Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut by Diane Duane

Alfheim.”
    That made Lee blink. “What religion?”
    “I wondered about that myself. It’s some local sect that worships a deity called Alma Mater—a variant on Herself, to judge by the name. The mainstream Alfen faiths consider this one kind of flaky, I take it, but their schools are highly thought of…Then dil’Sorden took an interim year—got a medium-access visa for Xaihon and planethopped in their space for a while, the usual ex-student stuff. When he got back, someone headhunted him for ExTel. And there he’s been ever since, working like crazy. Six promotions since he came.”
    Lee shook her head. She touched her desktop and brought up once again the list of dil’Sorden’s projects at ExTel. “There’s a thought,” she said, as the characters flowed by under the surface of the desk. “Did he get promoted over someone’s head? Does someone hold a grudge?”
    “Worth looking into.”
    The project descriptions kept flowing by. Lee shook her head again. “I keep running into these references to fairy gold all through his proposals,” she said. “FG network lattices, FG core bindings…”
    “Why wouldn’t you?” Gelert said. “Without a room-temperature superconductor, you’ve got no broadband comms, no high speed computers. No interstellar travel, no intersystem spacing, no gating facilities…”
    That brought Lee’s head around. “Oh, come on now, there was gating before there was fairy gold. How did our version of MacIlwain break through to his first alternate universe, otherwise?”
    “By accident. And supercooling. Lady of the Hunts, Lee, imagine what it must have been like. Liquid nitrogen everywhere: it’s a wonder the poor man didn’t wind up as an ice cube. But you can’t tune an accelerator ring predictably for interdimensional location without fairy gold for the inner winding on the dees. Without superconductor winding, there’s no telling which world out of seven you’d wind up in once you walked through a patent gate locus. Think how long it took poor MacIlwain to duplicate his results! That was the first thing Earth secured through Huictilopochtli when the two worlds came into phase again: the tuning technology, and enough fairy gold to make one gate that could be counted on, in phase or out. The Alfen even donated it.” Gelert grinned, a predator’s look. “So altruistic of them. They knew they were getting yet another universe’s worth of customers for their most expensive export…”
    “I should do some more reading on this,” Lee said, mournful. She had been hoping to avoid it.
    “You should.” Gelert grinned at her, shaking his ears until they flapped. “Instead of dancing around technology the way you dance around the tarantulas in my driveway. Sometimes I think your mother was frightened by a math textbook.”
    “Sometimes I think  your  mother was a—”
    “Now, now.”
    “Sorry.”
    “No, you’re not, so don’t say you are. You’ve been bad-tempered for the last month or so, but you’ve had an excuse, and you’ll get over it. It’s not interfering with work, anyway, which is the important thing.”
    They were quiet for a few moments. Lee looked up at her commwall again and watched the list of dil’Sorden’s next five years of planned projects go spilling by: work he would never now do. “You know what I keep coming back to?” Lee said.
    “What?”
    “Hagen,” she said. “Why he’s so antsy about this murder being ‘cleared up’—I assume he means solved—in such a hurry. Though I understand your explanation about the markets perfectly well.”
    “I’m not sure you do,” Gelert said. “Lee, I know it sounds dumb…but the markets always do overreact, and ExTel in particular has been waiting for this particular set of circumstances for a long time. Hagen’s boss was offered any number of golden parachutes over the last few years, attached to fat offers from other companies, and he refused them. He was waiting for the antitrust