Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (16 page)

The screen polarized itself. Lee had several ways to do anonymous research when she had to, and this seemed like a good time. She had her implant feed the commlink the encrypted password that routed the link through one of the public anonymizing facilities, then went into the 
Britannica
, brought up its “search” facility, put a selection of search terms in, and waited to see what appeared. Meantime, it was much too quiet inside the house. “Sound system,” she said. “Playback, classical, random.”

“Staaaarke scheiiiiiiite!”
 a woman began singing loudly to huge orchestral accompaniment; and Lee closed her eyes in brief annoyance…then had to laugh. Gelert had been playing around with her system’s programming features when he’d been here last, and had dumped all her own settings in favor of what he considered a more “educational” menu. In Gelert’s case, this naturally meant heavy doses of the most serious composers of the previous two centuries, or the loudest ones—Lee suspected that for him, the two were identical. Wagner therefore turned up high on his list, and the 
Ring
 cycle probably highest of all, with 
Gotterdämmerung
, especially the last act, winning by sheer force of sound effects. Lee sat with it for a moment, reflecting, and then let it run; it effectively drowned out the sound of hammers and saws from the back of the house.

The screen started showing results to her research, a number of references; but they all seemed to be to fairy tales. 
Once upon a time, a king married a dwarf woman
, one of them began.

Lee raised her eyebrows. 
Mixed marriage…it’ll never work.
 

She paged down. “Once upon a time…”

“In a faraway land…”

“Then the King stood up—”

“Expand that one,” Lee said. The screen caught her choice from her implant’s connection to her optic nerve and showed her the full selection.

Then the king stood up

and looked his last

on his garden, storied in song:

yet though he was chained,

he lifted his hands

to speak words that could not be imprisoned.

You cannot trample my roses, he said;

you cannot destroy my dreams!

Neither by day

nor yet by night

will they ever again be seen;

yet safe in the stone

the dreams will sleep,

safe from your thoughtless destruction!

Stone the roses,

stone my dreams,

stone your mortal hearts!…

Poetry
, Lee thought, amused. 
What am I doing wrong? Oh, wait a moment, I know.
 She went back to the search form, removed the word “Elf and added the term “Alfen.”

The search ran itself again and still did not completely get rid of the fairytale references, though at least now she started to get historical ones as well. There were several references to occurrences of the terms “roses” and “Alfen” in Tierra, though there they took the form of some medieval myth tangled up with the history of the Ostrogoths, and with “Dierrich of Bern,” who turned out to actually be the old Emperor Theodoric, and not from Bern at all, but Verona. There was a sentence down in the body of that article equating Elves with Alfen in a general sense, but nothing more concrete.

Lee raised her eyebrows and looked at the last entry, which at least seemed to have something to do with fact. 
…the dolomite mountain range near Aien Mhariseth is famous in many old stories that
 
tell of how the early Kings of the Elves kept gardens there of fabulous flowers, powerful for
 
magic and inaccessible to lesser beings. These myths may be traced back to Laurin XXXVII, who
 
founded what is now the modern city of Aien Mhariseth on the ruins of an older city of the ‘Central European’ Alfen, usually identified with the twentieth dynasty of the dil’Jhaira Hegemony,
 
the site a near cognate to Earth’s Bozen and Tierra’s Bolzano…

“Yes, but what about the damn roses?” Lee muttered. She scrolled down several more pages, but could find no further references to anything but myths. 
Great
, she thought. 
Someone’s sent us off to look for
 
the Holy Grail.

… possible confusion of the true rose,
 Rosa rosa 
, with
 Rhododendron ferrugineum 
, a species of the
 Ericaceae 
popularly referred to in several languages as the “alpenrose.” The plant which turns
 
some mountainous regions red with its blooms in mid to late summer…

Now botany
, Lee thought. 
Who needs this?

But her curiosity really was beginning to itch now. 
Are these things really just a myth…or do they
 
actually exist, though very well concealed?
 Certainly the Elves had the kind of clout to conceal something by misdirection or other means if they wanted to.

Look at you
, she thought then in disgust. 
You’re getting as credulous as the Pulchritude Paper’s
 
readers…thinking that just because you can’t find any information about something, someone
 
must be hiding it.

Still…

Lee sat there thinking. Her caller last night…what was the phrase he had used? “Imported without Alfen interference.”

Stolen
, Lee thought.

She shivered. The idea of the kind of trouble you could get into—getting caught stealing 
anything
 from Alfheim, let alone something that appeared to have some cultural significance…

But why am I being invited to do just that?

The doorbell rang. Lee sighed. “Peephole,” she said.

The screen reverted to its security function. Standing on her doorstep she saw a man who could have been mistaken for some ‘forties film star: big, rawboned, in a dark and retiring suit that fit him much too well, with open, kindly eyes in a chunky, honest face; an overall look that Lee had seen on enough suspects in her time to make her suspect him of white-collar crime. It was almost a disappointment when he held up a perfectly valid LAPD ident to the door. “Ms. Enfield?” he said, rather loudly.

Behind Lee, the sound system was reproducing the sound of the destruction of a neighboring universe by fire amid the collapse of its local ethical system. “Just a moment,” Lee shouted over the storm of brasses and thunder. “System, open,” she said, getting up. “Then call Gelert at the office…”

The officer stepped in, looking around; Lee went over to him and shook his hand. “Larry Mitcheson,” he said. “Division sent me to be with you until this cools off.”

“Whatever ‘this’ is,” Lee said, “and whenever that might be. Can I offer you something? Xoco?”

“Can’t stand it,” Larry said in an I’m-sorry tone of voice. “Got tea?”

“Just the bad strong kind made from warehouse sweepings.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “Mind if I look around?”

“Feel free,” Lee said. “Don’t mind the security people, they’re replacing the patio doors.”

“Armor glass?” Larry said.

“Doesn’t seem like I have a choice,” Lee said, resigned, as Larry went prowling off around her house. 
God knows what he’s going to make of the closets
, Lee thought. 
I knew I should have cleaned
 
those out.
 But that was probably like your mother’s advice about wearing clean underwear, in case you should be in an accident; you obeyed it and didn’t have an accident for twenty years, and then let it slip just once and got broadsided.

ON ANOTHER CALL: PLEASE HANG ON, said Gelert’s personal herald. Lee sat down with a sigh and waited, while the sound system, having passed through the destruction of the ancient world without damage, began singing the rising of the waters of the Rhine and the motif of Redemption Through Love.

Lee snorted softly; love had been singularly without redemption around here lately. Gelert appeared a second later, lying in his office and looking through his mail on his commwall, and she let the wry face go. “My bodyguard’s here,” Lee said softly to the commscreen. “And he looks like a crook. Or the mailman.”

“Best kind, either way,” Gelert said. “In the second case, the kind no one sees, let alone suspects. I’m glad you called, and I’m glad he turned up. You need to come in.”

“Half an hour ago you were claiming I wasn’t needed. What happened? Matt put a flea in your ear?”

Gelert twitched the ear. “Rather the other way around, I think. He wants to apologize to you. Yet again.”

“Let him wait. Seriously, Gel, what is it?”

“Not over an open link, Lee,” Gelert said. “Wait till you get into the office.”

Indeed
, Lee thought. “Search pan out?” she said.

“In spades.”

“I’ll be in as soon as the doors are fixed.”

*

It took a little longer than that, for Larry the Bodyguard took a while to finish examining her house, her gun, her yard, and her perimeter wall, as well as carefully going over her alarm and security systems until he understood them. Then he gave the company hov the same treatment, until Lee was fairly dancing with impatience to get away. But Larry was methodical, and she supposed she couldn’t argue the point: if more people were going to be coming after her, which seemed all too likely, better that he should know the territory as well as she did.

Finally, they locked up the house and headed for downtown. At least Larry let her drive, which was a relief to Lee: she hated to be driven by anyone but Gelert, who was monotonously safe. When they got to the office, though, Larry gave the place the same thorough going over that he’d done with the house. Lee drew the line at her and Gelert’s office, especially when Larry showed no sign of stepping outside so that Lee could talk to her partner.

“Look,” Lee said, “this is 
my office
. I am safe here. You do not have to sit in here with me! Look, we don’t even have windows. Just commwalls. And confidential things go on in here which, forgive me, are none of your business even if you 
are
 here to keep me alive. You can make yourself comfortable outside, all right? I promise I’ll let you know if I’m going to go out. Believe me, I have no desire to go out 
without
 you at the moment. Besides, that’s the only door out of here; I couldn’t leave without you knowing. Now can you excuse us?”

With a reluctant smile, Larry went out and let the door slip shut behind him. “Mass,” Lee said on the private channel, “give that nice man some tea and something to read. And warn us if he shows the slightest sign of coming in here.”

Gotcha, boss.

Lee sat down in her chair with a sigh, looking at Saturn and the methane snow as if it had been months since she’d seen them last. In some ways, it felt like it. Gelert sat down by Lee and rested his head on her shoulder. “Now,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Well, no. As all right as I’m going to be. The only really good thing about this morning has been being nasty to Matt.”

“He said he was the nasty one.”

Lee raised her eyebrows. “He’s having an unusually candid phase,” she said. “Never mind. What was too sensitive for the commlink?”

“Well, now.” Gelert walked in a couple of tight circles, then flopped down within gazing range of his “desk.” “Remember that gating problem we were discussing?”

“How the first guy in Alfheim did it.”

“Right. It turns out that the initial gating ring broke through to the next universe over partly by virtue of sheer brute power. It was a really big ring: apparently its builders had some concerns that it might actually create a local black hole, or cause the end of their universe.”

“And they built it anyway?” Lee said. “Says something or other about their mindset…”

“No argument. But then the MacIlwain in Tierra broke through much more easily by having the Huichtil gate to tune to. Each universe has followed the same pattern; once you don’t have to build huge powerful rings, you stop doing it…especially once fairy gold gets into the equation, making fine-tuning much more accurate, and numerous much smaller rings viable.”

And here Gelert grinned. “But here’s the good part. The gating theorists say that the present technology means that small high-power rings, ‘brute force’ rings that can drive so-called ‘free state’ gates, can easily be built if anyone cares to. The point is, no one cares to, at least publicly, because they’re really expensive. They need a 
whole lot
 of fairy gold for the multiplex core windings. And who has a whole lot of fairy gold…?”

“Elves,” Lee said.

Gelert grinned wider. “Better still, Lee, one of the tech journals I was looking at gives details of one specific kind of particle decay that can be detected in the neighborhood of such gatings. I bet you that our forensic sweeps can be rerun with an eye to looking for that decay. And if they can’t, I’m willing to go to the corner of Eighteenth and Wilshire tomorrow night late and see if I can’t wring just one last sweep out of the murder scene. Who knows what I might Scent?”

“Sounds like a great idea,” Lee said. “There’s only one problem. What’s this ‘I’ thing?”

“Lee…come on. Take at least minimal precautions, all right?”

“I’ll bring the bodyguard. Sorry. I’ll bring Larry. He’s a nice guy, you’ll like him.”

“I like him already, but that’s not the point. The area’s just too open.”

“It says reh’Mechren 
and
 Enfield on the office door, Gel…”

“So it does, and I want to keep the glass looking the way it does at the moment, and not like your patio doors.”

Lee frowned. Then something struck her. “Wait just a minute,” she said. “You said that the Alfen ‘MacIlwain’ broke through 
partly
 by brute force.”

“That’s right.” Gelert smiled. “And that leads us to the really interesting part. It seems that there are places where gating occurs spontaneously.”