The Witling

by Vernor Vinge

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Books by Vernor Vinge

  ABORTED RESCUE …

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  To Joan D. Vinge, for all her support

  in the writing of this novel

  One

  Fall had come to Bodgaru-by-the-Sea, and winter was not now far away. All up the sides of the mountains that sheltered Bodgaru’s northern flank, the tri-crowned pines stood green and snowy white in the fading sunlight. The town itself was still free of snow, but the cutting edge of the sea wind blew up off the beaches to lay sand and dust across the frosted brown grass that separated the townspeople’s stone houses. Only the furry terns were about in the out-of-doors these days: they screaked and scrawked as they glided between the houses. The townspeople were Summerfolk, and when the weather turned cold, many of them moved south where summer was forever. Those who stayed kept indoors, and worked their mines buried thousands of feet within the mountains.

  Parapfu Moragha looked out upon the scene, and silently cursed the day he had been appointed prefect of Bodgaru. Oh, at the time it had seemed quite a coup. His stone manse sat large and imposing on the ridge line that shielded the terminus of the Royal Road from the mountains to the north; he ruled a land larger than some duchies. But his vast “domain” was a cold, ugly borderland of the Summerkingdom. Bodgaru was seven leagues north of the equator—a short ride on the road, but more than two thousand miles as pilgrims walk it. The glaciers and mountains and snow-covered deserts that stretched from Bodgaru away to the North Pole were all claimed by the Snowking.

  Moragha turned away from the thick quartz window to eye his visitors with barely disguised distaste. A half-wit, a Guildsman, and a common miner. It was outrageous that he should be bothered by the likes of these on the eve of the prince-imperial’s visit, a visit that might be his last chance to persuade his friends at court to get him a new assignment. He eased himself onto the fur cushions that covered his stone chair, and said, “Really, Prou, why are you here?”

  Thengets del Prou returned his accusing look with characteristic blandness. Only the glint in his eyes told Moragha that the tall, dark-skinned Guildsman was really laughing at his discomfiture. “I am within my covenanted territory, My Lord. Bodgaru is less than eight leagues from Dhendgaru.”

  Theso Lagha, first speaker of the miners’ association, bobbed his head respectfully. He, at least, showed proper courtesy. “I asked him to come here tonight, My Lord Prefect. It seemed to me that what Hugo saw was important, so important that you might need the Guild immediately.”

  Moragha grimaced. Covenant or no, he feared the Guild. And he trusted Prou even less than the average Guildsman; the dark-faced smart aleck was of desert stock, with a practically unpronounceable name. Moragha wished that the miners didn’t need Prou’s senging quite so often, that the Guildsman would stick to his assigned city. “Very well, good Theso, just what did your man see?”

  Lagha urged the third visitor toward Moragha’s throne. “Yes, My Lord. Hugo here is indentured to our association as a woodcutter. Tell My Lord Prefect what you saw, Hugo.”

  Hugo was obviously a half-wit and a witling. His eyes wandered aimlessly about the room as he fiddled nervously with the sewn bladders of his slicker; Lagha and Prou at least had the grace to leave theirs by the pool. After several incoherent garglings, the old man finally managed: “May it please M’lord, I cut wood … for freeman and his friends, them that pull the rock from the hills. Mostly, I cut tri-crown pine over … over …”

  “Over northeast of town, away from the prospecting hills,” put in Lagha.

  “Yea … nice up there. No people. No things, excepting paddlefeet sometimes … and that only after the snow comes all the way into town … .” He paused for a long moment but his owner did not prod him on. Finally he recovered his chain of thought. “ … But this last nineday, before the first snow, there’s been some … thing so strange up there. Lights, faint. Like you see over Bilala’s marsh at night sometimes in the summer. I thought it might be same thing, but no, the lights stay and stay. Pretty. I go closer last night. Come in from the north … . Quiet, quiet. There are people there, M’lord, watching us, watching town.”

  “How many?” snapped the prefect.

  The witling’s face twisted in concentration. “Hard to say. Two, I think … they have a little house there and they sit and watch us from inside. And they’re strange. One’s so big, so tall … much taller even than the honored Guildsman.” He nodded at Thengets del Prou. “ … I go close, closer, quiet like the paddlefoot, and then …”

  His voice faded, as he stared beyond the thick stone walls at some remembered vision. Faintly, the prefect heard the wind keening through the twilight outside. He shivered. This place was so far north of where decent men should live. “Well?” he asked finally. “What happened then?”

  “I run. I run! I’m so scared.” The old man collapsed blubbering onto his stone chair.

  Moragha turned on Lagha. “For this you waste my time, freeman? Don’t you know that the prince-imperial”—the witling, boorish prince-imperial— “arrives in the Bodgaru prefecture tomorrow? I have more important things to do than listen to the ravings of your village idiot!”

  Lagha’s civility faded the tiniest fraction. “My Lord Prefect, Hugo has certain—problems, but he has been the property of my association for nearly thirty years, and in all that time I don’t believe he has ever told tales.” The object of their discussion sat looking dismally at the floor. “Frankly, My Lord, I believe he saw something up there.”

  “Squatters?” asked Prou.

  “I don’t know, sir. There are things that don’t fit: the creatures are very strange, by Hugo’s telling. That’s why I thought My Lord Prefect might want to commission you to seng the hills. If there’s a number of Snowfolk squatters up there you would detect it. And if these strange things be something else …” His voice trailed off.

  Moragha wondered briefly why the bad luck always happened to him. The prince-imperial was an untalented lout, a stain upon the royal family’s honor, but he was first in line of succession, and he was visiting the prefecture tomorrow. That visit was very important to Parapfu Moragha. But now there was this new problem to worry about; it just wasn’t fair. On the other hand—and here the prefect brightened—in the unlikely event that there were Snowfolk close to town, his detecting them on the eve of the imperial visit would indeed be a coup … . Even if he had to deal with the Guild to achieve it.

  “Well,” he said grumpily to Thengets del Prou, “will you reconnoiter that area for us?”

  Prou stretched his long legs lazily towar
d Moragha’s throne. “You know the Guild doesn’t like to involve itself with disputes between kingdoms.”

  “But we don’t know for sure what it is Hugo saw up there,” said Lagha.

  “True,” said the Guildsman. “Very well, My Lord Prefect, I will take the job. The Guild’s commission will be one hundred imperials.”

  Moragha started. That was ten times the usual seng fee. “Go to it, then.”

  Prou nodded, closed his eyes, and seemed to relax even more. There was a long silence as the dark-faced young man senged far beyond the manse. Moragha closed his own eyes. He had always prided himself on his Talent. He could easily perceive the densities of the rock and air beyond the walls of the manse. His artisans had arranged the flagstones about the building in subtle patterns of varying density, and every part of that design was clear to him. Beyond that he could seng several transit pools in the area, but the spaces in between were hazy, and without visiting them personally he never could quite place them in true space. That was the only real difference between himself and the likes of Thengets del Prou, who even now was perceiving densities thousands of yards up in the hills. Moragha tried to imagine what it must be like to have such omniscience—but as always, he failed.

  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.”

  Two

  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 comi
ng 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.

  The darkness was almost complete now, but Yoninne Leg-Wot confidently guided the sledge toward the pass in the hills ahead. He had to admire the girl sometimes. Among other things, she had an uncanny sense of direction. If all the Novamerikan colony could spare for this ground reconnaissance were a couple of social rejects, then they could have done worse than send Yoninne Leg-Wot and the senile archaeologist Ajão Bjault. Let’s not be maudlin, Ajão told himself. At your age you could never have wangled a colonist’s berth without the respect of a lot of people. You were lucky beyond all justice that this solar system has two habitable planets. And then an intelligent species is discovered on one of them, and you still whine about your declining career!

  He shook the snow from his head and pulled the hood down over his face. There was something vastly peaceful about a thick, quiet snowfall. Except for the ever-present drag of this world’s higher gravity, he could almost imagine that he was back on Homeworld, three parsecs—and forty years—away.

  Leg-Wot fell back so that they walked abreast. “I think we’re being followed,” she said softly.

  “What!” His response was halfway between a hiss and a scream.