"Slippage?"
"Yes, the differences between our two worlds. The passage of time is perhaps the most obvious symptom, but not the only one. But eating or not eating has nothing to do with whether or not a traveler may return, then or now. I suspect it was a sort of ploy devised by wise mortals to keep your kind from staying here too long. If they left without eating, and hence only stayed as long as they could last on an empty stomach, the disruption would not be too great."
"Disruption?"
A female brownie had walked silently into the room wheeling a cart with a tray on it — at least, Theo assumed she'd walked, although he hadn't actually seen her enter. She was plump and rosy-cheeked and quite ordinary in her proportions, as though someone had simply shrunk a slightly short-legged young woman to about three and a half feet high. "Where, sir?" she asked.
Tansy nodded toward a low table.
The brownie put the tray of fruit and bread on a table, dropped a curtsy, then pushed her cart back out of the room. The fairy-lord gestured for Theo to take the leather-cushioned chair next to the table, which had a casual elegance that suggested it was Tansy's own. Theo seated himself, a little apprehensively. Applecore squatted down beside the plate, sniffing. "Ooh, eglantine honey," she said. "That's nice, but."
"Help yourself." He turned back to Tansy. "So it's really all right if I eat?" He didn't want to be stubborn, but it was hard to believe the cool-eyed creature of a few hours earlier was suddenly itching to be his buddy-old-pal. "I'll still be able to go back home?"
"Eating this or any other wholesome food will have no effect on whether or not you can go back," Tansy said. "I swear by the Oldest Trees."
Theo looked to Applecore for a clue as to what was going on, but she didn't seem worried for him. In fact, she was scooping huge dollops of butter and honey off his bread with her hands and licking them off, so the food certainly wasn't poisoned or anything that crude.
"What did he call you, a sprite?" Theo asked her. "Is the definition by any chance, 'Mouth like a sailor, manners like a tiny flying pig'?"
She grinned behind a smear of honey. "Shut up and eat, you great big waster."
He broke off a corner of bread and picked a fruit that looked like a salmon-colored cherry. The bread tasted like bread (only much better) but the fruit was like nothing else he'd ever had, the bold sweetness undercut by a certain perfumed tang — a wonderful, exotic flavor. He was reminded again that he was starvingly hungry and he scooped up a whole handful.
"As I said, I'm very sorry for my earlier… abruptness," Tansy proclaimed. "I was preoccupied. But I have given the matter more thought and realized that it is still important for my principals to meet you, and also that you should not be left to fend for yourself in what must be a very disconcerting new world."
Theo still didn't trust the situation. Tansy was fairly convincing as a nice guy but it was hard to ignore the earlier behavior; Theo couldn't help wondering what might have happened during the course of the day to change things. Or was that just what these Flowers were like, these high-powered fairy-folk — able to shut off or turn on simulated emotions at will, like real-world sociopaths? It wasn't the most comfortable thought.
Either I'm paranoid or they're totally freaky. Two great choices.
"Could you just send me back instead?" he asked. "I mean, no offense, but I didn't want to come here in the first place. I really don't need to meet anyone…"
"Ah, but you do." Tansy smiled brightly. Theo thought for a disturbing moment that the ascetic, white-haired creature was going to walk over and chummily thump him on the back. "Surely you haven't forgotten about the spirit who found you in your home and attacked you."
"Not much chance of that."
"That sort of entity will not be long thrown off your scent, and could not be avoided forever even if you could cross back and forth between your world and ours every day. As it is, once you have settled back down into your normal life again it will easily find you. And next time you will not have Mistress Applecore to help you, or a door through which to escape."
Theo remembered the thing's raw face and oozing eyes; he suddenly felt clammy under the arms. "So what are you saying? That it's just going… going to get me someday? No matter what?"
"We hope not. But it will take a more cunning mind than mine, or a better equipped laboratory, to find exactly what the thing is and remove it or placate it. That is another reason why you should go to my friends in the City. They are better connected than I am, closer to the seats of power… and that means all sorts of power. I have chosen the life of a poor country philosopher and scientist, you see."
"You said, 'Another reason.' What's the first reason?" Theo suddenly wondered if Tansy or his allies might have set the corpse-thing on him themselves, just to make sure he did what they wanted. "Why me? You said there were these, I don't know, groups. Political parties. And one of them wanted to talk to me or something. Why?"
"I am not at liberty to disclose too much, in case you…" Tansy hesitated, then began again. "You see, you will have to travel a long way, and…" Apparently deciding this was just as unproductive a tangent, he pulled a stool out from behind one of the equipment-covered tables and sat down on it, his long legs bent at the knees. He wore what looked like very expensive fawn suede slippers, with no socks. "Let me explain a little." He pulled out his glasses and put them on, then leaned over to look at a display on one of his desktop instruments. He waved his hand over it and the screen changed from silvery to a sparkling blue-green; a cloud of mist drifted up from the screen but quickly evaporated as he turned back to Theo and Applecore.
"Your race, Master Vilmos, and my race have lived in each other's shadows a long, long time. Not always in harmony, it has to be said. When we first noted the rise of your kind, there were some of our folk who thought we should…" He paused.
"Thought you should what?" Theo demanded. "Wipe us out like bugs?"
Tansy waved a negligent hand. "Let's not get sidetracked."
"Sidetracked? Like, that's a small matter?"
"The fact is, despite early doubts, our two races have managed to share the world a long time — not the world as you know it, I should make clear, but the world as we both know it. It is not really one world, you see. They overlap. Or, rather, they coexist, your world and our world, although not always in the physical plane."
"Physical plane? Overlapping worlds?" Theo was irritated by Tansy skipping over what was clearly an important part of the story, namely the actual desire of some fairies to bump off all the humans. He was being treated like a child, which made him want to act like one on purpose. "This is beginning to sound like astrology or something," he said, slouching back in the chair. "I hate that stuff. I had a girlfriend once who was always telling me that I was retrograde or something when what she really meant was that I was being an asshole."
Tansy's smile regained a little of its earlier wintry chill. "Yes. Well. Without going into too much detail, in deference to your undoubted fatigue, suffice it to say that while our two races used to share the physical and metaphysical bounty of the world very closely, we have grown apart over the years and our needs have changed. I suppose the easiest way to say it is that your people now take much more from the earth than we do — and I am not talking about the spinning globe, the actual planet with its topsoil and air, but about something a bit more intangible. In a way, it is like two towns built on the same lake. Your town has begun to pump away a far larger share of the clean water, and to return those waters to the lake fouled."