“I understand you,” Laurin said. “I loved this, too.” He looked over his shoulder through the still-patent gateway in the air at the garden, lingering in the shadows behind them. “It was unique, endangered, as I was endangered…and I loved the roses even more because of that. But now they’re safe. Now the garden can bloom again in Aien Mhariseth, without fear. Now the curse is lifted, and twilight becomes just one more time when the roses burn. Maybe the sweetness of the danger is gone. That may take me a while to get used to. And yes, that’s sad. It’s more of a price than I ever thought I’d have to pay.” He breathed out. “But it’s worth it!”
After a moment, Lee nodded. “Yes, of course it is.”
His smile was sorrowful, but edged with humor. “But you knew that already. Better than I did, probably. And if we can’t stand a little sadness, a little suffering, then we’re not worth much as gods.”
Lee glanced over into the lengthening afternoon, where God stood all golden in the light, Her arms raised in astonishment and joy at what She had made. “She’s not the jealous type,” she said, “but I’d still be careful how I talked…”
The Elf-King laughed. “She won’t mind if you hold Her place until She gets used to the new shape of things,” he said. “And Justice will still have plenty of work that needs to be done, for there’s going to be more than the usual amount of confusion in all the worlds for a good while.”
“As long as we’re not out of a job,” Gelert said.
“Oh, no,” Laurin said. “Why should a world reborn necessarily imply complete perfection? We’re all in for interesting times.” He rubbed his face in a gesture that was the same as that of the man on his knees in the garden, though not quite as hopeless.
“‘We’…”
“I can’t speak for others,” Laurin said, “but you and I will have more work to do together. We’re standing in loco parentis, and it seems likely enough that there’ll be teething pains among these worlds—spots where things have gone wrong and we’ll have to intervene. Physicality has changed. For all I know, some of the laws of science, some physical laws, have changed, too. We may have to go off and do some tinkering with that, here and there.”
“I’m hardly an expert—”
“Lee, we officiated at this transformation together. It’s not work I can do alone. Meantime, all we can do is go on living life at one second per second, and see how things unfold, in the new worlds and the old ones.”
“New worlds to explore…” Lee said.
“Yes,” Laurin said. “Not just planets. Humanity will be busy. All the humanities will, from here to Xaihon, and beyond. And as for the rest of it…”
“We’ll see how it works out,” she said. “There are going to be a lot of things to sort out. God knows what the LAPD’s going to make of this!”
“You mean your murder case?”
Lee laughed out loud. “I mean a city that doesn’t entirely resemble the way it looked last night! They’re going to need some explanations. So will the city government.”
“So will the UN&ME, I would imagine,” said the Elf-King. “And the committee, when it reports, will find it has answers to all the wrong questions. Or most of them…”
“Not all my questions are answered, either,” Lee said. “Omren dil’Sorden is still dead.”
“Yes,” Laurin said. “But look what his death gave birth to; and look how many won’t die, now, because he did.”
There was no arguing with that.
“We all need to get back to work now,” Laurin said. “It’s going to take a while for us to get used to the new order of things, and to help others get used to it. For myself, I’ve been alone for a long time. Many centuries, alone with the truth, and the burden, and the fear. Now, at last, the burden and the fear are gone…and I’m alone no longer.”
Lee looked at him silently for some moments. “Neither am I,” she said at last.
He smiled at her, understanding completely; understanding, Lee thought, as probably no one else in the universes could. “And for the first time,” said the Elf-King, ” I have a partner.” He looked over at Gelert. “Assuming you can spare her occasionally, madra.”
Gelert merely grinned at him, and then at Lee. “You think we’ll need more office space?” he said.
“We’ll handle those problems as we come to them,” Lee said. “But right now our universes are going to need separate attention.”
The Elf-King nodded. “I’ll call if I need your help,” he said. “I have your number.”
Lee gave him a wry look, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Later,” she said.
*
Lee went home via LAX: not because she had to—she knew she could for this little while go anywhere with just a step or two—but to confirm a suspicion she had. She and Gelert walked for a little while under the main terminal’s great dome, and saw more than a few Alfen coming and going about their business, graceful and fair. “Just look at them,” she said.
“There is a resemblance,” Gelert said, “isn’t there…” For he saw it as she did: the look that had been on the Elf-King’s face, and on those of many others of his folk, though well mixed with confusion, and sometimes with fear. Lee knew the fear would pass. And in the meantime, perhaps for the first time, she enjoyed the sight of them—of creatures no longer immortal in the way they had been, aloof, untouchable, and unconcerned. There was something different about them now.
“As he goes, so go his people,” Lee said. And then she smiled, for that was the key to it. They look like people now. They were still an astonishingly beautiful species, but now that beauty didn’t repel. They looked like life and death mattered to them, and as a result, the casual observer would no longer have an irrational desire to kill them.
It was probably going to take everyone involved a little while to get used to that. Humans were not going to be quite perfect either, not for a good while yet if ever, and humans could be as stubborn about distrusting sudden change as Elves.
And the humans… Lee looked at her hands; the palms, the backs. There did seem to be fewer wrinkles there. Though are there really less of them… or do they just matter less? But the inhabitants of all the other worlds had now gained a share of the innate beauty that Alfheim wore as a result of being the core world of the sheaf. We’re all cores now, he had said. Oh, there’ll be trouble too: who knows what kind? But life is now more worth living, if more unpredictable, than ever…
“I know that look,” Gelert said. “Take your time. I’ll catch a cab to the office.”
He nosed her in the neck, once, wetly, then trotted off toward the doors.
Lee spent perhaps another half hour there, watching the people come and go, starting to learn the change in them. Then she went out to find where Gelert had parked the hov, paid the parking fee at the gate, and drove back toward the office, slowly, looking at the changes in the streets and the buildings and the faces of the people as she went, until finally the mental cataloging simply got too tiring. It would be not just years, but lifetimes, before people learned the full meaning of what had happened to their lives, their worlds. Everything was new, and would be for a long, long time. Not quite the definition of Heaven, Lee thought. But close enough.
Not far from the office, she stopped the hov, parked it, and got out to look north and east. Sunset was easing along, golden. The peppertrees planted along in front of the suburban frame housing here hung their trailing green cool and shady over the sidewalk as if nothing had happened at all. Lee lifted her gaze toward the hills, where they stood silhouetted against the deepening creamy blue of an Ellay city sky.
There, without having to See, she saw the burning, all carmine, crimson and blood-color, glowing on the hills—the burning of the roses, like a light from within, no longer hidden but now in plain sight for any mortal; the token of immortality visiting itself on the world, just a little alien, but so young and glad and splendid that no one would be afraid of it for long.
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The curse is broken, Lee thought, and the time for being afraid of each other is over at last. Now, finally, we get to work and find out what life in the Worlds is about…
She walked to the office, in silence, musing. The silence was a short-lived thing. When Lee got in and pushed the glass door open, Mass looked over the desk at her, and said, “Eight million commcalls, boss! You’re not gonna leave here for days.”
“Order me a pizza,” Lee said, and headed past him into her office. “Order me three. And no anchovies!”
Before she even looked, she could tell that the wall between her office and Gelert’s was down by the blast of sound that hit her. It was Wagner again, the end of Gotterdämmerung—the world of the old Gods crashing in fire and orchestral ruin about their heads. Gelert was sitting in the middle of his office floor, talking hard to someone on the comm; he flashed Lee a grin as she came in, and then turned his attention back to business. Giving interviews already, Lee thought, with some amusement. And he’s probably already in the process of dickering with someone about the price of an option on the true story of the End of the World.
She turned to her desk, sat down… and then could do nothing for a few moments but gaze at it with the beginnings of tears in her eyes. On the goldstone of the desk, in a pool of light of its own making, lay a single white rose; and the rose burned. Even from a meter away, the cool fragrance of it reached Lee—and latent in the light of it, even to someone without the Sight, were a million second chances, and all possibility.
Behind her, in the music, the Rhine rose and washed the old world away. Lee looked at the rose for a long, long moment. Then, “Mass?” she said.
“They’ll be here in ten minutes, boss.”
“Not that. Get Matt on the comm for me, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
Lee reached out to the white rose, picked it up. Its cool light welled through the flesh of her hands, so that they glowed; and its thorns, when she tried one against her thumb, were blunt.
When Lee looked up again, Matt was looking at her from the commwall. His expression was haggard, guilty, even a little frightened. “Lee—” he said, and faltered into silence.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“About the case—” Matt said.
Lee took the longest breath of a lifetime, and let it out again. “No. Not about the case,” she said. “Got time for dinner? I know a place where they do great fondue…”
APPENDICES
The Seven Worlds
About the writing of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses
THE SEVEN WORLDS
At the beginning of STEKR, the Seven Worlds are the known universes in a main sheaf of eleven. The other four worlds are not described, the implication being that though the Alfen had verified their existence, they had no further information about them.
The sketches below are fairly basic, but should convey a general sense of each world’s feel. Please note that some of the descriptions below reflect general wisdom about transcontinental migrations of human peoples as it was generally understood in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I know that there’s debate about some of these migration patterns, but I haven’t revised this material to reflect that.
The “positioning” data reflects the way the universes are spatially oriented to one another “on” the surface of the tesseract on which they’re arranged. The terms “face-on” and “side-on” are obviously oversimplifications of very complicated hyperspatial relationships. Briefly, it’s easier to get into a universe with which yours shares a “face-on” relationship than it is to get into one that’s “side-on” to you. Normally, the face-on relationship is one that the core of a sheaf has with all the universes it spawned when it rotated.
All the other universes in a sheaf have less intimate interrelationships that involve very slow oscillation around / through the core universe: a movement generally reminiscent of the way planets circle a star in a relatively structured manner, but several dimensions “higher” in complexity. The side-on relationships also shift very slowly over time, so that a universe relatively easy to access in this decade may be more difficult (or less) in the next. These relationships become important to intrauniversal commerce because the easier it is to get at another universe, the less energy has to be expended on the gating. Naturally, with the events of the end of STEKR, things are going to get even more complicated.
(1) EARTH (Lee’s home)
Positioning against other universes in sheaf:
Face-on: Alfheim
Side-on: Midgarth, Xaihon, Tierra, Huictilopochtli
Cultural flavor: “Western hemisphere”-“New World dominant
Sovereignty: world: UNME (United Nations and Multinational Entities)
DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted: historical-passive/ indeterminate
VETO POWERS: North American Union, Britain, USSR, IASA, GM, China, France, IT&T, GloBank, Krupp Gesellschaft A.G.
BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: Rather like ours until after WW II; MacIlwain (young genius in various universes including Huictilopochtli [Temac], Tierra [Las Ibanez] and Xaihon [Hu Sahuen]) goes from work on Manhattan Project to multi-tEv accelerator project and ensuing breakthrough in worldgating theory in 1952. Worldgating limited to exploratory-military expeditions until Three-Geneva Intercontinual Peace And Interpenetration Agreement (1956) among the governments of Earth, Xaihon, and Alfheim, at which time embassies were opened and ambassadors exchanged. Tierra and Huictilopochtli added to the agreement after their respective interpenetrations in 1959 and 1966; Midgarth added in 1969 (modified agreement, allowing selective temporary evacuations to the other Five Worlds during Fimbulwinters and Twilights of the Gods). Seventh World (Terra) not discovered until 2001 due to cyclically poor positioning in Pattern.
(2) TIERRA
Positioning against other universes in sheaf:
Face-on: Alfheim
Side-on: Earth, Midgarth, Huictilopochtli, Terra
Cultural flavor: “Western Hemisphere”-“Old World” dominant
Sovereignty: National sovereignties: (country-states) Spanish/Latin flavor
DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted: historical — passive/otiose
LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: Latin
VETO POWERS: Spain, Italy, Egypt, Swaziland, Congo, Morocco, Algeria, Tanzania, Brazil, Portugal, Greece
BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: Major branching in 60-30 BC period. Death of Julius Caesar during outbreak of bubonic plague causes abandonment of campaigns to conquer Britain. Plague decimates many Gallic and Germanic tribes and leaves Western Europe open to be completely secured by the Roman Empire.
Sure of its northern front for the first time in centuries, the Empire consolidates its gains in the south and penetrates further into Africa. The Empire finally falls in AD 1712 — caught between the great independent African civilizations and the Romanized African civilizations, (both preindustrial, both attempting to expand northeastward in search of technology and fertile croplands,) and the revolution-torn Eastern European provinces pushing toward Rome. Africa is the site of the Hundred Years’ War from 1712-1812. When the dust settles, the cities of Aranga have been destroyed and salt sown on their sites, and the Queen of Timbuktu has been crowned Holy Roman Empress by Pope Sextus VI.
Queen T’Shange and her daughter-Queens spend the middle of the nineteenth century alternately subduing and negotiating the Northern Peace with the Slovaks and Polaki, the leader-nations of the TransEuxine rebellions. With the outbreak of peace, the Industrial Revolution begins in the Nile Valley, and industrialization spreads swiftly enough through the civilized world for the first manned space shots to leave Mtwara in 1941, and for Las Ibanez’ worldgating breakthrough to occur at the Bir er Ressof (Algeria) accelerator in 1948 (slightly earlier than most otherworlds). Ethical problems (specifically the discovery via reconnaissance of other Christs, and scriptural variations, both Old and New Testament, in other Universes) cause a brief moratorium on outworld gating, the Great Synod of Athens, and the assassination o
f Pope Joan XXIII.
However, with the election (forced by Queen Nyala) of Arrian Mehese as Pope Innocent IX, the ban of excommunication on those who gate outworld is lifted in 1953. Tierra interpenetrates Xaihon in 1955 and Earth in 1959, signs the Agreement, opens relations with Alfheim in 1968, and is in the forefront of intercontinual relations thereafter — establishing the first Tierran factories in Xaihon and Huictilopochtli in the early 70’s.
(NB: Humans do not cross the Aleutian landbridge in this universe. North and South America are unpopulated, as is Australia until the mid-1800’s.)
(3) HUICTILOPOCHTLI
Positioning against other universes in sheaf:
Face-on: Alfheim
Side-on: Xaihon, Terra, Tierra, Earth
Sovereignty: World (Aztec translation of “U.N.”, governing body)
“Western Hemisphere”-“New World” dominant
Cultural flavor: Aztec/Inca/Mesoamerican
DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted – historical: nonotiose: occasional documented intervention
LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: Azteca
VETO POWERS: Mexico, Guatemala, Central America, California (has a Queen), Columbia, Ecuador, Belize
BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: Main branching in 1490’s. Cortez is driven off course by hurricane in the Bahamas, is shipwrecked in Cuba and dies there of dysentery (or tertiary syphilis) with most of his men. No further investigation into “southern New World” until Spanish ship La Reina in 1582; most colonization attempts concentrate on Florida, but continuing failure (disappearances of colonists) discourage more attempts. While Black Plague ravages Europe, Inca and Aztec civilizations continue to grow unharmed. Great Age of Sail, stimulated by finding of drifting wreckage in the Caribbean, takes first Aztec exploratory expeditions across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean (also up the Pennine coasts as far as Britain), where they find a Europe almost entirely decimated and demoralized by plague.