Diane Duane Cuts the King's Roses Again
Earlier in the week, I posted a recap of “Once Upon a Time” that got re-tweeted over on that thar Twitter thing – by none other than author Diane Duane, who has written so many Star Trek books that I have read more times than I can count. That was cool.
That also led to our being able to offer you this excerpt of her new eBook, Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses: The Author’s Cut. This story is set in an alternate universe listed in So You Want to Be a Wizard, part of the YOUNG WIZARDS collection of novels. This is an updated version, released as an eBook.
So, sit back and enjoy!
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STEALING THE ELF-KING’S ROSES: THE AUTHOR’S CUT
by Diane Duane
The black-and-whites were dotted around the intersection of Eighteenth and Melrose when they got there, the yellow tapes in place stretched between palm tree and parking meter and mailbox and anti-ram stanchion, screaming POLICE! DO NOT CROSS! in various major languages of Earth and the Worlds. The street itself was absolutely typical of this part of Ellay—blacktop four cars wide, patched halfheartedly a couple of years ago and shimmering in Mondrian gray/black/gray down the length of it toward Santa Monica Boulevard; the strip of green curbside lawn already going brown in this too-arid spring; wide white sidewalks, half the slabs cracked; bungalow houses in white stucco with red or brown tile roofs, ornamental palms and cacti bristling here and there, interspersed with poinsettia trailing splashes of dilapidated red; doorways gated and locked against the thugs from the next neighborhood over. Over everything the hot blue sky arched, the white sun in it standing lunchtime-high, and the erstwhile inhabitants of the black-and-whites stood around in the meager shadow of the royal palms nearest the corner and tried to look as if they were doing something. Near them, half across a driveway, was a white tarp, and under that, a blue one.
Lee and Gelert had left their company hov parked on Wilshire. They walked around the corner and saw it all laid out for them, and as they did, one of the shapes standing in shadow looked up and saw them: the only one of the people standing there likely to get much good of the shadow, being nearly as skinny as a palm tree himself. Jim Blessington came stalking along toward them in the sun, head down, shoulders bent as if the light had weight, the blue LAPD coverall glancing the sunlight back from rank patches and the rolled-back hood. Only as he got close did he look up. “Mz. Enfield,” he said.
“Mr. Blessington,” Lee said. “How’s the family?”
“Doing well, thank you. Marta turned three last week.”
“I can’t believe it,” Lee said. “It seems like about half an hour ago that we flew Michelle over to Cedars. The boys all right?”
“As good as they can be with the Birthday Girl ruling the roost.” Blessington grinned a little, then nodded at Gelert: Gel tilted his head, flipped his ears forward. It was all the greeting they ever exchanged. Jim worked professionally enough with madrín but found it hard to socialize with them, and only his tremendous skill as a detective, and his “kill rate,” had kept this from becoming a disciplinary issue.
“So what have we got, Jim?” Lee said, as they walked toward the tarp.
“We’re hoping you’ll tell us. Body’s at LACC right now. As far as we can tell, the guy came around the corner from Melrose, walked down toward his car. Someone waited for him…” Jim made a “blooey” gesture with his hands. “Left the scene. On foot, we think…but your reading, we hope, will confirm.”
“We’ll see.”
Gelert paused. “Blessington,” he said, “you know that this is some damn political thing from Upstairs. We’re not needed here.”
“Damn well I know it,” Jim muttered. “Nice you know it, too. ”
“Wanted to make sure you knew we knew it.”
“Always said you were a gentleman,” Jim said, “as houn’ dogs go.”
Lee took no official notice of any of this. “Jim,” she said, “any sign of the murder weapon as yet? It would do us the most good.”
“We’re conducting a house-to-house. Don’t think we’re going to find it here, though. I’m betting it’s fifty miles away in a dry wash somewhere, or a lot farther off than that. Meanwhile, we’ve already been all over this area for physical forensics purposes: you don’t have to worry about fouling anything.”
The three of them paused by the spread-out tarp. The other uniforms, two men and a woman, nodded to Lee and Gelert as they paused by the tarp. ‘The samples have gone down to Parker?” Lee said.
“Yeah. You want me to move people back?” Blessington said.
Gelert gave him a very straight-faced look. “What are we, a kindergarten class? We can tell your people from the perps just fine. Maybe they want to get back in the shade, though. No reason for them to boil their brains.”
“Huh,” said Blessington, one of the seemingly null noises he made that Lee had learned to translate as approval. He waved a hand casually at them and headed back to the palm trees.
Lee stood there over the tarp for a moment, Gelert beside her, and closed her eyes. Madam, we’re on Your business now, she thought, as she executed the series of tiny jaw-clenches and neck movements that brought her implant online and started it recording. Be in what we see, for the innocent’s sake…
She waited a few seconds for the “aura” that came with the onset of judicial sight: a blurring around the edges, not quite a rainbowing as of visible light but a sense of multiple possibilities. Lee leaned over and pulled the tarp away.
The bloodstain had sunk deep into the cracked white cement of the sidewalk, running down the cracks and the joins between the slabs. Lee blinked, her eyes watering at the strength of the impression of what had happened here, still so recent. The body lay there already, drowning out everything else. No, she thought. Earlier.
The vision resisted her, lying there with limbs splayed, its chest shot away, seeping. Death in any given spot always impressed itself powerfully on the matter there, making it hard to perceive any life sharing the same spot in time and space: and it was life that Lee needed to see now. She did not turn her eyes away from the body, but held her gaze steady, waiting for the shift. Slowly it came, but not before she’d had to spend a good long while looking at the chiseled, classic beauty of Omren dil’Sorden’s face. It had been much easier, last night, seeing it in just a glimpse, on the news, before she knew his name.
Lee held her pity in check, waited. It was not pity she needed now, but paraperception, and slowly it came. The body was no longer lying in front of her, but falling to the ground past her left shoulder.
Through the silvery mist of uncertainties implied by the movement of the air molecules between her and the murdered man, Lee felt the wind and concussion of the second shotgun blast as it hit dil’Sorden. A second, faded perception overlaid her first: the last tattering impressions leaking from dil’Sorden’s sensorium as he fell. Lee took note of the perception, but didn’t expect much from it. Hydrostatic shock, nerve damage and blood loss, let alone the overriding disbelief and horror at what was happening, had left dil’Sorden’s own view of his last moments nothing much more than a terrible dark blur, with a long wet jagged bloom of brightness laid across it at the very end, the remnant of a last glimpse of the nearby streetlight as he went down.
Slowly, because the moment resisted quick movement and was likely to be denatured by it, Lee turned a little, looked over her shoulder. The fall was in process again, from a slightly earlier point in time. There were only so many of these reversals she could induce without draining that “site” or point of view dry: she had to see as much as possible in each of them. Here was the first shotgun blast, from a little farther down the sidewalk. Lee looked at the shape holding the gun, but from this “angle” could only see clearly what dil’Sorden had seen clearly; and that was little. Eyes, then the barrel of the gun. The shape itself was far more uncertain, a dark blur. Still, not a tall man: he barely came up to dil’Sorden’s shoulder. Stocky, perhaps a hundred kilograms, a head that looked almost rectangular. Turn a little, she willed him, but from this angle there was no profile, or not enough, the features all lost in darkness and blur.
The emotional context was starting to force its way through the merely physical. This was inevitable, but Lee resisted it for the moment and concentrated on seeing. What she saw was no longer a fall, but a run, the tall slender blur running around the corner, away from the light of Melrose, garish through the Heisenberg blur. The second shape, the stocky man, running after, bringing up the sawed-off shotgun.
Lee watched as they ran toward her, seeing the first blast again, and saw dil’Sorden’s arms fling up as if in surprise as he stumbled; but before the second blast, she turned away from the fall she knew was already beginning, and saw the second shape come around the corner.
But not all the way around. Close to the wall he stopped, watched, a shadow. He was in sharper focus than the others, the uncertainties about him less, though still present. Tall, taller even than dil’Sorden; a slender man, erect, very still. After a moment he slipped back around the corner, out of sight.
Lee knelt there and considered going after him. That had its dangers: pull too much energy out of the forensic “field” of the area right now and it could be exhausted for further investigation later. I have enough to go on with as a start, she thought: after we’ve pulled his profile and coordinated with physical forensics, I can have another run.
She closed her eyes, let the state of investigative vision lapse, and looked around her again, closing down the recording her implant was making and adding her digital “signature” to it as it closed. The sealed record would feed itself wirelessly into the city judicial-data system as soon as she got near a transponder: it might be doing so now if there was a ‘sponder in one of the black-and-whites, which seemed likely. Blessington was standing not too far away: as Lee replaced the tarp and got up, brushing herself off, he walked over.
“One triggerman,” she said. “Human. A hundred seventy centimeters or so, stocky, very square-built, say a hundred kilos. Wearing a business suit of some kind, to judge from the color and the contour of the artifact.”
“Good, that’s good,” Blessington said.
“But look for someone else, too,” Lee said. “Alfen. Tall, say two hundred ten centimeters. Thin. Not muscular. Another business-suit type, but more elegantly cut.”
“Aren’t they all,” Blessington said rather sourly.
Lee smiled slightly. “Maybe just a witness,” she said, “but somehow I don’t think so. I’d see if physical forensics finds any trace of his involvement on the body…fibers or whatever. They might give us a lead that would be useful.”
“That’s confirmed already,” Blessington said. “The guys at Parker have picked up some of that. And Gelert smelled him straight off.”
Lee nodded, followed Blessington’s glance. Gelert was about halfway down the block, walking very slowly, stiff-legged, bristling, while the uniformed cops watched him with idle curiosity. Lee smiled very slightly as she watched him stalk along. Her paraperceptual cues came in visual form when she was working, but Gel’s, predictably, came as scent. Gelert’s people were the greatest trackers in the worlds; at the core of their nature as a species was the understanding that what they hunted, eventually they found. The hunting could take all kinds of forms, quarry variously concrete or abstract; all over the Worlds, madrín were researchers and scientists, consultants and advisers. But finally it all came down to noses, one way or another, a situation Gelert often complained about as seeming awfully undignified in someone with a doctorate. Yet nothing could have moved him to give up this particular form of the talent, and the hot fierce look in Gel’s eyes after he had been working on a crime scene always made it plain to Lee that this particular style of discovery was what he lived for.
“What’s he after now? Did he say?”
Blessington shrugged. “He growled. I couldn’t understand him.”
Lee raised her eyebrows. “He tends to drop into dialect when he’s distracted.” Gelert had put his nose down to the sidewalk, and his pace was speeding up: he was nearly to the end of the block.
“Lee, you want us to keep this end of the scene locked down for a while?” Blessington said.
“It’s a good idea. I need to talk to the people at Parker and have a look at the victim’s profile and recent history before I come back for another look.”
“Okay. Bensen, Echevarria,” Blessington called over to two of his people as Gelert turned left around the house on the corner lot and vanished from sight, “better go with the gentleman and keep people out of his way while he’s working.” The two uniforms nodded to their boss and headed off after Gelert at a dogtrot.
“You know this neighborhood at all?” Lee said to Blessington.
He gave her an amused look. “I lived here before I was married.”
“What’s around the corner?”
“A nightclub: a couple of restaurants. It was the nightclub dil’Sorden came out of. He’d come in earlier, alone. Had a snack and a few drinks, listened to the jazz combo that was playing there last night, paid his bill, and left.”
“He didn’t meet anybody?”
“Not according to the club owner.”
“Did he go there often?”
“The owner said he saw him occasionally. Not a regular, but he would drop in for something to eat after working late. The place has a rep for its ribs.”
Lee nodded. “Jim, he was already running as he came around the corner. Whoever shot him came around after him, fast. He had to have been waiting for dil’Sorden in one of the doorways that face onto Wilshire: I’m going to have another look at that later. Here’s how it went—”
She and Blessington went up to the corner, and Lee reenacted for Blessington what she had seen. At the end of it all they stood there again over the tarp, looking down at the spot where dil’Sorden had fallen.
“Contract job?” Blessington said at last.
“I can’t see why, but then I only had time to skim his profile on the way over,” Lee said. “There seemed to be some urgency ‘Upstairs.’ ”
Blessington made that sour face again. “Which smells weird to me to start with,” he said, “but then I’m just a detective.” The delivery was ironic but not hostile: Lee smiled slightly. “Speaking of smells,”
Blessington said, and grimaced. “Bensen, what the hell are you guys up to?”
He listened for a moment, face immobile. “How about that,” he said. “Yeah, bring it back. Be careful about how you wrap it; it might have been handled two or three times before it got there, and maybe after.”
Blessington looked over at Lee. “He’s good,” he said. “He found the murder weapon three blocks over and two blocks up, in somebody’s front yard, two feet deep in pachysandra.”
“You owe him one, then,” Lee said. “Think how many manpower-hours he saved you.”
“He’ll remind me of it, I’m sure,” Blessington said.
Down the street, Gelert and the two uniforms were coming around the corner again: one of them, Echevarria, was carrying an antistatic evidence bag, glancing back smoky silver reflections in the hot sun as they approached. Gelert was trotting along with his tongue hanging out, looking to Lee’s eyes unusually pleased with himself. As the officers stowed the shotgun in the car, Gelert sat down beside Lee and Blessington.
“The murderer caught a bus,” Gelert said. “About twenty minutes after the killing: one of the night buses down Melrose.”
“Stupid,” Blessington said. “Too many witnesses.”
“He seemed willing to take the risk,” Gelert said. “Forensically it was smart: his lifetrace got tangled up with a lot of others, fresh and stale. And by the time we pull that bus out of service so that I can go over it, there’ll be more overlay still. But it won’t help him, because I should still be able to tell when he got off, and once we plot the times against the bus schedule, that’ll tell us where.”
“Assuming it ran on time,” Lee said, with understandable skepticism. No Ellay native ever really believed public transit would do anything so unusual.
“Night buses usually do,” Gelert said. “Especially the automated ones, and I think this route went auto some time back.” He looked up at Lee. “Did you see the other Alfen?”
“I did,” she said.
“Where’d he come from?”
“Around the corner. He went back that way. I’m going to work on him on the second pass. But I think we need to go up to Parker first to talk to physical forensics and take a little more time to go over the victim’s profile. Oh, and Jim? I’m going to ask the club to stay closed until this evening, so Gelert and I can go over the ground.”
“Right,” Blessington said. “Tell them to call me if they need authorization. Meanwhile, we need to get this weapon to Parker. Bensen will stay with the site here. Meet you afterward?”
“Sure, Jim.”
Blessington and Echevarria got into one of the black-and-whites and drove off: Gelert sat panting for a moment, watching them go. “That didn’t take you long,” Lee said.
“The trace was pretty strong,” Gelert said. “What I found odd was the way it dropped off as the guy who’d used the gun got to the bus stop. Normally it gets stronger when you stand in one place for a few minutes.” He was starting to frown.
Lee looked down toward Melrose. “You thinking that someone was helping him hide his trace somehow?”
“I’m thinking about that second Alfen,” Gelert said.
“So am I. Bensen?” Lee called. “Have you got any more site tape in the car?”
“Miles of it. Want some?”
“Please.” Lee went over to the black-and-white, and Bensen handed her out roll after roll. “Three be enough, ma’am?”
“Should be. I’m going to block off the sidewalk from the corner to the club dil’Sorden was in: it looks as if our perp came out that way.”
“Right. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
Lee headed for the corner, and Gelert got up and came with her. “So what are you thinking of?” she said softly, as they came up to the corner of the side street with Melrose, and Lee fastened the tape to the street sign there. “How do you fade out a lifetrace?”
“No way that I know,” Gelert said, “unless the person himself is dying. Not having seen the news today, maybe our murderer did die on a bus last night, but frankly, I doubt it. Something else happened. I want to know what. At the very least, I’m going to get a paper out of it.”
Lee smiled slightly. “I thought you were through with your post-doctorate publication cycle.”
“One more never hurts.”
“Yeah, right. Research junkie.” Lee stopped opposite the door of the club. LA VIDA LOCA, said the cold dark neon sign attached to the blind white stucco of the building’s frontage. No window: solid brown wood door. It was one of those “we keep it dark in here for a reason” places: intimate, or secretive, depending on the crowd that used it. “You want to go on with this?” she said to Gelert, holding out the roll of tape she’d just finished looping around the parking meter opposite the club’s door. “Take it on down another couple of shops, say to the dry cleaner’s there.”
“Right,” Gelert said, taking the tape in his teeth and backing down the street with it. Lee went to the club door, pushed it open.
After the brightness of the street it took a moment or so for her eyes to get used to the dimness, even though the lights inside the place were on full. The decor was modern enough, but very dark, all reds and hardwoods: if the furnishings had been less well kept, it would have struck Lee as the kind of place where married men went to have dinner with the women they weren’t married to. “Can I help you?” a male voice said.
Lee turned. A man stood there in white T-shirt and jeans; the first glance gave her an impression of longish, unruly gray hair, wide-set dark eyes, big shoulders, big hands, polishing a glass with a glass cloth. “Yes,” Lee said, bringing out her professional ID and showing it to him. “My name is Lee Enfield: I’m a ‘mancer working with the LAPD, investigating the murder that happened around the corner last night.”
“Mike Ibanez,” the man said.
“What time would you normally be opening tonight, Mr. Ibanez?’
“Six,” Ibanez said.
“All right Mr. Ibanez, my partner Madra Gelert and I are going to need to do a psychoforensic sweep through here later today: probably early this afternoon, though we’ll come sooner if we can. Until the first sweep is done, we’ll need you to keep the premises locked, and not open them again until we clear them. You can stay inside, that’s all right, but no one else should come in: no deliveries, that kind of thing. The County will compensate you for your downtime and any employee overtime or reimbursement that the closure entails. I’ll bring the paperwork for you when we come back. Is that all right?”
“Sure,” Ibanez said.
“Thank you,” Lee said. “My partner and I may have some questions for you afterward.”
“Sure, no problem.”
Lee wondered whether he was always going to be this voluble. Of course, he may just be freaked out. It’s hard to remember that other people don’t see murders every other day… “Thank you,” Lee said. “Will you lock the front door behind me? We’re taping off the front sidewalk, but all the same we don’t want anyone slipping in and contaminating the scene before we’ve had a chance to examine it.”
He nodded and accompanied Lee to the door: as she stepped out, she heard it lock behind her. Lee made her way down the sidewalk toward the middle of the block, staying close to the wall, and out past the dry cleaner’s where Gelert had fastened the tape.
“Talkative guy,” she said to him, as he held the tape up to her and they started to walk back. “We’ll see what we find out later on. You want to drive? I wouldn’t mind a few minutes to look over the profile Hagen sent us.”
“Go ahead.”
Their company hov was a Skoda Palacia with the flex-species package. Gelert nosed the driver’s side door open, and the hov recognized his touch on the lock and reconfigured the driver’s seat as the forward-facing flat contour pallet that Gelert preferred. He jumped in, lay down, and let the guidance sleeves and safety webbing connect up around his limbs and hook into his implant, while Lee got in on the passenger side and kept the hov from belting her up until she could reach into the backseat for the printed report that Mass had handed them as they left the office.
She started paging through it as Gelert pulled out into traffic. Omren dil’Sorden had just turned thirty-two years old. He had been working in ExTel’s network development department for eight years: his official title there was “senior research assistant.” The personnel-department files appended to his CV explained that his work mostly had to do with building and enhancing telecommunications network structures at the point where they interfaced with intraworld gating facilities—both commercial gates like those at Kennedy and LAX, and “electrons-only” minicollider exchanges such as were maintained by many public and private companies. It was specialized work—Lee understood the general concept, but she had the sinking feeling that she was going to get to know it a lot better in the coming days. For the moment, she gathered that dil’Sorden had been mostly busy with improving present solid and wireless telecom networks in the LA area, and designing the new ones that would replace them—nets specifically structured to integrate with the new intercontinual comms gateways being installed at LAX over the next couple of years. Not exactly a job that makes people want to kill you, most of the time, Lee thought. At least you wouldn’t think so.
She read down the list of projects dil’Sorden was involved in, one after another, and found herself shaking her head. When did he sleep? Lee thought. The terminology was bewildering: when she ran into a description of a “packet shunt-squirt pipeline array,” she stopped, able to get no impression of anything but some kind of giant lawn sprinkler. Whatever the technical details of the systems he was designing, Omren dil’Sorden was plainly a busy guy.
Lee flipped forward through the profile to the personal evaluation pages. There were a lot of them. There was no way to work for a big company these days without having their psych and sentient-dynamics people all over you, monitoring your personality and mental health and assessing how they stacked up in relation to the corporate persona. Lee had never particularly liked the idea of this, which was one reason why she had originally risked low pay and an uncertain lifestyle to go into business “on the small” with Gelert. However, at times like this, the psych profiles and all the rest of the bean-counting had their uses, if only to give you a place to start asking your own questions. Intelligence levels border-high/high, Lee read in one of the summaries. Good cooperation coefficient. Good intuition/data ratio. Good initiative/teamwork-integration compromises. Acceptable attendance and tardiness record. No visible or expressed bigotries. Negative vice/antisocial coefficient. Coworker attitudes toward subject generally good, with the usual offset.
“Now what does that mean?” she said softly.
“What?” Gelert looked over her shoulder.
Lee pointed to the phrase on the page. Gelert looked, then snorted down his nose. “It’s corporate code for the fact that he’s Alfen, and they know that most people hate Alfen.”
“Oh, come on. ‘Hate’ is kind of a strong word, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, maybe it is. After all, the Elves are all spiffy dressers, they all drive Porsches or better, their parties never run out of ice; when not merely rich, they’re fabulously wealthy, and they’re all stunningly beautiful, immortal, and eternally young: what’s not to like?”
Lee gave him an ironic look, dropping the report in her lap as they merged off the Wilshire onramp onto the Hollywood Slideway, and the Skoda locked itself into the traffic flow at 100 kph. “Seriously, Gel,” she said. “Why would anybody come after this poor guy with a shotgun? He was just some kind of hardware maven. No family in this universe, as far as I can tell from this—there are holes in it.”
“I know. I’ll go digging and add in some background when we get back to the office.”
“No relationships—that, if anything, would have turned up in a corporate detailing.”
“Assuming it had been kept updated in a timely manner.”
“I bet this one is as updated as it can be. We’ll find out. But if it is, then that means there goes your crime passionelle. Your broker buddies are going to have to make do with something else: dil’Sorden wasn’t even dating.” Lee looked out the window for a moment, watching the green, dusty, upsloping ground cover beside the slideway rush by. “Unless this guy stole someone else’s project and made them mad enough to kill him because of it. Work is all he seems to have had time for, to judge by this.”
“Could have been. Don’t worry…motivation will out,” Gelert looked grim. “Just give it time. No murder is motiveless, any more than anything else in sentient behavior is.”
“Just sometimes the motive is buried deeper than usual,” Lee said. “Not too deep for us to dig up, I hope…”
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