Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (19 page)

“Nothing concrete yet. I think their people have to get together with the FP’s Office and synchronize everybody’s schedules. Plus we’re probably all going to have background checks run on us first…”

“In our case, I suspect they’ve been run already,” Lee said. “Have you looked over Matt’s little note?”

“All fifty-three pages of it.”

“Is it going to be enough?”

Gelert looked up from his pad. “Well, the language is fairly robust.”

“It’s going to have to be, if we’re going to be successfully extradited after they chuck us in jail over there.”

Gelert sighed. “That little reference to lost cultural artifacts…” he said. “Was that pointed at us, I wonder?”

“Hmm. Paranoia, Gel…?”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“It sounded more like general exculpation to me,” Lee said. “A kindly way of saying, ‘Some of you guys ran amuck in our universe two centuries ago and stole “magical” things from us, and they blew you up, remember? So don’t be surprised that we’re so sensitive. And don’t get cute, because you still don’t know how those things work, or how 
we
 don’t get blown up by them.’—Nyaah, nyaah.”

Gelert chuckled.

“And it might have been aimed at us, too,” Lee said, resigned, “so don’t ask 
me
. I have no idea who my mystery caller might have spoken to, or who’s behind him, or indeed who may right this minute be wringing him out in some exclusive clinic with whatever the Alfen use for babble juice, or even Sight.”

“It’s been giving me some concern,” Gelert said. “…You scrambled?”

“Yes.”

“The things we were discussing…if they exist, their affiliation with a certain entity would seem to indicate they’re potentially far more powerful than other, more mundane objects,” Gelert said. “I had a look at some of the reports on the artifacts removed from Alfheim during the Tierran raiders’ ‘acquisitive period.’ Universal law itself, in Tierra anyway, was profoundly subverted in places when these items were brought in…gravity, lightspeed, other forces and powers that are usually well beyond human interference.”

“Justice?” Lee said softly.

“Hard to tell,” Gelert said. “I didn’t see anything in the literature. But if that was true…if you knew what to do with it, maybe even if you didn’t…such an object could alter how one perceived the truth, even with the Sight.”

“Break a case open,” Lee said, “or destroy it. Possibly pervert Justice Herself…”

Gelert shook his head. “Or maybe just blow a hole in the LA area the size of Lake Val San Fernando,” Gelert said, “the way a little jade statuette about two inches high blew up the Tierran gating complex at Mexica.”

Lee sat there for a moment. ” ‘Hagen knows what you know,’ said my caller.” She mused. “‘All is revealed…’ Probably it’s smarter for us to act as if the Alfen on the other side know exactly what our caller told us, too.”

“But do they know what we’re going to do about it?” Gelert said.

“Right now,” Lee said, glancing at the screen and wondering how secure the scrambling really was, “I’m going to forget about it. We have the dil’Sorden case to go over, with an eye to where we’re going to be, what information is likely to be made available to us, and what we might be able to push them into releasing that they don’t really want to.”

“I’ve got a little list,” Gelert said. Behind him, Gilbert and Sullivan started playing. One of the pups, Fhionn, Lee thought, woke up, twitched his ears, then sat up and started to howl along.

Lee smiled, sat back, and looked at the list Gelert showed her; and they started to make their plans.

Several hours later, when they were done, Lee got up and went to make herself a sandwich. She had shut the screen down, but left the commlink active, feeding the linkage from her implant into it; and that link she was sure was secure… here, anyway.

So now we wait to see if our unknown friend comes out of the woodwork again to see what we’re
 
going to do
, she said, watching the Palmerrand characters stream by along the bottom of her field of vision. 
With an eye to finding out more of what this is all about. Because, by God, if we’re going to
 
be used as pawns by him or the people behind him, we’re going to be alert pawns… ready to use
 
whatever we find to our own advantage, and “take” anything that gets too close.

And when we’re over there
, Gelert said, 
we make damned sure we don’t get caught with
 
somebody’s roses actually in our teeth. I’m none too confident in Matt’s wonderful piece of
 
paper, or even of the protection of the UN&ME.

But if we look like we’re looking…then we draw our mystery man out a little further.

Which I would like to do
, Gelert said, 
since I want to know why we’re suddenly so attractive as
 
tools. But in the meantime, all we can do is tidy up our work and be ready for the call.

*

The official announcement by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office of the Hemispheres Union came three days later. 
Not too eager
, Lee thought, 
but not too slow, either…in case someone was thinking about
 
changing their mind.
 The investigative committee was a group of twenty-five accountants, fiscal analysts, police, and Federal detective staff, and three “coordinators” whose function, Lee thought, was probably merely political. 
Ruffled-feather smoothers…
 But she and Gelert were the only ones in the group who were psychoforensically trained: a fact that both interested Lee and bothered her. They were all directed to meet their Alfen escort in two days’ time at the gating complex at JFK to begin their work.

Lee and Gelert both spent the next two days at the office, dealing with loose ends. It was quite late, the night before their departure, when Lee stuck her head out into the front office: both Gelert and Mass had already left. “Larry? Ten minutes.”

“Right, Ms. Enfield.”

She shut the door, looked around to see if there was anything else she needed to pack from the office. Her travel pad already had all the casework for the dil’Sorden murder packed away in it, along with other relevant case law and a hundred other odds and ends of data she’d thought she might be able to use. There was nothing in there, though, that had anything to do with the various confidential information searches she and Gelert had been running of late. Better to keep that safe in her head…
as safe as even
 
that is, anymore…

The commlink rang. Lee stood still for a moment. 
I was half expecting this…
 she thought, glancing down at the desktop to make sure that the recording facility was working.

“Reh’Mechren and Enfield,” she said, “good evening…”

This time there was at least a shape looking back at her from the commwall…but only a shadowy one, silhouetted but only indefinitely; a shape that might be human, might not, the way it wavered. “So what I predicted has happened,” the voice said.

“Yes,” Lee said. “Could this possibly be because you set it up?”

The subsequent silence actually managed to sound surprised. “Not sure how I would have managed that.”

“Neither am I,” Lee said, “but then I have no idea who or what you are.”

Silence again. “And what are you going to do there?” the voice finally said.

“My job.”

“Even if it may bring you into personal danger?”

“It’s done that before. One of the little perks. I’ll take my chances, I guess.”

“And what about the roses?”

“What about them?”

“I see,” the voice said. This time its tone was too even to betray anything of the user’s thought.

“I doubt that,” Lee said—but it was too late: the line had already gone dead.

She sat back down at her desk again, looking at the commwall, which had reverted to methane snow and Saturn, gibbous at the moment, the rings casting a knife-edge shadow on the swirls of vague golden cloud below. 
What am I getting myself into
, she thought. 
Or more accurately: what am I being set
 
up for?

There was no telling. Yet she couldn’t back out. Even Matt, damn him, had been right. Lee was in with a chance to discover the truth about something important. 
If I had more of a hint what it might be…

But no such hints were going to be forthcoming. She was just going to have to go in there and See what she could see, and hope to get out of Alfheim again with information that would be of use in their case.

She touched the desk. “Save that,” she said. “Flag it for Matt’s attention: store it in ‘safekeeping’ and encrypt a copy for the double redundancy file.”

The desk flickered the commcall’s file designator at her, then vanished it, confirming storage. Lee touched the desk down into standby mode, picked up her pad and her bag, and left.

Larry brought Lee back to the house, checked it one last time. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning early, Ms. Enfield,” Larry said. “Then the Alfen will be handling security for you after the gates, my boss says.”

“Back to Homicide, huh?” Lee said.

Larry grinned. “For the immediate future.”

“The happy hunting grounds. Have a good time, Larry…”

Lee locked up, and Larry drove off. 
Time to pack
, she thought. She headed into the bedroom.

And what about the roses?
 the voice said, in memory. 

 She was still uncertain of the answer.

*7*

Gelert was waiting for her at the curb with his hoverpack, sitting there with his ears up and his coat bristling a little. “I know, I know,” Lee said as she got out of the hov and went around to the trunk to help Larry with her bag. “I’m late, I’m sorry…”

“Good luck, Ms. Enfield,” Larry said, shaking Lee’s hand. “Good luck, 
Madra
 Gelert. Good hunting…”

“Thanks, Larry. Take care,” Lee said. And he was gone.

“Off to Homicide,” Lee said with a slight smile. “Bodyguarding isn’t the right work for him. I hope they don’t reassign the poor guy to me when I get back…”

“Well, he did a good job,” Gelert said. “Meanwhile, what kept you?”

Lee guided her bag up onto the curb and started digging around for her travel slips. “I overslept.”

” 
Today?
 You have to be kidding me.”

Lee shook her head, annoyed at herself. “I couldn’t get to sleep,” she said. “When I finally did, I’d turned the alarm off, because I didn’t think I was going to sleep at all…”

They walked into the terminal under its great dome, half a mile across. The sun glittered off the Fuller dome’s myriad mirror-polished joints as Lee and Gelert threaded their way among thousands of other passengers, heading for the target clusters at the core of the dome space. LAX was a breakaway from the basic “engagement ring” architecture popular worldwide for gating facilities. The FG-augmented magnets that served the new generation of accelerators had made it possible to bend the targeting path so acutely that gating clusters could be sited directly on top of the ring: and LAPort, taking advantage of this technology, had used it to consolidate under the one dome all the facilities that would normally have been strung out along miles of a ring’s circumference at multiple fixed targets. “It’s beautiful in weather like this,” Lee said, “when the sun comes in…”

“You mean, it started to be beautiful once they got the air conditioning problem handled.”

“Well, that didn’t take them so long. But I still hate all the walking…”

Gelert produced a grin. “You mean you wouldn’t rather be stuck on a nice maglev for hours at a time?”

“Please,” Lee said. They came up to the central ring of check-in desks, found the ones with the TransCon logo showing on the displays above them, and gave the attendant their SlipCases and ID. Lee yawned.

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t give you trouble,” Gelert said. “I didn’t sleep all that well either.”

Lee looked at him thoughtfully, unwilling to say too much more about what was concerning them—at least while they stood somewhere so public. “You all right?” she said.

Gelert shook himself, hard enough that his ears rattled. “It’s nothing I won’t get over,” he said. “Anyway, we’re early enough that we’ll have a little layover time at Kennedy. I can have a nap there.”

The attendant gave them back their documentation, and Lee and Gelert headed in through the desk ring and toward the gate cluster. Lee glanced at the virtual travel docket now glowing under the surface of the SlipCase, checking the gating time, but also looking curiously and with some concern at the second line of the routing. TC 8665 LAX-JFK, said the first line: but the second one said XX 1024 JFK-AXX. Just a blanket identifier for their destination in Alfheim, nothing specific as regarded the location: and no “carrier” designator, nothing to say who was responsible for their travel, no one to make responsible if something should go wrong…

“Not overly forthcoming, are they?” Gelert said. He paused and turned to the gate attendant to let her wave her reader wand over the SlipCase in his pack.

“Not terribly.” Lee held out her case to be waved, and they walked on through, making for the central array of hexagonal target rooms. Most of them were opaque at the moment: a few had vanished their front faces and were taking incoming passengers. Lee looked for the TransCon herald on the displays over the hexes as they walked. “You have the usual trouble packing?” Gelert said.

Lee laughed at him. “For once, no. Any other time, yeah, I’d be running around in circles trying to figure out how to pack for a universe I’d never been to before…”

Gelert looked sidewise at her. “You 
are
 nervous,” he said. “You can’t even pack for a different climate as a rule, let alone another universe.”

Lee raised her eyebrows. She’d been determined to say nothing further about the night before. Yet if she was going to say anything further to Gelert about it, this was the time: it was a fair bet that nearly every communication between them from now until they got back from Alfheim would be insecure. The Elves would be eager to make sure that none of their guests were abusing their hospitality, and even more eager to hear what they were saying about the progress and business of the commission.

At last she shook her head. “It wasn’t anything, really,” Lee said. Gelert put his ears back in an expression of skepticism, but said nothing.

“What about you?” Lee said, as they came to a still-opaqued hex labeled TC 8665, and stood in front of it waiting with a few other passengers—a family from Xaihon, all in ornate, bright tabards, a Midgardner in a fur cloak that must have been killing him even with the air conditioning, various humans, and some assorted aliens from the Xainese Pangemony—a pair of salamandrines, and someone who at first glance looked like a dinosaur in morning dress. “Did you talk to Nuala about things?”

She didn’t say which things, or need to. Gelert sat down and looked up at the glowing sign, which said in several fonts and several different frequencies and colors of light, 
5 minutes to pretransit.
 “She doesn’t like me to,” Gelert said. “Her feeling is that the less she knows about some things, the happier she is. If I try to push her on it, it causes trouble later. I’ve learned better, over time.”

Lee nodded, though still she thought, 
Maybe it’s just a cultural thing, but I’d find that hard. If you’re
 
going to live with someone, you should live
 with 
them, not around them.
 Then she sighed. It wasn’t going to be an issue for a while, if ever. After the business with Matt, it had become more obvious to Lee than ever that living with someone that closely wasn’t something she needed to be thinking about, now if ever.

The wall in front of them went transparent, and from behind them, one of the LAPort gate managers went into the gate hex with an activation pod. The sign on the still-opaque part of the hex changed to 
Assembling
, and the automated annunciator system started calling the transit.

Lee and Gelert showed their travel slips to the attendant as they stepped in, made their way to the back of the hex, and turned to face the open wall. “I don’t know why we do this,” Gelert said, “when the odds of us actually being turned the right way on arrival are as poor as we both know they are.”

“Social conventions,” Lee said. “Habit. Torschlusspanik. What climate did
you
pack for?”

“What?”

“What climate did you pack for?”

“Not 
that
 what. Tor something??”

The door in front of them went opaque again: apparently the transit slot wasn’t very full. “Transit in fifteen seconds, ladies and gentlemen and so forth,” said the gate manager, glancing at his pod with sublime indifference.

“Torschlusspanik,” Lee said. “Fear of being locked in somewhere.”

“Fine. Explain to me what which way you face has to do with this wonderful new panic.”

The world went 
flick!
 Lee knew from various articles she’d read that the bland plain surfaces of the hex booths were an attempt to minimize the visual side effects of transit, but it never worked for her. That sight of the world seeming to wobble under her as if in two big waves, a sort of visual hula—followed by a sensation as of her eyes wobbling in their sockets and taking some moments to steady down—was something she had decided she was just going to have to live with. No one else she knew seemed to get it as badly as she did. “Gglp,” she said as the transit completed and the people around them started to move toward Lee and Gelert with the bored, look-elsewhere expressions of commuters everywhere.

“You all right?” Gelert said, as they turned and followed the small crowd out into the transit section of the ring at Kennedy.

“Fine.”

“You always say that. And you’re not. Maybe it’s something chemical,” Gelert said. “You should go to that doctor that Leslie told you about. Maybe it’s just some inner ear thing.”

“I read an article that said it might just be a side effect of traveling in a straight line for the only time that anyone really does it,” Lee said. “All the rest of the time it’s curves of some kind or another.”

“That’s just what I’m saying. Maybe it’s like when you’ve been on a merry-go-round for a while and then you get off and try to walk straight. But in reverse.”

Lee shrugged. The two of them walked counterclockwise along the ring, with clusters of hexes on their left and the inner ring-rail system on their right, toward the next car stop, maybe an eighth of a mile away.

Gelert looked with interest at the windows of some of the small shops between the hex clusters as they passed. “You didn’t finish about the torschlussthing,” Gelert said.

“And I’m not going to. You just can’t let go, can you?”

Gelert grinned. “My people have a saying—”

“They usually have a saying.”

“—’Bite till your teeth meet, and after that, keep your mouthful.’ ”

“Profound.”

They came to the ring-rail entrance and studied the display beside it, which claimed that the next transport would be along in five minutes. “It always says five minutes,” Gelert said, sitting down again, “and it’s never been right. Not once.”

“If people didn’t keep holding the thing’s doors open past the time it’s supposed to leave,” Lee said, “it would be right.”

“So in the middle of the night it may be on time occasionally,” Gelert said, as the display started scrolling through lists of gates due for departure in the next hour. “A lot of good that does us. There it is, though. XX 1024, cluster 015.” He got up again, sighed. “Typical, it’s right across the ring from us…”

Lee smiled just a little as she sighted the transport coming toward them along the ring. “You know,” she said, “I’d swear you’re going out of your way to sound blasé about this. Listen to you, grumbling about shuttlecars and coming out on the wrong side of the ring. t’s 
Alfheim
 we’re going to, Gel. We’re not even having to pay for it! This is the dream run, the trip everyone wants to make and no one’s allowed to.”

The transport pulled up: the glass doors slid aside, inner and outer, and they got in as several people got out, including a Borastran of truly tremendous size. Again Lee had to remind herself not to stare as the person just managed to wedge itself between the doors when they were open at its widest. “
That’s
 why these are late,” Gelert said, as they got into the now-empty transport, and the doors closed immediately.

He nosed his hoverbag over to the side of the transport, out of the way, and watched idly as the Borastran went rolling away across the ring concourse behind them like a giant rogue green leather jelly donut, various legs and other appendages waving as it went. “But you’re right. Sometimes I wonder why they don’t loosen up a little and let more tourism in.”

“More? Let 
some
 tourism in, you mean. Rather than the minuscule amount that they presently clear through.”

Gelert shrugged and turned to look forward, the way the transport was going. “Maybe things are going to start changing soon,” he said. “I’m not even sure that it matters, in some ways, what the committee’s findings are. The Alfen are going to have to loosen up some of the access restrictions a little. Or rather, they’re going to have to be 
seen
 to loosen them up. A little creative PR could do a lot for them.”

“While I understand your point about the commission’s findings,” Lee said, “I think the PR is necessary anyway. It’s not like they’re not an incredibly intelligent and successful people; it’s not like they’re not entitled to that success—but by and large, whenever the Alfen are in contact with the media, they don’t seem to care if the contacts suggest that they could do just fine without us. That they don’t particularly care what we think—or what anyone thinks.”

“Maybe it’s true,” Gelert said, glancing at Lee.

“Maybe it is. But it’s not smart to rub people’s noses in it. Sooner or later it’s going to come back to haunt them.”

“It’s doing that now, I think,” Gelert said. “I think someone high up among the Elves has realized that they’d better look cooperative with the UN.” He looked back the way they came again. “But I don’t think that’s necessarily going to mean they’re going to enjoy the process. I imagine we can expect a little hostility along the way.”

Lee nodded. The transport stopped to let on a number of passengers from some other gates that TransCon was using at the moment: humans from various universes, various salamandrines and a pair of Kewa, all spindly legs and spines, and a couple of Alfen. Lee didn’t look straight at them, but she didn’t have to do that to see the way other human passengers, even the other aliens, edged away from them a little while trying not to look like they were.

That made her wonder, as she turned away to look the way Gelert was looking, at the maglev track curving and curving away to the left in front of them. But it had often made her wonder before. Humans she could understand being intimidated by that perfect beauty. But why the aliens? Why should one species’ sense of beauty, so different from humans’, be affected by it? Even just on Earth, the definition of what made a human being attractive shifted wildly with climatic and cultural zones. 
What is it a Kewa
 
senses about an Alfen that makes them take a step back?…

Unfortunately that was something no Kewa was likely to confide in Lee, since they were so protective about the languages in which they discussed personal matters. 
But then even humans are reticent
 
enough about it
, Lee thought, as they pulled into the next transport stop. 
In fact, about most things…