The Witling

Four

Me? Play up to that flat-noised, gray-faced savage? I’d rather die.” Yoninne Leg-Wot crossed her thick, muscular arms and glared at Bjault.

Ajão leaned toward the irate pilot as far as the leather restraints would permit. “Look, Yoninne, I’m not asking you to, to do anything immoral. I’m just saying that this fellow likes you—and he’s obviously very powerful. If his title,” and here he pronounced an Azhiri phrase, “means what I think, then he is the number-one or number-two man in their state, even as young as he seems. We need his goodwill.”

For a long moment Leg-Wot scowled down at the boat’s polished deck. Bjault suddenly wondered if she were really so disgusted at the thought of getting friendly with the young Azhiri, or if she were just so twisted by past romantic failures that she couldn’t even playact anymore.

It wasn’t until this Pelio had talked to them that Ajão realized how much Leg-Wot looked like an Azhiri. She was a little tall, perhaps, but she had the build and the hardness—if not the coloring—of the aliens. Of course there were many differences: the Azhiri bone and cartilage structure was vastly different. Their features looked as though they had been pressed from soft clay, then smoothed until nose, chin, brow, and ears were all rounded and indistinct. Pelio was either very spoiled or very lonely to take to someone who must look as exotically strange as Leg-Wot.

But this was exactly the sort of good fortune they needed now. Less than an hour after Pelio left the dungeon, Bjault and Leg-Wot had been teleported (what other word could he use?) to a clean, comfortable cell, where they were treated to warm baths and a meal. The next morning, they had been led to a small lake—to board the strange round boat that floated there. Now Bjault guessed the solution to several of the mysteries that had confronted them before their capture. And if Pelio were really taking them elsewhere—as he had said in the dungeon—then that guess would be put to the test in just a few minutes.

Finally the woman answered him. “I don’t see that it really matters, Bjault. You say that sucking up to this fellow is the only chance we have for survival. I say that it’s just the difference between dying slow and dying fast. You yourself told me the local plants are tainted with heavy metals. I suppose we can still eat them, but we’ll eventually be poisoned—no matter how chummy I get with this big shot. Our only hope is for rescue, but the suit radios are so damn weak, and this planet’s ionosphere is so active, that any signal we send would get smeared unrecognizable. And even if Novamerika knew we were alive, it would be a stupid gamble for them to risk another ferry trying to pull us out of here.” She lay back limply. Her old spirit seemed completely quenched.

It’s almost as though she’s making excuses, thought Bjault, as if she’d rather not be rescued. “You may not care whether ‘the dying is slow or fast,’ Yoninne, but the distinction is important to me, and perhaps to the whole human race. From what Pelio said, I think he’s got part of our equipment: the ablation skiff, the pistols … and the maser. With the maser we could make ourselves heard on Novamerika; they must be listening to the telemetry station Draere set up. And as for the ‘risk’ they’d be taking to rescue us: don’t you realize what we’ve stumbled into? This world could be the greatest find anyone has made since mankind left Old Earth—the greatest discovery in thirteen-thousand years. These Azhiri can teleport. Even if their trick doesn’t violate relativity, even if they can’t ‘jump’ faster than light, it still means that the entire structure of human colonization is going to be transformed. All down the centuries, man’s colonies have been isolated by an abyss of time and space, and by the enormous cost of travel from one solar system to another. Colonial civilizations, as on Homeworld, rise and fall just as surely and just as rapidly as they did on Old Earth. No doubt man has colonized several thousand worlds, but we know of only a few hundred, and most of those through hearsay. Whatever greatness a civilization achieves dies with it, simply because we are so isolated.”

Ajão realized his voice was gradually rising. He was making a point that haunted many, including Leg-Wot. How often and how loudly had he heard the pilot denounce the Homeworld Union for not spending more money on interstellar colonization, “trade,” and radio searches for unknown civilizations. “But now” he continued, more softly, “we may have found a way around all this. If we can find the secret of the Azhiri Talent—even if we can alert Novamerika and eventually Homeworld to its existence—then the distances between the stars will not matter, and there could be a truly interstellar civilization.”

Leg-Wot looked thoughtful, less glum. Bjault had always believed that humanity as a whole was one of the few things she really cared about. “I see what you mean. We’ve got to get back word, whether we survive or not. And we’ve got to learn everything we can about these people.” Her face lit with sudden, unthinking enthusiasm. “Why do they always teleport from one pool of water to another? I’ll bet these guys have a high-class technology hidden beneath all the medieval window dressing. The pools are some sort of transmitting devices.”

Ajão breathed an inward sigh of relief that the girl had snapped out of her mood. It was hard enough dealing with his own discouragement. He shook his head, and said, “I think these people are every bit as backward as we thought before, Yoninne. I’ll wager that teleportation is a natural mental ability with them.”

“Well, then, why do they always seem to teleport from pools of water?”

Bjault’s reply was lost in the shrill whistle that suddenly sounded from one of the boat’s upper decks. It was almost like a steam whistle, though Ajão couldn’t see where the sound came from. Whatever its origin, the whistle obviously signaled something important. The two guards who a moment before had been playing a dice game—at least it looked like dice, even though the stones were dodecahedra—stood up abrupdy. One of them swept the dice into a leather bag. They both settled back in padded couches and strapped themselves in. The moment Ajão had seen all those couches, with their uniform system of restraints, he had guessed that they were only incidentally used to tie down prisoners. It was just one more bit of evidence for his theory. In another few moments he hoped to see a much more important confirmation.

The whistle continued to wail for nearly a minute, as crewmen and soldiers took their places. When the tone abruptly ended, he could hear the townspeople cheering on the pier somewhere behind him. They had dutifully assembled (or been assembled) to see their ruler off. It fit the cultural picture he had of this Azhiri state.

Bjault twisted around on his couch, trying to take in every detail. This boat was the strangest vehicle he had seen in all his 193 years. In basic form it was an oblate spheroid. The hull at least followed this description perfectly, while the three-tiered deck structure only approximately filled the outline of a spheroid. The craft sat low in the water, and its construction seemed much stronger than the planet’s gravity required. Heavy wooden beams and thick planking were used everywhere. And though the craft was rich with ornamentation—paintings, tapestries, precious-metal inlays—there was no grillwork, and no overhanging ornaments. There was also no visible means of propulsion: no masts, no oarlocks.

Ajão found himself gathering all this in with a speed and interest he had not felt since … since he finished his exhumation of the library ruins at Ajeuribad, back on Homeworld more than a century before. His reconstruction of relativity theory from the charred microfilm records had eventually put Homeworld back in touch with the stars, after the two-thousand-year-long Interregnum. But what we’ve discovered here could be yet more important, thought Ajão. He almost felt young again.

The crewmen and guards around them seemed to tense. Whatever it was, it would happen any second now, though Ajão sensed nothing himself. He looked at Leg-Wot and she shook her head uncertainly. He glanced across the water at the shoreline two hundred meters to the east. The land beyond was rugged. The triple crown of the bluish green pines were lightly dusted by snow.

There was no flicker: the landscape simply vanished, was replaced by another much greener, much darker. Simultaneously his ears popped and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. Then the boat smashed back into the water and his couch rammed against his back. Around them the lake waters rose in a massive ring wall. Through the sounds of shattered water he heard the boat’s timbers groan as they absorbed the sudden acceleration.

And the boat sat bobbing in the lake—a lake, anyway. It certainly wasn’t the one they had been in a moment before.

The sky was dark, the air warm and wet. At first he thought it was night, but as his eyes adjusted, he realized that this was a normal overcast day. As the sounds of their arrival died, he heard the rain cascading past them along the boat’s curving hull, falling upon the lake to make myriad transient craters in the water.

Boats flickered in and out of existence across that surface, sending good-sized waves splashing this way and that. Along the water’s edge, camouflaged craft—military boats?—were arranged in neat rows, like pleasure boats in some Home-world marina. Inland—obscured by the rain and trees—there was a collection of low, squat buildings with slit windows, all very reminiscent of field fortifications used back on Home-world toward the end of the Interregnum: again, evidence that the Azhiri possessed some analog of automatic weapons and artillery. Somehow he had to fit that evidence with the rest of his theory.

Ajão turned to Leg-Wot, who had recovered from their abrupt arrival and the transformed landscape much faster than he. “You felt that jolt when we arrived, Yoninne? That’s one good reason why these folks prefer to teleport out of water.”

Leg-Wot’s eyes widened in understanding. “The planet’s rotational speed.”

Ajão nodded. “At first glance teleportation seems like a simple—if supernormal—trick: you disappear at one point and appear at another, without ever suffering the inconvenience of having been in between. But closer inspection shows that nature imposes certain restrictions on even the supernormal. If you are moving relative to your destination, then there is naturally going to be a collision when you arrive—and the faster you’re going, the harder the crash. This world rotates once every twenty-five hours, so points along the equator move eastward at better than five hundred meters per second, while points north and south rotate at correspondingly slower speeds. Teleporting across the planet’s surface is like—”

“—Like playing hopscotch on a merry-go-round,” said Yoninne. “And so they jump into water to cushion the impact of their arrival. Ha! I bet that accounts for those lake chains we saw from orbit: these people have to teleport in short jumps from puddle to puddle.” Ajão nodded. Even with water to cushion the impact, these boats would be shattered if they splashed into their destination at more than a few meters per second. So they could not safely teleport more than a few hundred kilometers at a stroke. No, that wasn’t quite right: from a given point in the northern hemisphere, you could teleport due south to the point whose south latitude was the same as your north latitude (and vice versa), since such pairs of points have the same velocity. But that was a quibble. Most long distance trips would require many jumps—and therefore strings of many transport lakes.

“But,” continued Leg-Wot, “we should have seen this from orbit. We had plenty of pictures of these lakes and the boats in them. If those jackasses back on Novamerika had only spared us some decent reconnaissance equipment, we could have had continuous coverage of our ground track, and we would have seen these guys teleport. Hell, if Draere’s people hadn’t been so anxious to set up that telemetry station landside, they might have stayed in orbit long enough to—”

She was interrupted by the boat’s warning whistle. Ajão wondered just how that sound was generated. Jump. Again he felt the sinking sensation as the boat rose westward from the surface of their destination lake, then smashed back into the water. It was raining here just as heavily as before, but they had definitely moved: this new lake was huge, and he could see dozens of other boats bulking darkly through the gloom. Long wooden buildings crowded the shoreline. Warehouses? Along the water’s edge, work crews in slickers tied boats into the piers. The scene was busy, but there weren’t as many laborers as Bjault would have expected in a medieval harbor. It was more like a jet- or a spaceport, where a few technicians loaded thousands of tons of cargo with automatic equipment. Then Ajão saw the reason for the seeming anachronism. Of course! The Azhiri workers could simply teleport cargo from their storehouses to the boats’ holds, and vice versa. Probably the only real hand work was in the maintenance of the boats and buildings.

Again the whistle, and again they teleported. Ajão tried to keep track of each jump, but it was difficult. Not all lakes were set amidst fortifications and warehouses. Some were surrounded by deciduous forests whose fallen, three-pointed leaves turned the ground and the water’s edge to orange and red and chartreuse. Jump followed jump, and the landscapes beyond their boat flickered swiftly by. As the minutes passed the air became almost tropically warm. The rainstorm was far behind them now. Sunlight streamed down through blue sky between blocky chunks of cumulous cloud. To the north, the clouds merged into a dark gray line against the horizon.

The jolt as they splashed into each new lake was always in the same direction and of much the same force: Ajão estimated that they were heading steadily southeastward. There was something else that didn’t change from jump to jump: a tiny, camouflaged boat always sat in the water a hundred meters away when they popped into a new lake, and always disappeared in a great gout of water just before their own boat jumped. Apparently they had an escort.

Another jump … and the pressure in his ears was sudden, painful, and increasing. Ajão swallowed rapidly, found himself just barely able to compensate for the rapidly lessening air pressure. He opened his eyes, looked across the water. This lake was small, a nearly perfect circle. Broad-leafed tropical vegetation bordered a sandy beach. Mansions of pink-and-white marble were scattered through the greenery up the precipitous hillside.

For the first time in several minutes, Leg-Wot spoke. “You really think the Azhiri teleport by thinking pure thoughts, Bjault? I’m not so sure. If it is a natural mental ability, then it seems to me that the trick should cost almost no energy to perform.”

“Yes. That would be the simplest assumption, anyway.” He leaned forward, trying to see as much of the landscape as possible.

“But this last jump took us up a good thousand meters. You felt your ears pop, didn’t you? This barge we’re on must mass better than a hundred tons. Do you have any idea how much energy it would take to lift it a kilometer? Teleportation or not, that’s a job for heavy machinery, not a kilogram of quivering cerebrum.”

“I don’t—” he began, then stopped. To the left, the curving hillside was broken down almost to the level of the water, and Ajão could see out, beyond, and down. Far below, through that V-shaped cut, was the ocean. And on the horizon was a tiny strip of green. For a moment he just stared, unable to fit perspective to the view. Then he understood. This last jump had taken them to a lake set in the cone of an extinct island volcano.

It was hard to believe that less than half an hour earlier he had seen snow and felt a wind so cold it frosted his face.

“Well?” came Leg-Wot’s flat voice.

Ajão tried to recover his line of thought. “I don’t believe the Azhiri expend significant energy when they teleport things. Have you noticed that when other boats jump, a mass of water splashes out from their departure point?”

“Yes—” From across the boat, they heard footsteps and laughter. Several Azhiri, all dressed in light kilts, slipped over the railing and splashed into the water. Seconds later, Ajão saw the same three wading out of the lake toward a small group that had gathered, happily waving and shouting, on the gleaming beach. This was clearly journey’s end. Hadn’t Yoninne noticed?

“So,” said Ajão, “I think their teleportation is actually an exchange of matter. When they jump somewhere, they simultaneously teleport the matter they displace back to their departure point.” It made sense. Something had to be done with the air or water that occupied the destination. Otherwise, matter would be teleported into matter, with explosive results. By Archimedes’ law, the weight of a boat is equal to the weight of the water and air it displaces; so when they teleported upward, the work required to lift their boat was balanced by the energy released in lowering the exchange mass to the departure point.

The guards were unstrapping the two prisoners now, pulling them to their feet. But Yoninne clung tenaciously to the conversation. And Ajão could see why now. The nobleman—Pelio—and his entourage were descending the wooden stairs from the upper decks. Ajão could see the somber, almost sullen, look on the boy’s face, and hear the cheerful conversation of those around him. Poor Yoninne.

“I see what you mean,” said Leg-Wot, her voice strangely tense. “So that’s another reason why the Azhiri jump from water.”

“I think he’s coming down here, Yoninne,” said Bjault.

Leg-Wot bit her lip, nodded stiffly. “What … what shall I do?”

“Just be friendly. Try not to tell him too much about our origins, at least until we’re sure the Azhiri really are technologically backward. But most important, get that maser.”

Pelio and company had reached the first deck and were walking purposefully toward the Novamerikans. Finally Yoninne said softly, painfully, “Okay … I’ll try.” For an instant he thought she might break beneath the pressure of her embarrassment and fear, but then their guards urged them to attention, and they were confronted by Pelio.