Vernor Vinge - The Witling

“Anyway, this Pelio kid showed me around the overgrown park he calls a palace.” Leg-Wot went on to describe the places she had seen: the hedgework that girdled the side of a mountain, the mammoth treehouse. Bjault’s questions brought out a hoard of detail, and they talked for several hours—till she thought the archaeologist probably had a clearer vision of what she had seen than she herself did.

The torches were burning low by the time he returned to the question he had asked at the beginning of the evening. “But you weren’t able to persuade this Pelio to show you our gear?”

“Uh, no … and that’s really a strange thing. I told you the boy is lonely, that he can’t teleport himself like the others. I think I’ve got him wrapped around my little finger. We were actually on our way to some high-security area where they’ve stashed our stuff. Then these two other characters showed up; they rank lower than Pelio—one of them was his brother. But somehow it really upset him to see them. It was almost as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He made up some kind of lie about who I was, but I didn’t understand all the words.”

Finally Bjault had no more questions. The night beyond the doorway was slowly cooling. In the silence, the faint stridulation of the lagoon’s tiny mammals sounded loud. “You’ve done well, Yoninne,” he said. “My confinement has scarcely slowed our progress, I’d wager. If you can just stay in Pelio’s good graces long enough to get another crack at that maser, we’ll get ourselves rescued yet.” He paused, and an impish look softened the lines of strain and age in his face. “I’m just glad you don’t speak Azhiri any better than you do.” “Huh? Why the hell is that?”

“Because you haven’t had a chance to pick up any swear words. Your vocabulary—mine, for that matter—has all the purity of a child’s. It has to, since children are about the only people we’ve had a chance to listen to.”

Leg-Wot bit back an angry retort. She’d rather not let him see how mad such remarks made her. “Don’t worry, Bjault. I’m learning.”

With that the committee of two adjourned for the night. They tried to rig a curtain across the doorway, but finally had to settle on stuffing one of the largest chairs into the opening. It didn’t really block the way, but it would slow anybody—or anything—trying to enter. The transit pool was harder to block, since they couldn’t see how to drain it. Finally they gave up, Bjault doused the now-guttering torches, and they retired to their separate couches. Leg-Wot pulled the coverlet over her head and quietly shed the protection of her clammy flight suit.

She lay awake long after the old man’s breathing became loud and regular. With the torches out, the land beyond the doorway was flooded with light. The first moon still hung out there above the cone’s curving lip, but now the second, larger moon had risen, to shine several degrees above the first. They were both a common grayish brown, like the basaltic moons of a thousand other planets, but now they were so close together she could see the subtle difference in their hues. They were at last quarter but their light was so bright it made a complex net of double shadows across the broad-leafed trees that stretched downward from the cabin. The skittering and rustling continued as loudly as before. It was an altogether different music from the night reptiles of Homeworld or even the insects she had heard on Novamerika, yet it had a certain attraction.

What would she do tomorrow? She thought of the green scrap of cloth she had discarded. Unless she had broken the clasp on it, it was still wearable. But she’d be damned if she’d make a fool of herself again! That spoiled kid would just have to get used to her wearing a flight suit. Leg-Wot felt her teeth gritting together, and tried to relax. She knew how much was at stake here, how important it was to play up to Pelio. Without him, they would be without protection, and—more important—they would have no way of recovering their equipment. If word didn’t get back to Novamerika, it might be more than a century before the new colony would risk its resources by landing here again, more than a century before they would discover this world’s great secret.

She glared out onto the moonlit landscape. There was really no help for it. After all, it hadn’t killed her to wear the thing. Pelio obviously didn’t think she looked ridiculous, and he was the person she had to manipulate. If one more day’s humiliation was the price of getting that maser, then she would pay it.

This time there were no hitches. Again they went to the place Pelio called the Highroom, but now they found the special servant who could jump them into the Keep itself: they emerged from the transit pool into a vast, pale-lit emptiness. The wan light came from scattered greenish patches that seemed to float in the dark. It took Yoninne several seconds to realize that those patches were the same funguslike material that had hung gangrenously from the walls of their dungeon in Bodgaru. But this place didn’t stink, and the floor was dry and unslimed beneath her feet. The room was an ellipsoidal cavern so long that the glow patches on the far wall were little more than green stars in the dark. Their transit pool was set on a fifty-meter-wide ledge that shelved out from where the cavern’s wall began curving over into the ceiling. Abruptly Yoninne realized that nearly half the greenish lights were actually reflections in an oval lake that filled much of the cavern’s floor. The water was so still that she might never have noticed it if she hadn’t seen the faintly reflecting hull of a boat moored against the near shore.

They started down the steps that led from the shelf. As usual, Pelio’s servants trailed a fair distance behind. “This is my family’s Keep,” said the prince with evident pride, “probably the best angeng” (?) “in the world.” She had a hard time following the rest of his description; there were too many words that she did not recognize. But she was able to piece together the overall story. Originally the Keep had been a natural cave, with only one small entrance, and that near the Highroom. The Guild had senged (felt? seen? sensed?) the cave’s location and sold the information to the Summerkingdom. Pelio’s ancestors had entered the cave and enlarged it to its present size. The single entrance had then been blocked. From then on, security was relatively easy to maintain: the Azhiri could not teleport to any point that they could not seng. And if you weren’t a Guildsman, the only way to seng a location was to travel—by some means other than teleportation—to within a few meters of it. After that, apparently, the spot could be senged from any distance.

Once in every generation, the passage from the Highroom to the Keep was unblocked. New members of the royal family climbed the narrow stairs that led up the cliff to the Highroom, and then walked down the passage from the Highroom to the Keep. A very few trusted servants—those destined to become Highroom attendants—accompanied them on the second leg of their pilgrimage, but only those of royal blood ever made the entire trip.

Most of the palace servants had made the pilgrimage up the stone stairs to the Highroom, so they could teleport themselves and—if need be—their masters that far. The Highroom attendants could then teleport the visitors inside the Keep. It sounded like a pretty good system: except for the royal family (and the Guild, of course), no one could get all the way into the Keep without another’s help.

“And the lake? Why is that there?” asked Leg-Wot as Pelio’s talk petered out. The boy still seemed friendly—after all, he had agreed to take her here this morning—but he was a good deal quieter, more nervous than before. Sometimes she thought he didn’t even want their conversations overheard by the bodyguards. She didn’t know what to make of it, and now that they were so near her goal, it was beginning to get on her nerves.