She opened her eyes on hot still darkness. All the storefronts on this side of the street were dark: only the blue neon that said LA VIDA LOCA flashed on and off, the light seeming to spatter and jitter rather than flashing evenly, the excited energy states of the atoms in the gas interacting oddly with the uncertainties of judicial vision and the Brownian motion of the night air. In the crazy stuttering lightning of the neon, Lee saw the door of the club pull open, and Omren dil’Sorden came partway out, and paused.
There was enough light that just this once she saw his face while still alive, despite the uncertainty-blurring. He looked haunted: he looked afraid. He moved, now, becoming a paint box blur against the stucco of the outside of the club. The door closed behind him. From farther behind him, to Lee’s left, the shadow came out of the doorway, holding the shotgun.
It was the same short stocky shadow as before. But Lee turned away from it and looked at the corner instead. Dil’Sorden looked behind him, saw the shape pursuing him, fled around the corner. The man with the shotgun went after.
A heartbeat passed. And suddenly, that dark figure was simply there, at the corner of the building, his back to Lee, leaning out to look down Eighteenth Street. The crack of the first shotgun blast bounced off the nearby buildings. Then came the second blast. The slim dark figure edged out a little farther… watched. Then he pulled back. As Lee watched, he seemed to edge into the air itself, as if between two parted curtains. A second later the air fell together again, like curtains, and the Alfen shadow was gone.
Lee let out a long breath, opened her eyes on common day again, closed down her implant’s recording of what she had just Seen, “signed” and sealed it, and turned away. Off to her left, down Melrose a little from La Vida Loca, a black-and-white was parked: an officer she didn’t know, a young Hispanic guy, sat in the driver’s seat. Lee walked down to the cruiser, feeling her recording route out of her as she came within range of the transponder. She leaned down to the car’s window. “If no one else needs the evidence tapes up,” she said, “you can take them down now. This site’s dry.”
“That’s fine, ma’am,” the officer said; “we’ll take care of it.”
Lee walked on down Melrose to where she’d left the company hov parked, got in and started driving back toward the office. A few blocks down she hit a red light. “Call the office,” she said to the hov.
“Yes, boss?” Mass said after a second.
“Any calls?”
“One, repeated.”
“Oh, no, not Hagen…”
“No. It was Mikki from LAPD Physical Forensics.”
“Oh! Did they find the owner of the gun?”
“He didn’t mention.”
“He didn’t? Weird.”
“But you should call him back. Anything you need at this end?”
“No, I’ll be back shortly. Is Gelert still there?”
“He was just going out.”
“Before he goes, tell him I saw the Tooth Fairy.”
There was a long pause. “Boss, did you miss your breakfast?”
The light changed. Lee laughed. “I’ll talk to you later.”
*
It took her about three quarters of an hour to get back through the pre-lunchtime traffic. The cool of the office was a relief. Mass looked up as she came in, and said, “Did you call Mikki?”
“Not yet.”
“He just called again.”
“Thanks…I’ll take care of it.” She went into her office, looked at her commwall, and stared, momentarily aghast.
Her normal window on cisSaturn space had been replaced by a representation of a geometric space such as Picasso might have imagined: the “ground” was a huge Cartesian gridwork, even featuring a single barren tree in the foreground. Where a floppy watch should have lain over one of the tree limbs, though, Lee saw that someone had draped a representation of a file folder. And the whole background of the image was a series of piles of more file folders: thousands of them.
Lee walked over to her desktop and found that Gelert had left her a note under its surface. I’ve left a scan running for a series of search terms, the note said, streaming past in Palmerrand notation. Don’t interrupt it. It’s going to take a while, as dil’Sorden’s files amount to several terabytes of material. Articles, letters, and memos that fit the criteria are being placed in the file directory hanging off the tree. I hope you’re a faster reader than I am.
“Suuuzzz…” Lee swore, and sat down in her chair. “Oh well…” She reached out to the desk, touched it, brought up the list of phone calls, and tapped Mikki’s name.
The tree and the forest of files vanished: Mikki was looking at her, with the ornaments of the Whatsit Tree turning gently in the bright air behind him. “I was starting to think you’d left the planet,” he said.
“Not today,” Lee said. “What’s up?”
“I have something for you. Or will have. A copy of the obscure object of your desire should pop out in the next day or so, if my connection is on time. She’s having to be cautious: the press is hot to get its hands on these things before the embargo date, and the computers at Five-Interpol’s PR department are being watched with some care.”
“Okay. I’ll start baking. As soon as you get it, day or night, send it to me here: it’ll reach me wherever I am.”
“To hear is to obey. But Lee, keep your head down about this release copy. There may be those who want to know how you got it before E-time if you’re too obvious about how you use the info.”
“I understand you. I doubt I’ll have to use the data publicly anytime soon. What about that gun?”
“Stella says they’re still tracking it through the usual several false registrations, and she’ll let you know when there’s something concrete.”
“Tell her I said ‘Sorry, mommy.’”
Mikki grinned. “Gotta go.” And he was gone.
Lee sat back in her chair, looking once again at the field of Cartesian coordinates covered with file folders, sighed, and went off to get herself a sandwich before starting in to work.
*
When Gelert came in much later, the desktop was covered with the remains of several sandwiches and seven empty cans of green-tea soft drink, almost all other visible spots being obscured by Palmerrand notes Lee had scribbled to herself and sunk under the desk surface. “You find your bus?” she said, without looking up, as she scribbled another note.
“Yes,” Gelert said, falling down on her floor, “and I don’t care if I never smell chewing tobacco, bubble gum, or various other substances again. The habits of these people! It’s no wonder no one wants to use public transport.” He started washing the pads of one forepaw, wrinkling his nose.
“You find the guy you were chasing?” Lee said.
“Impossible not to,” Gelert said. “His scent is most distinctive. My guess is that he got off the bus about twenty minutes later, on the edge of a near-derelict area down by Rampart: one of the places where they’re still doing quake clearance from ‘99.” He put his ears down flat. “But at no time was his scent as strong as it should have been for someone who was in that bus all that while. It got weaker and weaker all the time…as if he were just fading away while he stood there.”
He gave Lee a look. “And I saw someone just ‘go away’ in plain sight,” Lee said. “Like pushing a curtain aside, and going behind it.” She shook her head. “It’s in the record now, Gel. What Matt and his boss will make of it, I have not the slightest idea. But we both perceived it, each in our own way…so if I’m crazy, at least it’s folie a deux.”
Gelert started washing the pads of the other forepaw. “The idea that Elves have secret powers that they’ve never told anybody about isn’t going to wash terribly well as part of a prosecution case,” Gelert said, sounding morose. “Besides, the guy didn’t do anything but vanish.”
“We can’t help that,” Lee said, “and I refuse to worry about it right now. My life seems at the moment to be narrowing to one subje
ct: fairy gold.”
“Wait a minute. Tell me what you haven’t found before you start out on what you have.”
“Oh, the negative side is the big one.” Lee chucked her stylus to the desktop and stretched wearily, leaning back in her chair. “Taking more or less in order the scans you programmed in,” she said, “there is no evidence of drug dealing, drug use, or anything of that sort. No gambling, legal or otherwise—”
“Even in the encrypted files?”
She nodded. “The network manager at ExTel sent along a backdoor key to the encryption.”
“Suuuz, they were forthcoming!”
“Which is something else we may want to consider later on,” Lee said. ” Why were they? But anyway, no gambling, no vice, no sexual content even…nothing even remotely shady.”
“You don’t think ExTel purged these records before they came to you?”
“Of course they could have,” Lee said, “and I’m not sure how we would tell they had, any more than I know how to tell they hadn’t. But let’s assume, for the moment and for the sake of our sanity, that they haven’t, because there was very little time between my concrete request and Hagen’s fulfillment of it. I know I mentioned the possibility of wanting more data to him yesterday, but if he really does want dil’Sorden’s case ‘cleaned up’ in a hurry, I’m assuming he’d at least leave anything in that might lead us to a murderer. Yes?”
“I’ll allow you that for the moment,” Gelert said.
“So. Clean criminal record, nothing covert tucked away in the files, a lot of correspondence but all very innocent—mails to and from friends back in Alfheim, and other friends and work associates here and in Tierra and Huictilopochtli. Everything else has to do with work, or finances. And so much of his work is about fairy gold that—”
“Wait a minute,” Gelert said. “Finances?”
Lee shrugged. “Bank statements, investment portfolios, brokerage stuff…”
Gelert got up. “Lee,” he said, “you have no mathematics in your soul…it’s your only major failing. You leave the banking information to me: I’ll sort through it. Everything else you’ve looked at, though, has been clean?”
“Boringly so. I think we have here that true rarity, the complete geek. He really seems to have lived for his work.”
“Leaving me to wonder whether perhaps for some reason, he died for it,” Gelert muttered. “Because if he really wasn’t doing anything else…” He trailed off. “Well, one thing at a time. You have any notes on the desk that might help me?”
“I’ll copy them all to your desktop.”
“Thanks.”
“And in the meantime I’ll go back to studying dil’Sorden’s ExTel projects.” She breathed out. “But what are we going to do about your ‘guy who faded’?”
Gelert shrugged one ear. “Pass on the info to the DA’s Office in the morning, with everything else. It’s no worse than the Elf who ‘vanished.’ They don’t like what we Saw? Let them go hire themselves some other ‘mancers.” He walked off to his office to examine the slab of glass in the middle of the floor that was his own “desk”: and Lee sighed and turned back to her work.
*
They worked late. Soft drink cans and paper plates began to pile up again on Lee’s desk, and Chinese food containers on the floor on Gelert’s side.
“There’s something here I’m not seeing,” Lee said.
“The forest for the trees?” Gelert said.
“Go on, be that way,” Lee said. “Meanwhile, explain to me why there are two transmission speeds for fairy gold.”
“What?” Gelert got up from his desk and ambled in to look over her shoulder.
“Look at this.” Lee snapped her fingers at the commwall, so that it showed Gelert the output from her desk, enlarged. She had been looking through the footnotes to the Britannica’s basic article on fairy gold. It was surprising how much you might think you knew about something so basic to the civilization of the worlds, and how little you found you knew about it when you started digging. Lee was now down into the sixth or seventh level of technical annotations, getting more confused and more fascinated all the time.
She pointed at the annotation that had caught her attention. It showed two conduction speeds for fairy gold at 18° C—3.063xl013cm/s, 3.065xl014cm/s: and next to the second one was a “dagger” pointing at a footnote that said only, attributed. “Attributed to what?” said Lee. “I’ve never seen anything but the first value, at least not since high school. It’s supposed to be a constant, like the speed of light in normal space. But now here’s this other one. Is it something you get in college physics? Because I admit right now, I wasn’t paying attention in my first-year course. I had a crush on the instructor.”
“Tall guy? Darkhaired?” Gelert said. “Blue eyes? Kind of a drawl—”
“I’d kill you,” Lee said, “but I’d have to explain it to Nuala and the pups afterward, and that would pain me.”
Gelert gave her a slightly penitent look. “All right, withdrawn. But as for this—” He stared at the wall, shook his head. “You’re asking the wrong person. My usual intersection with FG is on the commodities markets, and as a fashion statement most other people don’t notice.”
“Yeah, I know,” Lee muttered, pushing her chair back from the desk. “But seriously, you’re always going on about your connections at UCLA. Isn’t there someone there you could ask?”
Gelert sat down, looking thoughtful. “UC’s a little short on the harder sciences these days, except for astronomy and medicine. Most of the multidimensional physics specialists are up at Stanford or over at Brookhaven or the University of Chicago these days: the schools that have ‘history’ with rings or colliders seem to attract most of the people interested in gating work. I’ll see what I can find out in the morning.”
“Okay. How’re you doing over there?”
“Not too badly. Our guy’s investment portfolio shows some interesting preferences.”
“Oh?”
“Take a guess, Lee.”
“Fairy gold?”
“He’s bought a lot of contracts over the past few years,” Gelert said thoughtfully. “Not necessarily strange: it’s a standard commodities metal—better than most because the price per gram is so high and the market supply is steadier than most. Dil’Sorden would always sell again after a few months, make a small profit, nothing spectacular…Deal in what you know, I guess.”
“I suppose that makes sense…”
The commlink went off in the front office. Lee reached over to her desk. “Reh’Mechren and Enfield, good evening…”
Mikki’s face looked down at her from the commwall. “Sorry, am I interrupting something?”
“No!” Lee and Gelert said in unison, then both laughed. “What have you got for us?” Lee said.
“Official business first,” Mikki said. “We had a breakthrough, and I thought you two should be the first to know. We tracked the gun back to the real owner. His name is Jok Castelain: he lives in Upper San Francisco, and he has multiple arrests and several convictions for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Kind of an errand boy, and it looks like he was doing someone’s errand the night before last. At least one piece of clothing in his apartment matches at first assessment with some fibers we found yesterday in the doorway your assailant jumped out of. And at least one set of prints on the shotgun is his.”
“All right,” Lee said softly.
“It gets better. He’s under arrest in San Fran. They caught up with him as he was heading for SF Intercontinual.”
Lee slumped back in her chair, grinning.
“So at least you have that much good news. San Fran are talking to LAPD right now: he’ll be down here for questioning in due course.”
“You guys are miracle workers,” Gelert said.
“Couldn’t have done much without you. So, as your reward…here we have the piece of resistance,” Mikki said.
An icon representing a file appeared on Lee’s de
sktop. In small clear letters, the “cover” of the file said, ANALYSIS OF INTERSPECIES HOMICIDE AND OTHER CRIMINAL MORTALITY IN THE SIX WORLDS, 19932003. “You should print this,” Mikki said, “and then destroy the file, and then probably burn the printout when you’re done with it. It’s going to take you a while to get through it, but I had a quick skim, and there are two things I want to draw your attention to. First, look at the chart here.”
The icon popped open in her desktop, riffled through a number of virtual “pages,” and stopped at one two-page spread, a graph of incidents plotted against time. “Check out this curve,” Mikki said. “There’s definitely been an increase in the number of murders of Elves in the last ten years. Look at the curve. It never goes down.”
Lee looked at it, a steady sprinkling of plotted points, arcing slowly upward. Remembered voices spoke in her head. It’s code for the fact that the company knows he’s Alfen, and everybody hates Elves. And a “joke” she had heard once: What do you call a thousand dead Alfen? A start.
“Always up,” she said, thinking out loud.
“It gets better, Lee,” Mikki said.
“It can hardly get worse,” she said softly.
“Wanna bet? Look at this.” The report riffled its virtual pages again, and showed her a bar graph: one very small sampling in green, another large one, much larger, in red—a curve not so much heading upward, as trying to launch itself out the top of the page. “That’s the last three years,” Mikki said. “That’s the number of murders across the worlds in which at least one other Alfen has been involved in the killing.”
“As victim?”
“No. As the murderer.”
It was bizarre. It made no sense. Why now? Why all of a sudden? “Could it be a statistical blip?” Lee said.
“If this were only one universe we were looking at, I’d be suspicious myself. But Lee, this is a master average. Five worlds: Midgarth’s out of the sample, since if you include it, the difference in the time constant makes it throw a false negative or false positive. If I knew anything about numbers”—and Mikki’s mouth drew into a tight line—”I’d think I was looking at some kind of conspiracy here…”