Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  He straightened.

  Hidden in the wall was a medical coffin, surrounded by a life-support machine of the self-sustaining kind. Here also was the special distorter-and-lie-detector combination Gosseyn recognized as the products of Lavoisseur’s technology.

  His coffin. His birth-coffin.

  Gosseyn turned. Patricia had emerged from behind her dressing screen.

  “I am Gosseyn Four. The fourth version.”

  She nodded. “My brother killed you.”

  HE examined the settings on the distorter-detector combination. From the ranges involved, the magnitude of energy flows recorded in the system’s log, it seemed as if Gosseyn Two had died even as he landed on one of the prearranged safety spots, a hospital on Venus, to which he had trained his body to teleport by reflex when driven unconscious; but at that death-moment (for no events in the universe were perfectly simultaneous) his brain was out of the range of Enro’s no-identity effect, so that his body hidden in a medical capsule here in the great palace of Gorgzid was able to quicken to life. He touched the unit with his finger: The electron tubes were dark and cold. There was no connection with the body on Venus, which was probably even now being autopsied by Null-A physicians.

  Had Enro merely allowed his attacking effect to reach a higher energy potential before striking, the similarity between the two Gosseyn bodies would have been broken and Gosseyn Two’s identity would have been lost. Enro would not have made this mistake had he not been blind with anger.

  Gosseyn straightened and turned toward Patricia.

  She was in a stately yet simple gown of gleaming metal cloth, with a chain of office around her neck, a diadem on her head, and a delicate scepter in her glove. She wore the regal ensemble with no trace of self-consciousness. Gosseyn could sense the energy source from her pistol near her thigh, but the folds of the dress betrayed nothing.

  He noted that she did not seem to see his nudity. On the one hand, she must have been present when someone manhandled him out of the birth-coffin into her bed. But on the other, her beginning to disrobe in front of him seemed automatic, not a matter of coy flirting. As if …

  He said, “You remember being married to me. I do not see how that could be, though. Those memories were implanted in me. They were false.”

  Patricia, for the first time, looked at a loss, uncertain. She turned her eyes away from his.

  But she said, “Null-A men are trained to observe psychological reactions, nuances of expression, subtle verbal cues. Unless I undertook a process of false memory implantation—similar to yours—I would never have been able to lure you into Thorson’s trap, and Thorson would not have been able to examine you up close. And it was necessary for him to examine the immortal man up close.”

  Stepping over to a drawer built into the side of the medical coffin, she drew out a bundle of clothing and tossed it toward him.

  “Implanted by whom? The Greatest Empire does not have that technology.”

  The bundle unfolded as he caught it in the air. It was a one-piece suit, durable and inconspicuous, wrapped around shirt, shorts, tie.

  “I was working with Lavoisseur,” she said.

  He began dressing. He noticed that the thermostat settings on the suit were already at the temperature he liked.

  “And why not have the false memories removed later?” he asked.

  She motioned with her hand, and a shoe box rolled out of the automatic closet and offered him socks and shoes.

  “Lavoisseur died on Earth, killed by Thorson’s men,” she said.

  He sat on the bed and picked up a shoe and turned it over. It was a brand made by a small firm in Chicago, one he habitually wore. The soles would adapt to different surfaces, in case the footing was rough or slippery or so on. The insides had a layer of comfortable medical foam that would chemically react to small cuts, bruises, or bunions to bandage and soothe them. Useful footgear for a man who does not know when he might step from one landscape to another.

  He said, “Enro thinks Lavoisseur must still be alive.”

  Patricia said airily, “Enro became Emperor because he is the kind of man who does not believe an enemy is dead unless he sees the body. Paranoia is useful to him.”

  Gosseyn donned the shoes and stood up. They were in his size. “No neurosis is useful. It has already driven him to commit unnecessary murders. Three murders, if you count me. Where is Lavoisseur? If you are his agent, you should know.”

  She put her gloved hand to her mouth, trying to hide a girlish laugh quite at odds with her regal appearance. Her eyes danced with mirth. “His agent? Oh, no. No, not quite like that, Mr. Gosseyn. Gilbert? May I call you Gilbert? I mean, I am the only person you know.”

  He opened his mouth to object that he knew many people, but he snapped it shut again. Gosseyn Four did not know anyone: He had never been out of this room.

  “He was your agent then. How did you find him? Where is he from?”

  “I don’t know. The Observer of the Crypt found him for me.”

  “The Chessplayer.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. My name for it. That machine seems to be behind everything that happens to me. It manipulates events to …”

  “To what?”

  “You tell me. You say it found Lavoisseur for you—why?”

  She said, “It wanted to stop the war between the League and the Empire. The only way to keep us safe was to dethrone Enro, and the only one who could do that was Lavoisseur, who created you for that purpose. Enro was too ambitious, and each passing year created more enemies for us.”

  “Us?”

  “Enro and me. Observer is like a nanny. It protects me.”

  Gosseyn nodded. Her statements agreed with Secoh’s. That did not necessarily mean that they were true; the two could have agreed on a story beforehand, or have been raised in a similar belief-system, or deceived by the same source, or … there were several possibilities.

  “I wondered why you were so reckless.”

  “Me?” She seemed startled.

  Gosseyn shook his head. “The first time we met, I had just been thrown out of a protected hotel during the policeless month in the City of the Machine. You were running down a dark alleyway. You spent the night huddled up to me, trusting me completely. On a psychological level, it never made sense. I am an artificial being, an experiment. Even if Lavoisseur was in on it, why go through such an elaborate ruse? Why not hire an actress to look like you? Or just have Thorson’s men walk up with guns and force me into a car….”

  “Thorson did not know what you could do. X told him you might teleport away, or use your control of energy flows as a weapon. Until they photographed your brain, they did not realize it was untrained. The third Gosseyn body, the one they found and destroyed, had been possessed of a fully integrated nervous system.”

  “It was still reckless on your part.”

  She smiled, stepped forward, and draped her hand over his elbow. “I didn’t know you cared!”

  He shook her hand away. “I mean, you thought the Observer would save you, and that belief is questionable. We should go to it right away and organize a hunt for Enro. It can put me in contact with Lavoisseur … if you are telling the truth.”

  She raised an eyebrow at that and turned her head toward her vanity table “Well? Am I?”

  The voice spoke from one of the drawers: “The subject is telling the truth, within limits. She has certain mental reservations, and is suffering a great deal of nervous tension.”

  Gosseyn said, “Related to what thought?”

  “Murder!” said the machine. “It is a violence-related thought of a high magnitude …”

  Patricia said, “Stop! That’s enough.”

  The voice halted.

  She said in exasperation, “Stop trying to get my lie detector to rat me out. Get your own machine.”

  “What are you hiding?”

  She tilted up her nose and looked at him through long lashes. “It is not that easy. You’re
going to have to trust me.”

  “I am not sure I should. Someone told me you had merely manipulated the Earth government and the people of Venus into helping you, that your ultimate goal was to oust your brother from power and seize the throne for yourself.”

  “Someone who?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll ask the questions. Why would you work for Lavoisseur—or have him work for you, whichever it was—against your own family, against your people and your empire? Why support Earth above your own home world?”

  She put her hand on his arm once more and tugged on it.

  “I’ll answer,” she said, “if you come with me.”

  “I need more answers than just that. How did Enro kill Crang? How did he kill me? What is the method? And what is his range? He says he can reach across interstellar distances, but he certainly did not have that power or that range during the war, or else he would have simply assassinated the League leadership.”

  “I’ll get you the answers to those questions—if you come now. Time is short.”

  He walked with her.

  As they passed through the outer suite, he caught the humid, heady perfume coming from yet another room not far away: the smell of orchids.

  He breathed in the scent. “Why orchids?”

  She said, “You know why. It’s in your memory.”

  The memory in his head was this: Gosseyn had been working as a carpenter for Michael Hardie when the man had been adding eccentric towers and wings to his Florida home. He had been asked to walk his employer’s daughter, Patricia, to the nearby town, to keep an eye on her and help her carry some packages. She had slipped away from him, and he spent a worried hour looking for her. He finally found Patricia sitting on a bench near a flower shop, a potted plant in her lap and a book on neurolinguistics in her hand. He had helped her carry her packages to the streetcar, and they fell into a conversation. She had said orchids are rooted in the decomposition of other organisms, but their bloom is colorful: They bring beauty out of corruption.

  WHEN the Empress stepped through the doors of her suite, guards in splendid scarlet uniforms with boots polished to a mirror-shine snapped to attention, saluting with their energy-rifles. Aside from these armed men—directly outside the door to Patricia’s suite—the wide corridors of the Imperial Palace seemed empty.

  As they walked, he said, “You promised me certain answers.”

  She said, “Have you ever seen a distorter fail in mid-transmission? The distortion process creates a momentary non-identity condition. Prolonged exposure is fatal. Man cannot live and particles cannot retain their integrity without a location in time and space. The Observer Machine explained it to me once, this way, when it was explaining the danger that accompanies even minor distortion of time-space involved in clairvoyance. Life evolved in sublight conditions, in a vast but boundaried area of stable and neutral space-time. Outside that boundary, conditions are different. The previous condition of the universe, where all matter and energy existed at a pinpoint of no-time and no-space, is a condition the living process cannot tolerate to be reminded of.”

  Gosseyn said sharply, “You must have been inside the Crypt for the Observer to communicate with you, in the coffin itself. Why was it warning you about a dangerous side effect to Enro’s power?”

  She shrugged. “It came up in the conversation somehow. Did you want to know about his range? During the war, he could not read the plans hidden in vaults of enemy headquarters, or see the movement of ships, except at close range, within a thousand light-years. Some ancient piece of technology gave him a breakthrough: He was watching Gosseyn Three and the expedition to another galaxy.”

  Gosseyn said, “Is he on the planet Ur?”

  “Yes. I don’t know the location. The planet is supposed to be a ghost world. There are special conditions there that Enro believes render his powers less dangerous to himself, even when he is distorting photons across intergalactic distances. I don’t know the details.”

  She led him along the shining floor toward a tall pair of golden doors, and the gold panels were sheathed in the heat-shimmer effect of a high-density force-barrier.

  Gosseyn stopped. “You were going to tell me why you were loyal to Earth.”

  “It should be obvious. Earth is free.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  He shook his head. “There has got to be more to it than that.”

  “I am a normal woman, Gilbert, and I want what any normal woman wants. It’s the people around me who think I am a goddess and an empress. They want to crouch down on the floor and bow to me. Do you know what I saw on Earth, the first time I visited it? No one bows there. No one puts his face on the floor.”

  The mental picture formed was still incomplete. Autocracy was a system of government demanding total loyalty: Members of the Party were allowed no private interests, no self-thoughts. The Party was their only conscience. To be denounced as disloyal meant death, with reprisals against one’s family; and the only way to prove loyalty was to denounce others.

  In the case of Gorgzid, the Party psychology was also married to a Cult psychology. And the Cult demanded even more—for the loyal follower, every thought had to be devoted to the idol, to the symbol, for which there was no referent in real life. To doubt was sin.

  Impossible that someone raised in such an environment could escape the damage caused by the necessary psychological adaptations to the madness.

  Gosseyn tried to imagine a woman born and raised amid the routine cruelty and falsehood of the highest levels of a ruthless theocratic government turning her back on it all and wanting only a normal life. She calmly betrayed her brother, her emperor, her people, and her church, all for a philosophical idea utterly unlike anything a youth spent among ruthless intriguers would have prepared her to understand.

  Patricia seemed like a woman too rooted in practical matters to be easily carried away by an ideal. Unless …

  “When the Observer introduced you to Lavoisseur, you fell in love with him, didn’t you? You’re loyal to Null-A because … of him?”

  Emotion brought color to her cheeks, but she smiled a lazy, charming smile and said in an arch tone, “I found him immensely pigheaded and annoying to deal with, almost more trouble than he was worth. Much like you. Now come on.”

  “I think my first priority should be to visit the Observer.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That might prove difficult. Besides, don’t tell me you don’t want to meet him!”

  “Who?”

  “My new husband.”

  “Husband? Crang was killed this morning!”

  “It was a quick engagement.”

  “Who did you marry?”

  She smiled at his confusion and stepped forward. The door automatically opened for her.

  Over her shoulder, she said, “I married the Ashargin heir. You remember him!”

  And she swept forward into the vast chamber beyond.

  9

  Because we make artificial but necessary distinctions in speech and thought between various phenomena in the plenum, our habit is to ignore their fundamental unity.

  Atop a shining platform reached by a series of steps, beneath a canopy of scarlet held up by posts crusted with gold, on a throne of barbaric and dazzling splendor, wearing a heavy coronet too large for his head, and huddled in a mass of red and gold finery, overburdened with gems, sat a thin and dark-haired man, pale and twitching. He was a boyish figure, large eyed as a waif.

  This was the Ashargin heir, Rhade. Gosseyn knew him well: Not long ago, the Chessplayer had, by some technology unknown to Earth, implanted Gosseyn’s memory and being, his essential self, into the young man’s nervous system.

  At that time, Ashargin lived as a wretched prisoner of Enro, working as a thrall in the Shrine of the Sleeping God, making sure that as he grew from boy to man he would learn nothing but cowardice and servility. It had been a cruel, desperate attempt to shatter the human spirit right down t
o its base.

  Enro’s calculation was that no opposition to his rule would ever center around the legitimate heir to the throne. The youth was brought to the palace and put on display for Enro’s generals and courtiers. Any conspirators would take one look at the only other person with a legal claim to the throne and shudder and wish long life to the current Emperor.

  Gosseyn, while occupying Rhade’s body and living his life, had taken certain steps to undo the psychological damage. With improvised neural training techniques, and short time, he had not been able to do much, but Ashargin began developing the courage and confidence that come from even a small exposure to absolute mental health.

  The moment that Patricia and Gosseyn stepped into the room, the slender, neurotic-looking man shrugged his shoulders. The long ceremonial sleeves fell from his hands, revealing the two heavy energy-pistols he had been holding in his grip.

  One was pointed at Gosseyn, the other at Patricia.

  Rhade Ashargin did not speak or hesitate. His fingers depressed the triggers. There was a flash of intolerable brightness and a roar of deadly energy. A wide sweep of energy flooded the chamber.

  Patricia did not scream or show alarm. She was watching Gosseyn. Her expression contained the unearthly calm of a woman committing suicide. It is a violence-related thought of a high-magnitude….

  GOSSEYN’S extra brain had only three object-locations in space-time “memorized,” that is, attuned to the special cluster of cells near his brain stem. One was Patricia’s pistol; one was the panels taken from the wall in her bedroom; the third was Patricia herself.

  When Rhade fired, Gosseyn’s reaction, fast as thought, was to trigger the cells attuned to the location of wall panel in the bedroom and those attuned to Patricia, forcing a similarity, a near identity. She was relocated into the bedroom and out of harm’s way. Her pistol was in Gosseyn’s hand.

  The Colt model automatically erected a hemisphere of neutralizing force when its Geiger counter detected atomic rays directed at the user. Gosseyn did not even need to press the thumb-button. However, the weapon’s tiny alarm rang: The force-shell was about to be overloaded.