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—”
Gaun waved his hand airily. “Sure, Aj, we’re doing all that. But look: what we really want is to duplicate and improve upon the Azhiri trick, to build ships that can travel between the stars in days instead of decades. We’ve gotta find out what goes on inside Prou’s head when he teleports, and to do that we need a lot more equipment than some clocks and a planetary ferry. We need biophysics labs, and a few thousand topnotch specialists—things we don’t have on Novamerika.
“I want to break the ramscoop out of mothballs, and fly an Azhiri volunteer back to Homeworld, where such facilities do exist.”
Gaun seemed almost intimidated by his own suggestion. It wasn’t that they couldn’t find an Azhiri willing to spend years in cold-sleep on a trip between the stars: Prou, at least, was so basically Faustian that he’d be eager to go. But the million-ton starship that had brought the colonists from Homeworld was partially dismantled now, much of its equipment built into Novamerikan ground installations. It would take a major effort to refit the ship, and the colony would be weakened as a result. Ajão said as much to Gaun.
“I know, and that’s the real reason why I’ve come to you,” admitted the science adviser. “The Council isn’t going to like my idea one bit, and if I try to ram it down their throats like I have some things in the past, they’re gonna like it even less. But you they respect, even admire. You’re so damn diffident—and so damn right most of the time—that if you told the Council to go to blazes, they’d probably ask you the way.
“I want you to present my case to the Council. Tell them how much the colony will eventually gain again from this sacrifice. Sure, we’ll be set back a couple decades—even if we refit the starship for a minimum payload—but when the first ftl ship arrives from Homeworld, we’ll make it all back, and more. Will you tell them, Aj?”
Bjault had agreed, and when the time came, he spoke before the Council, which put the matter to a general referendum over the two-way. The vote had not been close: in less than a year’s time, Thengets del Prou, Ajão Bjault, and a dozen others would begin the forty-year voyage to Homeworld.
… But Yoninne Leg-Wot would remain here, perhaps forever unaware of what she had made possible. The thought brought him back to the present, to the hospital room, to Pelio and Yoninne. He suddenly saw that the girl’s eyes were open, and had been for several seconds. There was self-awareness in those eyes, but none of the fire and determination he had known.
“Hello,” the girl said. “My name is Ionina. Who are you?” Her voice was calm, peaceful. But she spoke in the language of the Summerkingdom, and pronounced her own name the queer, unpalatalized way Pelio did.
Bjault replied, but Yoninne said nothing more; though her eyes remained open, she seemed to lose interest in her surroundings. Pelio looked up from the girl, his face alight. “Did you hear her, Ajão! The doctors were right. She will recover!”
He tried to respond to the boy’s enthusiasm, but failed. When Bjault first regained consciousness, he had asked about Yoninne. “She’ll definitely improve,” the medic had said. “I don’t see any reason why she won’t eventually be able to take care of herself, talk, even write. But most of her memory has been wiped away, and it’s possible that she will never again be able to reason at the highest levels of abstraction.”
So. Their adventure on Giri had given him the stars—and taken from her the essence of her individuality. Somehow, it hurt to think of both at the same time … .
She was glad when the stranger left. She vaguely realized that he belonged somewhere in the vanished past, with all the memories, skills, and experience that had made her a different person. But that other she had suffered much, and had never really enjoyed herself. Now there was another chance.
She looked up at Pelio’s gray-green face, and took his thick hand in hers. She had lost much that was of value, but she was no fool. She knew a happy ending when she found one.
Books by Vernor Vinge
*Tatja Grimm’s World
*The Witling
*The Peace War
*Marooned in Realtime
True Names and Other Dangers (collection)
Threats … and Other Promises (collection)
Across Realtime
comprising:
The Peace War
“The Ungoverned”
Marooned in Realtime
*A Fire Upon the Deep
*A Deepness in the Sky
*True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
*The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
*Rainbows End
*Available from Tor Books
ABORTED RESCUE …
The pilot’s voice came distorted and faint against the roar: “Three hundred meters up, and your reflector is shining loud and clear. Hold on, gang.” The shuttle’s thirty-meter bulk hovered, then slowly descended. The snowstorm was literally blown away around it, and looking up, Bjault could see the hillsides lit by painfully bright, electric-blue light. He gasped. They had been followed: across the snowfields, dozens of figures stood silhouetted in the glare.
The craft lurched slightly, then toppled to one side. Draere’s voice came as calmly as if she were discussing ancient history. “Ground turbulence like I’ve never seen. I can’t recover …” The blunt-nosed ferry curved gracefully downward, smashed sideways into the valley floor, and exploded … .
Yoninne had just risen to her knees, her machine-pistol coming to bear on the three soldiers, when a thunderlike snapping sound shook the ground and she was thrown head over heels into the snow behind her.
The men and women of Planet Earth have just received their introduction to the power of mind.
This edition contains fifteen full-page illustrations by awardwinning artist Doug Beekman.
About the Author
Vernor Vinge is a four-time Hugo Award winner (for the novels A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep and the novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High” and “The Cookie Monster”) and a four-time Nebula Award finalist. He has been feature
d in such diverse venues as Rolling Stone, Wired, The New York Times, Esquire, and NPR’s “Fresh Air.” His most recent novel is Rainbows End.
Highly regarded by scientists, journalists, business leaders—as well as readers—for his concept of the technological singularity, Vinge has spoken all over the world on scientific subjects. For many years a mathematician and computer science professor at San Diego State University, he’s now a full-time author. He lives in San Diego, California.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE WITLING
Copyright © 1976 by Vernor Vinge
Originally published in 1976 by DAW Books.
Illustrations copyright © 1986 by Doug Beekman
Map of Giri drawn by Vernor Vinge. Map copyright © 1976 by Vernor Vinge
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429924894
First eBook Edition : May 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vinge, Vernor.
The witling / Vernor Vinge.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-765-30886-3
ISBN-10: 0-765-30886-X
1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 3. Psychokinesis—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3572.I534W58 2006
813’.54—dc22
2006048189
First Tor Edition: December 2006
Vernor Vinge, The Witling
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