Vernor Vinge: The Witling

Finally the Guildsman opened his eyes. For a moment he seemed disoriented. Then, “You just wasted one hundred imperials, My Lord Perfect,” he said. “I senged nothing up there but the densities of snow and rock.”

There was something strange in the other’s expression, and Moragha struggled for a moment to identify it. There was no laughter behind Prou’s dark eyes! That was it. For the first time in the nearly two years he had known the man, that ironic glint was gone. The Guildsman had senged something, something so important he was willing to break the Guild’s bond to lie about it. Moragha suppressed a sneer, and said, “Thank you, good Thengets, but I think I will check further. The Royal Atsobi Garrison is only one league to the south. I can have a company of mountain troops up here in an hour. Freeman Lagha, you’ll have your Hugo direct the imperial soldiers. Any questions or comments?”

Moragha raised his hand in dismissal. Lagha retired with Hugo to the salt water pool at the center of the room and departed. The prefect stood as the Guildsman prepared to slip into the water after them. “A moment, good Thengets.”

“Yes?” The Guildsman had recovered his old composure. There was even the beginning of a faint smile on his face.

“Are you sure you didn’t miss anything on your survey?”

“Of course not, My Lord. You know it’s nearly impossible to detect objects as small as individual men—their densities are so much like water. But there is no large group up there, I assure you.”

“Very good. Still, it might be wise for you to stay in town the next few hours. If my troops were to find you up in the hills, we might conclude that you had senged something strange up there and were trying to get to it first. I would never want the Guild to be suspected of violating the trust we put in it.”

Thengets del Prou stood very still for a moment, his smile slowly broadening. Finally he said, “As you wish, My Lord Prefect.”

Late in the afternoon, the archaeologist and the space pilot began packing their equipment. For twenty days, they had worked out of the bubble tent hidden among the peculiar three-crowned evergreens northeast of the alien village. They had probed that village with their telephoto cameras and their sensitive microphones. The archaeologist had recorded everything and talked to his computer, and now the space pilot thought they understood the language—

“Of course we understand the language, Bjault,” said Yoninne Leg-Wot, the irritation showing sharply in her voice. She dropped the twenty-kilogram bulk of the collapsed tent onto the sledge and turned to glare at the spindly archaeologist. “I know, I know: There are ‘subtleties we don’t yet grasp.’ The only people we’ve consistently been able to eavesdrop on are children and women. But we’ve got a good-sized vocabulary and a handle on the grammar. And with these new imprinting techniques, we won’t forget them. Hell, I speak this Azhiri lingo better than English even though they made me take three years of that back at the Academy.”

Ajão Bjault looked away from the stocky woman and tried not to grit his teeth. For the last twenty days he had had to live with her. With any other woman, such an extended companionship would have generated all sorts of scandalous rumors—even though Bjault was well into middle age, prolongevity treatments or no. But Yoninne Leg-Wot combined a squat, slablike body with a clever mind and a crippled personality. Among the crew, and probably the colonists as well, she would have been the hands-down winner of any unpopularity contest. And though Bjault understood her problems, and tried to be friendly, more and more he felt like a diffident fool.

“I don’t know, Yoninne. It seems to me that some of the things we don’t understand could be awfully important. There is a whole class of words —reng, seng, keng, dgeng— which are high-frequency but which we can’t relate to their activities.”

Leg-Wot shrugged, swept the last outstanding piece of equipment—a video recorder—into the sledge, and zipped the plastic cover shut over the cargo. She grabbed the control box and punched START. The sledge’s oxyhydrogen fuel cells revived, the motors whined faintly, and the tiny sledge started up the hillside at a slow walking pace. To continue the conversation Bjault was forced to follow her.

“Futhermore, why have we seen so few men out-of-doors? What are the men doing? How do they make a living?”

“We’ve been over all this, Bjault. These guys are miners. They spend most of their time underground. These hills are lousy with copper. And I’ll bet the ‘-eng’ class words have to do with mining, so it’s no wonder we haven’t observed the activities they refer to.”

“But how do they move the ore or its refinements out of here? The roads—” Yes, the roads. Before leaving orbit, Ajão had seen the photos Draere was taking. There were roads, but they were scarcely more than footpaths going from one lake to the next in the pattern of small, artificial lakes that netted the planet’s inhabited continents. In some cases, those “roads” arced with geometrical precision across hundreds of kilometers—yet they did not follow great circles. It was Draere who pointed out that the curves they followed were the intersection of the planet’s surface with planes parallel to its axis of rotation. How could the Azhiri race be capable of such precision and still be unaware that the shortest distance between two points on a sphere is a great circle?

Yoninne interrupted him impatiently. “Oh, please , Bjault. There may be some puzzling things about this civilization, but basically there is nothing to fear here. We know for certain that the Azhiri don’t have atomics or electricity. From what we’ve seen they don’t even have gunpowder. They live well enough, I suppose, but they’re primitive.

“Where is your spirit of adventure? This is only the fifth time in thirteen thousand years that the human race has run across another intelligent species—or even the artifacts of another species. It would be a hell of a surprise to me if there weren’t a lot of unanswered questions.” She twisted a toggle on the control box and the sledge pivoted on its left track to avoid a large boulder. They followed, walking in the deep tread marks it left in the drifts. It was snowing, and the overcast made the twilight deeper than it would otherwise have been.

“Believe me, Yoninne, I am excited—though there’s a good chance we’ve just stumbled on a lost colony. But I think we should wait, and look around some more before we call in the ferry. The expedition only has three ferries. If our situation goes sour I’m not sure that they’d divert another one from the colony on Novamerika.”

“Well, fortunately, Draere didn’t agree with you. When I messaged her, she seemed more than eager to get off that Godforsaken little island she’s been stuck on the last few days. Cheer up. You’ll have people to talk to besides me.”

How true, thought Bjault. He turned up his heater and fell into step behind Leg-Wot. The wet snow was coming down thickly now, so thick that the village and the ocean were completely invisible. In the deep twilight, Leg-Wot and the sledge were little more than shadows. No trace of wind rustled the twisted evergreens around them. The only sounds were the crunch-crunch of the snow beneath their feet, the whine of the sledge’s motors, and the faint—yet all-pervasive—hiss of the snow falling on the forest.

This heavy snowfall had been one reason Draere and her fellow officers had chosen tonight for landing. The locals wouldn’t catch sight of the ferry’s landing jets through this murk. In fact, the sound of the jets would be muted considerably by the snow-filled air. And since there was no wind, the ferry would have no trouble homing on the radio reflector he and Leg-Wot had set up in the valley seven kilometers north of town.