by Diane Duane
“While I understand your point about the commission’s findings,” Lee said, “I think the PR is necessary anyway. It’s not like they’re not an incredibly intelligent and successful people; it’s not like they’re not entitled to that success—but by and large, whenever the Alfen are in contact with the media, they don’t seem to care if the contacts suggest that they could do just fine without us. That they don’t particularly care what we think—or what anyone thinks.”
“Maybe it’s true,” Gelert said, glancing at Lee.
“Maybe it is. But it’s not smart to rub people’s noses in it. Sooner or later it’s going to come back to haunt them.”
“It’s doing that now, I think,” Gelert said. “I think someone high up among the Elves has realized that they’d better look cooperative with the UN.” He looked back the way they came again. “But I don’t think that’s necessarily going to mean they’re going to enjoy the process. I imagine we can expect a little hostility along the way.”
Lee nodded. The transport stopped to let on a number of passengers from some other gates that TransCon was using at the moment: humans from various universes, various salamandrines and a pair of Kewa, all spindly legs and spines, and a couple of Alfen. Lee didn’t look straight at them, but she didn’t have to do that to see the way other human passengers, even the other aliens, edged away from them a little while trying not to look like they were.
That made her wonder, as she turned away to look the way Gelert was looking, at the maglev track curving and curving away to the left in front of them. But it had often made her wonder before. Humans she could understand being intimidated by that perfect beauty. But why the aliens? Why should one species’ sense of beauty, so different from humans’, be affected by it? Even just on Earth, the definition of what made a human being attractive shifted wildly with climatic and cultural zones. What is it a Kewa senses about an Alfen that makes them take a step back?…
Unfortunately that was something no Kewa was likely to confide in Lee, since they were so protective about the languages in which they discussed personal matters. But then even humans are reticent enough about it, Lee thought, as they pulled into the next transport stop. In fact, about most things…
“This our stop?” Gelert asked, craning his neck a little to look out the window.
“Three more,” Lee said. “This one’s a local.”
The doors opened, and the two Alfen, a dark-complected, ebon-eyed man, and a tall fair woman with streaming silver hair, strolled out, followed by their luggage. Lee watched them go, especially the woman, and wondered how someone in a T-shirt and jeans could manage to look so much like exiled royalty. It was more than just carriage, or bearing…there was something else going on. Lee glanced sideways and saw all her fellow passengers watching the Alfen, too, though they, like her, were trying not to be caught at it. Even the Kewa were covertly slanting their spines in that direction, like two brown brooms trying to peek around a corner.
Lee sat back as the maglev started up again, watching the curve of the tracks before them pour past. After a few more stops, the one they wanted came up, and Lee and Gelert got out, their luggage floating along behind them. “You see a display anywhere?” Gelert said, gazing up and down the ring.
“Over there…” They made their way to the tall stack of displays by a large hex cluster set aside for custom transits. The XX-designated gate wouldn’t be patent for an hour yet, and there was as yet no sign of any other commission members. “Here’s where you get your nap,” Lee said.
Gelert heaved a sigh and looked around. There was a waiting lounge not far away, with a bar next to it. “No,” he said. “I have some journals to read: I might as well get caught up. You want to go do some shopping?”
“Not today. Might take a walk, though.”
“Right. I’ll watch this for you.” Gelert nosed Lee’s luggage to activate the follow-me function, and wandered off toward the bar, the bags trundling obediently along behind him.
Lee walked around the ring a little ways, looking at stores and newsstands with no great interest, until she came to a facility map. The structure of Kennedy’s ring facility was open to the sky, but not to either side—the signs hovering just below the glass ceiling were usually the only way to tell where you were. But the facility map confirmed for Lee what she’d expected: she was still on the landward side of the ring, and there was access to an observation platform not too far away.
She walked on a little farther and went up the escalator, then showed her SlipCase to the reader by the glass doors; they opened and let her out on the platform. Lee stepped out into the salt breeze, looking around. The square platform was glass brick underfoot, and surrounded by the stanchions of a general restraint field. To her back was salt marsh, and then the endless jumble of the roofs of Brooklyn and Queens. Before her was the rest of the ring, stretching away to either side, following the old lines of Sheepshead Bay and reaching out to complete the great glass-roofed circle in the waters of New York Inlet. Far off to her right was Manhattan, crowned with towers, glistening, bristly and brittle in the early sun.
She stood there for a few minutes, smelling seaweed and ocean, listening to the wind hissing in the marsh grass and the distance-attenuated sound of surf rolling up on the Rockaway beaches. Up here, the tension that had kept her up all night seemed unreal. But so did the shape that had appeared in her commwall, indistinct, its voice altered.
Why be so obvious about it? Lee thought. Why not just assume a virtual seeming that has nothing whatsoever to do with his or her or its real shape? Heaven only knew there were enough commwall utilities that would let you do something of the kind. What’s served by turning up in my office with I AM IN DISGUISE written all over you?
It was puzzling enough. But more troubling was the idea that her visitor had put into her head. Every now and then you hear some speculation about some weird or powerful Alfen artifact, something else that can affect its surroundings the way fairy gold does…the same kind of syncatalytic response. The roses, whenever they’re mentioned, seem to be something like that. Though as far as I can tell, the Elves never comment past the basic insistence that there’s ‘no such thing.’
Yet that’s not what my visitor thought. It was sure they were real. And that they would have power here: that even a single one of them could be used somehow. And maybe not just as a way to reveal Alfen technology, render it inactive. Something that powerful, if you understood it, could very likely have applications as a weapon…
She wandered forward to lean on the neutral top of one of the stanchions, gazing out at the sunglitter on the water, the cloud shadows that slid across it. Her concerns about who might be behind this, who might want such a tool, such a weapon…The Elves had made themselves more than enough enemies over time. And by and large, over time, they had also proved themselves invulnerable to any real damage.
Anyone who really wanted to hurt Alfen interests had to get into Alfheim—but their controls were so tight that there was no way to do that. Which leaves some people wanting to hurt them as best they can on the outside, in the other universes where they have influence, or significant holdings. Maybe even to use their own technologies, something Alfen, to do it—to rub some salt into the wound.
What bothered Lee was her visitor’s assumption that she would be willing to cooperate with such people, no matter what the reward might be. She was offended. But she was also fascinated—and she wanted to get to the bottom of why this offer was being made to her and Gelert now. Obviously something to do with the dil’Sorden case. Obviously someone sees us as usable, one way or another. As independent investigators… or as pawns.
Or else someone sees this as a way to find out just how independent we are. Whether we can be fooled into being useful to them, while at the same time setting ourselves up to be discredited and removed from the UN&ME investigation. Any sense that the commission had been seeded with people covertly hostile to Alfen interests, or in cahoots with such people
, would give the Elves the edge they needed to have the whole thing called off.
She turned into the wind, running her hands through her hair to work out some of the tangles that the wind had already put there. This is a very fine line we’re going to be walking, she thought. Stray too far over it one way or the other and we’re dead, in terms of business. The DA’s Office will unload us on the spot, no matter how successful we’ve been for them, and we’ll have trouble getting any work anywhere else.
Not that that wouldn’t please some people.
Lee sighed at the thought of Matt, and pushed him resolutely out of her mind again, in an exercise that had become all too common these last few weeks. Am I ever going to feel any better about him? she thought, feeling forlorn. Is this sadness ever going to go away? Clinically speaking I know it will…but right now I feel like I’m bleeding all the time. And if the pain makes me careless, makes me make a mistake…
She took a moment to detangle her hair again. The wind was picking up, making her eyes tear. But I have to follow this up, Lee thought. I have to know. And in sudden memory Mart’s voice said, laughing that dark laugh of his, You always have to know, don’t you? No matter who it pisses off. That curiosity of yours is going to get you killed someday. But because it’s what makes you good at your work, it’ll be the death you’d prefer.
She’d had no answer for that at the time. Matt’s genuine humor was often so heavily flavored with irony that it was easy to mistake it for hostility until you learned to read its other accompanying signs. Lee pushed the thought aside again. All she had to do now was work out some way to do something that would help her find out what was really going on, without seeming to be doing anything.
Her hair was about to become one big knot. Lee grimaced, cast one last look at the New York skyline, and went back through the glass door. Once out of the wind she spent a few minutes unknotting herself, then went back down the escalator into the terminal and made her way back to the bar where she’d left Gelert.
He wasn’t alone. Standing there talking to him was a big, bulky man, dressed in an incongruous combination of a navy blue three-piece suit with a Midgarth-style daycloak over it in gray; and all of it looked rumpled, as if he’d slept in it. Lee grinned at the sight of him. Of all the other people who’d been picked to participate in commission, Sal Griffiths was probably the one she knew the best, and certainly the one she liked the best. He was out of the Manhattan DA’s Office, with years of experience in racketeering law and the investigation of money laundering; it was Lee’s opinion that he could smell a quarter in your back pocket two blocks away, and tell you whether it was heads or tails. “Sal,” she said, coming over with her hand out, “you’re early.”
“Always be early,” Sal said, and pumped Lee’s hand the way he always did, as if he was trying to jumpstart her. “Gel here tells me you overslept this morning. Not your style.”
“No,” Lee said, giving Gelert a look intended to suggest that he should keep his muzzle shut. “My fault for taking work home with me. Sit down, Sal. You have trouble packing, too?”
He laughed at the look she was giving the daycloak. “No idea where we’re going,” he said, “so I’m more or less prepared for everything with this rig. Short of Antarctica. Are there Elves in Antarctica?”
“Probably there are,” Gelert said. “And probably there are people who wish all the Elves were in Antarctica.”
“Huh, Huh, Huh, Huh,” said Sal. Lee restrained her own laughter: Sal’s was nearly black with concentrated sarcasm, and until she’d gotten used to it, always made him sound as if he was in the early stages of an asthma attack.
“You and the audit team get all your prep work done?” Lee said.
“Everything we can do without seeing their books in their own computers,” Sal said. Those little close-set eyes of his narrowed, a look that always made Lee think of a particularly intelligent and motivated rat getting ready to start gnawing through a door. “Of course, no way our work is going to be done when we’ve finished going through those. We have to find the pointers to the books they’re not going to let us see. By which I don’t mean the first extra set they release to us, privately and under great protest, when the pressure starts to go on.” He smiled. “And we have to do it before they chuck us out of Alfheim, because getting in again to follow up the dirt, once we find it, is going to be damn near impossible.”
“You’re that sure about the dirt?” Gelert said, very quietly.
“There’s always dirt,” Sal said, nearly as softly. “Come on, Gel. They may be Elves, but they’re human, or humanoid, anyway. They’re no bunch of Kvei, who don’t even know what a lie is, or Demesh, who’d immolate themselves rather than tell you one. Our psychologies are close enough for my understanding of the rules to work just fine over there, too. The initial figures they showed us already have some hints of things that don’t work out. Broad hints, anyway. Some of them are broad enough that they look like they’re meant to distract us from the fine detail. We’ll allow ourselves to be distracted… at first.” And there was that smile again. Sal loved his work, and Lee was glad of it.
Lee nodded. “Hey, here comes Doris,” Sal said. “Doris!” He waved at the tall red-haired woman who stood across from them out in the concourse, looking at the cluster display.
That was the way it went for the next twenty minutes or so, as one by one members of the commission started to show up. The bar got full, and slightly noisy with the sound of people looking each other over, sizing each other up…and occasionally glancing over their shoulders to see if their Alfen escorts had shown up yet. Within maybe twenty minutes, everybody was there, the whole overqualified crowd, people from all over this planet and various others—Olafsson with his big blue eyes and wild blond hair, a bulky guy with a brain full of economics and a string of probably unnecessary but decorative degrees from UEU; Erlimi seTen, the Wasai political economist, tall and dark in plush tabby-patterned fur, with her mane tied up in an Hermes scarf, and her right forefang pierced and inlaid with ruby, like a drop of blood; Mellie Hopkins, like a little fierce tropical bird in her spiky red hair and her bright sari, and toting a briefcase stuffed with legal briefs and chocolate; le-Heksatur-Mekevet-Elte, sitting in a bucket chair and wreathing hir tentacles gently around hir while s/he discussed some obscure fragment of neoKeynesean finance theory with Mellie; Kei Yu Hwa, a small, dark, silent, watchful man who for no reason Lee could understand had left the fabulous wealth of his home and family at the heart of the Xainese space-travel empire for a job as a Frankfurt-based commodities broker.
There were various others Lee knew only slightly—both alien and human—but she knew, because they were here, that they were the best in their various fields, possibly even irreplaceable. If a bomb dropped on this room… Lee thought, and then shied away from the thought. Of course we’re in no danger. Silly idea. The whole UN&ME is watching.
But what about when they’re not watching? said something in the back of Lee’s head, as she spotted an Alfen walking toward them down the concourse.
Others saw her, too, and the ruckus at the bar began to quiet down a little. The approaching woman wore a sober charcoal business skirt suit, and what Lee at first took for a dark veil, it was so long and swirled so lightly around her. But as the woman got closer Lee saw that the darkness was waist-length hair, black as night on Midgarth in the middle of the Winter, almost invisible in its blackness. Suit or not, she looked about eighteen; but her eyes suggested a placid and wicked youth, somewhere in the high three figures. She paused near where the bar seating spilled out into the concourse, and the assembled members of the UN&ME Special Investigative Committee for Alfen-Intrauniversal Overview, silent now, looked at her as thoughtfully as she looked at them.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “my name is Isif dil’Hemrev. I’ve been assigned by the Elf-King’s Office as one of the Committee’s liaison officers, and I’ll be assisting in escorting you to your various destinations in Alfheim. Woul
d you follow me, please?”
Everybody picked up or poked or kicked their assorted luggage and went after her, slowly, as dil’Hemrev made her way over to the hex cluster that had been flagged for the Alfheim transit. It went transparent as she approached it, without any sign of her having used one of the usual activation keypads that port gating personnel usually carried. Lee gave Gelert a look; together they lined up behind Per Olafsson and a few others and began entering the hex.
A presence to her left and a sudden scent of bitter lime made Lee glance that way. “ExAff,” Mellie Hopkins said under her breath, without looking at Lee.
“Sorry?”
“Alfen Bureau of External Affairs,” Hopkins said softly, amid the rustle of footsteps and jostling luggage, as she stepped into the hex beside Lee and Gelert. “She’s a spook.”
Lee put her eyebrows up. She’d been of the opinion that pretty much everybody they’d see from this point on would have been a government operative of some kind or another. At least Hopkins shared it. “Pretty one, though,” Lee said very softly.
Hopkins snorted. “Pretty is as pretty does, and her heart’s as black as her hair,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Ran into her on an antitrust case a few years ago. I’d like to feed her to a jesh, except it’d give the thing indigestion.”
Lee made a wry expression but said nothing. “Is everybody in?” dil’Hemrev said. “Good, we’ll transit right away then.” The walls opaqued.
Lee swallowed and braced herself for the usual hula, but was surprised when suddenly the wall of the cubicle behind her vanished. What happened? They forget somebody? was her first thought. What went wrong? But dil’Hemrev was gesturing them out. “This way, everyone, if you please…”