Stealing the Elf-King's Roses

by Diane Duane

  Another layer of security? Lee thought, confused. But she followed dil’Hemrev out with the others, and quickly saw that wherever this was, it wasn’t Kennedy anymore.

  She and the others were standing under a dome more like that of LAX’s main terminal than anything else: maybe only a quarter mile or so across, but impressive enough in that it wasn’t Fuller-braced, but used instead a more widely spaced bracing system more reminiscent of Gothic arches than anything else, the ribs as transparent as the glazing between them. Through the dome poured the cool, faint amber light of a sky shrouded in high haze: Lee was strongly reminded of an afternoon during her last visit to San Francisco. But another thought was more to the forefront at the moment. I didn’t feel anything! How did they do that?

  She followed the others out of the hex cluster, glancing back at it. It was in the center of that big space: there were no other clusters, just that single one of seven cells. Somebody’s private ring? Lee wondered.

  “Interesting,” Gelert said under his breath as he padded along beside her. “No controls. None that we could see, anyway.”

  “Not as interesting as completely getting rid of the transit side effects,” Lee said softly. “If they could bottle that and sell it, they’d make nearly as much as they do from FG futures.”

  Dil’Hemrev paused in the middle of the space, letting the commission members gather around her. They were all looking around them in slight confusion: there was no one else in all this big space but them. “Do we need to wait for transport?” Olafsson asked dil’Hemrev.

  She shook her head, smiled, glanced up. Lee and the others followed her glance. Above them, the quality of the light coming through the dome changed suddenly, subtly, and it took the moment during which the first breeze reached Lee and ruffled her hair for her to understand that the glazing, whatever it was made of, had simply gone away. A second or so later the bracing that had supported that glazing began to slip away, running down the “surface” of where the dome ought to have been like rain running down a windowpane, contracting toward the shining white floor, vanishing. They were standing on a white island in the middle of a placid sea, and off to one side, the westering sun eased itself through fading veils of passing cloud and slowly came out in a splendor of tarnished gold.

  “It’s a nice day,” dil’Hemrev said. “I thought we might put the top down.”

  Lee was both impressed and faintly annoyed at the staggeringly offhanded display of technology, for to her eye there was a message added: Bet you don’t have anything like this. Seeing it, though, she had second thoughts about how few hex clusters stood under the dome. They probably have a whole battery of matter-handlers in the floor, so that they can manifest clusters on demand, as many as they need. But then that kind of matter handling, based on Bose-Einstein condensates, needed huge amounts of fairy gold. Which they unquestionably have…

  There was the slightest shudder: the floor moved, settled. Everybody shuffled a little, balancing themselves. Dil’Hemrev turned, and most of the other commission members turned to look the way she was looking. There was some low cloud on the horizon: but the wind now ruffling all their hair and clothes was running through it, and it started to break and slip away.

  “Suzanne H. Christ,” Gelert said under his breath. “Will you look at that.”

  Lee looked at the near horizon, as the island on which they all stood began slowly to move toward it, and thought of all the old stories about the city of Ys, Ys of the bells, which sank beneath the sea. But which sea? Lee thought. The old stories got so tangled over and through one another, even in the same universe—let alone with stories from other universes. Which world had had a king intent on building a city so splendid that all the men of his time would call it parYs, “like Ys” or equal to it?

  Now, looking at that city’s towers as they gazed down at themselves in a sea all brazen-blazing with afternoon, Lee thought that the poor king would have had his work cut out for him, if this was the city he meant. Described broadly, the place wouldn’t have sounded all that special. A bay, the city following the line of the bay around, the spires of its greatest buildings centered on the center of the bay, dwindling in height as they spread around the crescent: handsomely designed, yes, the shapes of the towers sleek, varied and elegant, the colors and materials varied, too. It all looked planned, even studied. There was nothing haphazard or spontaneous about it, and it was unquestionably a work of art—nothing “extra” there, everything building necessary to the design, everything contributing to the effect as a whole.

  Yet all your breath was taken away, not by the size of the buildings or the ambition of the design: nothing so heartless. Somehow this skyline said to you, not “I am great, I am powerful,” but “I am fragile, I am temporary.” Some immortal architect or planner, had looked on the passing things of the world and felt sorry for them—all the common, mortal, material elements of life, the things that crumble and fade and are outlived. That builder or designer had found a way to make the stone and the steel and glass themselves express that sorrow. And somehow the feeling came to you, across the water: it struck you about the heart, so that you gasped with the immediacy of it, and with the feeling that you and that city were kindred somehow.

  “Welcome to Alfheim,” dil’Hemrev said. “Welcome to Ys.”

  Lee blinked back the tears without being particularly concerned who might notice, for nearly everyone else in the commission party was either wiping their eyes furtively or looking for some way to turn to avoid having others see them doing it. One or two of them were actually crying on other commission members’ shoulders, overcome, and plainly mortified by it.

  Dil’Hemrev looked around at them, grave. “The… distress… will pass shortly,” she said. “I apologize for not having mentioned it earlier, but some guests don’t experience it, and we’ve found that mentioning the effect can actually induce it. The phenomenon seems to have something to do with the angle of orientation of the transit between our home universe and Earth’s: it’s much greater than usual. Please accept our apologies.”

  There was no immediate answer but some subdued snuffling. “The accelerator ring,” Lee said after a moment to dil’Hemrev, for she gathered that it would be a few moments before any of the others were ready to speak, “it was right under us, wasn’t it? It follows the arms of the bay around…”

  Dil’Hemrev nodded. “It was installed under the seabed here, about forty years ago, around the same time the city was expanded and redesigned. It’s not our biggest access ring, but probably the most powerful.”

  Lee nodded and gazed at the city again, and past it. Behind it, maybe fifty miles to the east, a range of massive, spiky, jagged peaks rose up and up behind it, matching the towers in symmetry, but rendered indistinct by distance and low cloud—an insubstantial barrier, half airbrushed-out in the pale gold of misty afternoon. They made the composition complete, for they were the permanence against which that fragility had to be balanced to make sense. Beautiful though they were, Lee found herself ever so slightly irked not to know what to call them. It’s amazing how little we know about this place, she thought, even though it’s been part of the Five-Geneva Pact for ninety years. Most of their maps are classified, and even the ones that aren’t have big empty spaces all over them. Paranoia?…

  Lee blinked again, starting to be annoyed at the irrational tears, and paused to fumble through her bag for a hanky. Still, even paranoiacs have real enemies. They probably have their reasons, l just wish we knew more about them.

  The target platform kept on progressing across the water, heading for the city. Lee was surprised by how little it rocked as it went. Either they’ve got really wonderful stabilizing systems on this thing, she thought, or it’s absolutely massive. It occurred to her that the ring’s whole actuating apparatus could well be stowed away in this structure, making the gating complex even more secure. Moving it would be like removing the key from a door: without the gate targets and the actuator in place, the wh
ole accelerator circle would be useless. More paranoia? Or just clever design? Or both?

  Slowly they slid closer to the city, between the arms of the bay, and finally headed over toward its right-hand side, where there were some docks for boats—hovercraft and hydrofoils, as well as yachts of all sizes, and more mundane sailcraft, in about equal proportions, with the lower skyscrapers of the city towering over them all. “Looks like a millionaires’ convention,” Mellie muttered just behind Lee.

  Lee nodded, feeling the whole platform slow as they approached what looked like a curving glass wall jutting out into the water. The circle of the platform slid ever so slowly up against it, then snugged, softly but very solidly, into something far below. Lee could feel several different sets of vibrations, each terminating in a gentle “closing” shock that came up through the floor. This has to be the whole actuator array, she thought. If one of us has to leave here in a hurry for some reason, this isn’t going to be the way to do it.

  The glass wall before them slipped down to ground level and vanished as the dome had done. “This way, please,” dil’Hemrev said, leading them off the island and onto a long white marble jetty that joined what looked like a wide curved promenade paralleling the shoreline. The commission members followed her, gazing up and around at the buildings by the shore.

  “We won’t be needing ground transport,” dil’Hemrev said; “all your accommodations are a few minutes’ walk from here, and they back right up against the three buildings that make up Ys’s ‘financial district.’ ”

  “Very convenient,” Olafsson said. Lee could just hear him thinking what she was sure some of the others were thinking too: how convenient that we’ll see as little as possible of the city without Alfen guides hanging around. She glanced at Gelert, who was innocently doing a good imitation of a tourist, gaping at everything: the look of witless wonder he threw her was as clear a comment as Lee needed.

  After just a couple of minutes the group came up to a tall and graceful building with a cafe terrace in front of it As dil’Hemrev led them up the walk that bisected the cafe and toward the main doors of the building, Lee began to twitch a little at the looks from the Alfen who sat in the cafe, drinking their wine, or eating their meals, and who now paused to stare, coolly, at the new arrivals. The shoe’s on the other foot now, Lee thought Here we’re the exotica… and we’re not entirely welcome.

  The group made their way in through doors that vanished to admit them, and saw from the logo on the far wall of the entry hall that this was a hotel. “I didn’t know Hilton operated here,” Olafsson said to dil’Hemrev.

  “We run it for them under license,” said dil’Hemrev. “The same kind of arrangement they have with their properties in Midgarth. Come on over this way, we’ll get you checked in.”

  Lee followed the others to the reception desk, meanwhile thinking that this kind of setup was “convenient” for the Alfen, too: it meant that only local people would be running the hotel. I really have to watch this blanket paranoia… she thought, as a smiling Alfen woman took Lee’s SlipCase to wave it over the registration reader, then handed it back to her. “Suite 312,” she said, taking the SlipCase that Gelert proffered her in his jaws, “enjoy your stay. Good afternoon, sir…”

  Lee looked over the case, which was now showing her directions to the room and a thumbnail layout: the suite had a common living area and two bedrooms. Olafsson and several others who had already finished checking in had gathered around dil’Hemrev and were looking up from the reservations gallery into the center of the hotel atrium, in which a huge stylized fabric sculpture of some kind of winged creature hung, all done in flame-colors and seemingly caught in the act of soaring toward the roof and the starry stained glass ceiling at the top of the atrium. Lee joined the others, looking up at it.

  “Ystertve,” dil’Hemrev was saying to Olafsson: “life reborn. It’s a very old symbol, from a folktale. They say that this city was built on the foundations of another one that was drowned, millennia ago. The archaeologists have found signs of settlements that old some miles away, but no cities. None off the coast, either. Still, the story persists…”

  “The Phoenix,” Mellie Hopkins said, wiping her eyes again.

  “That would be one of your versions of it, yes,” dil’Hemrev said. More of the commission members were gathering around them: she looked around. “Ladies and gentlemen, I get the feeling you’ll all have found the transit wearing. With that in mind, there’s been nothing planned for the rest of the day: you’re at leisure to rest or have a meal or tour around, as you please. We do ask that you respect our people’s privacy: if you want to go out, get in touch with the front desk and someone will be glad to escort you around. As for business, that won’t start until tomorrow. The elevators are over this way—”

  Everyone began to head for the elevators. Lee and Gelert found themselves walking next to Sal Griffiths. “I hate this,” he muttered, “but I feel like I’ve just changed about fifty time zones at once, and I’ve got to crash and burn.”

  “We’re tired, too,” Gelert said, before Lee could open her mouth. “A nice afternoon nap, that’s what we need…”

  “Absolutely,” Lee said. She smothered a not entirely sincere yawn.

  They made their way up to their suite, waving to those they left behind them in the elevator: Sal and a few others got out on their floor, and headed off toward rooms on the other side of the elevator bank. Lee glanced at her SlipCase, which was now showing her a little arrow pointing down the hall to their room, as if it was necessary. She also noted the directory of commission members elsewhere in the hotel that had appeared. “We’re all on these two floors, it looks like.”

  “Convenient,” Gelert said. Ahead of them and to the right, their room door felt them coming and opened.

  Lee stepped in, looking around the big sitting area. Gelert came in behind her; the door closed, and Gelert nudged his luggage, telling it to set itself down. “Well, I feel a little better,” he said, glancing around. “Not even the Elves can make a chain hotel surpassingly beautiful.” He sighed. “But that’s the only exception to the rule. Look at that view… !”

  Lee was doing so, and having trouble managing the lump in her throat. The mist over that distant mountain range was lifting, and she was discovering that she had never before been so affected by a mere landscape. But there was nothing “mere” about this. Those mountains called to her.

  With some difficulty she tore herself away and went over to the bedroom on the righthand side. “Wow!”

  “Big bed?”

  “No, this one’s yours, it’s got the padded floor and the custom bath. Look at the size of that plunge!”

  Gelert wandered in behind her, looking at the bedroom and bathroom. “Don’t get ideas, you probably have one this big. Did someone just knock?”

  “Uh—” Lee went back into the sitting room, where someone had slipped a sheet of paper under their door from outside, and by the sound of it was now heading on down the corridor. Lee waited a moment, then went over to the sheet, picked it up, looked it over.

  “The schedule for tomorrow,” she said. “Morning meeting with the fiscal experts and the accountants and accounting team. The rest of us get an orientation tour.”

  “Sightseeing in Beautiful Ys,” Gelert said, sounding unusually dry. “Probably even more boring than what we’re going to be doing.”

  “Oh, I don’t know… it really does look like such a gorgeous place: it’d be nice to see some more of it, especially considering that we’re going to be inside hunched over computer terminals for most of our stay.” Lee went to have a look at her own bedroom, and found inside it a bed that deserved to have its own zip code. She sat down on the silky bedspread and stroked it idly, looking around at the room, and at the windows that gave on that spectacular view.

  Gelert looked in. “Nice,” he said, glancing around. He was looking for listening and viewing devices, Lee knew: she also knew that it was probably useless, these days wh
en you could hide a camera in a coin or a mike in a pinhead. “I guess I take back the line about chain hotels. Their furniture is nicer than usual.”

  Lee nodded, looking down from the view to the golden bedspread. She was surprised to find herself still stroking it, and indeed unable to keep her hands off it: the texture was ridiculously seductive. Annoyed, she stopped. Damned if I’m going to be seduced by a bedspread. She got up and walked back out to the lounge, gazing out at the view again. After a moment or so she rubbed her eyes.

  “Allergies?” Gelert said.

  “No. It’s just—” She was going to say “I’m tired,” but that wasn’t exactly it. “I feel like I’ve been in court all day,” Lee said. “Like I’ve been Seeing judicially—” Then she stopped again. “No. Like I’ve been resisting Seeing judicially.”

  “The same kind of worn down feeling you get when the litigants are bogging a court down in procedural rigmarole, before you can get to the meat of the matter…”

  “That’s right.” She looked out at the mountains, away across the plain from the city. The clarity of the blue sky above those mountains seemed impossible to an LA native: but then Lee wondered if it wouldn’t seem impossible to anyone. Nothing here looked ordinary, she realized. Everything looked preternaturally sharp, as if even though your vision was already perfect, someone had found a corrective lens that would make things seem clearer…and it was giving you a headache from looking through it. “Like someone had used image enhancement on reality…”

  “What?”

  “Just thinking.” She got up and went over to investigate the minibar. There were some soft drinks, some Alfen wine, both still and sparkling, some mineral water. She pulled out one of the mineral waters. “You thirsty?”

  “Not right now,” Gelert said, turning away from the window to pad around from sofa to chair to table, looking them over without trying to be too obvious about it. “Something else I noticed,” Gelert said. “The way they have their gate access handled from the main gating facility. Very interesting.”