James Schmiz - The Witches of Karres

“What about the vatch?” asked Goth.

“Well, I had the impression that after it dropped the Leewit here, it took off at top speed — as if it were scared Toll might catch up with it.”

The Leewit gave him a surprised stare.

“It was scared Toll would catch up with it!” she said.

“But it’s a giant-vatch!” said the captain.

The Leewit appeared puzzled. Goth rubbed the tip of her nose and remarked, “Captain, if I were a giant-vatch and Toll got mad at me, I’d be going somewhere fast, too!”

“Sure would!” the Leewit agreed. “No telling what’d happen! She’d short out its innards, likely!”

“Pull it inside out by chunks!” added Goth.

“Oh?” said the captain, startled. “I didn’t realize that, uh, sort of thing could be done.”

“Well, not by many,” Goth acknowledged. “Toll sure can do it!”

“Got a fast way with vatches when her temper’s up!” the Leewit nodded.

“Hmm,” said the captain. He reflected. “Then maybe we’re rid of the thing, eh?”

Goth looked doubtful. “Wouldn’t say that, Captain. They’re mighty stubborn. Likely it’ll come sneaking back pretty soon to see if Toll’s still around. Could be too nervous about it to do much for a while though.”

She regarded the Leewit’s snarled blond mop critically. “Let’s go get your hair combed out,” she said. “You’re kind of a mess!”

They went into Goth’s cabin. The captain wandered back towards the screens, settled into the control chair, rubbed his jaw, relled experimentally. Nothing in range — but they probably hadn’t lost the vatch yet. He’d been wondering about the urgent haste with which it had seemed to pass here when pursued by only one angry witch mother. Klatha hooks… shorting out vatch innards… He shook his head. Well, Toll was a redoubtable sorceress even among her peers, from all he’d heard.

Klatha hooks -

The captain knuckled his jaw some more. No way of knowing when the Egger Route would come droning awesomely up again, this time bringing a troop of witches to transport the Manaret synergizer, the Venture and themselves to the embattled Karres of more than three hundred thousand years in the future. It might be minutes, hours, or days, apparently. There was no way of knowing either when the vatch would start to get over being nervous and discover there was no hot-tempered witch mother around at present -

The captain grunted, shifted attention mentally down to the Venture’s engine room, to the thrust generators. Almost immediately an awareness came of the tiny, swirling speck of blackness there which couldn’t be seen with physical eyes… the minute scrap of vatch stuff that carried enough energy in itself to hold the ship’s drives paralyzed.

What immaterial manner of thing, he thought, would be a klatha hook shaped to snag that immaterial fragment of vatch?

Brief wash of heat… The speck jumped, stood still again, its insides whirling agitatedly. The captain pulled in some fashion, felt something tighten between them like the finest of threads, grow taut.

So that was a klatha hook!… He let out his breath, drew on the hook, brought the speck in steadily with it until it was swirling above the control desk a few feet away from him.

Stay there , he thought, and released the hook. The speck stayed where it was. As close to it as this, he could rell its vatch essence, though faintly. He flicked another klatha snag to it, drew it closer, released it again…

Hooks, it seemed, he could do. He might also find he was able to short out the speck’s innards if he made the attempt. But there was no immediate point in that. The speck was a tool with powers and limitations, a working device, a miniature vatch machine. He’d already discovered some of the ways such a machine could be made to operate. What else could it do that might be useful to know… perhaps might become very necessary to know about?

The captain stared at the speck in scowling concentration, half aware Goth and the Leewit had left the cabin. He could hear them talking in the outer control section, voices lowered and intent… Turn it inside out, in chunks? That might wreck it as a device. But since it was non-material vatch stuff, it might not.

There was a pipe in one of the drawers in his cabin, an old favorite of more leisurely days, though he hadn’t smoked it much since the beginning of the Chaladoor trip. He brought an image of it now before his mind, pictured it lying on the control desk before him, turned his attention back to the vatch speck.

Just enough of you to do the job!… Get it!

Out of the speck, with the thought, popped a lesser speck, so tiny it could produce no impression at all except an awareness that it was there. It hung beside the other for an instant, then was gone, and was back. The pipe lay on the desk.

So they could be taken apart in chunks and the chunks still put to work! Now -

“…not sure! ” The Leewit’s young voice trilled suddenly through his abstraction. “Yes, I do, just barely… Stinkin’ thing! ”

The captain glanced around hastily at the open door. Were they relling the vatch speck in here? It would do no harm, of course, if Goth knew about his new line of experimentation. But the Leewit -

Then he stiffened. Together! he thought at the two specks. The lesser one flicked back inside the other. Back down where you — but the reassembled vatch speck was swirling again above the thrust generators in the engine room before the thought was completed. He drew his attention quickly away from it.

“Captain?” Goth called from the outer room.

“Yes — I’m getting it, Goth!” His voice hadn’t been too steady.

The giant-vatch was barely in range, the relling sensation so distantly faint it had been overlapped by the one produced by the vatch-speck immediately before him. The entity had returned, might be prowling around cautiously as Goth had expected, to avoid another encounter with Toll and with klatha hooks of an order to match its own hugeness. But he had been careless — it wouldn’t do at all to have the vatch surprise him while he was tinkering with the devices it had stationed here.

It drew closer gradually. The witch sisters remained silent. So did the captain. He began to get impressions of vatch-muttering, indistinct and intermittent. It did seem to be trying to size up the situation here now, might grow bolder as it became convinced it had lost its pursuer -

Why had it brought the Leewit through time to the Venture ? She was a capable witch-moppet when it came to producing whistles that shattered shatterable objects to instant dust. From what Goth had said, she also had blasts in her armory with an effect approximating a knock-out punch delivered by a mighty fist. Neither, however, seemed very useful in getting the Manaret synergizer back to Manaret, past Moander, the Nuris, and the dense tangles of energy barriers that guarded the Worm World.

The Leewit’s other main talent then was a linguistic one, as the witches understood linguistics — a built-in klatha ability to comprehend any spoken language she heard and translate and use it without effort or thought. And Moander, the monster-god of the Worm World legends, who was really a great robot, reputedly “spoke in a thousand tongues.” Nobody seemed to know just what that meant; but conceivably the vatch knew. So conceivably the Leewit’s linguistic talent was the vatch’s reason for deciding to fit her into its plans to overthrow Moander through the captain.

There was no way of trying to calculate the nature of those schemes or of the Leewit’s role in them more specifically. The manner in which the vatch played its games seemed to be to manipulate its players into a critical situation which they could solve with a winning move if they used their resources and made no serious mistakes… and weren’t too unlucky. But it gave them no clues to what must be done. If they failed, they were lost, and the vatch picked up other players. And since it was a capricious creature, one couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t on occasion deliberately maneuver players into a situation which couldn’t possibly be solved, enjoying the drama of their desperate efforts to escape a foreseeable doom.