They went out and made their way down past the waterfalls and out into the central plaza. The sky had started to cloud over, just mackerel sky against pale blue at the moment, but thickening: the Santa Ana wind had broken, a cooler wind from the west beginning to take its place. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so abrupt in the line of work,” Lee said. “No matter how bad things got…”
“He’s having trouble understanding what he saw,” Gelert said. “He doesn’t like it any better than you or I do. If he supports us with the DA, then his credibility as well as ours is on the line. And if the DA can’t be convinced…”
“We all go down together,” Lee said.
Gelert shrugged his backpack forward a little as they came out on the flat after coming up the flight of steps to the plaza. “Elections are coming,” he said. “The DA moves up, all the people under him move up too…if they’re doing their best work and keeping him happy. If he gets unhappy, they get demoted. And we lose our freelance work for the DA’s Office, and look stupid, or ineffective, or negligent. Which affects all our other work.”
“So we have two days to figure out exactly what we saw, and then convince Matt, but more importantly, his boss, to believe it.”
“Sounds about right.”
Lee sighed. “Let’s get back to the office.”
“Only long enough to tidy up loose ends. Lee, you promised to come home for dinner with us.”
The last thing she felt like right now was being social. But I promised… “Nuala isn’t making anything special, is she?”
“Oh, no. She suggested we might bring something home.”
“I could bring some pasta dough, make something…”
“No, you’ll get all caught up in rolling those little ear things again all night, and we won’t get anything done. How about Xainese? The kids like Xainese.”
“…Okay. Let’s go.”
*
“So how do Elves disappear?” Lee said softly.
They were sitting in Gelert’s living room some hours later. It was the largest of several adjoining domes that butted against one another on several different levels, a rosette of hex windows at the top of each for letting in daylight. The condo was a sleek compromise between the den-structures that madrín built for themselves, and an apartment more suited to a bipedal species, with a sort of Southwestern tribal-NorthAm look about it—the interior all smooth plaster, graceful curves and (Gelert’s tastes being involved) much holoprojected art. The stairs between levels would relapse into ramps when human guests were gone, but right now most of Gelert’s and Nuala’s pups were racing around and practicing falling up and down the stairs in a mood of general rejoicing.
The floor was comfortably cushioned to a meter or so up the walls, and Lee in her jeans and T-shirt was leaning against one wall, surrounded by writing pads, printouts, and transpads hooked into her office commwall, and by a welter of mostly empty Xainese food containers. In Lee’s lap was a six month old madra pup about a meter long—Fhionn, she thought: even now she had trouble telling them apart, since they were all still identically covered with undifferentiated pinky-white, wiry fluff—lying on his back, legs pointing into the air in various directions, and snoring a tiny snore. A couple of meters from her, Gelert lounged amid similar clutter, and behind him lay his mate Nuala, a little bigger and a little slenderer than Gelert, lying listening quietly to them, only her eyes shifting occasionally as she watched the children run around.
“The answer, as you well know, is that they don’t disappear,” Gelert said. “They’re hominid bipeds, just like you and the Xainese and the Huictli and the Tierrans and the Midgarthr. They have a small range of psychic and psi abilities, just as other hominids native to the various other Earths do, but teleportation is not one of them.”
“But they’re not just like the rest of us,” Lee said. “Even in terms of what they’re made of. Matter sourced from Alfheim sometimes has properties not common to artifacts from other universes. Specially some of the pure chemical elements, which behave differently from elements native to other universes. The most obvious example being allotropic gold.” She glanced down at her pad, which was once again showing the Britannica precis on Au100+.
“That’s not the only way the Alfen are different from other humans, of course,” Nuala said in her soft little voice.
“No,” Lee said. She stretched, leaned back among the cushions. “Nuala, tell me something. How do they look to you?”
“Really?” Nuala said.
“Really.”
Nuala gave Lee a look out of her big soulful eyes. “I don’t want to offend…”
“You won’t.”
“They look to me the way humans should,” Nuala said, sadly, as if in apology, “and don’t.”
Lee folded her arms and leaned back for a moment, considering. It struck her as a good explanation: for when she, at least, saw an Alfen, there was always a kind of backtaste on the experience: a sense of sadness that everyone couldn’t look like that.
“But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” Nuala said after a moment. “One does want to keep looking at them, for some reason. I always feel a little foolish about it.”
“You wouldn’t be alone,” Gelert said. “Everybody does it. Anyway, the differences between Alfen matter and matter in the rest of the Earths aren’t going to be enough to let them do the Tooth Fairy number under their own power. What we perceived has to have been something technological.”
Lee sighed. “I don’t know if that’s so wonderful, either. Alfheim has a lot of history of keeping advanced technologies to itself until it feels like sharing them with other worlds. Usually when it can get the biggest political or financial return out of them.”
Gelert got up, stretched, turned around a few times, and lay down again: Nuala settled her head once more on his back. “Well,” Gelert said, “seeing how tightly the government of Alfheim controls access to its information, not to mention its territory, if they do have some new technology that lets people seem to vanish into nothing, we’re not likely to find out anything about it between now and the dil’Sorden case going to trial.” He gave Lee a morose look. “No matter how many favors I call in, there’s only so much that even I can do in the way of research in such a short time.”
Lee sighed, because he was, of course, right. A chorus of yelps descended the nearest flight of stairs, and out of the midst of the storm of legs and muzzles and white fur that ensued, another of the kids flung herself at Lee, more or less knocking Fhionn out of Lee’s lap and taking his place. ” Han’hi Hlee, Han’hi Hlee,” said Luin, the youngest and still the smallest, “Huan fell down and then Faha fell on her and then I jumped on top of them and I bit Huan in the m’hon!”
Lee gave Luin a good ruffling-up and a hug. “Yes, you did, didn’t you?” she said. “What a good girl! You just go do that again.” She put the baby down on the floor, and she scampered away after Fhionn and her other brothers, who were now running up the stairs again.
“You’re inciting my children to do what they want,” Nuala said, with an amused expression. “Don’t help me out or anything, Lee.”
Lee grinned and leaned back against the wall again. “I don’t know if I’m being much help to anybody at the moment,” she said. “Gel, we really have to get to the bottom of this, or at least be seen swimming for it. How do people usually vanish? I don’t mean Elves.”
“There are some personal stealth technologies; light diversion and so on…”
“Yeah, but Gel, I’d still See someone who was using something like that, just as you’d still Scent them. What I Saw just went away and genuinely wasn’t there anymore. He wasn’t hidden: he was gone.”
Gelert rolled over on his other side, looking disgruntled. “And there’s always a fade. Even when someone is dying it’s a progression; that’s how you tell it from a—”
He stopped. Then Gelert sat up, so abruptly that Nuala’s head slid off his back. Gelert sat blinking at the
opposite wall, as if he were seeing visions in it; and a second later he began to howl.
Lee stared at him. Nuala was sitting up, too, now, staring at him: and the pups came barking down the stairs from the den level, falling over each other again. “Gelerh’t mehHrnhuuh,” Nuala barked, “what’s come over you?”
“Premature senility!” Gelert said between howls of laughter. Around him the pups bounced and barked and tried to lick his jaws, confused by what sounded like their sire’s distress. Gelert wrestled a couple of them to the ground, still laughing out loud; and when they had forgotten what their distress was about and had run off again, he sat up once more and shook his head until his ears rattled. “Lee,” he said, “that’s when you vanish in the Scent, in the Sight. The only time. When you’re in the act of worldgating! The cutoff is sharp: there’s no fade. It’s weird enough to be rare even in the literature: I ran across it just once, a long, long time ago in one of the forensics journals. Someone was investigating a murder that had happened in a gating facility, actually in a private matrix cluster. The field of perception is sliced by the rotation of local space out of orientation with the ‘perceptual’ space in the gating matrix; it just cuts off sharp—”
Lee stared at Gelert and had to try hard not to laugh. He was grasping at straws. “Uh…Gel. There’s just one little problem with that. You can’t have a worldgate without an accelerator ring. And there aren’t any accelerator rings at Eighteenth and Wilshire!”
“I’ll grant you that,” Gelert said. “But Lee, at least there is a prototype for what I Scented, what you Saw. A rare one, a bizarre one, but a documented one. Now all we have to find out is, how do you worldgate to someplace, and away from someplace, where there isn’t a gating matrix already in place?”
Lee frowned as the pups began to flop down around Gelert now that the noise had stopped. Nuala, relieved, got up and headed into the kitchen, her tail swinging in bemusement. “What do you mean, that’s ‘all’ we have to find out?” Lee said. “You can’t gate to someplace that doesn’t have a gate matrix tuned to the originator gate, and in phase with it!”
“That’s the way it is now,” Gelert said. “But think. It wasn’t always that way, Lee. Otherwise, how did the very first Macllwain, the one in Huictilopochtli, open the first gateway out of his home universe into another one? There has to have been a time when there was only one accelerator, and no second one to tune to.”
Lee searched her memory and came up empty. “If I ever knew that,” she said, “I’ve forgotten it. The history of science wasn’t something I went in for much after grammar school.”
“We’re going to go in for it now,” Gelert said. “I’m going to pull an all-nighter on it.” He was grinning. Lee had to grin as well, for this was her partner at his most relentlessly alive, baying on the track of data. “And I intend to have enough information to hang a theory on by lunchtime tomorrow. Because here’s your question: what did the Alfen version of MacIlwain use?”
Lee thought about that and didn’t have even the beginning of an idea. “I’ll leave it with you, then.” She leaned back against the wall again; the pups, slightly disturbed by her movement, got up, and some went after their mother into the kitchen, others up the stairs again. “Meantime… what was all this other stuff you wanted me to look at?”
“It’s dil’Sorden’s banking and investment data.”
Lee reached over, found a spare cushion, and started punching it soft. “Wake me up when you’re done.”
“I don’t think you’re going to sleep through this,” Gelert said. His grin was stretching wide. “Just bear with me.”
Both their screens began showing echoes of Gelert’s commwall back in the office; bank statements started flowing by. “This is the investment portfolio part of his banking information,” Gelert said. “He had the usual ExTel package to start with—they have an employee share deal of the normal kind. Nothing unusual there: mostly he let the ‘smart’ fund manager program handle it for him. And his banking records show regular contributions to a pension fund and so on, as well as his own contributions back to one of the Alfen shared equity trusts.”
Lee blinked at that. “I didn’t know they had to contribute back. I thought those trusts were just for disbursing each Elf’s share in Alfheim’s profits from fairy gold sales. Like that yearly oil-resources payout for Alaskans in Tierra.”
“No,” Gelert said. “If they’re working, they have to return a certain percentage of their own earnings to the trust; seems to be a cultural requirement. Anyway, his contributions were all in order—what he seems to have done is just roll over any profits the company investment fund made straight into the Alfen trust. And by and large, his investments were straightforward enough—pretty conservative, really. But one place he did swing out, a little. Take a big guess?”
“Fairy gold?”
“See, I told you you wouldn’t go to sleep.” Gelert nosed his infopad, and the view on it and on Lee’s pad changed to show a series of electronic correspondences. “He bought and sold FG futures on the Chicago Mercantile and a couple of the other commodities markets. It makes sense; it was a big interest area for him. And bearing in mind that most of his work at ExTel surrounded this huge new infrastructure program he was working on, the price of fairy gold would have been something that he thought about more or less constantly. In fact it was the controlling factor in his ring expansion project getting off the ground at all—the price was going to have to drop enough for the company to sanction it. To judge by his letters to various colleagues at work, both in Ellay and elsewhere on the planet, he didn’t think the go-ahead was imminent. But then the approval came through…a whole lot sooner than he was expecting. One or two e-messages to other people suggested he hadn’t thought anything would happen much before 2011; they were expecting a ‘cyclic’ drop in the price around then.”
Lee shook her head. “Seems like a long time to wait…”
“If you’re going to live forever unless you get sick enough to die or someone kills you,” Gelert said, “does it really? But dil’Sorden knew it was a massive project when he and his team proposed it, with a very long lag time between development and implementation. It involved, among other things, installing a third data-only ring underneath LAX…and billions of talers’ worth of investment on just that. Not to mention three other new comms-and-data-only gateways for the Ellay and New San Fran areas.”
“Dear sweet Suz,” Lee said.
“Exactly. So when the okay came through, it looks to me from his notes and mail as if Omren got very curious as to the timing. He started making some discreet inquiries. At first he didn’t find out much of anything, and it looks like for a couple of weeks he gave up and just got on with work. But then there are several mails to people, about a month after he got the go-ahead, bringing up the issue again. And a friend of his in Accounting, whose anonymity has been carefully preserved in dil’Sorden’s notes, tells him that he thinks the project got the green light because there’s going to be a change in the price of fairy gold.”
Gelert looked at Lee as if he expected some particular response. “Well, wouldn’t that be kind of unusual?” she said, cautious. “You told me that one reason fairy gold was such a good commodities metal was because its price was so steady.”
“Yeah, but Lee, think about it. Most of the time, a steady market implies tight control. Think of the oil cartels in Tierra and Huictilopochtli: it’s the same principle. I don’t think there’s ever been any doubt that the Alfen influence the price of fairy gold by controlling the rate of supply. The only thing preventing a big outcry on the issue is that the Elves have never shown any sign of using that control to induce artificial scarcity and push the price up.”
Lee leaned back and frowned. ” Why haven’t they?”
Gelert grinned at her. “Ah, the sixty-four taler question. I doubt it’s altruism, but no one really knows. The received wisdom is that it’s just generally better for their business to keep the price steady
—but as usual they’re not forthcoming as to why that should be so: intraAlfheim trade is pretty much a closed book to economists in other universes. Some people say there’s nothing sinister about it—it’s simply in line with the general conservatism of all their other interuniversal trading policies.” Gelert shrugged his ears. “Maybe. In any case, when the price fluctuates, it usually has to do with events in other universes, and the price gets inflated only on the so-called post-supply ‘middleman’ markets, where you don’t have to wait for a scheduled release of the commodity—places where you can gamble on making a fast buck. But this isn’t one of those.”
Gelert leaned over and looked at the message on his pad. “And there’s the line that makes me wonder, right there. ‘Main T&A,’ that’s ExTel trading and acquisitions, ‘has authorized a major bid buy for early 2005 that will make the infrastructure projects more feasible than they would have been.’ And here’s his note to that: ‘Mai says off the record that thirty tons have been bid at $1435.’” Gelert stared at the glowing words in the floor.
“So his project wouldn’t have any problem going ahead.”
“No kidding.” Gelert looked at Lee. “But that’s where the problem lies. Fourteen hundred thirty-five dollars is just shy of half the present market price.”
“Half?” Lee stared at him. “How could fairy gold possibly drop that much value on the markets by then?”
“How indeed,” said Gelert.
“And how would they possibly know it would? We’re talking nearly two years from now.”
“Whereas most futures contracts cut off at six months, a year at most,” Gelert said. He bared his teeth for a moment. “Well, insider info gets spread around no matter how governments legislate against it. Sounds like someone knows there’s going to be a big change in Alfen government policy, doesn’t it? Except that if there was going to be a policy-driven change, you’d expect it to drive the price up, not down.”