The Witling

by Vernor Vinge

  Of course the Azhiri race itself had come along millions of years later, just as Homo sapiens had only developed in the latter stages of mammalian evolution. But where their animal precursors could teleport only a small fraction of their body mass, a trained Azhiri could reng whole tons. At least most Azhiri could—Pelio was an exception, a cripple. Apparently, he couldn’t even defend himself against the Talent.

  Bjault noticed a small transit pool half-hidden in the trees up the hillside. He left the beach to climb toward it. There really wasn’t much reason to, but he had nothing else to do. He would just have to be patient another day or two. Leg-Wot was so close to recovering their equipment. He entered the clearing and walked to the marble rim of the pool. Leaves and other forest debris floated on the surface. Apparently this pool was little used. Bjault wondered how the Azhiri managed to avoid accidents. Sooner or later, some poor fellow would get into a pool just as someone else arrived, and be chopped in half, his lower body teleported wherever the newcomer had departed. Perhaps the Azhiri clairvoyance—“seng,” or whatever they called it—was even more effective than Leg-Wot reported.

  It suddenly occurred to him that there was another reason why accidents didn’t happen. It takes energy to cut a solid or liquid, to break the molecular bonds along the surface of the cut. If—as it seemed—the Azhiri didn’t expend energy to do their tricks, then there was only one way they could cut an object by use of the Talent: if the materials along the cleavage were chemically identical at both the departure and arrival points, then there was little net energy expense during a teleportive exchange. Thus you could reng two equal volumes of water. (Or, if you wanted to kill somebody, you could reng two equal volumes of your victim’s medulla oblongata; jumble his brain, in effect. Witlings led a precarious existence indeed on Giri.)

  Bjault gazed idly across the clearing, and happened to be looking right at the man as he popped into existence, then dropped three or four centimeters onto the deep grass. The archaeologist rose abruptly to his feet, but not before two more men materialized.

  “Don’t move, witling,” the first of them said. “The prince requires your presence.” All three wore the standard kilts of the household guard, but there was something tense and furtive about them. Ajão had been dealing with bureaucratic and military types for well over a century, for so long that he almost had a feeling for their lies. These three behaved like soldiers in enemy territory. He took a step backward, toward the path that led to the beach. One of the three disappeared, popped back into existence a little way down the trail. At the same instant an incredibly sharp gust of wind struck Ajão’s ankles, knocking his feet out from under him. Two of the men closed in, grabbing his arms. “We can kill you before you even start to scream. Don’t hinder us, and we may let you live.” Ajão gritted his teeth in pain and fear as they dragged him across the grass toward the transit pool. This was kidnapping, not the lawful activity of jailers! And the difference was not academic—he might never see Yoninne or the maser.

  As his abductors reached the pool, the fellow bringing up the rear screamed, and there was an abrupt snapping sound, like nearby thunder; Ajão looked up to see the man’s body smash into the bole of a tree at the far side of the clearing. Just at the entrance to the clearing was a fourth man, a dark-skinned Azhiri in a plain green kilt. He stood unmoving, but Ajão’s captors went pale with fear. “Guildsman,” one of them shouted, and when he looked down at Bjault there was murder in his eyes.

  There was a second snap of thunder, and his would-be assassin was literally blown away. The ground slammed up against Ajão and he felt nothing more.

  Beyond the railing, the city stretched as far as he could see. Individually, the buildings were beautiful, their stone and timber construction blended subtly together. Even the largest of them, three and four stories tall, were part of an immense garden. Vines and tree limbs had been guided through the latticed balconies and rooftop porches, to set off with tones of green and brown the blue paint of the outer woodwork.

  It had to be a city, but no building stood closer than one hundred meters from another. Only the pathless gardens and their trees and flowers and tiny ponds lay between them. It reminded Ajão of the planned cities they were just beginning to build on Homeworld when the Novamerika Expedition was launched forty years before. Those cities had been made possible by the advanced Homeworld technology with its computer-directed helicopter transportation—whereas the Azhiri achieved the same effect without mechanical tricks. Ajão felt a little envious. Their city might be thirty kilometers from east to west, yet the Azhiri could jump from one end of it to the other with scarcely more than a two-meter-per-second jolt.

  Ajão was lying on a soft couch set on one of the roof porches. Except for the soaked condition of his flight suit, and the soreness in his legs, he was quite comfortable. This was hardly a prison cell. The furniture and art work excelled what Pelio had provided them. A wide, low table sat alongside the couch. Its surface bore two circular paintings, each more than a meter across. They looked almost like maps: the blue representing ocean, the green and brown and white the land. Notations in the Azhiri syllabaric script marked various points. There were even little sea monsters painted on the blue … . Why, these were maps, polar orthographic projections! One disk represented the northern hemisphere, and the other the southern. What a strange projection to use; the equatorial continents were distorted almost to unrecognizability.

  From behind him came footsteps. Bjault whirled to see—his rescuer. The fellow leaned over the couch, offered Ajão something dark and very cold. Iced drinks yet; all the comforts of a tech society. Ajão numbly accepted the glass. “Where am I?” he asked, as the other settled himself into a nearby chair. The stranger looked a bit older than Pelio, and was probably of a different Azhiri race: his skin was a very dark gray and he stood nearly 160 centimeters tall, rather big and lean compared to the other natives. His green kilt had a stylized pair of silver moons stitched across the side.

  “Near the center of the business district of Dhendgaru, right here,” he said, pointing to a gray splotch on one of the maps. He moved his finger about a centimeter. “And here is the Summerpalace, less than two leagues away. You haven’t been moved far … and you are free to return.” He looked up abruptly at Ajão. “But I must speak with you first. My name is Thengets del Prou, second Guildsman resident in Dhendgaru.”

  Ajão’s ears pricked up at the word “Guild.” “Thengets del Prou,” he pronounced the words carefully. “I’m Ajão Bjault.”

  Prou smiled. “Even if you didn’t look like an outlander, I’d have known you weren’t from the Summerkingdom. Summerfolk have considerable trouble with the hanging consonants in my name.”

  “Then you aren’t native to this kingdom yourself?”

  “Oh, no. I was born in the Great Desert, the second son of a chiefling among the Sandfolk.”

  Bjault remembered what Leg-Wot had said about that race. “Aren’t your people, uh, great enemies of the Summerkingdom?”

  Prou’s grin broadened. “They certainly are. And I’d probably be a combat leader crawling through the sand to raid some Summerkingdom oasis, if I hadn’t been destined for the Guild. But I don’t remember my family. I was less than a year old when the Guild took me. It was a lucky thing, too: occasionally the Guild will miss a child, which can be horrible for the village he’s born into. There are cases of super-Talented kids just taking over isolated villages, killing anyone who opposes their whims. Children like that should be raised by equally Talented adults—Guildsmen—who can plant consciences in them.”

  Prou slouched down in his chair and hooked one bare foot over the edge of the map table. He had none of the severe formality Ajão had seen in other Azhiri. Prou seemed to be one of those people who does his particular job very well, and has a lot of fun with that job and the rest of the universe. In fact, his casual nonchalance reminded Bjault of some of his wackier grad students, years ago on Homeworld.

  Ajão tri
ed to suppress the natural liking he felt for the man. Was there any objective reason to trust him? The archaeologist sipped at the sour alcoholic drink and tried to disguise his indecision. What could explain Prou’s appearing just in time to rescue him from the kidnappers?

  “You must have been watching me for some time,” Ajão said finally.

  The Guildsman hesitated a second, then nodded. “I was at Bodgaru when you were captured. I tried to get to you before the Summerking’s troops, but it was just too risky. The local prefect was watching me pretty closely.”

  Ajão raised his eyebrows. “I was told the Guild was beyond laws and governments.”

  Prou laughed. “It may seem that way to some people. Certainly we have physical power. We can seng everything on Giri and even on the moons, so we can teleport objects anywhere in the world without first making a pilgrimage to both the departure and destination points as a normal person must do. We dug the transit lakes simply by renging down rock from the moons. And if it ever comes to a fight, a single Guildsman can destroy whole cities the same way.”

  There was no boasting in Prou’s tone—and Ajão realized he was telling the literal truth. If a hundred-ton moon rock were exchanged for an equivalent volume of—say—air at Giri’s surface, the net potential energy released would be equivalent to a small fission bomb. Perhaps that explained the glassy plain Draere had photographed in the southern hemisphere.

  “But,” continued Thengets del Prou, “do you know how many Guildsmen there are—in the whole world?”

  Ajão shook his head.

  “Less than six hundred—and a quarter of those are children. Six hundred out of four hundred million normal Azhiri. Yes, we do have power, but at the same time we abide by the Covenant. If ever the commoners and the kings’ armies united against us, they could destroy the Guild, though the price would be millions of lives.”

  A three-way balance, thought Ajão; the Guildsmen with their terrible powers, the national aristocracies with their well-trained armies, and the commoners with their numbers. Any two could successfully gang up on the third. So every kingdom—no matter how feudal its structure—must treat its subjects with some justice. And between kingdoms, open war was to be avoided, since it would weaken the aristocracies relative to the Guild and the commoners.

  “And that’s really why you and your lady are so important, Adgao. You are witlings, yet the powers you were playing with up in Bodgaru were as great as any Guildsman’s—I saw the flying monster Ngatheru’s troops shot down. One way or the other, your existence will change all the world. I want that change to be for the better … or perhaps it would be more objective to say that I want to have some control over how things change. In any case, I couldn’t let the Summerkingdom’s intelligence arm have you to themselves: I sent Prince Pelio an anonymous letter describing your capture. The prince is fairly powerful, and certainly the greatest eccentric in the court. I was counting on him to keep you out of Ngatheru’s hands. Then I could contact you, try to persuade you to put yourselves under Guild protection. Pelio couldn’t complain about the arrangement to his father without revealing his own misdeeds, and I was sure you would go along once you saw how much safer you’d be with us.”

  Ajão disagreed but remained silent. No matter how uncertain a patron, Pelio had the maser, and that was their only salvation.

  “But I never realized,” the dark-skinned Azhiri continued, “that someone else was playing the same game. You probably guessed those were not Summerpalace guards who attacked you. They were expert soldiers, though: all three could teleport themselves without a transit pool. Whoever was behind them wants both you and your equipment. I’d give a lot to know just who it is: Prince Aleru? Someone in the intelligence arm?”

  But Ajão scarcely heard Prou’s speculation. “Our equipment? What about it?”

  “Pelio stored it in his private room in the palace Keep. I was in the Keep yesterday, attending a very dull reception King Shozheru held for the Snowfolk ambassador. I snooped around—something Guildsmen are peculiarly equipped to do—and found the prince’s private room. But I was too late. I found two dead servants there—they weren’t too late; they must have surprised whoever was going through Pelio’s room. As far as I could tell, the thieves took everything of yours they could carry.”

  The revelation was a ragged knife stuck through Ajão’s middle. “What?”

  Prou nodded. “I looked everywhere.” He described what he had seen, and Bjault realized he was talking about the ablation skiff and the wreck of their powered sledge; someone had taken all their loose gear—the maser included.

  The Guildsman saw the look on Ajão’s face. “I’m sorry too, Adgao. But my offer still holds. If you and your friend wish, I will take you away from Pelio and the court. Otherwise, the royal family will eventually discover that Pelio is consorting with witlings, and when they do, you two, and even the prince, will be in mortal danger.”

  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 kilometer
s 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.

  He 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 …