The Witling

by Vernor Vinge

  Pelio looked anxiously down at Bjault. “Yes, things are going to get a good deal more strenuous before they get easier. Do … do you think you’ll be able to make it?” He was deliberately obscure; the consul and the guards were listening. There were good reasons for keeping their ultimate plan secret. Whoever grabbed the maser and tried to grab Bjault was still at large.

  Ajão nodded painfully. “I’ll go through with it even if I have to crawl. You’re right … today was bad. But I’ll get better. I just need a little rest … I think.”

  “All right. Try to sleep. If you need anything there’ll be a couple of guards just outside this room.” They stepped back through the curtain, and as they returned to the dining room, Pelio continued in a softer voice, “How sick is he?”

  Yoninne considered. Bjault was more than 150 Homeworld years old—not counting the years he spent in deepfreeze during the trip to Novamerika. That made him one of the oldest humans in known history, so there wasn’t any way of estimating how durable he was. For now, she might as well try to feel optimistic. “Don’t worry. He’ll recover.”

  Pelio brightened. “Good.” He waved the others away and they entered the dining room, sat down at a corner table. Samadhom curled up under the table, his head resting on his master’s booted foot. “You know, I’m almost beginning to think that we’ll make it, that this whole crazy thing is going to work out. Let me show you what I suggested to the chief navigator.” And he described his scheme for rotating the men from sleep, to guarding the consulate, to guarding the equipment aboard the yacht. The witlings would be safe from sabotage even if their mysterious enemy had planted several agents in the crew. It was a good plan; Pelio had taken care of just those things she and Bjault could not. The boy seemed a lot brighter, a lot more flexible away from the court of Summer. Perhaps in the end, she thought, he will benefit from our scheming as much as we will.

  Their talk slowly petered out, without either of them really being aware of the fact, till they were just sitting there, looking at each other with silly smiles on their faces. It’s that damn wine, she thought to herself, and wished she’d had some a long time before. She realized now she had liked Pelio almost from the beginning, and she realized why: he looked at her as though it were a pleasure to do so. He made her feel light and tall—as she hadn’t felt since she was six years old, when her figure still fell somewhere in the range people termed “cute.” It was strange: here she was, stuck in a backward corner of a backward world, with only even chances of getting home alive—and suddenly she felt less alone than ever before.

  Pelio’s thick hand reached across the table and closed gently over hers. “Perhaps my father’s learning about you and Adgao was the best thing that could have happened to me. Oh, at the time I was scared out of my wits, and when you described your plan—then I was even more scared, in a way. But now I see how carefully you and Adgao have thought everything out, and I’m so grateful I was included in all this. If it works we’ll find your witling kingdom, where I … where we can have normal lives. And if it doesn’t—well, at least it will have been a spectacular try.”

  Later, Yoninne blamed the wine for what she said next, but at the time it was the most natural thing she could think of. “I’m glad. When we decided to have Thengets del Prou bring us to the festival, I was afraid we were just ruining your life to save our own necks.”

  “Thengets del Prou renged you to the festival—not some incompetent chamberlain?” Pelio spoke softly but his tone was flat.

  The change in his voice barely registered in Yoninne’s mind. “Prou was responsible. We—Ajão and Prou really—weren’t sure you would help us unless you had no other choice. I’m so happy now that it’s turning out best for you, too—”

  Pelio’s hand was snatched from hers as the prince crashed to his feet, half-stumbling over the drowsing Samadhom. The watch-bear gave a pained yelp and pushed himself further under the table. For a moment, Pelio just stood staring at her, his face as pale as a Snowman’s. “You mean you three set me up for all this?”

  Yoninne felt her skin go chill; her dreamy mood was turning into a nightmare. “But—but you just said this is better than going on with your old life!”

  Pelio leaned across the table, his smooth, round face coming within centimeters of hers. He said something she didn’t understand, but it must have been a curse. “Yes, I said that—and perhaps it’s true. But I didn’t know you had intrigued, manipulated me into this—like some child or dumb animal.” His words came fast and slurred, and for a moment Yoninne thought he might strike her. “I have no choice now. We go to County Tsarang, just as you planned. Only now I know how I stand with you, and if we come out of this alive, I’ll … I’ll …” His voice choked off in anger and confusion, and he stomped out of the room.

  For a long while after he left, Yoninne stared at the scarred wooden surface of the table. As if to blot out what had just happened, the details of her surroundings crowded into her consciousness: the fire crackling in the room’s stove, the muted singing from downstairs, the dry, smoky smell of the place. She felt the tears building in her eyes, and tried to hold them back. She hadn’t cried in fifteen years, and she’d be damned if she did now. But finally she couldn’t help herself … perhaps she really was damned.

  Fourteen

  Bjault stared at the ceiling for several minutes before he realized he was awake, and that the pain in his guts was not cramps, but intense hunger. He slipped the quilt off his body and sat up. The wind howled from beyond the room’s tiny chimney, and the torchlight from the hall flickered this way and that. He felt none of the dizziness and nausea of … the previous night? He glanced at his suit watch and saw that he had slept more than ten hours. The pain was gone now, and he felt as though he could go another century—if he didn’t starve in the next ten minutes.

  Bjault stood and pulled aside the door curtain. In the silverplate mirror above the washbasin, his brown face appeared gaunt and disheveled. He leaned close to the metal and pulled his lips away from his gums. For a long moment he stared at the bright blue line he saw running between teeth and gums. Lead poisoning: that blue stain was one of the few symptoms he remembered for it. Then the heavy metal concentration in Azhiri foodstuffs must be hundreds of times higher than he had thought. And his recovery was at best a temporary thing. How long do we really have? Weeks? Or only days?

  And if only days, should we stop eating? Or will starvation only speed the effects of the poisons already ingested?

  But by the time he was dressed and walking down the hall to the dining room, Bjault had regained some of his good spirits. With luck, they might be back on Novamerika before he had another “attack.” After all, Yoninne hadn’t shown the faintest signs of discomfort yet. In many ways this world seemed to be doing her good: last night she had been positively solicitous.

  He stepped through the curtains into the dining room, and saw the grim-faced group standing around the table. Two locals faced the Summerfolk. The Snowmen had slipped their parkas off, and stood naked from the waist up, their skin gleaming in the torchlight. One of them drew a triangular sheet of paper from his quilted leggings and said, “We’ve had another report from the Island Road, M’lords, since we first warned you of the storm. The way is still clear for about seven leagues, but the storm is moving toward us, and the transit lakes within it are freezing over too fast for our workers to keep them open. It may be a nineday before traffic can resume.”

  Pelio’s voice was angry. “But we’ve got to move on. And our right of passage is guaranteed by treaty.”

  The Snowman’s broad face clouded for a moment before he decided to laugh. “The treaty you made was with us, not with our weather. Feel free to travel the Island Road: six or seven jumps down the line you’ll come out shattered across a three-foot thick layer of ice.” His smile became a bit malevolent. “Are you really so anxious to escape from your own incredible bragging?” Apparently the story of Pelio’s confrontation with his father at the
Summer Festival had spread all the way to the Snowkingdom. There was a moment of dead silence as the prince’s guards and officers tried to pretend they hadn’t heard the Snowman’s last remark. The wind sounded faintly through the stone walls.

  Pelio did not respond to the gibe. “That’s not what I meant. The treaty says Summerfolk have right of northern passage—even if you have to let us use another of your roads.”

  “Hmmph, I suppose if you insisted we’d have to let you take the North Road, though the rest of your kind seem content to stay here in Grechper and sit out the storm.”

  “We do insist,” said Pelio.

  “Very well.” The other shrugged. “I’ll get you a clearance.” The Snowmen hiked their parkas back onto their torsos, and buttoned up. They turned and went down the stairs without any show of courtesy.

  For a moment, no one spoke. Ajão sidled around the table to where breaded meats were piled high on a wooden plate. He was so hungry that this crisis took second place. He ate two of the meat-filled rolls and still the silence was unbroken. Ajão looked back and forth across the room, trying to figure out whether he was missing something: Pelio and Leg-Wot stood on opposite sides of the table, grimly avoiding each other’s eyes.

  Finally Pelio turned to their pilot-navigator. “Well?”

  The army man came briefly to attention before answering. “They are as arrogant as usual, Your Highness, but I am afraid they are telling the truth. I seng surface ice on the transit lakes down the road. If we wait out the storm, we might be here three or four days.”

  “Captain, you know that we can’t delay eighteen hours, much less three days.” Shozheru’s advisers had been adamant: the witlings were given just nine days to carry out their scheme. Of those nine, little more than one remained. “What about the North Road? The Snowmen said we could get clearance to travel that.”

  The soldier nodded and beckoned to a subordinate. The aide opened a leather case and rolled a world map onto the table. “Here we are at Grechper.” The navigator pointed at a spot about halfway out from the pole. “Now if we could continue on our way down the Island Road”—he sketched a straight line across the disk to the far margin—“we would wind up in County Tsarang in about another eighty leagues—less than ten hours, if we pushed it. But if that way is closed to us we could use the North Road.” He indicated a fine row of red dots that marched inward across the map to the pole. “We’ll have to take on a local pilot, though, since I can’t seng that route; they don’t allow Summerfolk pilgrims much north of Grechper. It’s about forty jumps to the North Pole. That’s more than you might expect, but we can’t afford quite as great a jolt on each jump as on Summer roads. The Snowmen’s northern lakes are small and there’s often ice in ’em—which could hull the yacht if we slammed in too hard.

  “At the pole we switch to this road”—he pointed—“and start south for County Tsarang. That’s another seventy-five hops.”

  The prince grimaced. “Altogether, that’s thirty-five jumps further than the Island Road. How long will it take?”

  “By the treaty, they need supply us with only one pilot, so I doubt if we’ll do better than six jumps an hour … say twenty hours in all.”

  “Very well. We’ll return to the yacht and prepare to leave. At the same time, I want you”—Pelio was speaking to the consul now—“to do everything in your power to encourage prompt Snowman cooperation: we need that clearance for the North Road and we need a pilot who knows the way.”

  The elderly official bobbed his head. “As you will, Your Highness.”

  It took nearly three hours for the Snowmen to produce a qualified pilot. During most of that time, Ajão and the others huddled near their boat’s tiny stoves and tried to keep warm. The skies were still clear and both moons were up now, at opposite ends of the sky—one full and the other a narrow cresent. To the southeast—beyond the shelves of frozen ocean—the stars disappeared a few degrees above the horizon. Along the edge of the lake, Snowmen chipped industriously at the smoky ice that formed even in the doped water. Only an occasional boat jumped into or out of the lake. At least fifty boats, more than half of them of the heavy Snowman design, were tied up at the wharves—all waiting for the Island Road to clear.

  Toward noon, twilight brightened the southern sky as the sun made a valiant effort to pop above the horizon. But they were above the arctic circle here at Grechper, and the effort was in vain.

  At one point, their navigator sent a message ball down the Island Road to the first transit lake that he senged to be ice-covered. Minutes later a reply smashed into the water near the yacht. The badly crushed wood ball was hauled aboard, and cut apart. The message within reported that the storm was furious and worsening.

  And all that morning there on the frigid deck, Pelio and Leg-Wot exchanged scarcely a word. The only time Ajão saw one look at the other was once when he caught Leg-Wot glaring at Pelio’s back. Neither of them even asked him about his recovery. It was as if they were different people now; what happened while he was sleeping? He tried to get Yoninne into a private conversation, but she refused to be maneuvered.

  Finally their new pilot—escorted by the two Snowmen who had originally brought the bad news about the storm—came stomping up the gangplank. Once aboard, the stalling—if that was what it had been—ended. The yacht’s chief navigator took the fellow on a short tour of the hull, carefully pointing out the dimensions and weaknesses of its structure. Five minutes later they were renging steadily northward. The boat slid sideways in the water as it came out of each jump. Twilight faded quickly from the south. The moons looked down from a star-filled sky.

  Ajão saw no more boats with the sun-over-fields seal of the Summerkingdom. The traffic along this road belonged to the Snowfolk: their boats, almost perfectly spheroidal, were unmistakable. The buildings around the shores were smaller now, and there were rarely towns beyond them. They looked to be little more than huts built from thick ice blocks. This far north, ground temperatures never rose above zero, even in the middle of summer; ice and snow were as good construction materials as any. Besides, the bedrock hereabouts was probably buried under several hundred meters of ice. League after league, the land remained a sterile, frigid desert. He realized now that even the Snowfolk couldn’t maintain their way of life above the fiftieth parallel. No doubt the only people living by these lakes were the snow-chippers needed to keep the road open.

  At one point the wind died—perhaps they were in the lee of some mountain range hidden by the night. While their Snowman pilot took a rest, the crew inspected the boat’s hull, and tried to chip away some of the greenish ice that covered the lower window slats. In the relative silence, the deck stoves crackled and spat. With the wind down, those stoves had a chance to heat the deck, and the men huddled near them. Ajão wondered that this sudden warmth didn’t bring Samadhom out of whatever cubbyhole Pelio had found for him in the boat’s hold.

  Ajão looked through the ice-stained windows at a boat across the lake. Something new and curious was going on there: the craft slowly turned upside down, like a whale doing a lazy bellyroll. It started to roll back, then abruptly was teleported from the lake. Now why in heaven’s name had the Snowmen rolled their boat before they jumped? He walked across the frosted deck to where Pelio stood warming himself. The prince didn’t look up as Bjault asked about what he had seen in the water. For a moment he thought Pelio wasn’t going to reply. Finally, the Azhiri shrugged. “I thought you and Ionina knew all the answers, Adgao,” he said softly. “I’m an ignorant lout it suits you to use just now, remember?”

  The light dawned on Bjault. He glanced across the deck at Yoninne, but that worthy stared grimly at the shoreline, determined to ignore them. Well, Bjault sighed to himself, I suppose neither of us were meant to be intriguers. He was almost relieved that the boy understood the situation. Aloud, he said, “There are many things we don’t know, Your Highness. Perhaps that’s why we … tricked you. If you were lost hundreds of leagues from home and su
rrounded by strangers who might be hostile, wouldn’t you act a little bit, uh, sneaky—even toward the people you thought were friendly?”

  The prince’s gaze fell back to the fire shining through the isinglass grating of the stove. “I suppose. From you I could accept this, but I thought Io—” He broke off, started on an entirely new course. “The boat you saw roll over was preparing to jump to some road in the southern hemisphere.”

  It was an ironic fact that in some situations the Azhiri could jump thousands of kilometers easier than hundreds: for if your destination lay due south as far below the equator as you were above it, then you could teleport there without suffering even the smallest jolt. So the Snowkingdom could occupy opposite ends of the world, yet—in a sense—still be a single, connected domain.

  But that didn’t really answer Bjault’s question. “I mean, why do they turn the boat upside down?”

  Pelio shrugged again. “The people at the South Pole are standing on their heads compared to us and no one can reng a boat unless it’s first turned so the keel will point down at the destination. That’s true even for the jumps we’ve been making, though you probably haven’t noticed the trim changes, they were so slight.”

  This sounded like nonsense, till Ajão saw that it could follow from conservation of energy: if no adjustments were necessary, you might make a perpetual-motion machine by teleporting a pendulum back and forth between the North and South poles. An interesting and curious fact—but now he could think of nothing more to ask. And it seemed that Pelio had nothing more to say. Despite all the men on the deck, the boy was completely, miserably alone. Ajão sighed and returned to his seat.