Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (44 page)

(5) MIDGARTH

Positioning against other universes in sheaf:

Face-on: Alfheim

Side-on: Terra, Tierra, Xaihon, Earth 

Cultural flavor:  “Western Hemisphere”-“Old World” dominant

Sovereignties:  National (cyclically in exile due to the Fimbulwinter): Northern European flavor

DEITY/DEITIES: Historical/active intervention: emphatically and actively non-otiose

LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: Icelandic/Norse

VETO POWERS: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Russia (Imperial/Tsarist)

BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: One of the oddest of the Seven Worlds.  Mankind did not evolve in Africa, but (as far as evolutionary evidence suggests) in France and Germany, over a very short period of time as such things go (about 6000 years from
Pithecanthropus
to
Homo neanderthalensis
).  Migrations went northward thereafter; encouraged, as far as can be told from cave paintings and the remnants of prehistoric legends, by the Gods. 

These entities are apparently what Their name implies — supranormal, immortal beings of great strength, controlling several brands of magic (
seithr, runr, laengr
) with some similarities to the sorts practiced in Earth, Xaihon, Tierra and Huictilopochtli, but also many major dissimilarities.  During active periods They are easily documented (by normal means such as photography) and interviewed (though the only language They consent to speak is a fossilized, extremely pure Norse of the sort spoken by Icelandic peoples in most of the Seven Worlds).  The Gods, with a few exceptions, correspond to the standard Norse pantheon extant (though passively) in Terra and Earth.

This identity creates something of a problem for the mortal inhabitants of Midgarth, since the interactions of the Gods, with minor variations, follow the broad course of Norse mythology — the creation of “the World” and of mankind, the loosing of Evil in the form of Loki and the Wolf’s various children, and eventually — once every two thousand fifteen years of Midgarth time — the Twilight of the Gods, with its subsequent battle to the death between Good and Evil, and the destruction of the world in fire and storm.  Since the strictly temporal quality of the “entropy constant” is set higher in the Midgarth universe than elsewhere in the Seven Worlds, time runs faster there; two thousand fifteen years passes in what (in the other Six Worlds) comes out to approximately six years and four months. 

Despite this horrible and repeated destruction, Midgarthian history managed to follow a course rather like that of Earth’s and Terra’s North European areas (except for details such as the Roman Empire, exploration of the Far East, etc. — no area of Midgarth was colonized except for a circle with the North Pole at its center and France at its circumference) — with long interruptions, but roughly parallel nevertheless.  There were no Dark Ages, but neither was there a Renaissance as such; scientific and cultural advancement came very slowly, each millenium becoming painfully aware that it must store as much as possible of its knowledge for its descendants.  The building of disaster-proof libraries became an art.  Repeated appeals to the Gods to do something proved futile; the Gods believed themselves bound by Fate to repeat the cycle until some higher Force should relieve them of the necessity.

This cycle had been repeated many, many times — some 1.5 million times, if theory is correct and the whole sheaf of Worlds came into being at the same time — when Kainnson of Denmark implemented his theoretical conclusions with the financial support of the Crown of Denmark and made worldgating breakthrough at the Nibe-Hobro accelerator in (Earth)1969.  There was considerably more urgency attending the discovery than there had been in most other of the Seven Worlds; Kenzisson was hoping to find the people of Midgarth a way out of their homeworld before the first indication of the Twilight, the seven-year-long Fimbulwinter, then twelve (Midgarth) years away. 

In this he was successful, for as soon as preliminary contacts were made and embassies began to be exchanged, all the worlds signatory to the Three-Geneva Agreement offered either logistical or concrete aid in evacuating the population of Midgarth for the duration of future Twilights.  Massive high-power gatings are performed (powered out of Kattegat Intercontinual) to Xaihon and Tierra, so that the entire population of Midgarth (1980 census: 8.4 million) “winters” for several seasons in either Xaihon/Seixan Hui or Tierra/Ultima Tule.  Winterers trade off work, either professional or manual, to the host nation/world in return for wages, food and shelter — in the most successful and certainly the largest “welfare” program in the history of any world.  In return, Midgarth makes available to scientists from the other Seven Worlds some of the finest high-energy facilities anywhere, as well as general research facilities for those interested in studying the nature of time, the entropy constant in Euclidean universes, and other such anomalies that come with the atypical Midgarthi physical laws.  Midgarth is also something of a haven for comparative religionists, and is especially esteemed, after the Regeneration following each Twilight, as a vacation spot of great beauty. 

(6) TERRA

Positioning against other universes in sheaf:

Face-on: Alfheim

Side-on: Midgarth, Xaihon, Huictilopochtli, Tierra

Sovereignties:  National  (U.N., non-binding on members!)

Cultural flavor:  Mixed

DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted: historical/passive-indeterminate: otiose

LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: French

VETO POWERS: USA, Great Britain, France, Russian Federation, China

BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: Our world.  Not discovered until 2001 due to cyclically poor positioning in Pattern (caused, as far as is known, by the Riemannian structure of our universe, unique among the Worlds, which are all either classic Einsteinian in curve [Tierra, Earth, Xaihon, Huictilopochtli] or Euclidean variants [Alfheim, Midgarth]).  Not yet added to the Three-Geneva Agreement due to lack of independent discovery of worldgating: though reconnaissance survey tours have been going on for some time.  There is also interest in Terra’s legends of “natural” worldgates, a phenomenon occurring only very sporadically in the Otherworlds except for Alfheim, and not even slightly understood.  Breakthrough anticipated for early 2000’s with completion of multi-tEv accelerators —always supposing that a “MacKenzie” turns up.  Three McIlwains presently in advanced physics courses — impossible to tell yet which one will be the catalyst. 

(7) ALFHEIM

Positioning against other universes in sheaf:

Face-on: Earth, Terra, Tierra, Huictilopochtli, Midgarth, Xaihon

Side-on: None

Core-to-core: immediate affinity with 11 other cores in neighboring tesseracts

Sovereignty:  World [Alfen
rai’Miraha
, “Council of Lords], under the Elf-King (
‘rai-Lauvrin
)

Cultural flavor:  Modified “Western Hemisphere “-“New World” dominant

DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted — historical/documented manifestations: passive

LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: N/A 

VETO POWERS: N/A (no separate nations)

BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY:  Core world of the Seven, Alfheim stands in a peculiar and unique relationship to all of them.  Things that happen in the Otherworlds are mirrored, to some extent, in Alfheim; and vice versa.  But its history is among the quietest of any of the Worlds’ — though not the most uneventful. 

The coreworld of any tesseract (as we now know) is the world the “rotation” or movement of which through the “fourth-dimensional angle” produces the other ten worlds associated with it.  (The actual epoch at which this rotation took place is subject to only the most roundabout estimates; “background” radiation studies in Alfheim now suggest that it took place some two hundred billion years ago, but this datum is subject to experimental error of +/- twenty billion years.) A coreworld’s multidimensional “affinity” with both other cores and its own product-worlds causes its space to acquire unusual characteristics, the most noticeable of these (in Alfheim’s case at least) being a far greater malleability to the actions of living agencies.  In such universes, both physical and mental actions are both more easily effected, and more effective.  Various attempts have been made to understand or explain this phenomenon; but as the Elves have recently pointed out, explanations can wait while the fact itself is being dealt with. 

Alfheim’s version of the third planet from Sol remains, even in its “twentieth century”, a remarkably pastoral and unspoiled place: low of population, high of technology, in many ways surpassing the best that its associated worlds in the sheaf have to offer.  No one knows whether humans evolved independently on Alfheim, or, if they wandered in from one of the otherworlds, at just what point they did so; but Alfen archaeology makes it plain that they were there from at least 40,000 BC onward.  (However, fossil remains of at least one sort have been found to be misleading; for
Tyrannosaurus australensis draco
and his brothers still roam the Alfen Outback and veldt, alternately annoying and  delighting paleozoologists, and convincing folklorists of one reason why dragon myths are so widely spread through the otherworlds.) The migrations of the Alfen followed a path similar to those of Earth and Terra, though the numbers of people making them were at first much smaller.  Even at that early date, it is plain from cave paintings and other such sources that death, except by violent accident, was unknown — all burials show some sort of trauma in the remains. 

Migrations progressed at a leisurely pace, their numbers slowly growing — apparently the difference in physical laws in Alfheim also affected reproduction to some extent, so that births were (and still are) relatively few.  Their tribal structure persisted, largely unchanged, through the Alfen’s settlement in cities (about as far as the Catal Huyuk period).  It then shifted, without too much fuss, to the sort of royal state common in the early-historic Mediterranean cultures of Earth and Tierra; kings were chosen, the purpose of their rule being to cause the fertility of the land — and their success at that determining whether they lived or died.  In the other worlds, such selection had various kinds of effects — but in Alfheim, due to the malleability of the universe, it caused those kings who were effective at altering the universe around them to survive and breed more kings equally effective.  Eventually — over many centuries — the combination of the universe’s malleability and the royal prerogatives caused the Elf-Kings to become the most powerful magicians known in any of the universes where magic worked. 

The power of the Kings grew even greater as more migrations occurred and a given King or Queen became responsible for control of more and more land and weather.  Consolidation of tribes became commonplace during the secondary migrations: whichever petty-king proved most adept at controlling weather and the other details of tribal life by his magic came to rule the other neighboring tribes as well…sometimes by violence, but usually by default.  Tribes and cities and eventually nations came to swallow one another in this manner, flexibly, from the earliest times; and the tradition continued until all the populated areas of Alfheim, in its early “fifteenth” century, were in contact with one another, and the greatest of the Alfen “continental groups” gathered together at Aien Mhariseth (“Elder Mariseth/Latemar”, Alfheim/Bolzano) to decide the rulership of a world. 

The Alfen were even then a primarily northern-hemisphere culture, with Elves living nearly everywhere habitable from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer.  But some of them had learned to cope with climactic conditions that could challenge even the most powerful magic-worker; and premier among these were the Elf-lords of the Americas.  Their mixed heritage — descended from both the children of the great Asian-Aleutian migrations and the children of Alfen-European colonists — united the best of royal lines from both East and West; their situation presented them with a various and near-untameable weather and crop complex; but the relentless demands of natural selection caused the Elf-Kings of the Americas to rise to the occasion.  When the Elves of both Eastern and Western Hemispheres met in Aien Mhariseth for the first time to determine the Kingship of their world, twelve thousand years ago, it was one of the “American” Elf-lords that took it, becoming 
rai’Hlavren
, “world-masterer” — now “Laurin” in Alfen — and to the inhabitants of the other six worlds, the Elf-king.  The kingship has not been out of the North American line since then, though there have been numerous attempts by the European lines to wrest power back.

Afterword

Of all the novels I’ve written in the last thirty years – probably more than fifty now – this is the one that has, from start to finish, taken the longest. I think the project started when I was eight.

In our living room we had a big breakfront – so my mom called it, anyway: a massive piece of mahogany furniture with drawers at the bottom, a writing desk part in the middle, and glass-doored bookshelves on either side. The shelves, stacked three high, were filled with an encyclopedia the name of which I can’t now remember – not one of the well-known names, anyway – and two other sets of books.

One of them was a set of the classics, identically bound in enthusiastically fake leatherette: brown, with gold-stamped backs. They were where I first met Shakespeare (in a rather oversimplified version which I was later shocked to find could be laid at E. Nesbit’s door) and the Robin Hood stories, with the wonderful Howard Pyle illustrations. I can’t remember much else about the classics collection: the Shakespeare and the tales of Sherwood were plainly what made the most impact on me.

The other set of books were thinner, taller, bound in red fake leatherette, and were straightforwardly storybooks. I can’t really remember now how they were organized. But one volume in particular was my favorite. It held, among other things, Celtic tales from Padraig Colum, and various other fairy stories of the world. And one of the stories was the tale of the Dwarf-King and his magical garden of roses.

I can still see the illustration to that story: the Dwarf-king, dressed in furs and royal robes, standing with one hand upraised and looking (for a dwarf) improbably majestic; and behind him, an amazing mountain range in sunset colors. Even now the sunset in that little four-by-five-inch illustration comes to haunt my dreams, despite my having years more recently seen the red-hot reality burning both in the Alps above Leukerbad and on the Santa Susanas in Los Angeles. The story, anyway, told of how the Dwarf-king caught sight one day of a beautiful human maiden and fell in love with her on the spot, and built a beautiful palace under the mountains for her, and then stole her away: and how though she came to love him, she also pined for the open air and the sight of the sky, and at last he let her go. And though troubles afterward befell both of them, she returned to him and became his Queen under the mountain, and they lived happily ever after.

It would be wrong to say that that story made some profound change in my life. But some aspects of it were unusual, a little unlike the usual run of fairy tales I’d been reading in the [Insert Your Favorite Color Here] Fairy Books collected by Lang. As a result, it burrowed in deep, as things you see in childhood often will, and waited for its moment. And something like twenty years passed.

Around then I was living in Manhattan, and stumbled across a restaurant on East Forty-Eighth street, just east of Fifth, called Chalet Suisse. The critics of the time spoke well of it; and as a psychiatric nurse with some disposable income and the country’s best restaurants on my doorstep, in the fullness of time I went to the place, fell in love with the Swiss food, and gradually became friends with the owner, the redoubtable Konrad Egli, who readers who’ve made it this far will immediately recognize. He was a quiet yet formidable force on the New York restaurant scene of the time, and unafraid of anybody – openly scolding the corporate suits from Exxon and NBC for smuggling the restaurant’s far-famed fresh-baked thin whole wheat biscuits out in bulk in their pockets, and once (I was there) telling Mick Jagger that a rich man like him could afford to wash his hair more often (apparently Jagger never again turned up there without having just seen to his hair).

It was the Zurich-born Konni who got me interested both in the history of Switzerland and its folklore. That interest gradually led into the long stretch of research that would culminate in
Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South,
and somewhere along that line I was surprised to run once again into my old friend the Dwarf-king. I discovered at this point that his history, and his story’s, was way more complicated than I had ever dreamed: and was, like so many other fairy tales, obscurely rooted in history. The enemies who came to take the captured princess away from him were in fact the Visigoths, and the princess was the intended of their leader, Theodoric (whose name later got corrupted into Dietrich by German saga-writers, and his then-base of Verona into Bern: which is why he turns up in Swiss folklore in some very confused forms indeed). I had in fact stumbled into a tangled and corrupted corner of the history of the late Roman Empire, close to its fall. This turned my brain around in my skull somewhat, but I turned my attention to the Dwarf-King and his story for a little while, out of pleasure at the renewal of old acquaintance.

Around this time I think I had just started expanding my reading of the works of C. S. Lewis to works beyond the Narnian stories – having moved through the Planetary trilogy (echoes of which can be heard dimly in
High Wizardry
) and then having come upon what for my money is the greatest of his novels,
Till We Have Faces
. The twin issues of beauty as a characteristic of the divine, and of physical beauty and how human beings handle its presence – or absence — is central to that book: and somewhere along the line that theme, in my mind, got itself tangled up with Tolkien’s handling of the beauty of the Elder Races in the
Lord of the Rings
sequence and the
Silmarillion.
The exact transition point would now be impossible for me to identify clearly, but there was a point when I looked away from the Dwarf-king and then looked back, and found that he had been transformed into an Elf. Legolas might have been shocked. (Or, taking into account the character’s development through the three volumes, maybe not.)

After that the worldbuilding got going in earnest. I have around here somewhere (and will add it if I can find it) an image of one of my earliest notes on tesseract structure as it affected the Eleven Worlds: it’s carefully drawn on a piece of the He-Man notepad paper that Paul Dini, Robby London and I were given while we were working at Filmation on He-Man’s first version. (My sole contribution to the project was the map of Eternia that appeared in the He-Man series bible.)

Work on the plot continued for years thereafter — a little here, a little there — while other projects passed in and out of the house: a lot of Star Trek as both novels and TV, some work with comics characters both in prose and comic format, and so on and so forth. But all the time the image of the Rose Garden as symbol, problem and solution was at the back of my mind, and the character business associated with it continued to grow and evolve until I had a framework that would bear the weight of the fairly large plot I intended to hang on it. Serious work began in around 1999, at which point the book sold and was turned in… just in time for the events of September 11, 2001.

As a result, the Alpine garden where the Elf-king’s Roses grow became indelibly associated, for me, with the terrible snow of ash in lower Manhattan that followed on the Towers’ fall. As a native New Yorker — born on East 86
^th
Street , raised in the City’s suburbs and later working and playing more or less in the Towers’ shadow — the blow hit me hard. Suddenly one final aspect of the book’s plot structure revealed itself to me – the idea that our world would be seen by the others in the sheaf not just as an opportunity to make money, but as a symbol of a deadly contagion that could not under any circumstances be allowed to spread. That material was added to the book before it went to press in 2002.

As usual, when you look at a work almost ten years after you’ve written it, you find things that the almost-ten-years-on writer really wants to fix. There are little edits all through this edition, but in particular the last few chapters have been rewritten to try to clarify exactly what the heck is going on. Previous readers of my work will know that I have no trouble at all playing Cosmic Conkers – i.e., banging two universes together and seeing which one breaks first — but this situation was big and complex even by my standards. I hope the revisions satisfy both old readers returning to a favorite work, and new ones reading it for the first time. (In particular, some readers have mentioned that they’ve never read the book because the original cover gave them the idea it was a romance. I hope the new cover will have remedied this.)

Finally: every now and then people ask me when I’m going to do another book in this worldset. Until now the answer had been, “I’m not sure where else I can go with this.” Now, though, after the revision, I begin to see some ways forward. We’ll see how this realization plays out over the next year or so.

In the meantime, thanks for visiting the Garden with me! I hope the Roses have burned bright for you too.

—Diane Duane

Dublin, Ireland

November 2011