Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  There was a loaded question. It meant he had a full grasp of the concept of world and that she wasn’t a native of his. “Yes.”

  “My father says it’s not much different than Earth.”

  She considered the implication of the statement. The male not only knew of the existence of another planet, he knew its name and spoke one of its languages. There was only one way she could imagine he knew so much. “Your father has been to Earth.”

  “Not for several hundred years. I have to say—judging by the city that you sent to visit us—your world has changed greatly since he was there last.”

  For a moment she forgot how to breathe, and only remembered as she realized she was going lightheaded. Deep breaths. Radically shifting worldview required deep breaths.

  “How…how…how old is your father?” It was the first of the “how” questions she could force out.

  The male considered the question for a minute. “The exact count of his age? I do not know it. He has needed four digits to count his age for hundreds of years. I believe, though, that he is still under two thousand years old. Maybe.”

  “And a year has three hundred and sixty-five days.”

  He thought for a while longer. “That seems to be a correct number. I confess, one such as I has little need to count the days. I do not watch for winter’s thaw to sow crops or such things as that.”

  Been to Earth. Lived for hundreds of years. Pointed ears. Lived on Elfhome. “You’re elves.”

  “That is what our people are called. You are a human?” It was more question than statement.

  “Yes. I am a human. I’m Lain Shenske.”

  “What does your name mean?”

  “It—it doesn’t mean anything. Shenske is my family name, given by father’s bloodline.” She didn’t want to explain being Jewish. “Lain is my given name, but neither one actually means anything.”

  “I am Kaanini-kauta-taeli. It means Lightning Strikes Wind; a brilliance that is there and then gone. My mother was angry when the priestess gave it to me: I will most likely die young.”

  “That’s terrible. Why would anyone even give a child a name like that?”

  “Because she saw my future.”

  She stared at him in horror.

  “I do not mind. It has freed me to seize life, live it as I wish now, with no thought of the long future. If you constantly compare this moment with some perfection that you imagined, you are fated to be forever disappointed. Adventure is the unforeseen, not the expected.”

  Blithe words for someone of sound body who had not had their dreams crushed. But was she not here, on an alien world, far greater than any she expected to explore? Europa would have been a long struggle to drill down through ice to open water and then pray for life. Exploring Elfhome might not be possible without her failure, because with the United States shelving its plans for Jupiter, the world had funneled its energy into the Chinese colony program.

  She hated to admit her mother’s platitudes of “sometimes bad things have to happen for the good things to follow” had any bearing on her present situation. Lain had snarled in her mother’s face for that and every suggestion to use the wheelchair or to push herself in physical therapy. Lain hadn’t seen the point; her life seemed over. She couldn’t have predicted this impossible event all riding on the flip of a switch.

  She cursed. A flip of a switch! Sooner or later the Chinese were going to flip the power switch again. If it wasn’t for her odd conversation with Yves, she wouldn’t have guessed that Pittsburgh’s disappearance was linked to the hyperphase gate in orbit. The Chinese would continue testing the gate until it was time for the colony ship to jump to Alpha Centauri. At that point, there would be no reason to keep the gate on. Pittsburgh would return to Earth and the connection to Elfhome would be lost.

  If she wanted to stay on Elfhome, she needed to get to a piece of land that wasn’t shuffling between the worlds.

  DRABBLE

  A New Day Dawning

  The sun woke Wojo that morning. Once he realized it was full daylight, he thrashed about for the alarm clock, knocking books off his nightstand. The digital face of the clock radio was blank. The power was off. He swore, scrambling out of bed to check the kitchen’s battery-powered clock. Eight o’clock. If he just pulled on clothes, he could make it to work on time. He glanced out the back window to see how traffic on I-279 was…

  A forest had replaced the highway.

  Wojo leapt back from the window, terror jolting through him. He had to force himself to look again.

  Redwood trees filled half of his neighbor’s yard—the part where their house used to stand. The driveway, sidewalk, and garden gnome—smiling as if it knew some monstrous secret—stood untouched.

  I’m still asleep, Wojo finally decided and went to take a cold shower to wake up.

  The forest, though, remained. He dressed, looking out various windows as he pulled on clothes. Everything out the front of the house looked completely normal—no stray trees there. The side windows showed the forest stretched east and west in a solid wall.

  He used a match to light his gas range and started brewing coffee.

  Had he gone crazy? No. The forest was irrational, not him. That was oddly comforting thought. External problems were, his opinion, easier to fix, or at least cope with. He tried the house phone and found it dead. So was, more distressingly, his cell phone. He stood drumming his fingers on the kitchen counter while the tin coffee pot bubbled.

  A wolf trotted through the woods. A very large wolf. Pony-sized even.

  Wojo made sure the doors were locked and got out his deer rifle.

  He filled his travel mug with coffee, added sugar and cream, picked up his rifle, and headed for work.

  WYVERN

  Kate Emerson wasn’t sure what pissed her off most. Was it being jerked off her first trip back to the states in years, to be shoved into an alternate dimension filled with undocumented zoology, real magic and snotty elves? Or was it that her smattering of ten human languages and knowledge of dozens of Earth’s more obscure cultures weren’t worth a damn with the Elfhome natives? Or was it that this time around, her native guide managed to always make her look frumpy?

  Stormsong came up the mountainside with all the fluid grace of a big cat, annoyingly beautiful in the muggy August heat. The nimble elfin bitch didn’t even pant. She paused at the edge of the kuesi’s blood, and murmured, “I told you that your ‘tracer’ would not work,” and continued up the rock face in bounds that would impress mountain goats.

  “I found this much!” Kate shouted after Stormsong.

  “What an idiot couldn’t see of the blood trail,” the elf’s voice came from somewhere above, “a blind man could smell.”

  Kate picked her way through the swimming pool’s worth of viscera to rescue her tracer off of the massive kuesi skull. When she’d heard that the railway project manager for the elfin crew was a female, Kate expected to skip all the normal macho butthead stuff.

  Stormsong waited on the summit beside Godzilla-sized footprints. The feet of their kuesi-snatcher mimicked the structure of birds: three digits pointed forward, one backwards. The talons had gouged the granite as deep as eight inches in places. Old, weathered scratches indicated that the stone outcropping was a common perch site.

  “Dragon?” Kate had checked her zoology reports last night, but they varied wildly from gigabytes of data on wargs—frost-breathing cousins of wolves—to three words on phoenixes: still believed mythical. The dragon section was nearly as scant, it stated “While apparently dragons vary in size, they are reported to be very large, fire breathing, and dangerous. Approach with caution.” Duh.

  Stormsong shook her head. “Too small. Wyvern.”

  Kate tucked into an overhang and scanned the nearby mountain peaks with her binoculars. In the broad valley below them, the railroad right of way cut its straight raw path through the primal forest of the elfin world. Out in the vicinity of Pittsburgh—which fate chose as the huma
n portal into this dimension—they had bulldozers, dump trucks and earthmovers working their way east. The low-tech elves, though, working from the sparsely settled coast, only had hand tools and the kuesi. Until a connecting road was complete, trading between the two races was at an impasse. Construction had been going smoothly until the wyvern decided that the work crew was a moveable feast.

  Speaking of which, Stormsong had poised herself on a rock projection like a piece of bait.

  “Get down.” Kate pointed to the protected ledge beside her. That only earned her a cold stare. Damn elves. “Move over here.”

  “I see better from here.”

  “The wyvern could take you from there.”

  The elf made a noise of understanding. “The wyvern. It sleeps. It hunts at night like a whou.”

  “Whou?”

  Stormsong sighed at Kate’s ignorance. “A night bird! It flies very quietly, and calls whou, whou, whou.”

  Kate caught herself gritting her teeth and worked her jaw to ease the tension. What was it about Stormsong that pissed her off so much? Kate wasn’t sure if it actually was the elf girl herself, or just the irritation with the general situation finding focus on the only breathing target.

  Kate returned to her scanning. “These wyverns. Do they den alone or in mated pairs?”

  “Mated pair. Like falcons, females are larger. The nest will be on a peak, high up, on bare rocks with dead branches and such to keep the young in. One mate will stay on the nest and the other will hunt while there are eggs in the nest. Once the eggs are hatched, both will hunt to keep the young fed.”

  So they were either dealing with a solitary creature, perhaps a youngster, or two beasts—which meant near the nest they’d have to be careful watching their backs.

  “Your viceroy wasn’t completely clear,” Kate said. “What are we supposed to do with the wyvern?”

  “Do?”

  “The viceroy said this was a royal hunting preserve. On Earth, when an animal on a preserve causes a problem, we trap it and move it to another location where it’s not in conflict with humans.”

  Stormsong shook her head. “Wyverns return to their nesting site, year in, year out. If we moved them, they would return next year.”

  “Zoos on Earth might take a mated pair.”

  Stormsong gave a musical laugh. “You might want to risk your life to trap such beasts, but not I. And no. Wyverns need magic to exist. They would die on Earth. Here on Elfhome, they nest on the strongest ley line in their range.”

  Native guides always believed in magic, but here it was a real, measurable force. Trying to determine reality from superstition was going to be a real bitch.

  “What else about this animal can you tell me? What does it look like? Is it a bird?” Damn big bird if it was, carrying off the elfin cousin of an African elephant.

  “Wyverns have four limbs like a bird, not six, so they have no front limbs. Their bones are light but strong, as are their scales.”

  “Scales?”

  “These are wyvern scales.” Stormsong tapped the vest she was wearing. Kate had never seen the elf without the vest of overlapping scales. Earlier attempts to look at it closer had been rebuffed. From the distance, the stuff looked like steel hammered into seashell shingles, and then somehow dyed blue.

  “It would be nice to know what the fuck I’m dealing with here. Can I see the scales?”

  Stormsong hesitated and then undid something on her left side and peeled back part of the scales. The scales were attached to a leather undergarment with a slit laced shut. The elf female undid the lacing and then wriggled a bit. If Kate had been a man, the show would have been extremely interesting.

  The vest was lined with hard leather. Over it had been tacked a strong cloth, to which scales were sewn into an overlapping pattern. All in all, the vest weighed only ten pounds, but a goodly part of it would have come from the leather. The edges of the scales were sharp and slowly cutting through the leather.

  “Why don’t you grind down the edges?”

  “It is organic carbon. There is nothing stronger that we forge that would grind it down. It can take a pistol bullet at close range without breaking. It is permitted only to the domana and sekasha caste.”

  “So this thing…wyvern…is bulletproof?” How the hell was she supposed to kill it?

  “It has points of weakness.”

  “How does it grow? Does it ever shed, like a snake?”

  “No.” Stormsong wriggled back into her vest and laced it back up. “The young are born with down, which is why the parents are so protective. They are vulnerable until they molt.”

  So Kate was fighting an armored attack helicopter. Oh golly joy. She wished that she’d thought to bring a missile launcher. She doubted that even her Winchester African with its .458 caliber rounds had enough stopping power for this, but she had nothing bigger back at camp, or on this planet. Kate studied the blood pool. If this splattering of blood and viscera on the southern exposure was from the wyvern arriving from their camp, then the blood trail on the northern exposure was probably from the wyvern taking off. She climbed up to another summit, hoping that Stormsong was right about the wyvern’s sleep habits. She’d seen falcons strike like bullets enough times to be nervous as she scanned the northern horizon.

  Stormsong stood waiting as patiently as any other native guide Kate had ever used. The wind played with the few strands of golden hair that dared to come out of Stormsong’s thick braid down her back.

  In the north lay several mountains offering possible nesting sites. Hiking for days through virgin forest without GPS, blindly looking for something that could swallow her whole wasn’t Kate’s idea of smart hunting.

  “You said that they nest on ley lines. That means they’re attracted to magic?”

  “They will nest where it runs strongest.”

  “They say magic is measurable. Can you tell, from here, which of those mountaintops has the most?”

  The elf girl shot her a hard look and then, reluctantly, nodded. “Yes, of course I can.”

  Stormsong cleared a flat rock of twigs and dust. From her waist pack, she produced a small, loosely bound, hand printed book, bundled in a layer of suede. She flipped through the pages of complex designs until she found what she wanted. Laying the book flat, Stormsong copied the page out onto the rock with what looked like a grease pencil, only the black lines glittered in the sunlight, like it contained flecks of ground metal.

  Kate frowned at the design as Stormsong carefully rewrapped the book and tucked it away. So far it wasn’t any more impressive than Earth “magic,” although a hell of lot more orderly.

  “Stay back,” Stormsong whispered, blocking Kate’s closer inspection with an outstretched arm. “Do not get metal near it, or make any loud noises.”

  That annoyed Kate, although she wasn’t sure why. Normally natives using magic didn’t piss her off, even when it was blatantly nonsense. What Stormsong had copied out looked oddly similar to computer circuit board design.

  Taking a deep breath, Stormsong chanted out a series of deep, guttural vowels. As if the mantra had thrown a switch, the black lines suddenly gleamed gold. A glowing sphere appeared over the spell, and slowly a model of the local mountain range took form. From the distinctive stone outcrop, Kate recognized that the centermost mountain was the one they stood on. Watery lines appeared in the model, of varying width and brightness, bisecting the mountains.

  Stormsong peered at the model and then looked up, scanning the horizon. “There,” she whispered as she pointed at a far peak. On the model, the line crossing over it was the brightest and widest. “That’s the strongest ley line in spell range.”

  The elf extinguished the spell, and smudged out the lines on the rock with her foot.

  Kate examined the distant mountain with her binoculars; it looked like the rest of the Allegheny range, an oversized rounded hill. One section of it seemed slightly bald. She unpacked her digital camera and its tripod. She had reluctantly
packed these, but it seemed that they were going to come in handy. Training the telescopic lens onto the treeless area, she set the automatic capture on it, took her hands off the camera and let it capture a perfectly still image. Once the timer hit zero, she gave it another second, and then started to enhance the image.

  The bald area enlarged to a wasteland of rock, strewn with broken timber.

  “Well, what do you think?” Kate asked the elf girl.

  Stormsong eyed the picture and then glanced out at the mountain, featureless to the naked eye. “Yes,” she said flatly. “That’s a nesting site.”

  Well, let’s not jump up and down with joy. Kate packed away the camera. “What exactly are the wyvern’s weak spots?”

  Stormsong picked up a stone and scratched out a rough drawing on the rock. “The joints in the wingtips, here, here, and here. If you can cut this membrane,” she indicated the taut skin of the wings, “you can ground it, which will keep it from striking and flying off. Its mouth and eyes are weaknesses. Death magic works, as does light magic.”

  Yeah, right. “Poison? Or does it avoid poisoned bait?”

  “It’s an indiscriminate eater, but it takes massive amounts of poison to affect it, which we don’t have.”

  “How big is this?”

  “They are not as large as a dragon, but they are considerable in size.”

  Considerable my ass, Kate thought, it has to be huge. But she kept her verbal opinion to a snort. “How do your people kill these things? Or do you just pick up the scales after they die?”

  Stormsong lifted up her bow in answer.

  Well, that explained the declining elf population.

  “It’s stupid to attack it on its own grounds,” Kate stated. “We’ll lure it to us, and we pick the shots.”

  “This is not a simple animal.”

  “The smarter it is, the better. We give it an option. To land in among the trees and hope for a clear takeoff, or take something here on its favorite landing site.”

  Stormsong gazed at the blood-splattered rocks. “We will try it your way.”