The Witling (22 page)

They had finally wedged the skiff in place, when a ripping stutter of explosions—like automatic gunfire—traced across the meeting hall’s upper windows. Around them, the troopers dropped to the floor. Dzeda shouted into his ear, “Get down! They’re renging rocks.”

They fell to their bellies and crawled around to the west side of the skiff. “One nice thing about living at the equator,” the count continued, “is that renged projectiles must always come out of the east.”

In the moonlit night they heard screams mixed with the staccato impacts. A soldier crawled swiftly across the floor to them. “Dzeda! Snowfolk squads are moving in our direction from the lake.”

Crump.
An immense crash sounded from down the hillside.

“I doubt they know where the witlings are,” said Mileru, “but if their reconnaissance squads get this far—”

“—They’ll reng in whole companies, and we’ll be overrun,” Dzeda finished. “But see here, Lan, I’ve ordered the area around the lake evacuated. I want Guild assistance to wipe out the forces there. That will give us time to finish what we have to do here.”

The frail, aged Guildsman was silent for a long moment, then spoke agreement—to what, Ajão didn’t discover till a couple of seconds later:

Pearly light shone through the west windows, silhouetting the ridge line that separated them from the main transit lake. The hall was briefly lit as bright as day, and the moon seemed insignificantly pale. As the light began to fade toward crimson, the ground beneath them jolted and danced; the skiff rocked gently where it sat, but the calks held. Lan said, “A rock from the outer moon, perhaps one hundred tons in weight … I renged it down to the transit lake.” Ajão looked at the Guildsman, but saw no sign of triumph in his old face.

Then the shock wave—refracted and attenuated by its passage over the ridge line—slammed against the meeting hall. The west wall bulged inward like some arthritic curtain, then crashed across the marble floor. The timbers above them first lifted, then settled lopsidedly.

Bjault watched, his jaw sagging: one hundred tons, the Guildsman said. One hundred tons, renged down through 200,000 kilometers. The potential energy released would be on the order of a small fission bomb. And the palsied Guildsman could bring such destruction to any point in the world. Tru’ud must be desperate indeed to risk such retaliation.

Dzeda was already on his feet. “Hurry. Lan’s wiped out the force at the lake, but there are still enemy scouts in our area, and if there’s any water left in the lake—”

“There isn’t,” Lan said sadly, almost to himself.

“—They might try to reestablish a roadhead.”

In the ringing silence, Ajão and Pelio opened the skiff’s hatch and helped fit Yoninne into her acceleration webbing. It was strange to see her face so peaceful and composed, while Armageddon itself played around them. Beyond the ruined wall, dust rose shimmering into the moonlight, softening the outlines of the wrecked buildings down the hillside. The scene might have been out of the Last Interregnal War on Homeworld, the aftermath of an aerial bombing. Yet there was no sign of smoke or fire. Except for Lan’s weapon, all the destruction had been done by wind and cold stone.

Bjault climbed aboard the skiff, and settled into his harness. Pain was beginning to pulse through his middle again—this latest recovery had been the briefest yet. He looked back through the hatchway to see Pelio turn aside from Dzeda and Lan.

“Here, Samadhom,” the boy said. The watchbear crawled awkwardly across the debris-strewn floor to his master. Pelio knelt and held the animal’s large head in his arms. “Goodby, Samadhom,” he said softly, voice quavering.

The watchbear could not come with them on this trip. The skiff’s acceleration webbing could protect two—at most three—passengers. That hadn’t mattered much during their relatively gentle flight with Bre’en over the mountains, but when the witlings slammed into the air at Draere’s island, the initial deceleration would amount to more than twenty gravities. Dzeda was right in a way: when you strike air at hypersonic speeds, it is something like a stone wall. Sam would die if they took him along.

But Sam understood none of this; as Pelio climbed into the skiff, the creature bumbled frantically after. Dzeda caught him by the shoulders and pulled him back; Sam’s
meeping
was weak but desperate. Pelio leaned out of the skiff and said, “Please, good Dzeru, will you care well for him?”

For once the count’s face was absolutely serious. “I will.” He looked back into the cabin at Bjault and added significantly, “I will keep him in good health … in expectation that you will return.”

Dzeda stepped back from the hatchway, and Bjault conferred one last time with Lan Mileru. Then the hatch was shut, secured—and they were alone. Through the window slits, Ajão watched the others depart; no one wanted to be anywhere near when the skiff jumped. As Bjault and the Guildsman had planned it, the skiff would emerge about a hundred meters above the ground near Draere’s station, which itself was three hundred meters above sea level; conservation of energy was not violated, however, since Tsarangalang stood at least four hundred meters above sea level. But the air they displaced over Draere’s island would be renged back here—to emerge moving at better than a kilometer per second. Woe betide anyone standing in the way.

The silence stretched on. Ajão had hoped that there would be no time in these last seconds for thought, for fear. As long as this moment had been days away, he could regard the plan as a simple problem in aerodynamics—one that math and common sense could solve. But now he was staking their lives on that solution, and the risks that he and Yoninne had glossed over could not be ignored: they might as well be sailing the ocean in a leaky rubber raft, or falling over a cataract in a wooden barrel. The skiff had been designed to fly at speeds far greater than a thousand meters per second—but only above the stratosphere, through air ten thousand times thinner than at sea level. Even with all the ballast they were carrying, the dense lower atmosphere would generate twenty gravities of drag. Could the hull and the ballast restraints take that? After all, the skiff was primarily intended to sustain thermal stress—not high-gee loadings.

Ping. Pingping.
The skiff jiggled slightly against its calking blocks. Ajão looked across the dark cabin at Pelio. “Someone’s renging stones again,” the boy said. A muffled explosion sounded from overhead and the ruined ceiling sagged even lower toward the skiff. Through the narrow windows he saw soldiers moving in the moonlight, soldiers who wore heavy leggings instead of Summer kilts.

Lan, reng us out of here!
prayed Bjault.

And the prayer was answered: one instant Ajão hung loosely from his harness, and the next—the next, he was squashed back in the webbing, and the skin on his face and arms tried to slide from his bones. In one crushing blow, the air was forced from his lungs and no more would enter. The wavering haze of blackout closed in upon his mind … .

… But not before he saw, through the window slits, a sunlit morning horizon falling away above them.

Twenty-one

A
s soon as the Council meeting ended, Bjault returned to the hospital.

Hospital Main was typical colonial architecture: a onestory building molded from fused alumina, with every door and every window manual. It was both practical and unlovely. But the Novamerikans had put their medical center on Oceanside Grade, overlooking the pyramidal palms and pink beaches that edged the polar sea. And of all the buildings in the new colony, the hospital was the only one with landscaped grounds. As Ajão walked across the deeply sodden lawn, the smells of flowers and grass mixed with those of the alien ocean. It was evening. The sun skidded along the horizon in a kind of extended sunset, its light turning the breaking waves to gold and translucent green. Here at the Novamerikan South Pole it would be evening—or something like evening—for another forty days. Then the sun would set and the winter storms begin. They weren’t as bad as the summer’s, when the sea came close to boiling, but they were bad enough; without special protection this lawn might drown in the rains.

He stepped off the grass and onto the ruby-tiled walk that led indoors. Bjault had spent the last thirty days in this building. For most of that time he was unconscious, his body’s blood replaced by a synthetic hydrocarbon that provided just enough oxygen to keep him alive while it slowly leached the metallic poisons from his tissues. The doctors told him that when the rescue ferry landed at Draere’s island, he was already deep in a necrotic coma. The last thing Ajão remembered was sitting in the transmission shack at the telemetry station, talking half-deliriously into a jury-rigged mike—and receiving no answer. Survival had been a close thing indeed.

But the rescue had meant more than individual survival. He could see that in the faces of the medical technicians who greeted him along the hallway. They had watched the Council meeting on the two-way; they realized that these last few days would change the course of man’s history through all space.

Bjault stopped at the door marked “10” and knocked softly. A moment passed, and Pelio-nge-Shozheru, the first Azhiri ever to leave his native planet, opened the door. The boy smiled shyly.”Hello, Ajão,” he said in Homespeech, even doing a creditable job with the word “Ajao.” Then he reverted to his own language. “I was hoping you would have time to visit us.”

Bjault stepped inside and looked across the room. And his spirits sank for a moment into his boots. Yoninne Leg-Wot lay asleep, the crisp blue hospital sheets drawn carefully up to her throat. An IV bulb hung at the head of the bed, though Ajão had heard that she was physically capable of taking solid foods.

They sat down on the bed. Ajão didn’t know quite what to say. Somehow, it hurt to look at the girl’s peaceful face. He turned to the former prince. “Are they treating you well?”

Pelio nodded. “Your folk are kind, though very inquisitive. My Talent is scarcely measurable: you should see all the tests Thengets del Prou is going through.” Again that shy smile. “On the other hand, I’m learning from them, too. And they’re going to bring Samadhom back on the next trip to Giri; they’re almost as eager to see him as I.”

He rested his hand on the bandages that swathed Leg-Wot’s head. “Best of all, Ionina is improving steadily. She wakes several times a day, and she recognizes me—I even think she understands what I say. Your doctors are really very good.”

Ajão grunted noncommittally.
Yoninne,
he thought, looking at her still form on the bed,
if only you could know how very much your sacrifice will mean eventually
. He himself hadn’t known for sure, till three days before, when he had heard Egr Gaun raging at the med tech just outside his hospital room.

“God damn it, woman,” the science adviser’s voice had carried clearly through the supposedly soundproofed wall. “I’m going to talk to him; I know he’s awake and alert. NOW LET ME BY!” The door crashed open and Gaun stalked across the room to Bjault’s bed. “How are you, Aj, old man?” he said, then turned to glare back through the doorway. The tech quietly shut the door, and the two men were alone. Gaun muttered something about “obstreperous red tape” and grinned conspiratorially at the archaeologist. As usual, the man’s behavior left Bjault in a faint daze. Gaun was a competent mathematician, and he understood the mechanics of administration, but most often he relied on sheer bluster to get his way. He was just the man Ajão had been hoping to see.

“Now that you’re awake, I thought you’d want to know what we’ve been doing with your discoveries.”

Bjault nodded eagerly.

“That was quite a story you beamed us from Draere’s station. Part of the Council thought you were simply delirious, but the rest voted to go through with the contact scheme you proposed: Ferry 03 picked up this Thengets del Prou shortly after we had you safely in orbit aboard the 02.

“Since we got back, we’ve put Prou through every test the labs can handle. We still haven’t the foggiest idea how the fellow does it, but we do know that his trick conserves all the usual quantities—excepting angular momentum.”

Ajão shrugged. He would have been astounded if
both
angular and linear momentum were conserved during teleportation.

Gaun continued slyly, “There is, however, one other bit of conventional wisdom that our Azhiri friends have bent badly out of shape. When the lab people were done with Prou here on the ground, we took him into space on the 03; turns out he can teleport the ferry up to 400,000 kilometers in a single jump … . But just guess how long it takes him to do that.”

Ajão silently damned the man for keeping him in suspense. “How long?”

“To the clocks aboard the 03, no time at all; to the clocks here on the ground, about 1.2 milliseconds.” The science adviser settled back to enjoy the expression on Bjault’s face. He was not disappointed. “That’s more than a thousand times the speed of light,” Ajão said softly. Ever since he and Yoninne had learned of the Azhiri Talent, this had been the fantastic, incredible hope at the back of his mind. But still: “What about causality? With faster-than-light travel, you can create situations where—”

“—Where an effect precedes its own cause?” Gaun finished the sentence for him. “Right. That’s always been the basic reason why people have accepted the light barrier. But now that we have a demonstrable ftl drive—namely Thengets del Prou—we’re forced to come up with some explanation, be it ever so unaesthetic. For example, suppose teleportation is instantaneous—in some particular frame of reference, independent of the teleport’s motion. Then effect could be made to precede cause, but only where the interval separating cause from effect is spacelike. See—no paradoxes.”

“You’re conjecturing some kind of ‘super-luminiferous ether’?”

Gaun nodded. “Kinda sticks in your craw, don’t it?”

Not really
. Bjault had spent much of his life digging physics out of libraries buried in the ruins of ancient cities; that’s why they called him an archaeologist. Yet he always dreamed of finding something that was totally new to man’s experience. “You may be right, Egr. We should ask Prou to jump test probes in different directions. If there’s an ‘ether drift,’ that—”