Vernor Vinge: The Witling

“Fine. I will take whatever of those fragments you have. Don’t interrupt. If my cousin Ngatheru is still upset with the situation, let him take it up with me or my father,” he said, praying that Ngatheru would decide to let the matter drop. After all, the baron-general was five tiers below Pelio as formal nobility was counted.

“Yes, Your Highness.” The prefect came briefly to attention as he capitulated.

Pelio took a last look into the dryad’s dark, mysterious eyes, then turned to slip into the transit pool. She is the most beautiful creature …

… And, like me, a witling.

Me? Play up to that flat-noised, gray-faced savage? I’d rather die.” Yoninne Leg-Wot crossed her thick, muscular arms and glared at Bjault.

Ajão leaned toward the irate pilot as far as the leather restraints would permit. “Look, Yoninne, I’m not asking you to, to do anything immoral. I’m just saying that this fellow likes you—and he’s obviously very powerful. If his title,” and here he pronounced an Azhiri phrase, “means what I think, then he is the number-one or number-two man in their state, even as young as he seems. We need his goodwill.”

For a long moment Leg-Wot scowled down at the boat’s polished deck. Bjault suddenly wondered if she were really so disgusted at the thought of getting friendly with the young Azhiri, or if she were just so twisted by past romantic failures that she couldn’t even playact anymore.

It wasn’t until this Pelio had talked to them that Ajão realized how much Leg-Wot looked like an Azhiri. She was a little tall, perhaps, but she had the build and the hardness—if not the coloring—of the aliens. Of course there were many differences: the Azhiri bone and cartilage structure was vastly different. Their features looked as though they had been pressed from soft clay, then smoothed until nose, chin, brow, and ears were all rounded and indistinct. Pelio was either very spoiled or very lonely to take to someone who must look as exotically strange as Leg-Wot.

But this was exactly the sort of good fortune they needed now. Less than an hour after Pelio left the dungeon, Bjault and Leg-Wot had been teleported (what other word could he use?) to a clean, comfortable cell, where they were treated to warm baths and a meal. The next morning, they had been led to a small lake—to board the strange round boat that floated there. Now Bjault guessed the solution to several of the mysteries that had confronted them before their capture. And if Pelio were really taking them elsewhere—as he had said in the dungeon—then that guess would be put to the test in just a few minutes.

Finally the woman answered him. “I don’t see that it really matters, Bjault. You say that sucking up to this fellow is the only chance we have for survival. I say that it’s just the difference between dying slow and dying fast. You yourself told me the local plants are tainted with heavy metals. I suppose we can still eat them, but we’ll eventually be poisoned—no matter how chummy I get with this big shot. Our only hope is for rescue, but the suit radios are so damn weak, and this planet’s ionosphere is so active, that any signal we send would get smeared unrecognizable. And even if Novamerika knew we were alive, it would be a stupid gamble for them to risk another ferry trying to pull us out of here.” She lay back limply. Her old spirit seemed completely quenched.

It’s almost as though she’s making excuses , thought Bjault, as if she’d rather not be rescued. “You may not care whether ‘the dying is slow or fast,’ Yoninne, but the distinction is important to me, and perhaps to the whole human race. From what Pelio said, I think he’s got part of our equipment: the ablation skiff, the pistols … and the maser. With the maser we could make ourselves heard on Novamerika; they must be listening to the telemetry station Draere set up. And as for the ‘risk’ they’d be taking to rescue us: don’t you realize what we’ve stumbled into? This world could be the greatest find anyone has made since mankind left Old Earth—the greatest discovery in thirteen-thousand years. These Azhiri can teleport. Even if their trick doesn’t violate relativity, even if they can’t ‘jump’ faster than light, it still means that the entire structure of human colonization is going to be transformed. All down the centuries, man’s colonies have been isolated by an abyss of time and space, and by the enormous cost of travel from one solar system to another. Colonial civilizations, as on Homeworld, rise and fall just as surely and just as rapidly as they did on Old Earth. No doubt man has colonized several thousand worlds, but we know of only a few hundred, and most of those through hearsay. Whatever greatness a civilization achieves dies with it, simply because we are so isolated.”

Ajão realized his voice was gradually rising. He was making a point that haunted many, including Leg-Wot. How often and how loudly had he heard the pilot denounce the Homeworld Union for not spending more money on interstellar colonization, “trade,” and radio searches for unknown civilizations. “But now” he continued, more softly, “we may have found a way around all this. If we can find the secret of the Azhiri Talent—even if we can alert Novamerika and eventually Homeworld to its existence—then the distances between the stars will not matter, and there could be a truly interstellar civilization.”

Leg-Wot looked thoughtful, less glum. Bjault had always believed that humanity as a whole was one of the few things she really cared about. “I see what you mean. We’ve got to get back word, whether we survive or not. And we’ve got to learn everything we can about these people.” Her face lit with sudden, unthinking enthusiasm. “Why do they always teleport from one pool of water to another? I’ll bet these guys have a high-class technology hidden beneath all the medieval window dressing. The pools are some sort of transmitting devices.”

Ajão breathed an inward sigh of relief that the girl had snapped out of her mood. It was hard enough dealing with his own discouragement. He shook his head, and said, “I think these people are every bit as backward as we thought before, Yoninne. I’ll wager that teleportation is a natural mental ability with them.”

“Well, then, why do they always seem to teleport from pools of water?”

Bjault’s reply was lost in the shrill whistle that suddenly sounded from one of the boat’s upper decks. It was almost like a steam whistle, though Ajão couldn’t see where the sound came from. Whatever its origin, the whistle obviously signaled something important. The two guards who a moment before had been playing a dice game—at least it looked like dice, even though the stones were dodecahedra—stood up abrupdy. One of them swept the dice into a leather bag. They both settled back in padded couches and strapped themselves in. The moment Ajão had seen all those couches, with their uniform system of restraints, he had guessed that they were only incidentally used to tie down prisoners. It was just one more bit of evidence for his theory. In another few moments he hoped to see a much more important confirmation.

The whistle continued to wail for nearly a minute, as crewmen and soldiers took their places. When the tone abruptly ended, he could hear the townspeople cheering on the pier somewhere behind him. They had dutifully assembled (or been assembled) to see their ruler off. It fit the cultural picture he had of this Azhiri state.

Bjault twisted around on his couch, trying to take in every detail. This boat was the strangest vehicle he had seen in all his 193 years. In basic form it was an oblate spheroid. The hull at least followed this description perfectly, while the three-tiered deck structure only approximately filled the outline of a spheroid. The craft sat low in the water, and its construction seemed much stronger than the planet’s gravity required. Heavy wooden beams and thick planking were used everywhere. And though the craft was rich with ornamentation—paintings, tapestries, precious-metal inlays—there was no grillwork, and no overhanging ornaments. There was also no visible means of propulsion: no masts, no oarlocks.