Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (17 page)

Lee sat still for a few moments and tried to wrap her brain around that concept, with very little success. It was like trying to believe that it was possible to receive commcalls on your fillings.
“How
in the worlds…?” she said. “Gelert, the whole gating concept relies on the application of huge concentrations of forces that don’t occur naturally.”

“That’s what you’d think, normally. But apparently, sometimes they do. And no one knows why. Except possibly some people…who have been noticeable by their professed disinterest in the subject.”

“The Alfen…” Lee said softly.

“The texts I was using for research were pretty general,” Gelert said. “But it would seem there are places in Alfheim where gating phenomena occur naturally. Unpredictably, of course. But it seems like the very first MacIlwain—his name was de’Dilhath in Alfen, apparently it means about the same thing—was ‘assisted’ in his breakthrough by the fact that one of these gates was near the CERN-analogue where he was doing his research, a place called Ailathseneh. It had been notorious for centuries for disappearances and strange occurrences…rocks rolling uphill, strange lights, persistent lightning strikes. The best theory is that there may be some conditions under which a planet’s surface naturally manifests cyclotronlike phenomena, as opposed to the atmosphere, which does that sometimes during sunspot highs. But the initial breakthrough from Alfheim to the first of the other worlds would never have happened without that ‘strange place’ being nearby.”

Lee digested that. “How many of these ‘places’ are there in Alfheim?” she said.

“No way to tell. Interesting, though; the implication in that very early theoretical work was that other worlds might have such places, too. But the whole concept seems to have been abandoned by the wayside very early on. Maybe with some reason. Once someone invents the commcaster, why keep inventing it? Or in this case, why bother hunting all over your planet for someplace that may occasionally behave as a worldgate, when with an accelerator ring and the right materials you can build one wherever you want it, one that behaves itself all the time?”

“And I bet I know who’ll sell you the ‘right materials,’ ” Lee said. She sat and thought for a little. “But, Gel, this still doesn’t help us as regards the corner of Eighteenth and Wilshire. If ‘cyclotronlike’ phenomena happened at all often there, I would think we’d have heard about it by now.”

“In that neighborhood,” Gelert said dryly, “I’m not sure I can agree. Nonetheless, another sweep is in the cards, so I’ll talk to our folks at LAPD and schedule it. Tonight if possible, because I’d love to put this data into the casework folder and send it off to the DA in the morning. Anyway, I’ve already put all the hard citations about these so-called free state gates in it. They’re just what we needed, Lee: something concrete to hang our disappearing Alfen on. Take a little time to go over it and let me know if there’s anything I missed. If there isn’t, a sweep tonight to detect that decay is all we need to justify our ways to Big Jim.”

“All right,” she said. “But there’s something else we need to discuss that I wouldn’t have wanted to go down the link, either.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I’ve always said so.”

Gelert laid them back and gave her a look. Lee ignored the look and told him about her unidentified caller.

“Alfen,” Gelert said, when she was done.

“It seems likely, though I don’t have any proof.”

Gelert brooded for a few moments. “But with what axe to grind?” he said. “Alfen politics is as tangled as anybody’s. There are people out to get the Elf-King, and people out to get his enemies, who are numerous—it looks like the Elves are no happier about being stuck in a hereditary monarchy than some people in the other worlds.” He looked thoughtful. “And the thing with the roses…That’s odd. No question that some Alfen artifacts are very powerful in other universes. Not that anyone knows why. But someone plainly wants us to be thinking about these. I wish I knew why.”

“To get us in trouble?” Lee said. “To make us a target, somehow…”

“Because of the dil’Sorden case,” Gelert said. “Because we’ve already found out too much about some things…and someone doesn’t want us finding out any more.”

“Simpler just to shoot us, I’d have thought,” Lee said.

“Someone was certainly willing enough to try that,” Gelert said. “But that was a strange line. ‘You’ll be offered an opportunity to leave town…Take it.’ A threat?”

“I don’t know why,” Lee said, “but it didn’t sound like one at the time.”

“You have to follow your hunches…” Gelert said slowly. “Well. I’ll do a little research on the roses myself.

They may not be just flowers: the term could be code for something else.”

Lee nodded. “I’ll copy my research run to you,” she said, “so we won’t duplicate each other. Meanwhile, let’s have a look at the casework folder.”

It took rather more than “a little time.” After Lee read through the accumulated casework and reviewed all their sweeps, she and Gelert spent most of the late afternoon and early evening on the fine points of their depositions, before Gelert went out to do the final sweep, with his implant enabled for detection of particle decay, around eight. Gelert did it alone, as he’d insisted, for Larry the Bodyguard agreed with him completely that the area around Eighteenth and Wilshire couldn’t be secured well enough for Lee’s safety. She tried arguing with him, but she was too new at it to be very effective yet, and additionally, she was unusually tired: the reaction from the previous night’s excitement, Lee supposed, was setting in. The result was that she rode home with Larry in the passenger seat, he checked her house out most carefully, and then when she promised not to go out again, he left her inside, locked in, with the unmarked hovs still minding the front and back of the house.

Lee made dinner and fumed, waiting for Gelert’s call. It didn’t come until nearly eleven. But when she heard his voice, she grinned.

“Got it,” he said.

“You got what you were looking for?”

“Exactly what I was looking for,” Gelert said, and his grin matched hers. He was not going to be any more specific over the comm, she knew. “I’ll patch it into the spot in the casework that’s waiting for it, and then send this off to Big Jim’s office.”

“With our invoice!”

“I’d never forget. Mass has generated it…it’s ready to go.”

Lee sat there for a few moments and said nothing. “You look sad,” Gelert said.

“Tired,” Lee said. “I’m still dealing with yesterday, I guess. But, Gel, there’s more to it than that. The DA will have enough to go to trial with…but we’re still no closer to knowing for sure who sent Jok Castelain around with the gun: who’s really responsible for dil’Sorden’s death.”

“I know what you mean,” Gelert said. “No closure.” He sighed. “Well, we’ve given them some good indications of where we should start to work when the trial phase begins. Meantime…” He looked at her thoughtfully. “You call Matt yet?”

Lee rubbed her eyes. “It’s too late,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

“All right. Sign off on this, and Mass will send it in.”

“Right. Listen, Gel…good work. Your nose has saved us again.”

“Your nose isn’t so bad either, Lee. Go get some sleep, and don’t even think of showing up here before lunch.”

“Right.”

*

To her own surprise, she rested well that night. But late the next morning, before the xoco was even made, while she was still slouching around the house in her bathrobe, all the good of the previous night’s dreamless sleep was shaken out of her by the commlink going off.

It was Gelert. “Are you watching the news?”

“Huh? No. Should I be?”

“Turn it on, fast. CTLA.”

“System, split channel,” Lee said. “Muckrakers.”

The system kicked Gelert’s image over to one side of the screen and displayed, on the other, what Lee instantly recognized as the front steps of Parker Center. It was a press conference. Indeed, it was a press conference with not only Big Jim Renselaar in the flesh, and there was a lot of it, but the Police Commissioner, a man not usually known for enjoying press conferences very much. Renselaar was in full flight. “Too many rubber chicken dinners,” Gelert said, “look at him!”

“Shhh!”

“—pioneering investigation of violence by Elves against Elves. The release of the Five-Interpol report makes it plain that the case we are presently investigating is merely the tip of the iceberg…”

“Icebergs,” Lee moaned. “No more icebergs, please…”

“Look at that,” Gelert said. “Just look at him taking credit for other people’s work! Sheer genius. It’s no wonder he’s going to be our next Mayor.”

Lee looked around for somewhere to be ill.

“And look at Matt standing there behind him, just the image of the loyal assistant DA! If things go as planned in some quarters, Matt’s going to lose half his title…”

This was a thought that had occurred to Lee more than once lately. She refused to say anything; animus did not reflect well on the bearer. “Shh!”

“—obvious implications of the Five-Interpol report for the Ellay Alfen community. We take attacks on this community very seriously, as is demonstrated by our present investigation of the murder of Omren dil’Sorden, a heinous crime that I am pleased to announce will be going to court within the next two weeks—”

“My God, he read the casework 
that
 fast??”

“Ssh!”

“—one of our star prosecution teams, Liayna Enfield and Gelert reh’Mechren. However, the present situation suggests that their tremendous talents can be better used in an even wider investigative role than in the present investigation…”

“What the hell is he talking about?!” Lee whispered.

“—in light of the Federal Prosecutor’s request this morning to the UN&ME to immediately organize an investigative panel, I am seconding Enfield and reh’Mechren to the FP’s Office with a request that they be part of any panel. We are glad to lend the best and most expert aid we have to this wider investigation into the unacceptable face of intraspecies relations—”

“No,” Lee murmured. “Oh, 
no
.”

“See that now, Lee,” Gelert said. “How does it feel to be the biggest steppingstone in the DA’s mayoral campaign? Don’t hide your feelings, now. Aren’t you proud and yet also
humble?”

“He’s fired us!”

“Not fired. ‘Seconded.’ Such a nice word. So nuanced.”

“The sonofabitch has thrown us right into the middle of it!” Lee said, lost between horror for herself and Gelert, and fury, well mixed with astonishment, at Big Jim. “Hasn’t he thought of conflict of interest? Hasn’t he thought of what happens when we go to trial?”

“No,” Gelert said. “And I don’t think he cares. It doesn’t matter now if the dil’Sorden case 
never
 goes to trial. He’s already being seen to do his part in the crusade against violence against other species, especially Elves. He’s dumped us on the UN’s doorstep, to his campaign’s everlasting enhancement. Because how many of his electorate—how many of them who can 
count
, anyway—are going to remember our names, or care about them, when Big Jim’s mayoral campaign begins to roll?”

“Or where we’ve been buried,” Lee said softly. “He’s thrown us right in the laps of the other Elves, Gel. The Elves who don’t want us to know why they’re killing their own people. Who bought him? Who told him where to throw us?”

“Got a call in to Hagen, Lee?” Gelert said softly. “Somehow I think he may be a while getting back to us.”

She looked at him in silence and could not think of a word to say.

*6*

It took the better part of two weeks for the noise to reach enough of a crescendo for the Alfen to respond: and the noise that flushed them out of cover, finally, was the UN&ME’s Secretary General standing up in a Security Council meeting to “guillotine” debate and call the vote on the empanelment of the Special Investigative Committee. The vote came down 106 in favor, Alfheim abstaining. The Assembly then adopted a resolution requiring the Alfen authorities (specifically naming the Laurin) to allow more transparency into Alfheim’s relationships with other worlds, and to immediately agree to a more detailed investigation. Amid the applause of the delegates, at session’s end the Alfen ambassador walked out of the Assembly with her lovely face looking unusually grim.

Lee watched all this happening with some concern, when she had time to think about it. Mostly she was annoyed that nothing was happening, and apparently nothing was going to happen, with the dil’Sorden case. Though a trial date had been set, no magistrate had yet been assigned: the reason Lee kept hearing from Matt’s office was “manpower shortages” caused by too many magistrates taking their holidays at the same time. But she thought she knew better. Word was quietly about in the DA’s Office: stall. And there were no more commcalls from Hagen.

“But it’s hardly a surprise, Lee,” Gelert said to her one afternoon in the office. “This is going to be the best way to make our discoveries go quietly away. The case itself won’t be postponed…but its scheduling will, again and again. You know how the game goes; we’ve both seen it before. Meanwhile we’ll have been packed off to Alfheim for Herself only knows how long, surrounded by lots of lovely bureaucracy, with our own communications curtailed, and almost certainly thoroughly snooped. We won’t be able to do anything concrete about the dil’Sorden case while we’re stuck there. And anything we do discover, we’re going to have a hard time communicating privately.”

“Assuming we actually ever 
go
,” Lee said. “There’s been nothing from the FP’s Office, or the UN, for ten days now.”

“Oh, we’ll be going, all right,” Gelert said. He stretched, rolled over on his back. “It’s just taking a while for the Alfen to blink. Sooner or later it’s got to happen, though they’re being slow about it…probably to look tough in front of their own people. The implication in the UN resolution was clear enough. If the Laurin doesn’t cooperate now, then any leads that suggest he’s involved in this conspiracy will be followed back to the source with vigor. And the Alfen don’t like the idea of sanctions by the other worlds even to be mentioned.”

“It’s just saber rattling,” Lee said. “No one’s going to slap any kind of sanction on the Elves with an eye to isolating them. It can’t be done! They’re too tangled up in every part of interworld relationships.” She pushed a can of green tea drink across her desk, brooding. “What’s going to happen is that after our committee makes its report, all the interests who think it’s going to benefit their own agendas will start yelling for Alfheim to implement the findings, become more transparent, more accessible. And it won’t stop there. Big money and big business all over the worlds are going to start pushing that little crack wider and wider, until finally they’re demanding an open-door policy.”

“The Alfen will never stand for it,” Gelert said.

“Nope,” Lee said. “But the other interests will all keep pushing. They’ll call for the end of the monopoly, maybe an interworld/international body set up to administer the distribution of fairy gold.”

“Enforced by an interworld armed force.” Gelert said. “And just as any other world would, the Alfen will refuse. They’ll say they have the right to sovereignty over their own world, and the right to control access. It’s all right there in the Five-Geneva Pact.”

“Which is not going to stop some people,” Lee said. She swallowed. “They’re going to perceive the monopoly as a tool that can be used to put a stranglehold on other worlds, whenever Alfheim gets an Elf-King who’s prone to hold a grudge…or get territorial. Which means sooner or later, there’s going to be a war.”

“Probably sooner,” Gelert said. “There’s never been a war 
between
 worlds. It’s going to be interesting.”

Lee could hardly think of a bigger understatement. “We’re thinking along the same lines,” she said softly. “But Gel…here’s what’s bothering me. The Alfen are not a stupid species. Or a warlike one. They should have been able to defuse this particular problem a long time ago, but didn’t. Why not? And why is this all coming to a head now?”

Gelert shook his head until his ears flapped. “No idea. But I wonder…is he having political problems of his own?”

“Who? The Laurin?” Lee raised her eyebrows. “If he was, how would we know?”

“Makes me wonder, though. How do you get a new Elf-King?”

“The old one dies, I think,” Lee said.

“Takes a good long time for that,” Gelert said, “at least from our point of view. I wonder if Alfen political usage includes a tradition of assassination?…”

“Not something I’m read up on,” Lee said.

“It might be worth checking,” said Gelert. “Not that they let other worlds know that much about their political systems to begin with. More secretiveness…”

“Why 
are
 they so secretive, I wonder?” Lee said, getting up to go over to their little cooler for another tea.

Gelert rolled right side up again and put his head down on his paws. “That’s something we’ll probably never find out,” he said. “But then why are humans so aggressive in one universe and relatively pacifistic in another? Why has Midgarth never had a war bigger than the one that leads up to each Fimbulwinter—just little settlement-to-settlement raids—while the Huichtilopochtlin cultures seem to have wars every weekend, the way other species have football?”

“Ethical constants set differently in the different universes,” Lee said. “Or so they told us in history class.”

Gelert snorted softly. “It’s a nice theory, but until I see an ethical constant running down the street, clearly enough to run after it and sink my teeth into it, I’ll withhold judgment…  Anyway, we have other things to think about. When they finally 
do
 get the panel all chosen, and the Alfheim government finally blinks, we’re going to have to make sure that our own agenda doesn’t get buried under everybody else’s.”

“I’ve seen some of the names already,” Lee said. “Not a bad group. Mellie Hopkins, you remember her. And guess who else? Sal Griffiths…”

“Really. Well, they’re solid enough, I’ll grant you that. But most of the rest of them are going to be strangers, and most of the rest of them will have their own axes to grind.”

“It’s not the humans I’m concerned about,” Lee said. “It’s the Alfen.”

“Still thinking of your midnight caller…”

“Yes.” She popped the top of her green tea, had a drink. “Gel, something bigger is going on.”

“Bigger than the runup to a war between worlds?” Gelert said, giving her an odd look. “What could be bigger than that?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “But you keep telling me to follow my hunches…And my hunch says something far worse than just a war is coming. Change. Or death. And we’re going to be going into the middle of it, going into a world we don’t know very well at all, into the midst of a people we don’t really understand…”

Gelert’s gaze rested on Lee for a little while. “If you get anything more concrete in the hunch department,” he said, “let me know.”

Lee nodded, wishing that this would happen as soon as possible…for the shadow brooding over her at the moment was making work increasingly difficult; a sense that what was coming was not merely death, not merely change, but something ineffably worse than either.

Lee shivered and turned back to her desk.

*

It was perhaps just as well that there wasn’t much work to do in the office at the moment. She and Gelert had been concentrating on clearing away any remnants of earlier caseload in anticipation of the call from the Investigative Committee. That afternoon there had been no reason to hang around, and both of them had prepared to head home early. “Larry,” Lee said, sticking her head out into the front office and looking over into the small corner niche he had made his own, “school’s out for the day…”

“Right you are, Ms. Enfield.” She could not break him of formal address, no matter how she tried.

She got her work bag, and they headed down to the hov together. “Going to be a quiet time for you when we head off,” she said, as they got in.

“Not so quiet,” Larry said. “They’ll post me back to Homicide.” He smiled slightly.

“Where your heart is, huh?”

“Yeah.” Lee pulled out of the parking space and swung out into the main flow of traffic. “I guess the Alfen will be giving you one of their own people as a bodyguard when you go over…”

That was a thought that Lee didn’t relish. Having either a male or female version of that difficult beauty around her for all her waking hours would not be terribly pleasant. She had managed to get used to Larry somewhat, but an Elf… “I don’t know how they’re going to manage it,” she said. “They haven’t even said yes to the committee yet…”

“But they will,” Larry said as they got onto the freeway. Lee glanced sideways, a little surprised to see the frown settling onto Larry’s face. “They’re going to have to. And probably it’s about time that they had to cooperate with something. There’s always a feeling about them like they’re better than you, somehow… and they know it… and they know 
you
 know it And that, down deep, they really like it that way. Be kind of fun to see 
them
 having a hard time for a change.”

Goodness
, Lee thought, 
my bodyguard is a bigot.
 But then she thought, 
Or is he? Any more than I
 
am?
… For her thoughts went back to Nuala’s line about Elves looking “the way people ought to, but didn’t,” and her own thought about how looking at and considering that beauty left her, at least, feeling sad. 
If you dwell on that feeling for too long, how soon does it start to turn to a sense of
 
unfairness?
 And after that comes the anger that leads to the desire to do something about the other’s unfair beauty…

“I think I can see your point,” Lee said, her patented neutral reply. They chatted about this and that on the way home, and in the house, Larry went carefully over everything before letting Lee settle in. “The unmarkeds are all set,” Larry said. “If you want to go out anywhere, just call…”

“I will. Thanks, Larry.”

She shut the door behind him and flopped down on the sofa, rejecting the idea of going anywhere at all; an afternoon off was something that lately she’d only have had time to dream about. There was some gardening she might do—what passed for her garden in the backyard, mostly summer succulents and the occasional sandpit cactus—needed to be raked. And there were various other tasks she’d been avoiding…

Lee sat there for a moment more, staring at the screen, and thought, 
Right, let’s get it over with.

“System,” she said. “Call Matt…”

The screen flicked on and immediately showed Lee the “busy” herald. “Please hold,” said the LAPD comm system’s voice.

Lee went into the kitchen for some water, paused there a moment, looking out at the garden. 
It really is
 
a mess
, she thought. 
Look at those leaves…And the grass is dying. I keep forgetting to tell the
 
house to water it. I’m going to have to get the landscape guy out here…

She walked into the living room and was surprised to see Matt’s face looking out of the screen, peering around. “Oh,” she said, “sorry! I didn’t hear the hold go away.”

“I thought maybe it was a message of some kind,” Matt said.

Lee sat down on the sofa. “Uh, no,” she said, “I try to be a little more direct about my messages than that.”

“Yes, I noticed,” Matt said. “Lee…”

“I know, you’re sorry.”

“You won’t even let me apologize, will you?”

Maybe she was doing him a disservice; but at the moment Lee really didn’t care. “I don’t know that I can stop you,” she said, “if you really set your mind to it.”

Matt simply looked at her for a moment, then let a breath out. “All right,” he said. “Never mind. But I’m glad you called: I needed to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Dil’Sorden.”

“Ah, our famous noncase,” Lee said. “I wish Big Jim would just make up his mind to either throw it out or prosecute it.”

“This is about that.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. He wants you to continue your investigation when you go over to Alfheim.”

” ‘If,’ I would have thought. ‘When’ is still up in the air.”

“Not for long,” Matt said. “Lee, there are still a lot of unanswered questions in that case. You know it yourself. Yet your casework up till now has been very, very sharp…maybe too sharp. The DA wants you to just quietly keep looking into it, while you’re over there. In particular, he’s interested in what possible political connections or ramifications there might be regarding this murder in Alfheim itself. Not as part of the bigger picture, necessarily; as an individual case in its own right. As it seems that there’s an unusual amount of interest in it over there…”

Lee sat quite still and pondered, just for a second, whether to tell Matt about her midnight caller.

“You’re the obvious choice,” Matt said then. “You must be getting something right… since no one has tried to kill anyone else involved in this investigation.”

“Thank you so much,” Lee said. “So you’re going to push me a little farther out on the limb, are you? Where would I be without my friends?”

Matt was silent. Maybe the bitterness of the words exceeded what Lee had intended. She didn’t care. “Seriously,” Lee said, disgusted, “I’m beginning to think everybody involved in this case has a scheme but me.”

“Even Gelert?”

She grinned sourly. “Oh, almost certainly. Gelert 
always
 has a scheme. But in his case at least I know which side he’s scheming on. Whereas you—” She glared at Matt. “Forget it. Go find yourself some other girl.”