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.”