand years were there, Lee thought, but something more alarming—a terrible arrested youth, in abeyance for who knew how long now, waiting for who knew what liberation; but never realistically expecting to find it. Here was a king who even though he had fought his way to more freedom than any of his predecessors, was still prisoner of his throne, trapped in a situation which often enough had left him wondering whether death might be preferable. But now he was faced with a challenge desperate enough to shake even that idle surmise to fragments. Now death might indeed be coming after him, but he would resist it to the last, if only for the chance of finding the answer, finding—

To see oneself in another’s eyes can strike any human heart deep; but Lee Saw herself there, not in any way she had expected, and without warning. Pierced, not knowing what it meant, what 
he
 meant or wanted, she staggered, almost fell against him, but was startled out of it by a soft groan in front of her—

—as the bolt inside the gate popped out of its socket and ran back, and the gate swung open in front of them. There stood Gelert, licking his chops and looking both uncomfortable and satisfied. “Henry the Magic Dentist is going to be cross with me when I get home,” he said.

Lee and the Elf-King went in past him. Gelert pushed the gate closed again and followed them. The space beyond them was narrow: four high walls, two of them blank, two of them with windows up high that belonged to the apartment building, and some lower ones and a couple of doors that were utility entrances. The ground was stained concrete, cracked in places. The Elf-King walked in a short arc across it, then paused.

“Well?” Gelert said.

“This is it,” the Elf-King said. “Still open…but not for long.” He stood still a moment, then started walking again, pacing out the bounds of the gating circle.

Lee twitched again, feeling the inimical quality of this world fraying at her composure. “Are you sure this is going to work?” she said.

“It has little choice,” the Elf-King said absently, as he finished the circle he was making in the little concreted space. “All spaces are continually trying to become all the other spaces that were created at the same time the core of their sheaf rotated. The difficult thing isn’t bringing them together, as a rule; it’s keeping them apart…”

He stood up straight, then, with a grim look on his face. “Crude,” the Elf-King said. “But it’ll work. You saw the circle? Step in, and we’ll go where my own power is centered.”