The Witling

by Vernor Vinge

  She had worked eighteen and then twenty hours a day; it was no use. The days passed just as quickly. And more and more, Bjault had been a drag on her progress. The old man tried to keep up with everything she did, to make her explain all the steps and procedures. She was rid of him only when he slept and during those hours he spent working an interminable Runge-Kutta analysis of the plan. At one point he had the entire desk and much of the floor covered with papers bearing his neat, pen-scratched mathematics. In a way, she had to admire Bjault for that: most of Leg-Wot’s contemporaries would be at a complete loss if they couldn’t solve their differential equations on a computer—they would never think of doing something like that by hand. But Bjault had been an adult before the reinvention of digital computers, and when he orginally learned his math, numerical analysis had all been done by hand. Still, it was an irritating waste of time; Leg-Wot had told the old man over and over again that his plan would work. She had known that the moment he described the scheme. It wasn’t that she was a mathematical genius—she just had a feel for certain things.

  But they had had several things going for them: the Guild’s secret assistance, an endless supply of hand labor, and—through Pelio—the authority of King Shozheru. Eventually they had licked all the preliminary problems; they were ready to begin the first, and safest, part of Ajão’s plan.

  The boat’s warning whistle sounded. Leg-Wot slid back into her chair and pulled her harness tight. All along the deck, the crew took their places, while beside her Ajão and Pelio tied themselves in, too. The boy was nervous and tired; he had been up most of the night trying to get a couple of extra pilot-navigators. Pelio gave Yoninne a quick, nervous smile, and looked across the deck at the chief navigator. The navigator was an especially husky Azhiri dressed in baggy coveralls. The fellow never looked directly at Ajão or Yoninne, though he showed stiff courtesy to the prince. No doubt he thought Pelio was running from disgrace. The guy reminded Leg-Wot of her father: a hardcore officer willing to cooperate with his superiors’ most idiotic whims.

  The navigator had been a hard man to get. Only selected combat types ever made the pilgrimage across the arctic. It had taken Shozheru’s authority to pry him away from Summer’s army. But without him and the two other navigators, they would have to take on local pilots for at least part of their journey.

  Now the man’s heavy face tensed for an instant—and the first jump was accomplished. A dozen different impressions assaulted Leg-Wot’s senses at once. There was a moment of free fall as the boat rose up and eastward. Then she was pressed firmly back into her seat, and the boat’s timbers groaned as the yacht smashed into the destination lake. Suddenly the day was bright and cheerful, for there were only scattered clouds in this new sky.

  But that was only a single jump, the first of more than a hundred. Minutes later they teleported again, and jump followed jump, till their surroundings became a surreal blur in Leg-Wot’s memory. The skies stayed mostly sunny, and the warehouses at water’s edge looked pretty much the same from lake to lake, but the landscape beyond them flickered from grassy plain to city, to mountains. The sun edged jerkily southward as they traveled further into the northern reaches of the Summerkingdom. Traveling by “road boat” was like a pleasant combination of flying and sailing. It was strange to remember how frightening and mysterious their first ride on one had been. Now, even that crazy boat whistle seemed both sensible and commonplace: it blew when their navigator renged air from their next destination into its chamber—the air’s relative speed somehow determined the pitch of the whistle, so it was easy to estimate how much of a lurch to expect.

  Two hours passed, and they stopped at a place Pelio called Pfodgaru. It was lunch time. They were pulled into a wharf and pots of steaming soup were brought aboard. Leg-Wot watched Bjault as the food was passed around. The archaeologist had been unnaturally quiet all morning; there had been none of the usual penetrating questions, none of the theories thrown off the top of his head. Now he fiddled with his soup, looked half-nauseated. He noticed Yoninne’s gaze. “Cramps,” he said in Homespeech, “all morning.” They stared silently at each other for a long moment, and Yoninne knew they were thinking the same thought: Metallic poisons—lead, mercury, antimony—they’re in everything we eat, building toward sudden death within us. Are these the first symptoms? And if so, how much longer do we have? Ajão looked abruptly away, then said to Pelio, “We are still within the Summerkingdom?”

  The prince stared with some puzzlement at the two Novamerikans, then nodded, “We’re right at the northern edge, almost thirty degrees from the equator, further north even than where you were captured, though the climate here is milder than Bodgaru’s.” Yoninne looked across the stone warehouses, the weather-beaten wood residences. Pfodgaru was a pale, chilly imitation of cities further south. Yet things would get colder soon: along the railing, crewmen were enclosing the deck with slatted quartz windows.

  “I know,” continued Pelio, “this isn’t the nicest place in our kingdom, especially during the winter. But it is the southern end of the only polar road which treaty allows us to use. For the next hundred leagues—all the way to County Tsarang—we’ll be within the Snowkingdom.”

  Their next jump transformed the mountains surrounding Pfodgaru into a tiny gray serration on the southwestern horizon. The terrain didn’t seem too different from the northern reaches of Summer: there was a bit more snow, a bit less vegetation here. The towns they passed were built exclusively of stone. This was unsurprising, since there were no trees—much less forests—in the flat, gray land. Yet their stonework was different from what she had seen in the South. The designs were angular and faceted, their gargoyles more abstract than grotesque. And while the Summerfolk inevitably laid sections of different-colored stone next to one another, the Snowmen preferred the opposite effect: even when different sorts of stone were available, they segregated them so that each building was a solid shade of gray or brown.

  There was a feeling of poverty about the towns that Leg-Wot had not noticed in her brief visits to the cities of the Summerkingdom. Nature made life hard for these people. Most of the buildings around the transit lakes were small in comparison to what she had seen in the South. She was certain that if Bjault had not been sick he would have been pestering Pelio with questions: How did the Snowfolk support themselves? Where did they get food? How did they heat their stone houses?

  They jumped from town to town, each jump spanning perhaps a hundred kilometers. They were heading northeast now, so that every teleportation sent the yacht lurching up and eastward from the water of the next transit lake. The sun ran quickly toward the horizon. And it was cold. The wind keening through the window slats carried a subzero draft onto the passengers. The wood-burning deck stoves didn’t help much. Poor Samadhom huddled miserably by one for a while; then Pelio unstrapped him, and moved the animal into the boat’s hold.

  In the lengthening, north-pointing shadows, the villages seemed grotesquely squalid. The snow piled up high around the water like some mineral deposit; many warehouses were built of dirty gray ice rather than stone. Still further north, thick ice shelves stuck out into the water. Snowmen work crews hacked industriously at the ice, trying to keep the road open. The water in the lakes was a peculiar green now; even when it splashed up on the window slats and froze, it had a greenish cast. Pelio told Leg-Wot that the Snowpeople had potions they added to the water to keep it liquid even at these temperatures. Antifreeze, huh? It was hard to believe that only a few hours before they had been traveling through semitropical forests.

  Except for a thirty-degree wide band straddling the equator, Giri was a frigid world, its ice caps reaching down in places to the forty-fifth latitude. The colonists from Homeworld had been wise to settle on Novamerika, fifty million kilometers closer to the sun. The Novamerikan tropics were insufferable, but swimmable beaches extended to the poles. In the three years since the colony’s establishment, she had come to love walking alone on those long, empty beaches.
But will we ever get back?

  She slumped in her chair and for a while sat as silent and withdrawn as Bjault. When she looked up again, the sun had set in the south. The twilight faded to night inside of four jumps—yet it was scarcely past midafternoon! The shifting landscapes were now lit by the stars and the fainter of the two moons. The buildings seemed more graceful, more delicately formed than they had in the failing sunlight. Yellow lamps glowed cheerily in their windows. The air was like crystal, yet the wind coming through the window slats blew steadily, strongly.

  Pelio became more talkative, as if he sensed the downturn in Yoninne’s spirits. He had been this way two or three times before, both on state visits to the Snowkingdom and on tours of vassal states beyond the pole. He described the functions of the various buildings clustered about each transit lake, and proudly identified the freighter traffic bound to and from the far fiefs of Summer; the sun-over-fields seal of the Summerkingdom shone on hull after hull, clearly visible even by moonlight. As they progressed into the northern night, traffic became heavier. Soon the splashing water had frozen over the windows and obscured their view. Every third or fourth jump, their pilot-navigator sent crewmen out to chip away the ice. The stoves were restoked and the tiny red sparkles leaking through their sides lit the deck.

  Pelio was so animated, so cheerful that Yoninne almost smiled. No doubt he thought they would most likely die at the end of their journey, yet he was doing his best to cheer her up. She wondered again if he would have gone along with this scheme, if the alternative had not been execution. Nine days ago—it seemed so much longer now—when Bjault and Thengets del Prou had first put Ajão’s plan to her, she had insisted that they go directly to Pelio with it.

  Prou had been skeptical. “Pelio would be taking a terrible risk in cooperating with you. The Keep is rotten with guards now; if he tried to use his authority to take what remains of your equipment, the chances are Shozheru would discover he’s been consorting with witlings. That would mean almost certain death for the prince—I just don’t think he’s willing to take that chance. We’ve got to create a situation where Pelio—and his father—will be forced to cooperate.”

  Yoninne had looked angrily across the tiny room at the Guildsman. Someone had murdered to get their maser; someone had come within centimeters of snatching Bjault. They were at the center of a deadly intrigue that neither she nor Ajão understood. And now this fast-talking Guildsman wanted them to betray the only dependable friend they had here. In the guttering torchlight, she couldn’t read Bjault’s face: did he really buy Prou’s argument? How could they be sure that Thengets del Prou and his Guild were not the people behind all their problems?

  The arachaeologist seemed to be reading her mind. “I think we can trust him, Yoninne,” he said in Homespeech. “If he wished us ill, we’d be dead or kidnapped by now. And the help he’s giving us will only serve to put us beyond his power.”

  “Then your pet Guildsman is doing this out of the goodness of his heart? Or did you promise him the keys to the magic kingdom?” Leg-Wot replied in the same language, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “If he’s not the guy who stole our weapons and the maser, then there’s nothing we could do or tell him that would be of any value.”

  Ajão answered quietly. “That’s not so. I told Prou about Novamerika. He’s almost as eager as we are to establish contact; he seems to be equal parts political realism and pathological curiosity. Do you know that for all his power, he’s not allowed to travel more than a few jumps from Dhendgaru? If we get rescued, he wants passage to Novamerika.”

  Leg-Wot grimaced. Bjault made Prou sound like some bright college student “thirsting for knowledge.”

  But Ajão’s plan was their only hope for survival now that the maser was gone. And that plan depended upon Guild cooperation. They had no choice but to trust Prou. She tapped her stubby fingers irritably against her chair’s armrest, then turned to the Guildsman and spoke in Azhiri: “Just how do you plan to force Pelio and the king to go along with our scheme?” The word “our” came easily to her lips. From the moment Ajão had described his plan she had been sure she could make it work.

  Prou leaned forward, seemed to listen for a moment to the night sounds outside the bungalow. “That’s simple, though a bit risky. You’ll publicly reveal yourself to be witlings, witlings intimately associated with Pelio. Shozheru will have to accept your plan, as a means of removing Pelio from the line of succession. His only alternative would be to have Pelio executed, and the king is really too good-hearted to do that. In giving Pelio this last chance, Shozheru will have to provide you with the equipment you need.”

  And so Leg-Wot had grudgingly accepted the Azhiri’s suggestions. On the day of the festival, Prou had arranged to have Yoninne and Ajão appear right into the middle of the royal court (even though it was not apparent that he was responsible for their arrival). The guards at the transit pool had immediately recognized them as witling intruders and the confrontation they had counted on took place—with just the results Prou had predicted.

  The thought brought Yoninne back to the present—to the chill night beyond the ice-splattered windows, to Pelio’s young face lit by the reddish gleamings of the deck stoves. It just wasn’t right: She was sure he would have accepted the plan, risks and all, if they had laid it out honestly before him. Instead they had betrayed Pelio, and put all their faith in a man who—despite Ajão’s logic—might still turn out to be the rat in this affair.

  Thirteen

  Grechper was the largest city she’d seen since leaving the Summerkingdom. It stretched around three sides of the transit lake: first the warehouses, many three and four stories tall, and beyond them the residential and business sections, angular buildings of stone and ice separated by narrow, crooked streets. A far cry from the open cities of the South. East of the transit lake lay a jagged, tumbled wilderness, glinting here and there in the moonlight. Yoninne had little experience with arctic environments, but she recognized this: the frozen surface of an ocean, crisscrossed by faults and pressure ridges. And that was the way they would go tomorrow.

  Their men marched protectively about them as they walked down the pier from the yacht. Above, the stars and moon gleamed in the crystal dark. The wind had died, but Yoninne could feel her warmth being radiated through her parka and face mask into that clear arctic night. Each breath froze into a million tiny diamonds, while beads of ice condensed around the eyeholes of her mask. Except for Ajão, their group looked like so many moon-lit teddy bears. And the featureless lump on the litter ahead of her was Samadhom, hunkered down under a pile of blankets.

  Their party proceeded up the narrow street that led from the pier. The snow and crushed ice beneath Yoninne’s feet felt like sand and gravel. What a place: how could anyone bear to live here? Yet it was clear that many people did. The wharves and streets were crowded, both with locals and travelers. The Snowfolk didn’t even bother with face masks.

  The Summerkingdom’s consulate in Grechper was a lone stone building that looked like a rebuilt warehouse. Inside, the halls were lined with hardwood paneling and murals depicting Summer landscapes. Firewood was imported all the way from Pfodgaru, Pelio said, to stoke the many furnaces that had been installed in the building. After the cold outside, the warmth and the sound of crackling wood were almost as welcome as a sunny day in the South. Now off his quilted litter, Samadhom padded down the hallways, sniffing enthusiastically into every room.

  The place seemed queerly familiar to Yoninne; despite the climate, Grechper and the consulate reminded her of home. Here, people walked from building to building, and the rooms were connected by hallways and doorways rather than by transit pools. She supposed that they must use transit pools for some jobs, but in most cases—if one end of a trip were out-of-doors—it just didn’t make sense to teleport.

  The consulate’s chief officer led the witlings up a steep stair to the second floor, where the rest of the consular staff stood nervously at attention. No one had been
warned of the prince-imperial’s visit to Grechper. Pelio put the staff “at ease,” and said mildly, “We’ll be laying over just one night—twelve hours or so. I’d like my men given hot meals and billeted according to their various ranks. My own party”—he waved his hand to include Yoninne and Ajão—“will also eat now.”

  The consul bobbed his head. “At once, Your Highness.” The fellow was a bit past middle age, and he and his subordinates had a kind of beaten look. Their clothing was not actually frayed, but it did look old and worn. Perhaps she was wrong to think of this place as a consulate—these people looked more like overworked shipping clerks than diplomats.

  And the meal they were served fit the same picture: the consul kept apologizing for not having anything fresh from the South, and his staff—doubling as waiters—hovered curiously about the dining table. For the first time the food tasted metallic, tasted as poisonous as it actually was. The only thing good about the meal was the wine, and in the end that almost made up for everything else: a pleasant warmth spread outward from her middle, and everything seemed more congenial.

  All through the meal, Bjault played unhappily with his food. By the time they cleared away the dishes, he had eaten barely a quarter of his share. A sheen of sweat lay across his forehead and his hands shook faintly as he pushed his plate away. For the first time she had a gut feeling for how terribly old he was—longevity treatments or no.

  Pelio followed her gaze and spoke to the guards who had stood inconspicuously in the background all through the meal. “Help Adgao to his room.” Two of them raised Ajão to his feet and supported him as they sidled down the hall, with Yoninne, Pelio, and the consul close behind. They passed through a curtained doorway—even here in the arctic doors didn’t seem to be very popular—and laid the archaeologist on a deep pile of pillows. All the while, Ajão protested that he wasn’t that sick. For once his talk didn’t annoy her; Yoninne knelt to loosen his collar. “I know, I know,” she said. “You may still be functioning now, but we’ve got another two days of this to go through.”