Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (22 page)

“Ystertve,” dil’Hemrev was saying to Olafsson: “life reborn. It’s a very old symbol, from a folktale. They say that this city was built on the foundations of another one that was drowned, millennia ago. The archaeologists have found signs of settlements that old some miles away, but no cities. None off the coast, either. Still, the story persists…”

“The Phoenix,” Mellie Hopkins said, wiping her eyes again.

“That would be one of your versions of it, yes,” dil’Hemrev said. More of the commission members were gathering around them: she looked around. “Ladies and gentlemen, I get the feeling you’ll all have found the transit wearing. With that in mind, there’s been nothing planned for the rest of the day: you’re at leisure to rest or have a meal or tour around, as you please. We do ask that you respect our people’s privacy: if you want to go out, get in touch with the front desk and someone will be glad to escort you around. As for business, that won’t start until tomorrow. The elevators are over this way—”

Everyone began to head for the elevators. Lee and Gelert found themselves walking next to Sal Griffiths. “I hate this,” he muttered, “but I feel like I’ve just changed about fifty time zones at once, and I’ve got to crash and burn.”

“We’re tired, too,” Gelert said, before Lee could open her mouth. “A nice afternoon nap, that’s what we need…”

“Absolutely,” Lee said. She smothered a not entirely sincere yawn.

They made their way up to their suite, waving to those they left behind them in the elevator: Sal and a few others got out on their floor, and headed off toward rooms on the other side of the elevator bank. Lee glanced at her SlipCase, which was now showing her a little arrow pointing down the hall to their room, as if it was necessary. She also noted the directory of commission members elsewhere in the hotel that had appeared. “We’re all on these two floors, it looks like.”

“Convenient,” Gelert said. Ahead of them and to the right, their room door felt them coming and opened.

Lee stepped in, looking around the big sitting area. Gelert came in behind her; the door closed, and Gelert nudged his luggage, telling it to set itself down. “Well, I feel a little better,” he said, glancing around. “Not even the Elves can make a chain hotel surpassingly beautiful.” He sighed. “But that’s the only exception to the rule. Look at that view… !”

Lee was doing so, and having trouble managing the lump in her throat. The mist over that distant mountain range was lifting, and she was discovering that she had never before been so affected by a mere landscape. But there was nothing “mere” about this. Those mountains called to her.

With some difficulty she tore herself away and went over to the bedroom on the righthand side. “Wow!”

“Big bed?”

“No, this one’s yours, it’s got the padded floor and the custom bath. Look at the size of that plunge!”

Gelert wandered in behind her, looking at the bedroom and bathroom. “Don’t get ideas, you probably have one this big. Did someone just knock?”

“Uh—” Lee went back into the sitting room, where someone had slipped a sheet of paper under their door from outside, and by the sound of it was now heading on down the corridor. Lee waited a moment, then went over to the sheet, picked it up, looked it over.

“The schedule for tomorrow,” she said. “Morning meeting with the fiscal experts and the accountants and accounting team. The rest of us get an orientation tour.”

“Sightseeing in Beautiful Ys,” Gelert said, sounding unusually dry. “Probably even more boring than what we’re going to be doing.”

“Oh, I don’t know… it really does look like such a gorgeous place: it’d be nice to see some more of it, especially considering that we’re going to be inside hunched over computer terminals for most of our stay.” Lee went to have a look at her own bedroom, and found inside it a bed that deserved to have its own zip code. She sat down on the silky bedspread and stroked it idly, looking around at the room, and at the windows that gave on that spectacular view.

Gelert looked in. “Nice,” he said, glancing around. He was looking for listening and viewing devices, Lee knew: she also knew that it was probably useless, these days when you could hide a camera in a coin or a mike in a pinhead. “I guess I take back the line about chain hotels. Their furniture is nicer than usual.”

Lee nodded, looking down from the view to the golden bedspread. She was surprised to find herself still stroking it, and indeed unable to keep her hands off it: the texture was ridiculously seductive. Annoyed, she stopped. 
Damned if I’m going to be seduced by a bedspread.
 She got up and walked back out to the lounge, gazing out at the view again. After a moment or so she rubbed her eyes.

“Allergies?” Gelert said.

“No. It’s just—” She was going to say “I’m tired,” but that wasn’t exactly it. “I feel like I’ve been in court all day,” Lee said. “Like I’ve been Seeing judicially—” Then she stopped again. “No. Like I’ve been 
resisting
 Seeing judicially.”

“The same kind of worn down feeling you get when the litigants are bogging a court down in procedural rigmarole, before you can get to the meat of the matter…”

“That’s right.” She looked out at the mountains, away across the plain from the city. The clarity of the blue sky above those mountains seemed impossible to an LA native: but then Lee wondered if it wouldn’t seem impossible to anyone. Nothing here looked ordinary, she realized. Everything looked preternaturally sharp, as if even though your vision was already perfect, someone had found a corrective lens that would make things seem clearer…and it was giving you a headache from looking through it. “Like someone had used image enhancement on reality…”

“What?”

“Just thinking.” She got up and went over to investigate the minibar. There were some soft drinks, some Alfen wine, both still and sparkling, some mineral water. She pulled out one of the mineral waters. “You thirsty?”

“Not right now,” Gelert said, turning away from the window to pad around from sofa to chair to table, looking them over without trying to be too obvious about it. “Something else I noticed,” Gelert said. “The way they have their gate access handled from the main gating facility. Very interesting.”

“Scenic,” Lee said. “Lovely view from out there.” But the view wasn’t what she had in mind, and Lee knew it wasn’t what Gelert meant either. He meant there was no way to get in or out of Alfheim without the Elves’ assistance. 
We knew that before, of course. But only in an operational way. It hadn’t
 
occurred to me at the time that they might have also made it simply physically impossible.

“I wasn’t thinking of that specifically,” Gelert said. “I was thinking that the arrangement would make the access very easy to service. But that view…” He was gazing out the window again. “Amazing how it affects you.”

“Me, maybe,” Lee said. “And everybody else. But you looked less troubled.”

“My people don’t have our tear ducts arranged the way you do,” Gelert said. “It’s not like I didn’t want to sit down and have a good howl. But I have my dignity.” He turned in a couple of circles and lay down on a big silken pillow on the floor.

“Your people also came from here, originally,” Lee said.

Gelert was washing one paw. “A long time ago,” he said. “You’d think that would make us immune.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Not quite,” Gelert said.

“Maybe you’ve been away for too long.”

“Could be.” Gelert put his head down on his paws, rolling his eyes.

“You tired?”

“A long day,” Gelert said, rolling his eyes up in his head again, then closing them. Lee held still, carefully not looking at the light fixture above both their heads, which Gelert had indirectly been considering.

“I could probably use a bath myself,” Lee said. She wandered into her own room, and the bathroom past it, taking a look at the fixtures and fittings. Not one, but two tubs: a long one and a round deep one. “Isn’t this nice,” she said, and started to fill the deep one.

From the sitting room, she heard Gelert’s tiny snore. That, at least, was genuine.

She took her time about preparing for the bath, bringing her jotter into the bathroom with her while considering which way one might sit in that round tub that would be the least likely to favor any viewing device. 
If they’ve got signal snoopers in here, too, that’s something to think about. But even so,
 
they may have some problems with this…

The tub filled. Lee swung the bathroom door shut, not entirely but enough to block the view of whatever might be up in that light fixture. Then she got undressed, put her hair up, turned to the tub, and put a hand in the water. 
Ow! No point in making a lobster out of myself.
 She ran some more cold water into the tub while pulling over a small table that held towels and so forth: she positioned it by the tub, dropping her jotter on it, then checked the water and found it acceptable. Lee climbed in very slowly and carefully, for the water was still really hot, at that point where moving too fast in the water actually stings.

Slowly she got herself settled, leaned back and got comfortable, then reached over to the little table for her jotter. She thumbed a couple of the controls at the bottom and brought up a broadcast of “The Worlds Today” that the jotter had picked up for her from Kennedy’s wireless broadcast network as they passed through.

There Lee lay soaking idly for a good while, looking at the home news, then selecting worlds’ news and spending a while listening to an analysis of the new Xainese trade initiative with the newly discovered Melekh systems. Under that display, though, where no inquisitive eye could see it, the Smalltalk program that she and Gelert used in the courtroom was running. It was a stepchild application, fathered by the more modern wireless translation technologies on the old shorthand and stenography concepts, and cousin to the in-body neural broadcast translation technology that made it possible for Gelert’s people, and other paravocal or nonvocal species, to produce words that speaking peoples could hear and understand.

Some years back Lee had had a twin to one of Gelert’s tiny implants installed just behind the cricoid cartilage in her throat, with one sensor connection running to the vocal cords and the other end neurilemma’d into the sixth cranial nerve. In open court, without anyone being the wiser, she could subvocalize and send silent-yet-“spoken” notes to her own pad, or to Gelert’s, or even straight to his own implant if it was something urgent. Or, if there was any question of eavesdropping, she could do as she was doing now, and transcribe her subvocalizations directly to one of the steno languages like Palmerrand or Doorsill.

She didn’t need to see readout at this point: the implant was giving her the little “feedback” echo which meant that what she was saying had been transcribed properly to Palmerrand. At the end of sentences she could hear the little in-system hiccup that meant her content was being saved for later transmission to Gelert’s end of their paired system, either on Lee’s command or Gelert’s. Anybody using a character “sniffer” on her would get scrambled Palmerrand characters or an encrypted growl, not much else.

“I saw what you saw, I think,”
 she said silently, and heard the machine transcribe the sentence. 
“At
 
least, about the room. First impressions…”
 She spoke for a little about what she had seen, or thought she’d seen, on the way in. She was detailed about it: there was no telling what might turn out to be important later.

Finally, Lee noticed that the water was getting cold. She paused, listening: from the sitting room she heard more snoring. Dusk was falling, and no lights were turned on there, though she could see a dim orangy glow: probably a nightlight or one of the other “finder” lights that a good hotel room might turn on in the dark. Lee smiled at the sound of the snores, scaling up. 
No point in moving him: let him sleep.
 She closed down her jotter, putting it aside, then let some water out of the tub and ran some more hot water into it.

A little while later, she got out, dripping, and wrapped a towel around her. It was almost dark out in the sitting room. Lee slipped in and scanned the walls, looking for the controls for the light switches. 
Now
 
where have they put them? And where’s the nightlight?
 For the source of the deep reddish glow she’d seen wasn’t in the room. 
City light, I guess.
 Lee turned toward the windows.

The mountains were afire. All the plain between the city and the peaks was drowned in twilight, with here and there the bright points of local streetlights showing in knots and tangles—little towns, villages, individual houses. But beyond them all, those mountains reared up glowing as if lit from inside, burning in the deepest imaginable carmine, a red hotter than any mere blood-color. They almost vibrated against the sky behind them, now a profound indigo in which the earliest stars were coming out. Lee stood there, gazing, hardly daring to breathe, as the Sight woke up and held her there, frozen, telling her that this mattered, this 
meant
 something. 
But what? I just got here, I don’t have enough information, I don’t
 
understand—

Even as she watched, that light began to leak out of the mountains, irrevocably, as if someone with a dimmer switch was turning it down, deepening within a few breaths to a dark shadowy rose. Watching the light fade, Lee got dressed as softly as she could, without bothering to look for the light switches. By the time she was done, the last embers of that light had dwindled to ash, and Lee spent a few moments more gazing out the window, wondering at how pale the mountains looked even with the light gone from them. There was no moon up, and the city light diffusing up from street level shortly washed out any remaining sight of the peaks.

Lee thought briefly of food, then realized how thirsty she was. She went to the minibar and pulled out another bottle of mineral water, then looked for ice: there wasn’t any. She glanced briefly at Gelert, still snoring away, and smiled ruefully. 
Their parties may never run out of ice, as he claims, but their
 
hotels still need work…