“The Interpol report,” Gelert said.
“Yes.”
“So Hagen is involved with this invasion plan,” Lee said, “and when it became plain that dil’Sorden had probably realized what that buy meant, Hagen had him killed.”
“No, that wouldn’t have been his idea. I think it more likely to have been Dierrich’s order, and the Alfen who hired the triggerman, almost certainly, is Dierrich’s deputy Mevel dil’Amarens.”
“I think Gelert and I would like to interview this person,” Lee said.
“I think you must achieve another state of existence to do so,” the Elf-King said, “since he was among the fifteen or so of Dierrich’s creatures whom I’ve just killed.”
Lee and Gelert looked at each other, and Gelert nodded. “I Scented him up there, too,” Gelert said. “One more piece of information that the DA will be glad to have… but Lee, did you record that?”
Lee shook her head. “I don’t suppose we could get you to testify at the trial?” she said.
The Elf-King gave her a thoughtful look, and nodded. “It will doubtless mean other disclosures,” he said, “such as the names of my deep-cover people in the LAPD, who fed the information about your forensic sweeps to me. But if I live through the next few days—yes, I’ll do that for you gladly.”
If any of us live through the next few days, Lee Saw him think. She shivered again, feeling more strongly the effect of the darkness about her, and the horror. Lee had always had an idle idea that the gigantic cyclic migrations from Midgarth had more to do with the weather than anything else. Now, though, she saw how very wrong she’d been. People in microcultures all over the Worlds dealt with the cold without too much trouble; some of them even liked it. But this leaden, deadly darkness, and the fear lurking away high in it, were something she hadn’t reckoned with. Out there the forces of Night and Hatred were moving; for this little while, this world was their own, and what life or light they found, they would stamp out without mercy. Lee almost wished she didn’t have to breathe out. She felt as if even that slight exhalation of warmth might attract the attention of something she emphatically did not want to see her.
Glancing up at that black sky, for once she had no desire to See it any better. The stars up there were set in no friendly patterns. They were merely cold eyes for something that viewed her only with scorn, the pitiful devotee of a Power that had no power here, at least in this time—not until the Winter ended in devastation, and the rising of the new-made Sun over a world broken but reborn. But that wouldn’t be for years yet, as this world reckoned time. Right now the dark Powers were in the full of their strength, and held this world in Their hands—
Enough time for our trail to go cold, the Elf-King had said. Lee wondered exactly how much longer that was going to take. The wind was beginning to rise, now, and it sounded like the howling of wolves; or of one wolf, huge, hungry, that waited to eat the Sun.
“We’re close,” the Elf-King said. “At any rate, Dierrich’s party, and some other parties in Alfheim who would prefer some other Laurin, all think if they deal with the multinationals now, they’ll be safe. But they’re blind to the cause of the problem. Genuinely blind in some cases—willfully blind in others. Dierrich fell into that second category, and so was as dangerous to our world by herself as all the others put together. She really thought that if she derailed the plans that ExTel and their many friends in the outworlds had built so far, they wouldn’t come back and try again. She thought they were just ephemerals, unable to hold a thought for more than a year at a time.”
His expression was grim. “But sooner or later, their corporate descendants would come back and try the same thing again; more violently, more conclusively. Because the symptom persists—the fact that will bring them back again and again. The transmission speed of fairy gold in Alfheim is many times what it is in the outworlds. What they don’t realize is that this is because Alfheim is the heart of the sheaf.”
Lee looked at him in the darkness. “You mentioned that before. What sheaf?”
“The sheaf of eleven universes of which Earth and all the others are part.”
Gelert gave the Elf-King an incredulous look as he paced along beside him. “Excuse me. Eleven?”
“There are four more that you haven’t found yet,” the Laurin said. “This wasn’t something we felt we needed to mention to the other universes, as it might have provoked awkward questions—such as, how did we know? The answers, however roundabout, would have led those in other universes to the realization that whoever controls the central universe of the sheaf exerts control over all the others. And that might have had unfortunate results.”
Lee and Gelert could do nothing but stare at each other.
“There,” the Elf-King said, and pointed. “Finally.”
Just rearing itself above the snow line, now, Lee could see something jutting up: a ring of stones, far bigger than the one she’d seen in Alfheim. “A transit ring?” Gelert said.
“Not a mechanical one. No particle accelerators: or at least, none of the built kind. It’ll serve our purpose, anyway. This gate swings only one way, and I can close it after us. Or jam it shut, which means that anyone trying to come after us will have to go the long way around through three other universes, the way they’re aligned at the moment, to come at us.”
He broke into a trot, and Lee went after him eagerly enough; it was a way to stay warm…and she was eager to get out of here. Gelert trotted alongside her, glancing from side to side as he went “They say this is really nice in the summer,” he said.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Lee said. The cold was beginning to bite hard into Lee again, and she was glad to get to the ring of stones, though the evil look of them dismayed her. They were black, roughhewn, ruinous; the way they leaned inward gave them a terrible look of silent threat, as if they wanted to fall and crush whatever walked among them. But the Elf-King walked into the circle as calmly as Lee might walk into her own living room, and stood there looking around him as casually.
When did I last think about my living room? Lee thought, as she went in among the stones, glancing at them mistrustfully. Right now she would have given anything to be sitting there on the sofa, nice and warm, with her feet tucked up underneath her, watching something mindless… or even just the news. But that thought immediately brought up the image of yellow sodium-vapor lights illuminating black-and-whites, and a sheeted corpse lying near Eighteenth and Wilshire. No, she thought. For his sake, I’ll see this through—
She went to stand beside the Laurin; Gelert joined her. The Elf-King had the stone from the “garden” in his fist again, and was standing there gazing down at the snow, a concentrating look. “I know a quiet spot where we’re going,” he said. “You don’t have to move. Just stand still and let the effect pass.”
Lee set her teeth as the cold, dark world around her shimmered and wobbled, as the cobweb feeling swept over her body and rooted in her bones for a long time, too long. She felt as if she was being thrown in the air like a ball, while outside her the world tumbled and tore itself to pieces in a way of which her Sight could make nothing, a distortion more upsetting than any mere gate-complex hula she’d ever experienced. After a moment everything settled down, and she opened her eyes, which she’d shut in self-defense. It was hot, incredibly hot; but that was probably only by contrast with the place they’d just come from.
And she and Gelert and the Elf-King were standing in a little triangular park with two streets running along either side of it. There were wheeled vehicles, some parked on either side of the little triangle of concrete and grass: others drove by on the ground, bright yellow. Taxis? Lee thought. New York?
It was New York. But it wasn’t. Lee looked around her, trying to See the difference. The street signs on the pole at the nearest corner said Avenue Of The Americas and 12th Street; but the feel of the street on which she stood was so alien and different from that of the New York where she and Gelert had been not three week
s ago that Lee felt like she might as well have been on Mars. “This isn’t Earth,” Lee said.
“Or Tierra. This is the new world, isn’t it—”
“Terra,” the Elf-King said, and it was all he could say for some moments. He bent right over at the waist, hands gripping thighs like a runner who’s just finished a marathon, like someone bracing himself in a desperate attempt not to fall over.
“My God,” Gelert said. “Except for the initial investigation team, we must be the first ones to visit here…”
“Oh, no,” Laurin said, and gasped for another breath. “Not at all.”
They waited rather nervously for him to recover himself, wondering who was going to come over to them and demand to know who they were and where they’d come from. But no one was nearby, and no one at any distance paid the slightest attention to them. The Elf-King managed to straighten up a little, glancing around him, and getting his breath back. “You’d think people appear out of nothing every day here,” Lee said.
“Probably not,” Laurin said, “but if they did, what would people do? Tell the police? I seem to remember you didn’t have a lot of luck with that.” He looked amused, though not at Lee specifically. “And your police are probably a lot more broadminded about people appearing and disappearing than the police here are.”
“I wouldn’t bet money on that just yet,” Gelert said. “Wait till we go to trial.” He looked around him thoughtfully. “You say that the Alfen who’re going to follow won’t be able to do so right away?”
“I’d be surprised if they could.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Some hours, at the very least.”
Gelert sat down, then, panting, looking like he was very much enjoying the hot humid air. Lee certainly was: but she still didn’t feel she felt entirely comfortable. “So your people knew about this place before the investigative team in Greenland did?” she said.
“Years before they did,” the Elf-King said.
“And you never thought to tell anyone?”
“We thought about it. Or rather, I thought about it. But there were reasons against it.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to decide for us what we should know and what we shouldn’t!” Lee said.
“Swiftly enough I wished we didn’t know about it,” Laurin said. “After that all we could do was try to contain it, and there was only one way to do that: silence.” He frowned at the cityscape around him. “We were the first ones to come to grief here. So many of us…” He shook his head. “Not right now. Are you all right?”
Lee twitched her shoulders a little as she handed him back his jacket. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Things don’t look right somehow.”
“They’re not,” the Elf-King said. “Come on—we have someplace to find.”
The three of them headed for the corner of Sixth and started walking downtown. “We started exploring here not long after I came to rule,” Laurin said. “At first it was casual interest; there were peculiarities about this world’s timeflow. And other details that made it interesting.” For a moment his face went closed; Lee noted that for later reference. “Normally those who went to explore, or visit, or even settle here, lost interest eventually and came back to Alfheim. Partly because of those oddities in the timeflow: four or five hundred years here would feel like a thousand years of local time in a more normal universe, say Earth. Of course that made this world a little unpopular: for my people the sensation of an accelerated timeflow like that is similar to chronic tiredness. But that seemed the place’s only drawback at first. Then, slowly, we noticed that our people who came here were beginning not to come back. It was hard to understand the causes.”
Then the Elf-King sighed, and the face that had seemed to be holding on to its secrets suddenly looked completely open, and frustrated. “Or maybe I should say, it was hard to get anyone interested in understanding the causes. Except as regards business, which means the fairy gold import/export business, the upper levels of our governmental structure have for a long time resolved that our people should be left alone in their travels into other worlds. There’s been a general sense that once an Elf willingly walks beyond the bounds and into the realms of the ephemerals, it’s that Elf’s business what happens to him.”
It occurred to Lee that this would explain some of the Alfen indifference to their own outworld murder statistics. “You mean,” Gelert said, “once he goes where he doesn’t belong…”
The look Laurin gave him was not nearly as hostile as Lee had been expecting. “There are enough of our people who feel that our kind shouldn’t have anything more to do with humans than absolutely necessary,” he said.
“Except to sell them allotropic gold,” Gelert said.
They paused to wait for traffic lights to change at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street, and Laurin sighed. “This goes partway to the root of the reason. There came a point where we knew that there remained some tens of thousands of Alfen in Terra, many of whom had been in relatively frequent contact with home… but more and more of them dropped out of contact, until at last none had been heard from, not one, for many months. I began expressing strong interest in these disappearances. But I met a great deal of resistance.” His expression would have looked wry, were it not also so very bitter.
“Unfortunately, as I said, being absolute ruler of a world doesn’t always mean that you routinely get what you want. Those theoretically subject to you soon become expert in finding ways to pursue their own agendas—and to make your own work difficult, in subtle ways, if your agenda conflicts with theirs. Nonetheless, I pushed the Miraha to set up an investigation of what was happening to our people in Terra. They resisted, but when I made it plain that they were not going to ‘wait me out’ of this desire, finally they agreed.”
They paused at the next block for another light. “So you sent your own team here,” Lee said.
“Yes; and quite a well equipped one.” Laurin’s expression now was wry, indeed ironic. “In fact, some of those whose paths we crossed mistook us for space aliens. That seemed funny at the time. But in retrospect I would have far preferred the commonplace kinds of alien strangeness one runs into in Xaihon’s universe to the awful kind the investigators found. The group returned safely, but they were unanimous that we should do everything we could to lock Terra away from the other worlds forever.”
“But why?” Gelert said.
“There are problems with natural law here,” Laurin said. “Terrible problems. Science is broken. The set of principles defined by the grand unified theory itself is flawed; something’s damaged it, so that particles which should exist don’t, or decay in bizarre fashions unknown anywhere else. Whether this is causally attached to the problems with that universe’s ethical constant, we still don’t know. But Terra’s constant seems ‘set’ terribly low—lower than the constant in any other world. There are crimes here—” He shook his head. “You can’t imagine. How good survives here at all, I don’t fully understand. But Terra’s universe is… not exactly maimed. Say rather it has birth defects, terrible ones. There seems to be no way to correct them. But what’s more frightening is that they’re potentially contagious.”
Lee had been wondering about the strange edgy sensation she’d been having since they arrived here, expressing itself in Sight as a slight uncomfortable skewing of things viewed, as if things just didn’t look right. Now she understood why, and she shivered. There had been nothing about this in the articles Lee had read at home about this world’s discovery…but then the emphasis of most of those had been economic or political. And possibly it would have taken much longer stays for people who weren’t trained sensitives to feel this difference…
Gelert had been listening with eyes halfclosed as he stood waiting for the light. Now he glanced up. “Some of the people with whom ‘we’ crossed paths?” he said.
“Not much gets by you, does it, madra?” the Elf-King said. He sounded faintly amused as the light changed and they
crossed the street. “Yes, I went with the investigatory team, though my people tried to prevent it. They were terrified of what would happen to Alfheim if something happened to me, for the Laurin traditionally doesn’t leave the Realm for long, or go too far out of the way. Some rai’Laurinhen have never left, have spent their whole lives in the one world—some never even leaving Aien Mhariseth, for fear that without them in their proper place at the center of the universe, that universe would fail.”
He laughed very softly. “Well, that was never going to be my style, as I made plain at my accession. I knew my world was robust enough to be able to do without me for a while. Yet Alfheim’s own fear was already creeping into my bones… and feeling the world’s fear, I was already afraid enough myself to insist that something terrible was likely to happen if I didn’t go. The Miraha fought me. But I have ways of fighting back.”
“So we saw…” Lee said.
He nodded, looking rather grim. Lee found herself wondering, perhaps unjustly, how many members of the Miraha the Elf-King had had to replace after the fighting died down—and then she suddenly wondered about the title some of them bore, the “Survivor Lords.”
“So off we went into Terra,” the Elf-King said, “at least as blindly and in as much ignorance as your own team came just now into Alfheim.” There was no rancor in the way he said it, just a kind of rueful acknowledgment. “We arrived in a time which would roughly have corresponded with the late 1940s in your own world. We were aiming for a later period, but the way time runs in this universe, what with local eddying and the complexity of other forces affecting the home planet, it’s not always possible to come out where you intend. As it happens, it was good we came out where we did.”
They stopped for one more traffic light, and Laurin’s face twisted in a way that suggested “good” was a word he would not normally have chosen. “Our study of the local history soon showed why our people had been vanishing,” Laurin said. “Where their differences were sensed at all by the humans in Terra, they were hunted down without mercy… sometimes imprisoned or tortured: usually killed. But that was just a symptom of a wider malaise. Terra’s worldsoul had been withering steadily over the previous decades, as technology enabled its creatures ever more freely to enact their fears and hatreds of one another, their darkest desires. And the more they were enacted, the darker the desires grew. Finally, they found their fullest flower. A great war broke out here, as it did in Tierra about that period. The whole planet was convulsed with that war. But one side hit on a novel idea. It told its people—mostly for purposes of political advantage—that one specific kind of humanity was responsible for its troubles. It would solve its problems by completely wiping them out.”