Vernor Vinge - The Witling

Ajão shook his head weakly. “You don’t understand.” You don’t understand; we’ll be dead in a matter of months if we can’t get off your wretched world. They had lost their only means of calling for rescue, the only radio on the planet with sufficient power to—His eye caught on the planetary map that covered the table beside him.

But there was another radio! There, at the edge of the monster-speckled blue ocean was the island where Draere’s people had set up the telemetry station. The place was a quarter of the way around the world and surrounded by thousands of kilometers of water, but if they could somehow get there …

If we only had an aircraft. If the colonial administration on Novamerika had let them have all the equipment they needed, they wouldn’t be in this mess now: the ablation skiff was no flyer, it was hardly more than a heat shield and a parachute. It had brought them safely down from orbit, but now it was good for nothing.

He looked up at the Guildsman. “You said the Guild can teleport things anywhere on Giri?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps we can make some sort of deal, then. As you suggest, we do understand, uh, magic that is unknown to the Azhiri. We would explain some of that magic if you would teleport Yoninne and myself here.” He reached across the map table to tap the island where Draere’s telemetry station stood.

Prou frowned, and Ajão wondered if he would value what little Ajão could reveal to him. There was simply no way the Azhiri could be taught anything of modern technology in the time that remained to Yoninne and himself. The machine pistols might be worth something to Prou, but they were gone now. About the only equipment they could offer him was their suit radios, whose range wasn’t much over fifty kilometers.

But that wasn’t Prou’s objection. “I could certainly teleport you there, Adgao—but you’d die on arrival. Look.” He sketched the line connecting Dhendgaru with the island. “The distance is more than one hundred leagues. One league is the farthest a normal road boat hops in a single reng—even with the heaviest hulls, no boat can safely jump more than two leagues at a time. You would be smashed into many small pieces if I renged you there.”

Ajão studied the map, and grimaced. Of course. The telemetry station was a quarter of the way around the planet. If they jumped there from here, they’d come out with a relative velocity of nearly a kilometer per second—directed downward. But still…

“What’s to keep you from taking one of those road boats out into the ocean? I realize now it would be a long trip, probably several hundred jumps, but we’d eventually get there in one piece.”

Prou shook his head again. “These abvom”—he tapped one of the ornate little sea monsters painted onto the map’s oceans—“aren’t here just for decoration, Adgao. They’d keng us before we got three leagues out to sea.”

It made sense. If the ability to keng depended—as it apparently did—on brain size, then seagoing mammals could well be the most deadly creatures on the planet, even if they could not teleport themselves. No wonder the Azhiri “roads” never cut across more than a few kilometers of open sea. Ajão half-rose from his couch. “But if the place is so inaccessible, how do you even know it’s there!”

Prou’s gray eyebrows went up. “We in the Guild can seng it. Just as we can seng the moons—even though we can’t take ourselves there, either.”

Bjault sank back onto the couch. In effect the telemetry station was as far away as Novamerika itself. For a moment he wished he had Leg-Wot’s flair for obscenity. This was an occasion for it.

Fie looked down at the map. At first glance, the polar orthographic projection seemed a terribly awkward way to map an entire hemisphere. The lands within thirty degrees of the pole were relatively undistorted, but toward the equator, the continents were so foreshortened that—on this map—all the Summerkingdom occupied a strip less than eight centimeters wide along the edge of the disks. Then Ajão realized that the projection would look quite natural to Azhiri eyes; it was peculiarly suited to their unique Talent. For them it was more important to know the velocity difference between two points than to know the actual distance between them. And the polar orthographic projection was a perfect representation of the velocity field of the planet’s surface. Straight lines on the map were not great circles, but they were paths of least speed change between the points they connected, and hence—from the Azhiri point of view—the shortest paths. That finally explained the strange curves the roads followed; if only he’d had this insight back before Draere tried to land.

The more he looked at the map, the more he realized how apt it was. You could see at a glance how many jumps were required to reach a destination safely, even tell the magnitude and direction of the jolt experienced on each jump. And it showed just how impossible it was to get to the telemetry station. Even if they traveled overland to the point closest to the station, there would still be an 8,500-kilometer stretch of ocean between them and their goal. If they took that in a single jump they would emerge at the station moving horizontally at several hundred meters per second. There simply was no way, unless …

“By God, that’s it!” Bjault said in Homespeech. He would never have seen it without this map, yet a born Azhiri would never have seen it without Ajão’s technical background. He looked up at the puzzled Guildsman, and said with a triumphant grin, “Between your Talent, and my ‘magic,’ I think we can get to that island!”

They called it the Festival of the Southern Summer—and ignored the fact that this marked the shortest day of all winter in the northern hemisphere. It was the greatest of the imperial holidays, equaled only by the Festival of the Northern Summer a half year away. The present affair wasn’t quite up to previous years—the duchies Rengeleru and Dgeredgerai were too busy holding their trade routes through the Great Desert against Sandfolk incursions to send their usual shows to the court. Nevertheless, most of the Summer peerage had come to the fest, filling all fifteen tiers of the Equatorial Amphitheater. The amphitheater was a natural ridge line stretching north and south some five hundred yards. It had taken the king’s laborers more than three years to carve the brownish-pink rhyolite of the hillside into fifteen shelves, each for a particular degree of nobility. Then millions of tons of topsoil, turf, and trees had been laid over the steps until an occasional pink streak of polished stone was all that showed through the green.

It was just two days since the mysterious invasion of the Summerplace Keep had been discovered. Though nothing had been revealed publicly, the rumors had spread—and the guards posted at every transit pool and ornamental pond of the amphitheater simply strengthened the rumors. Pelio wondered if things would ever return to normal. It had been a miracle that he was able to get Ionina out of the Keep unnoticed; he had never seen his father’s advisers so upset. Even though they found nothing missing from the king’s private rooms—and Pelio didn’t admit to his own losses—they were still faced with the irrefutable fact that someone had taken advantage of the diplomatic reception to rifle the Keep, and murder two air-rengers. The would-be thieves had had great Talent and incredible audacity. From that night on, patrols roamed the Keep, the first time any king-imperial had ever thought that necessary.

But only Pelio realized the true enormity of what had happened. Only Pelio knew that the thieves had actually stolen anything; someone had penetrated the Keep, someone who could reng objects out of it without the aid of the Highroom attendants. A Guildsman—or what was more likely, considering how carefully the Guild abided by the Covenant of Powers—a member of the royal family. The prince kept this knowledge to himself. He knew his situation was precarious; questions were being asked that might incidentally expose his relationship with a witling commoner. For a few davs he must avoid the girl, both in public and private.