Read The Witling for Free Online Page A

(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 Homeworld 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 Homeworld 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 collison when you arrive—and the faster you’re going, the harder the crash. This world