In this moment, symbol was everything. With the earth shaking under her and the wind screaming around her, Lee reached out shaking for one of the roses, broke it off its bush, clenched her fist hard on its thorns, and then upended it and squeezed until the white of its light was stained red with her blood.
Give him the gift he seeks!
And the Power descended in turn on him, and did her bidding.
Because of her Sight, Lee saw what was happening to him, in that first instant, as he did: a view imbued with both frightful intimacy and an awful passionless detail, a point of view like a god’s. Understanding what was happening to him, if Lee had then had any power of speech left to her, she would willingly have cried in anguish, with her own world’s MacIlwain, “I am become the Lady, the Creator of worlds…!” But she had no power left to do anything but crouch down against the shaking world, wondering in terror what have I turned loose! —as after a few breaths’ time of terror and pain, a vast darkness began rearing up above her, wavering in and out of shape, perhaps a man, perhaps not. Even in the face of this utter chaos Lee found herself thinking again of that commcall long ago—that moment echoing this one in essence if not in reality. And what about the roses? the voice had asked, holding itself steady because of its own fear of this moment, its terror at becoming the shadow that might well someday drown everything in the final blackness and cold—
But the fire of the roses was still around them, and would not be drowned. Or rather, the darkness knew and loved them too well to allow it. Beyond the roses on every side the tattering void was rushing in, a whirling vortex of form dissolving in formlessness, a hurricane’s eye of abnegation with that darkness towering up higher and higher at its heart. The dark was struggling with the torrent, thrusting outward against it and into it, a sword-edge of power cleaving through. There was still something of human form about the one wielding the sword of will, though how long he could keep a grip on that humanity, or what would happen if he lost it, Lee had no idea. Eleven worlds’ worth of force were battering like a screaming wind at the shape and the will now reaching inescapably inward to grapple with the heart of hearts of the worlds. Alfheim’s core shrieked like a world dying as he gripped it, thrashed and tried to tear itself to shreds in rejection of the traitor Elf who had just willingly made Death part of him. But in his own way, he was Alfheim’s core, sensate as the world was not. It had always been subject to him. Now, scream though it might, blacken its sun and kill its stars though it might, he was its ruler still. Lee could feel his terrible resolve gaining ground, unrelenting, unremitting, as he reached in and in to the power that even before he had possessed only in shadow, etiolated and incomplete. Now he was complete; everything else would follow.
… if he could only hang on! For the desperate world kept fighting. Lee, staring into the chaos tumbling around them, could See—or hear, she hardly knew which—the anguished, wretched scream of Alfheim itself as it found voice. I kept you immortal, I kept you beautiful, it would have lasted forever, why are you throwing it away?! She covered her eyes, weeping for the world’s pain; but that still couldn’t stop the Sight.
Because it was never meant to stay that way, his answer came, as he kept groping toward the the heart of the violent maelstrom, feeling for the very center, which was his very center as well. Because this should have happened a long time ago, if something hadn’t gone wrong, if the pain of the rotation hadn’t made the world feel it was destroying itself. Because if it doesn’t happen now, everything begins to die a death beyond anything mere entropy would have had in store. Because—
—and he found and grasped the final core, the heart of the sheaf of worlds.
Lee felt him find it. Even through the paroxysm of despair and rage and terror that Alfheim was suffering, nothing could have kept her from feeling it. As his hand closed around the inmost heart of his world, Lee felt it also close around hers; and along with Alfheim, and all the other worlds, and all the other lives in all the worlds, she bent double and clutched herself and screamed No!
But yes, he said. At last, yes!
And then he tore the core of the sheaf apart.
At least that was what it felt like. The pain was unbearable, so awful that the Worlds stopped screaming, and a silence of utter torment fell such as had not been heard for aeons. But Lee, transfixed by the agony equally with all the rest of creation, at least had some inkling of what was happening; and the pain didn’t blind her. Indeed, she wondered if anything would ever be able to blind her after what she Saw now, what she could not in any way have prevented herself from Seeing.
It seemed to him as if he was working with his hands, and therefore Lee Saw it so—though what forces he was applying to the great blazing core of light he held, she couldn’t imagine. All eleven universes’ energy, all eleven universes’ matter, all grasped in one mind and confined in one place, was a concept incomprehensible enough to her. She understood even less why, as he concentrated his will upon it, the sheaf of worlds should lose that appearance of a billion billion suns crushed together, and suddenly become transparent, hardly there, a bubble iridescent not with light but with probability.
Until the bubble multiplied itself outward, and became again not just one but eleven, commingling and interpenetrating, all their surfaces swirling with urgent brilliance…
… and in a vast and deafening tumult that would have been a cry equally of terror and deliverance, each of those eleven became eleven more, and their surfaces swirled in turn, power ready to be unleashed—
Yes, he said. Be.
In a silent roar of light, they burst into darkness, and Lee, and everything else, went with them.
But still she was not blind: still she Saw. She saw the new outrush of stars in the worlds just made, matter and energy locked again in their old embrace of fire. But much more of Lee’s attention was for the old worlds, the ones that had been created by the first rotation of the sheaf’s core. Theoretically she was still on a planet inside one of them. Yes, well, theoretically… Lee thought; for though she could see a hundred other universes’ events beginning to unfold, she had no idea where she was, or whether she still even had a body to be anywhere in. Stars in plenty she could see around her, but she couldn’t see anything of herself.
“You’re not looking,” he said.
His voice seemed to come from very near; the sound of it was localized again, rather than feeling like gravity or some other universal force that spoke from inside your bones, or your heart. Lee looked around for him, and slowly realized that it was possible to look around; that she had knees, and was kneeling on them… which was a good thing, since if she’d been standing, she would surely have fallen down by now. Lee blinked, and once more saw the darkness behind her eyes, which she’d thought she would never see again. And the stars dimmed through the thickening smoke of reestablished being, and were not stars, but just roses, burning in the twilight…
“Just roses,” she said, and then had to laugh rather weakly. ” ‘Just’…Gel?”
Not far away she heard the rustling as he staggered to his feet. “I’m here,” he said. “Wherever ‘here’ is. What just happened… what was that?”
“I rotated the core,” the Elf-King said. “Or actually I took away what was stopping it from rotating. It finished doing what it wanted to do, aeons and aeons ago…”
Gelert got to his feet, shook himself, prepared to wince…then didn’t. “Huh,” he said. “My ears are better—”
Someone pushed open the patio door from the living space of the house, came out onto the deck and stared up the hillside at the three of them.
The Elf-King smiled slightly. “Come up,” he said.
That first Alfen came up, followed by about ten others, singly; Alfen in ExAff livery, others in street clothes. All of them were carrying weapons. All of them came partway up the hill, then stopped, looking in confusion at Laurin. Lee looked at them in some slight confusion herself, for they didn’t look quite right somehow. They w
ere all good-looking enough people to be sure, but—
“Lord…” said the one who had led them out. “Rai’Laurin…”
“Well,” Laurin said, “what is it?”
There was one of those long silences, and the Alfen all looked at each other, holding their guns as if they were sticks, awkward, suddenly useless. “Lord,” said another, “we came to kill you.”
“So I gathered,” the Elf-King said. “Or to destroy this.” He glanced around him at the glory of the roses, and from their light the Alfen actually flinched a little, as if they thought it might do them harm. “Well, what will you do now? Do you know what happened?”
“Rai’Laurin,” another one said, “you changed the world. The worlds…” Some of them fell to their knees, looking at him with foreboding and terror.
Laurin shook his head. “The world changed itself,” he said, “as it’s wanted to do for a long time. Nothing stopped it, all this while, but us. If I changed anything, it was my own heart. Now if you don’t still want to kill me, maybe you’d like to get up, and go home, and see how matters go in Aien Mhariseth; help may be needed there. I’ll follow shortly.”
Obedient, they got up, those who had been kneeling, and they all turned to go. “And we’ll need another mrinLauvrin,” the Elf-King said. “Tell the Survivor Lords we’ll convene to choose one when I return.”
The Alfen nodded or bowed to him, and went. Some minutes after they passed the gates, a silent cordon of small craft leapt up into the evening sky and headed upward and eastward.
Lee stood there, trying to recover herself, and looking out across the valley, which had finished reasserting itself, toward the mountains and the sea. “It’s still so beautiful,” Lee said, looking out across the mountains. “But beautiful differently…” That painful squeeze of the heart was gone now; the mind and heart could rest comfortably in this landscape, instead of flinching from them and returning, again and again, in obsessive desire to let that beauty somehow rub off, sink in.
“That was because the core never rotated completely the first time, when we were the only world,” the Elf-King said. “We were in the way. We were stuck, all of us resisting the change; so it gave us what we wanted, and kept us the way we were, refusing what was supposed to come next…”
“Supposed? Who supposes?”
He shrugged. “I just read the handwriting on the walls of the Worlds,” he said. “I don’t pretend to be able to analyze it. But what happened is what’s been trying to happen for a long time—the same kind of thing that Midgarth kept doing again and again, in a small way, being born and dying and being reborn, cyclically. I don’t think it’s going to do that anymore, though. Now that the whole sheaf has finally rotated properly, Midgarth can settle down. No more Fimbulwinters. When that world’s people come home from this last migration, they may find the Gods’ chessmen in the grass again, one last time. But this time the Gods will be able to sit down and finish the game, and start a new one without the whole world having to start over from scratch.” He smiled.
Before, Lee would have had trouble looking at that smile without having to hide her eyes, as if indeed a God were smiling it, blinding—but not now. He was still handsome, but he no longer wore that terrible beauty as if it was armor, or a weapon. “You’ve changed,” she said.
“I’m mortal,” he said. “I couldn’t have done that by myself: and you were right…it took living, not dying.
That was your gift…”
Slowly he came toward her. Before, the slow approach would have filled Lee with unease. Now, she felt a small smile of her own stirring. “You’ve shifted the whole nature of your people,” she said. “A whole species reborn…”
“Not just ours,” he said. “But when I first heard the word ‘genocide,’ I knew it had to have an opposite. I couldn’t imagine what that would be. It took you to teach me that.” He stood before her, now, and took her hand.
“You took a big risk,” Lee said, “that I’d have the slightest idea what to do…”
“You took a bigger one,” Laurin said. “But the myths told me to trust you. There’s always a mortal woman—always one who willingly chooses the impossible, the unthinkable, and becomes the bride of infinity and the mother of universes. It was just a matter of finding the one who would say ‘yes,’ and not regret the choice…”
Lee wanted to glance away, embarrassed; but he wouldn’t let her. “A lot of your people may be angry with you…” she said at last.
“Maybe not as angry as they would have been before. For everything’s different, now. They’ll still live long, long lives: maybe even longer than before the shift, who knows? The lives of other humans, too, will be far longer now… for the gift that we were keeping to ourselves is going to be a lot more widely distributed. So will others,” he said, and smiled a harderedged smile. “The transmission speed of fairy gold is now identical in all the worlds. ExTel and its ilk can use their armies for something else… if indeed their executives aren’t distracted more or less completely from their business plans by what’s happened to them.”
“I want to go there,” Lee said.
“But you’re there now,” said the Elf-King.
She and Gelert turned…and found that he was right. The gating which had been a strenuous business was now the matter of a moment. With Gelert, Lee looked westward. Lake Val San Fernando and to the southeast was there again. Yet—
“Are you sure?” Lee said. The vista below her looked like Ellay. All the streets seemed to be in the same places. But there was something—Lee would have said, “something wrong about it” —except that, emphatically, there wasn’t. There was something right about it. Yet the air didn’t look any cleaner. The sea didn’t look any bluer. Traffic on the San Diego Freeway looked as backed up as ever. Or maybe that was just the result of all the astonished drivers, stopped in their tracks by the bizarreness that had just overwhelmed their world, who had stopped their cars and were now standing around in the middle of the 405, staring at each other and their city and trying to figure out what the heck was going on with everything.
The Elf-King smiled. “It’s made new,” he said. “Though people are going to have trouble describing what’s happened for a while. What are they going to say?” And he laughed; the first time Lee had ever heard him laugh for sheer amusement, no irony or fear about it. “That one afternoon, everything was going along as usual, and the next moment, the world had become Paradise?” Now his grin became ironic, and tinged with some sadness. “I don’t think it’s going to be quite that good.”
“No,” Lee said.
“But as for you and me,” Laurin said, “all the possibilities shift as well…if we can let go of our own pain.”
Lee turned to him, surprised. How could you tell—
Because the vision you had, you passed to me, he said. How else could I have seen what to do with the worlds, except with the gift of Seeing truth, and implementing it?
But it’s not what it was, she said. Everything you’ve done—
We’ve done, he said.
She had to accept it. It’s all a wonder. A wonder beyond wonders. The world has started over. All the worlds are new. And there are a hundred more to explore…
And every one of them is the core of its own sheaf, Laurin said. The possibilities will only keep on unfolding. Every world that’s born now has the chance to make itself over, to make itself more perfect, as soon as it’s ready…
“And so can you,” the Elf-King said.
She looked at him without comprehension. “In the myth,” Laurin said, “the Elf-King steals the princess from her lover, and brings her to rule over his people beside him. Though perhaps that’s an archetype that needs to be reworked somewhat.”
“In the myth,” Lee said, “she stops her people and the Elf-King’s from fighting by agreeing to rule his realm beside him. ‘And there she lives under the mountain yet, and is young forever, and can never die…’” Lee looked at him gently and with some regr
et. “I think the archetype is working matters out for itself in a different direction, something a little less simplistic. For my people, and for yours; and for us too. Because…I couldn’t—” She stopped, frustrated. “I can’t explain in words,” Lee said at last. “Look—”
She had to stop and think for a moment how to do it. This was no longer Alfheim, or Alfheim as it had been. But the space was still nearly as malleable, and so Lee bent her will against it and showed it the way she wanted it to part. “Just a step this way,” she said, and took his hand.
He took that step as she did, so that together they suddenly stood amid the short, harsh, summer-parched grasses that grew at the edge of her favorite vantage point, the topmost ridge of Topanga Canyon, where the old road down bent westward just so. There it all lay, the late-afternoon vista she had driven up here a hundred times to see—everything rose-golden with haze or smog; the glitter of distant glass and steel all softened in the saffron light, movement on streets and around buildings becoming remote and sweetly obscure; freeways streaming and shining, winding slowly down warm hillsides and pouring themselves in and out of the long stripes of shadow cast by downtown’s brave towers. The soft, crumpled hills drowsily embraced the city, leaning back against a sky blue only in the east; and off westward, the molten sea and haze-thickened sky reflected one another, blazing cinnamon-gold in the afternoon, while the honey sun poured down on Our Lady of the Harbor, where the statue of Her stood huge on that precipice above Malibu, gazing down in silence on Her city—
The man beside her stood silent. Lee looked down at it all, and breathed out in longing and irrational pain, looking down into the light.
“That,” she said. “How could I ever leave that? I love it too much, and the people in it. It’s where I do my work; it’s why I do my work. Without the threat to that, to the people I serve there, I’d never have done for the worlds what I did. That drove me. And I can’t leave it now. It’ll need me more than ever.”