Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  “This man is not an agent of Enro the Red, consciously or subconsciously,” the machine said firmly.

  Gosseyn studied the faces of the Councilors. He said, “That’s not it, is it? Your fear of me is more fundamental.”

  Nolo laughed weakly. “I do admit that the shock of meeting the man who cannot die is greater than I expected. A more-than-human confidence gleams in your eyes; it echoes in your words. No matter what we mere mortals say or do, you, the unknown man from an unknown world, are going to decide what happens to our lives and our worlds, and nothing we can do can stop you.”

  Gosseyn put his hand on the lie detector. “First, I have turned over all that I know of my origins to the Games Machines which are, even now, being constructed on the various planets that have accepted colonists from Venus and Earth. These machines can measure human sanity and integrity.”

  He paused while sensitive, energy-conducting lights played over his face. One by one, he met the eyes of the Councilors. In his deep baritone he continued, “Second, it is only a matter of time until I can discover who I am and where I come from. Once that is done, I will know the secret of how to preserve continuity of memory from one duplicate body to another: a secret I will share with any men sane enough to not destroy themselves, or others, with the knowledge. Gentlemen, these two statements taken together offer great promise. I expect that you all will soon join me, and be as I am.”

  Prin said to the lie detector, “Well?”

  The machine said, “The statement is true as far as it goes, but there is a deeper thought behind it.”

  Gosseyn said, “Once many men, not just one, have my special method of bypassing space-time, and the scientists of many worlds can study it, humanity as a whole will have an opportunity to understand something fundamental—essential—about the base nature of reality. The repercussions are not merely unknown, but unknowable.”

  Prin said to the machine, “Based on that last statement, can you tell us what this man’s real purpose is in coming here?”

  The lie detector said, “There is an identity confusion in the subject. He does not know who he is. On the surface, he regards himself as a copy of three other dead men, perhaps four, inheriting their memory chains, and therefore inheriting their name and self-ness…. This central difficulty obscures all other readings. The subject is not himself aware of his purpose in life, but that purpose is an immense one … his real purpose is tied into his real identity…. He is … connected … in some way, some basic-energy way, to an identity older than mankind.”

  Prin said in a hushed tone, “But … then who is this man? What is he?”

  Nolo said, “We know who he is. We were warned. Marines!” He raised his hand to the two guards flanking the doors.

  A voice came into Gosseyn’s head at that moment. This is Lavoisseur. You represent a tremendous secret, which you yourself only dimly grasp: a secret not just of immortality, but of infinity! By revealing your true nature, you are repeating the mistakes I made during an earlier incarnation, mistakes that led to the destruction of the Shadow Galaxy. The Councilors’ fear of you has grown beyond all bounds: They are going to kill you unless you let me help you. Quickly! Use your extra brain to suppress the radiations from the vibration machine!

  Gosseyn triggered all the nerve-combinations in his extra brain at once. The suppression emitter was muffled, but it required all of Gosseyn’s capacity to do it: He could feel the flow of nervous energy in his brain stem, stiffened with the overload.

  From outside the main doors came cries of pain and alarm, the shocking noise of energy-rifles being fired in an enclosed space, the sizzling echo of ricochets. The two marines threw open the doors and raced out, beyond Gosseyn’s range of vision.

  Then, a sudden ominous silence fell.

  The echo of a pair of footsteps resounded from the marble floor as a figure walked calmly through the double doors.

  It was a boyish figure, short and slim, but with the awkwardly large hands and feet of a late teenager going through a growth spurt. However, he had the large head, the wide shoulders, the hawkish eyes, the slender-lipped mouth, of a Gosseyn body. Gosseyn estimated the biological age of this younger version of him as equal to sixteen or seventeen. The youth was wearing a red and scarlet jacket of a military cut.

  There was a series of rapid metallic clicks as the tall doors slid shut behind him. The magnetic pistons of the locking mechanism had been triggered by some outside power.

  Elderly Ifvrid Madrisol rose to his feet saying, “Who are you, young man? How dare you to enter here?”

  The seventeen-year-old spoke. From such a young man the voice was surprisingly powerful and strong, indicating a Null-A precision of control over the acoustic cavities and vocal cords. More highly pitched, of course, but the tone, timbre, and accent were those Gosseyn had heard, before his death, from the mouth of Lavoisseur.

  Only the words themselves were horribly, insanely wrong.

  “I bear a message from your Emperor, who is the father of the race that will replace mankind. The universe has judged you, gentlemen, by the laws of evolution … and you have been condemned to death.”

  Norcross was the only man quick enough to put his hand to his pistol before he died. The other Councilors were slain where they sat, their heads sheared off by a jagged lightning bolt.

  The similarity channel used to send words into Gosseyn’s brain, at the moment, flooded Gosseyn with a complex of thought-forces meant to paralyze his nervous system. He used the cortical-thalamic pause to break the connection and defeat the paralysis, but that moment of distraction was enough: The young man pulled out his sidearm, a Gorgzid military-issue nuclear-electric piece, pointed it at Gosseyn, and pulled the trigger.

  The boy said, “I am similarizing the energy from this weapon in my hand to a neutral spot in orbit. However, the moment you release the suppressor machine, my powers will be neutralized, and the bolt will strike you. Now, you might think that you will merely wake up in another Gosseyn body elsewhere, but the same suppressor field that prevents you from using your biological distorter in your brain will prevent the automatic similarization of your memory information into your next body. Checkmate.”

  “You monster!” Gosseyn stared in horror. “Who are you, really?”

  The young man said lightly, “I am Gilbert Gosseyn. The real Gilbert Gosseyn.”

  12

  The general rule is that any notions of identity are simplifications of a more complex underlying reality; this rule applies to self-identification as well.

  The young man continued, “The real Gosseyn! I am the person you would be if an earlier version of you had not erased your own memory in a rash attempt to stop me.”

  The lie detector spoke up out of turn: “There is confusion. I was asked to verify the testimony of the man named Gosseyn: The young man now speaking does have continuity of identity with the name ‘Gosseyn,’ but there are other identities present in his mind.”

  Gosseyn said, “Who is he?”

  “He thinks of himself as Lavoisseur, but there is additional confusion, as he knows you knew him not by that name, but another. There is deceptive intent involved.”

  Gosseyn said to the boy, “When first we met, you called yourself X the Unknown Factor. You are the crippled version of Lavoisseur he created to infiltrate the Hardie gang.”

  The young man’s eyes narrowed in grim amusement. “Is that what he said? He told you the truth as best he knew it. When I created him, that was what I wanted him to believe.”

  “You created him?”

  “Of course. I had to create a version of myself who thought he was the original, to make mind-to-mind contact with the Observer of the Crypt, so that I, from a safe distance, attuned to his thoughts, could watch to see what the Observer would do with him. It used him to spread Null-A to several planets before I could prevent it. He was using the name ‘de Lany’ at that time. Later, I recovered partial control of my stray self. I arranged to have him, under t
he name Lavoisseur, go to Earth just before the Galactic Invasion, to keep me aware of any resistance gathered around the Semantics Institute, or from the Venusian detectives. A Venusian detective named Crang befriended him—or should I say you?—and figured out that he was a copy. At first the thought-flow was from him to me, for I had designed the Lavoisseur body on a genetic level to have increased adrenal flows to make him ever in a state of nervous excitement. But I underestimated myself.”

  “Are you claiming that, once he discovered your existence, Lavoisseur arranged your accident, to wound you, and speed up your life process?”

  “Ruthless, wasn’t it?” The young man called X smiled. “But the psychological strain on him was terrific. I had also kept to myself my method of immortality through body-duplication, but he examined his own construction and reproduced the technique, creating an amnesiac version of himself: the first copy of your current memoryline.”

  “Gosseyn One.”

  Now the young man smiled grimly. “I admit I was startled the first time I met your first body—imagine seeing a young and uncrippled version of yourself dragged into a room with your fellow conspirators. Imagine my relief when I discovered you were a brain-damaged version, unable to use your powers. But I could not have you killed, because you were the only clue leading back to Lavoisseur. When Gosseyn One was born, Lavoisseur disappeared from my view. After that, when I tried to enter the low-energy nerve-meditation to find his thoughts, all I could find were yours. And you knew nothing. I had at that time assumed the identity of Lavoisseur to control the Semantics Institute, to prevent the Institute from hindering Thorson’s plan to invade Earth.”

  “Prescott shot you.”

  X shrugged nonchalantly. “Your appearance on the scene meant I had to exit before any awkward questions were asked. What if they had checked your fingerprints? I was tired of being in a wheelchair, and I needed to be offstage for a while, to maneuver you into a position to kill Thorson, who had grown ambitious. The older and more insane version of you, the man who thought he was Lavoisseur, got himself killed off nicely: I blocked his extra-brain distorter signal using the non-identity method, so nothing was transmitted to his next body. A fitting penalty for trying to reveal the secret of immortality!” The boy frowned soberly. “But he was not the first version of me to make that foolish error. In ancient times, I also tried to immortalize the Shadow Galaxy, with results too hideous to describe. It is to prevent that catastrophe from repeating itself that I am here.”

  Gosseyn said, “I assume you are prepared to prove your more unlikely statements? I admit I have doubts on a basic level that a murdering madman like you could be any sort of version of me.”

  X said harshly to the lie detector, “Verify this!” and to Gosseyn: “I have come here with every expectation of killing you, should you prove stubborn. I needed to trick you into a situation where your death-trigger would not release your memories back into me, as I have no wish to have my thoughts confused with your sentimental emotionalism.”

  The lie detector said, “The statement is a true one, according to the information and belief of the speaker, but there is a deception based on omission.”

  The young man said, “The omission is this: I am waiting for compatriots of mine to establish a no-signal condition in this area. You examined the body of Gosseyn Three? There is a mechanical means of neutralizing the immortality circuit.”

  “Then you are the one who killed him.”

  The young version of his own head nodded. “The Interstellar League was almost correct. Gilbert Gosseyn, the real Gosseyn, is indeed an agent of Enro the Red.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I thought that would be clear by now. Superior and sane minds should not bow to inferior and unsane governments. My attempt was to create a universal government, working through Enro and Secoh. A government ruled by sane men, the only men who can be trusted with power over others. The Observer in the Crypt of the Sleeping God was programmed to release its passengers when safe, and to educate them according to the scientific knowledge left aboard. That knowledge included the Null-A training techniques, of course. I wanted that knowledge released only into the ruling class of the new empire: You see the difficulty.”

  “Null-A’s would not help you establish a galactic empire.”

  “Correct. That meant that Null-A training had to be forbidden to men until after the galaxy was conquered. However, the Observer of the Sleeping God was programmed to do otherwise: Working through you, it propagated Null-A through several planets that were unknown or unmapped, including Earth, as well as the electronic tube technology and the lie detector.”

  Gosseyn noticed the oddity: Working through you. The seventeen-year-old several times had slipped into the habit of referring to Gosseyn as if he were Lavoisseur, the immortal man who brought the Null-A science to Earth.

  Wryly, he realized that this verbalization was just as accurate as to call him by his current name. He had lost Lavoisseur’s conscious memories at his creation, it was true, but the drive, the ideals, the loyalty to Null-A, that remained. Something of Lavoisseur survived.

  The boy said, “Only on Earth did the seed take root. The original attack on Null-A Earth, and the reason for the Greatest Empire base there, was to destroy the philosophy, and to start the galactic war that would lead to union.”

  “That plan failed.” Grimly.

  “Did it? The League Powers, in order to cooperate during this war, had to give some of their sovereignty over to an interstellar body, an emergency commission known as the Security Council. Control of that council is the next step. The members who were more recalcitrant were gathered here to be eliminated. You were allowed to escape from Gorgzid to bring your warning to the League Powers, bringing all together to this one place, this buried war room I could not find except through my link to you. Enro has been maneuvered into a position where he must use psychological methods, rather than open war, to establish universal dominion. The loss of life will be much less.”

  Gosseyn said, “You speak as if you expect to persuade me to join you.”

  “Why not? We are one and the same individual, after all. But I remember our former lives all the way back to when I and two women awoke in the suspended-animation coffins of the crashed spaceship that later was worshipped as the Crypt of the Sleeping God. Do you understand the utter pointlessness of opposing me? There is no Cosmic Chessplayer aside from me. On Earth, my duplicate was called de Lany; on a prehistoric Mars that died when the dinosaurs were young, I was called Xenius; on Yalerta, I was Ysvid of Forever Isle; on Ur, the most primal of all worlds, I was called Ur-ath-Vir the First-of-Living. I have a thousand names. I am eldest of all men: the galaxy’s one immortal. I am Lavoisseur from a time period before the man you thought was Lavoisseur, the modified version of me, began to work against me. I am the original Lavoisseur, the eldest of all the Gosseyn line.”

  The lie detector said, “False statement. This is not the man you knew as Lavoisseur. He is—”

  But a shot from the blaster ended the comment.

  As Gosseyn leaped on the boy, he released the suppressor, and an invisible tangle of energies flooded the chamber. The boy’s not fully developed muscles were no match for Gosseyn’s Null-A-trained body; but, as they wrestled, the young body had a suppleness and strength that showed that he was not lying, at least, about being a Null-A. The young muscles reacted with the strength that only tissues momentarily disconnected from the fatigue centers of the brain could match.

  But Gosseyn knew the same techniques, and he was more massive, had longer reach.

  The two struggled over the still-firing gun. The blinding ray scrawled curlicues of burning debris across the wall and ceiling of the chamber, blowing out vision screens and chandeliers. Then the boy’s muscles sagged and suddenly gave way. Gosseyn, off-balanced, nonetheless retained his grip on the widely struggling figure, one hand clamped like a vise on the boy’s gun hand. During that moment, the boy strained and
pointed the weapon at the suppression emitter. The machine exploded in the shower of electron tubes.

  The boy dematerialized right out of Gosseyn’s hands.

  13

  The advantage of non-Aristotelian integration over the stereotyped reflexes of categorical thought is greater flexibility of mental adjustment of abstractions to the facts they represent.

  Two things happened rapidly.

  First, Alert lights flashed red throughout the Council Chambers of the Interstellar League. In several places, the wall decorations swung back to reveal television screens and electronic tactical display maps. Phones rang in front of the chairs where the corpses of the Interstellar alliance government slumped. Tinny voices called out, shouting out alarms and warnings, begging for instructions.

  The television screens displayed the view above the city of Accardistran Major. Hanging above the North Pole of the planet, with the supermetropolis looming from the polar jungles below her, was a dreadnought-class battlewagon some two miles long, shimmering with eerie green shadows as she materialized into view. On her prow was the triangle of Three Watching Eyes, the emblem of the Greatest Empire.

  These were the compatriots X had been expecting.

  A zone of force, transparent at first, but smoggy-black and growing blacker, was radiating from powerful projection arrays amidships. This sphere, centered on the ship, encompassed within its border a large dome of atmosphere, several miles of the city, and a bowl-shaped bite out of the planet crust.

  Second, as the force-zone solidified, Gosseyn felt a space-distortion ripple through the area: He recognized it as the same shadow-substance effect used to break Gosseyn’s relationship with his next bodies.

  Gosseyn was aware of the fact that his “memorized” locations in his brain were no longer connected to anything … all but two. He could still feel the locations at the post office and the Earth embassy: within the sphere projected by the ship. At a rough guess, the volume of action of the isolation-energy was about eighty-one cubic miles.