Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (37 page)

“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.”

Lee stared at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

“They even have a word for it in most of the major languages here,” the Elf-King said. “They call it ‘genocide.’ ”

She and Gelert stared at each other again. “You mean,” Gelert said, “that everyone on both sides fights, and all the people on one side are killed—”

Laurin shook his head. “I mean that one side captures all of one kind of human—say, all the Anglos in Ellay, or all the Xainese in New York—or let’s even say all the people of whatever kind in Brasil, or Belgium, for there were signs when I last visited here that the definition was widening to where people lived, from what kind of people they were—and simply puts them to death.”

Lee stopped in the middle of the block and stared at him in utter disbelief. 
“How can such a thing be
 
permitted…?”

“It’s as I said. Their universe’s ethical constant is set too low for the world itself to prevent such a crime. Thousands of our people were caught up in the war and killed, as both fighters and victims. Others were devoured in the greater terror, the one the Terrans made other names for: the 
shoah
, the Holocaust.” For a long moment he stared at the ground. “Some of my people,” Laurin said, hardly to be heard now, “their natures twisted by the nature of the world around them, may even have been… involved in the species-killing. Drawn into it by the desire to wipe out those more mortal, less perfect than they…”

Lee could think of nothing at all to say. The silence hung heavy and deadly for a long time.

“But the terror here is an indicator of what’s coming toward us,” Laurin said. He shook his head. “To a certain extent, we’re protected from such things until we know they exist.”

“Heisenberg…” Gelert said.

“Yes,” the Elf-King said. “The observed affects the observer. That’s the problem. As soon as we have perceived such a thing and know it to be real, in one world… then it can spread to other worlds as well. Perhaps now it can also become worse yet. Now that we know ‘genocide’ is possible…what else, worse than that, may become possible as well?”

Lee looked at Gelert in apprehension and horror.

“I still have some control over what I think,” Gelert said, “so I’ll exercise it.”

“But others have no desire to exercise such control,” Laurin said. “There the danger lies. All the same, when our team came back, we devoted all our energies, every scrap of our knowledge about the local worldsheaf, to find a way to seal Terra away from the other worlds. Our control over worldgating in our own spaces…” He trailed off suddenly.

Gelert looked at him. “It extends to control over worldgating in other spaces as well, doesn’t it.”

It took a few moments before Laurin would meet Gelert’s eyes. “Our world’s position at the heart of the sheaf… gives us certain advantages. We did everything we could, manipulating space to close down ‘rogue’ gating accesses on Terra. It has an unusual number of freestate gates—far more than any of the other cognate worlds in the sheaf except our own. Every one of them was potentially a way for contagion to spread. We closed all of those gates that we could find, except for a few that were too powerful; and those we watch. We also manipulated our own space to make access from the other worlds in the sheaf to Terra as difficult as possible. That work was mostly mine, as
rai’Laurin.
Whenever I’ve traveled in recent years to another world in the sheaf, there may have been business or politics involved, but also there’s always been a more covert purpose: to make sure the walls between the worlds are holding—holding Terra out.”