Summoned to Tourney (26 page)

She waited, watching Beth with the same kind of patient expectation that a top sergeant has when he calls for volunteers from a crack unit.

What the hell do I know about those shadow-things? Or about earthquakes, either? I wouldn’t be any help—

Unless she knows something she isn’t telling me…

Ah hell. It’s Eric and Kory down there, trying to play leader. Kory makes a great knight-errant, but he’s not exactly a team player. And Eric can’t even plan a grocery run.

God help us, the two of them together are worse…

She recalled only too well the times she had sent them out after simple staples, flour, eggs, milk, and toilet paper—and they had come back with pretty candles, macadamia brittle ice-cream, and Brussels sprouts. Not a roll of toilet paper or an egg in sight.

Men. Can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t get a new operating system.

“All right,” she said, reluctantly. “I guess I’d better get downstairs before they start looking for someone to sell ‘em magic beans.”

Elizabet just smiled.

The creak of the stairs made Eric look up, expecting to see Elizabet or the punk. Instead—

“
Bethie!
” He leapt up from his seat on the couch, vaulted the elf in the pink cat-suit, and rushed for the stairs. Beth’s red hair was straggly and damp with sweat and tears; her face pale and thinner. But the smile on that face, though weak, was genuine. And the eyes held no fear, no ghost of insanity.

Kory was right behind him, but the elf had other ideas than his simple hug. He scooped Beth up in his arms, carried her the rest of the way down the stairs, and placed her gently in the chair he had vacated. Eric plodded back down to his own seat, feeling vaguely upstaged.

There was nothing wrong with Beth’s mind, which further relieved him; they caught her up with what had been going on in less than a half an hour. She took it all in and asked two or three intelligent questions before sitting back with a frown of thought on her face.

“Shit. We are in a world of trouble.” She shook her head and looked straight at Susan Sheffield. “You’re taking this all very well.”

The scientist sighed. “Either I’m crazy, in which case anything I say or do isn’t going to matter squat, or I’m not crazy, in which case I’d damned well better do something to help, if I can.” She smiled faintly. “I never was a political activist; I figured on trying to make things better by actually doing something instead of going out and getting my face on TV and my name on somebody’s shit-list. Looks like it’s time to ante up, doesn’t it?”

“You will,” Beth said grimly, “as soon as I figure out where you can be useful. But I have to admit, I’m really kind of surprised that you aren’t freaking out over this Tolkien-fan’s wet-dream, here.” She waved her hand at the elves; Eric nodded. That was one question
he
wanted an answer to.

Susan Sheffield blushed. “I—ah—oh, shit, this isn’t going to sound any crazier than anything else. I’ve seen you elves before. And not in a fantasy book either.”

She glanced over at the one in pink. “I’ve seen—I remember seeing—her, in particular. And a really good-looking kid that isn’t in this room, a kid right out of a beach movie. Except, of course, that he had those eyes and ears.”

There was a chorus of “
What?
” Arvin looked amazed; Dharinel outraged.

Dharinel was the first to recover. He did not turn on Susan but rather on the young elven girl. “You!” he thundered, his face darkening with anger. “How—”

“Don’t get your pantyhose in an uproar, Oberon,” Susan said, fearlessly—or maybe stupidly—interrupting the tirade before it got started. “It happened a long time ago, when I was a kid; one summer vacation. About fifteen, skinny, nerdy—if there was a contest for ‘least popular,’ I’d have won it.
You
said you wanted me to call you ‘Gidget,’ ” she finished, nodding at the pink-clad elf.

Dharinel stared at Susan with his mouth dropping open.
I guess that no one’s ever talked back to him before
, Eric thought, holding back a grin. “Gidget?” he said. “Gidget?”

The elf blushed. “It seemed like a cute name at the time,” she said apologetically. She turned to Susan, and stared at her. “Thirty summers ago, roughly?” she asked, frowning. “Would you have been ... the math scholar? The one going to Yale? And you only wore black, right? You read nothing but math and fantasy, you watched no television except educational, you had a black cat, and wanted to be a witch so that you could curse the cheerleaders with terrible acne and bad hair for a weekend.”

Susan’s face lit up. “You remembered! I didn’t think you would! What is your name, anyway?”

“Melisande,” the girl replied. “I never use it with humans.” She grinned. “I remember you as much for the fact that you simply wanted the pretty girls to experience what you were enduring as anything else. Despite the fact that they constantly made fun of you, all you wanted was justice, not revenge. That was actually charmingly forgiving of you.”

It was Susan’s turn to blush.

“But how on earth did you remember
us
?” Melisande asked. “After your magic summer, you mortals aren’t supposed to recall a thing!”

Susan made a face. “A combination of luck and sheer stupidity,” she said. “I started smoking in college, which was stupid, and I went to a fellow psych student to get him to hypnotize me to make me stop, which was even dumber.
He
was interested in previous-life regression, God help me.” She shook her head. “Well, he didn’t get Bridey Murphy, but I woke up without needing cancer-sticks, and remembering my fifteenth summer without the blurs around the important parts. It wouldn’t have happened if he’d been more competent and ethical, and a little less eager to get a story about himself in
Rolling Stone
and usher in the Age of Aquarius.”

Dharinel seemed a little more appeased, if a little puzzled by some of Susan’s terminology. Melisande sighed with relief. “Part of the forgetting is to keep you from breaking your hearts over us,” the young elven girl said. “You will grow up. We remain teenagers forever.”

“I never thought about it that way. I just figured it was infatuation on my part, and whatever on his. Anyway,” Susan continued, “I spent ten years thinking I’d hallucinated it all. Then I realized that it didn’t matter. I’d had a wonderful summer, you gave me confidence that let me ignore the cheerleaders that fall, you taught me all about the differences between lust and love, and love and sex.”

“A not inconsiderable set of lessons,” Elizabet observed from the staircase.

Susan nodded. “When I finally got to Yale, what I learned from you elves even kept me from doing anything horribly stupid. I didn’t start drugs, I didn’t buy into the Hari Krishnas or the Moonies. I did two minor, stupid things: I started smoking, then I went to an idiot to find a way to quit.” She shrugged. “So there it is. Now I know you are real. And it still doesn’t make any difference. I still had that summer. And I’m enough of a scientist to know that there are plenty of things in the universe that are weirder and harder to explain than elves and magic.”“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’ ” Elizabet murmured.

“Exactly.” Susan spread her hands. “There it is, friends. Now that we have the question of my sanity settled, is there anything we can do to stop Blair from creating Nevada beachfront property out of Northern California?”

“None of us are scientifically trained,” Beth reminded them, as Eric nodded vigorously. “Susan, is there any way of you getting in there and sabotaging that stuff? Or maybe coaching us and getting some of us in?”

“Same as a snowball in hell,” the scientist said frankly. “After the little war you had in there? There isn’t going to be a cockroach in there without an I.D. badge, and they’ll be running every one of them through the scanner to make sure the badges and stats match.”

The elves looked baffled; Beth explained to the concepts of “I.D. badges,” “computer records,” and the types of objects their magic could not duplicate to them, while Eric thought of another question. “Susan, is there any way you can tell from out here if Blair’s turned that thing on? And when he does—how much time do we have?”

She closed her eyes and sucked on her lower lip for a moment, thinking. “I couldn’t tell from outside the lab without a lot of really specialized equipment,” she said. “I really couldn’t. As for how much time we have, that’s theoretical. I mean, we only just proved we can trigger micro-quakes—but-—”

“But?” he prompted. Stray bits of PBS science programs ran through his brain. Something about simulations Come on, you have to have run some computer modeling on this before you started!”

“We did,” she hesitated. “Theoretical. Purely theoretical, and we really didn’t want anyone to
think
about the possibility of using Poseidon as a weapon. Instead of using the array at the point where the fault-creep is hanging up, on a line on either side of that place, you use it at the greatest area of stress, and just increase that stress until it
has
to break loose.” She began spouting techno-babble at him; he stayed patient for a while, and finally she calmed down and returned to speech ordinary mortals could understand. “The computer says—well, it would take some time to set up it, but then you could kick the machines to trigger a quake in maybe an hour, maybe less. Maybe not less, because it’ll take some time to build up that kind of stress. Not much more, though. At least, that’s what the computer says.” She shrugged. “You know what they say about computers: garbage in, garbage out. We were right on when it came to the micro-quake and stress reduction stuff. I would say, since the major-quake stuff is based on the same model, it would be just as accurate. But I won’t swear to it.”

“Uh-huh.” He rubbed his eyes. “I assume they’re going to have to do something different with the equipment—I mean, this isn’t a Godzilla movie where everything’s in a van. How long do you think it’d take them to get everything set up?”

That took her by surprise. “To trigger the quake? They’d have to move the sound probes, reposition them. Get clearances from landowners and permits—well, maybe not that—”

Eric smiled thinly. “Yeah, they can probably bluff for at least twenty-four hours, provided they don’t have to set one up in the barrio. Or someplace where it’s likely to get stripped for parts two minutes after it hits the ground.”

Susan grimaced. “Yeah. Wish they did; our problems would take care of themselves. They’ll have to recalibrate. Figure he can get an unlimited number of goons to go do the setup, where I had to make do with me, Frank, and one lab kid—so it’ll take him—a day. Maybe less.” She suddenly straightened. “Wait a minute—that’s how we’d know they’re going to start!”

“If they move the equipment!” Eric was elated, and the elves all turned to see what had gotten him so excited.

He explained quickly, and as soon as Susan finished drawing a rough map of where the probes were, Melisande left to recruit a team of Low Court “kids” who would keep watch on the probes. Dharinel cautioned her against interfering with the probes or the new placements.

“We do not know what the creature may have protecting these instruments,” the warrior said, gravely. “They are probably at least partially steel, which means that you would not be able to affect them magically. My guess would be—were
I
he, and did I know that Susan might have gone renegade—that he will have a human at each of them.”

Melisande tossed her pink hair scornfully. “And what can a human do to us?” she asked.

“Little,” Dharinel replied, giving her a look. “But the creature may well be able to armor its agents against your magic and illusions, and their
steel-jacketed bullets
can do much.”

Melisande blanched.

As well she might. Steel—Cold Iron in any form—had disastrous effects on elven physiology. Even a fragment of a bullet might well kill one, though the marksman managed only to wound.

Storming the gates is going to be right out.

Pretty obvious that Dharinel—who had apparently been appointed their war-leader by default—had already dismissed that idea out of hand. He might prefer to stay Underhill, but he wasn’t stuck back in the Middle Ages like some of the Underhill crowd. He knew modern ways, and modern weapons, and he did not underestimate humans.

Okay, they’d have some notion of when Blair was going to rev up the engines. That would buy them time to do something. What, he had no idea. They probably couldn’t cut the power to the probes. They probably couldn’t subvert the guards. No way they’d be able to get inside the labs. Now if there was just something that they could do about the energy the probes would be putting out…

Wait a minute. It’s energy. Elves play around with energy a lot. I’ve seen ‘em change electricity into magic power—oh, they don’t do it well but they can! And I’ve seen Kory hold a lightbulb in his hands and make it work just for kicks. Can we feed that energy back on itself or maybe—maybe turn it into something else?

Maybe ordinary humans couldn’t—but Bardic magic seemed to have a lot to do with energy manipulation, just like the elves, might be able to work a conversion of one kind of energy to another.

“Who’s the best mage here?” he asked aloud. Every pair of elven eyes looked from him to Dharinel.

Dharinel seemed less than pleased to be singled out.

Great. Figures. The one elf here who hates my guts. Could be worse, I guess. Could be Perenor.

Dharinel looked at him warily, but nodded his head. “I am,” he said simply. “I can work with you, Bard. This is more important than my animosity.”

Thanks, Laughing Boy.
He gestured, and Dharinel followed him into the kitchen. Eric gestured at the chairs, and Dharinel assumed a seat as if it were a throne.

Welcome, Your Highness, to my humble kitchen.

He dug into the fridge and poured them both big glasses of Gatorade, then got out the pretzels. Elves, he had learned, loved pretzels. Maybe it was the salt.