Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  The second woman nodded to the first, who turned and said, “Gilbert Gosseyn! We have decided to deal with you on the same basis as we would negotiate with a sovereign interplanetary power. Your ability to disturb the patterns of fate is equal in magnitude, at least, to that of Enro the Red, even were his entire military empire restored to his command.”

  One of the men stepped forward and said, “For the moment, the warrants for your arrest from Accolon and Gorgzid we will ignore. We are throwing in with you.” His glance toward the two women made Gosseyn realize that the six men, perhaps a different “unit” in this fluid social structure, had decided to allow the two women to seize control and were now following their lead.

  Gosseyn realized the psychological pressures merely of the day-to-day life in such a society would be immense. Any misstep, real or feared, any moment of hesitation or doubt, and the initiative would be seized by someone luckier or more ruthless. Added to this was the continuous doubt whether one would be punished for some failure by another person in the unit or organization; there would be a constant pressure to stay alert and abandon any units about to be punished for failure.

  There were quick introductions: The men were named O-Vath, E-Vath, Wu-Vath, Ai-Vath, Ah-Vath, and Y-Vath. The women were Evana and Yvana. At the moment, Yvana had seized the leadership role.

  Gosseyn said, “You said you represented both your organization and also the general Corthid government? How do you resolve conflicts between the two?”

  Yvana replied, “If you choose to deal with our unit, you will be wagering your prestige that the rest of Corthid will accept to be bound by what our unit decides. If our unit is successful, the other organizations will fall in line with our policy; otherwise, they will repudiate us, and we will suffer, as well as you. If you treat with us as if we represent Corthid, your fate is tied to our group fate.”

  Gosseyn realized that he had been assuming that, like the other galactics he had met, these people would be organized into a hierarchy: one of them the ship’s captain, the others his crew. A foolish assumption. From the casual way they spoke, Gosseyn realized their mental and social habits were more flexible than that: Whoever was the “luckiest” among them, the quickest to turn events to his advantage, would be in the leadership role for so long as his luck held out.

  There was something familiar about such an approach.

  Gosseyn said, “You have a Games Machine here on Corthid, don’t you?”

  At that moment, a loudspeaker clattered to life in the room. “There is a message from the Hidden Capitol. The Safety Authority declares it is taking control of this case: All exploitation games must cease! All related wagers are held in abeyance until further notice. Escort Gilbert Gosseyn to the planet surface, to speak with Illverton.”

  The eight cunning-eyed, sly-faced individuals in the chamber, the six men and two women, sagged with disappointment.

  GOSSEYN was allowed up on the bridge to watch the landing. The bridge canopy was an enormous transparent dome, giving an unobstructed view in every direction: Amplifier screens just below the canopy were tuned to a number of different frequencies and showed the X-ray, radio emission, and infrared patterns of the surrounding universe. On one screen was an image of the gravity-waves, and this showed a black, smoky shape smothering several stars in one direction.

  Gosseyn nodded toward that image. “Enro has begun destroying solar systems. What lies in that direction?”

  E-Vath answered, “Many of the most highly populated planets of the Sixth Decant of the Galaxy used to be there. The spread of the shadow-matter cloud that swallowed the central systems will not be visible, from this location, for another ninety centuries; since the shadow itself is a faster-than-light effect, it overtakes any visible images of itself as it spreads. However, the influence on the space-time metric propagates at similar speeds, and so gravity-wave instruments can pick it up.”

  Gosseyn tried to imagine the magnitude of the catastrophe: billions of lives snuffed out as planets and suns lost their coherent matter-energy states. Even with a highly organized evacuation, there were simply not enough ships to move whole continents of people into space, and the Shadow Effect rendered nearby distorter traffic unreliable.

  Enro’s doing. The great dictator had begun his next program of mass murder with the same callous efficiency as the last galactic war: Only now the weapon was a force of nature destroying the fabric of time and space.

  The Corthid ship was entering the atmosphere, and the canopy overhead turned rosy-pink with reentry heat. In moments, the great dark curve of the world had flattened from a globe to a horizon, so that nocturnal landscape was spread below. In the dim light of two moons, Gosseyn could detect rough terrain below or perhaps (in the dimness it was difficult to see) merely clouds, but there was no light, no evidence of cities.

  Dawn broke suddenly over a landscape of red crags tinged with white frost as the ship sped across the terminator to the dayside of the planet. There was nothing below but empty waste.

  O-Vath explained, “Corthid is an ancient world, the eldest world inhabited by man. Our records stretch back over twelve million years. The atmosphere long ago lost its protective chemical-electrical properties, and the oceans evaporated to space. The surface has not been habitable for a quarter-million years: Our peoples removed their civilization underground during the many centuries long before that.”

  Even as he spoke, the ship came to a cavern mouth two miles across. Down into a half-mile-wide bore fell the ship. Here were scattered lights, for built into the sides and floor of the round shaft were installations and barracks, looking small and doll-like in the distance.

  Gosseyn’s extra brain detected charges of energy running through the stone. Miles of rock had been artificially degravitized.

  The bore was not straight, nor was it short. First on one heading, then on another, for many minutes and many miles, the ship sped on. Deeper and deeper beneath the crust of the planet they traveled.

  The bore opened into vastness. They sunk into an underground world. Above them, like a sky, was the solid roof of weightless stone, and suddenly below them, bright from the light of countless floating lamps, were the cities and farmlands of Corthid. The lit areas were gathered around buried cisterns large as oceans, connected by canals as large as rivers.

  The cavern space was huge beyond the reach of sight. The lights were gathered high above the well-tilled robot-worked farms and rice paddies, plashes of green against a dark stone background. But the same lights were gathered low above the avenues and courtyards of the metropolitan areas, giving them a jewel-like, nighttime look. Since the crust of the planet overhead was artificially made weightless, there was no danger of collapse, no matter how large the cavern system grew.

  Degravitized matter was unstable on a fundamental wave-level, so that the approach of any ordinary matter set the gravityless particles into agitation. Any time a ship appeared within light-years of the planet, the planet surface itself would act as one gigantic detection array, and the gravity reaction was not limited by the speed of light. The crust also protected them against all but atomic bombardment of planet-destroying magnitude. It was an elegant system.

  Gosseyn said, “How can your world maintain its predominance? Your space fleet is larger than that of Accolon or Petrino, who are the other major interstellar powers in the League. You have more colony planets under your sway even than Gorgzid. And yet your natural resources and raw materials must have been exhausted long ago.”

  Yvana smiled at him, a dazzling smile. “You know better than that. Predominance is caused by having a superior form of organization. Our system rewards and encourages brilliance but also rewards hard and steady work, team-loyalty. Because those other worlds we visit are richer after we depart, they welcome us again.”

  Evana rolled her eyes. “That’s what we tell people. Actually, it’s just luck.”

  The ship hung in the dark air of the cave, above the dazzling, jewel-like display of the
capital city of Corthindel, on the rocky shores of a buried sea. Through a floor-plate, Gosseyn studied the scene underfoot. There was a squat cubelike building, the center of several power plants and communication grids, which Evana told him was the headquarters of the Safety Authority. Across a large, parklike area from this, a stepped pyramid arose, its peak shining with a flare of atomic light. Rank on rank of that mighty building was merely the housing of electronic brains linked in series. So huge was the thinking machinery that the colonnades and schoolrooms dotting its lower levels only gave a slight texture to the sweep of metal. The Games Machine.

  He asked Yvana about it.

  She said, “It was installed by a small colony of Earthmen who have taken up residence during the war. Recently certain citizens have volunteered to be rated and graded according to the Null-A methods taught by the Machine. Our callidetic adepts can sense the increased ‘luck,’ the ability to shape events, of anyone so trained, and therefore organizations are automatically forming around the Null-A’s here: We predict they will skyrocket to positions of great influence in politics, sciences, arts, and business.”

  Gosseyn realized that the psychological pressures brought to bear on the Corthid culture in the coming years would be slightly terrific. If their leadership was based on self-promoting individual initiative, they would be eager to “exploit” the advantages of the Null-A training but would grow increasingly uneasy as the Null-A training “exploited” them by changing them to personality types more stable, more group oriented (in one sense) than the average callidetic Corthidian but utterly individualistic in another sense.

  Gosseyn said, “I cannot reconcile what you told me about your government system, which seems to rely entirely on the self-initiative of self-appointed leaders, with this Safety Authority, which apparently has no limit to its powers.”

  Yvana told him the Safety Authority was a recently created emergency agency. “Originally it had started in the same self-promoting fashion as other organizations, but when the technology was discovered that held out a promise of being able to drive back the Shadow Effect …”

  Gosseyn was startled by the news. Stepping to a magnifier, he swept his gaze suddenly back and forth across the dark cavern floor below, following the power lines coming from the huge cubelike building of the Safety Authority. There! How could he have missed it? Distorter arrangements the size of skyscrapers, one after another, spaced across the city. Gosseyn focused the viewing plate at a farther point on the cavern floor. There, among the farms and fields under the blazing artificial lights, rose another distorter bank, a four-hundred-foot-tall spire: There was another beyond that some six miles away, and a third, dimly visible in the distance, beyond that. All were connected by heavy insulated cables and power couplings, and farms had been abandoned or other structures torn down, and cleared, to make the wide paths across the cavern floor for these hastily erected cables to pass.

  “… We had to organize ourselves quickly, and with absolute loyalty, behind the leadership of the Safety Authority. The other organizations were pressured by public opinion to fall into line….”

  Gosseyn said, “How did this man make this discovery?”

  Yvana said, “Illverton is a paleoarcheologist, who goes alone to explore the outer asteroids of our system for years at a time. His publicists claim he came across a working starship of the Primordials and the machines aboard were still operational after two billion years, including a model of a device to inhibit the Shadow Effect.”

  Gosseyn said, “Doesn’t it strike you as unlikely that he would happen to come across such an astonishing find so recently, just in time to save your planet?”

  Yvana smiled. “Among a race of people with the Callidetic talent? Unlikely? We don’t ask such questions.”

  Gosseyn said, “I suspect this Illverton is an agent of Enro’s. There is no way he could hide a naval base on the most well-defended enemy planet of the League, unless the local government—in this case, your Safety Authority—was firmly in his camp.”

  Yvana looked at Gosseyn with astonishment. “Are you asking us to rebel? The Safety Authority is our only hope for our planet to escape destruction! Scientists have examined the distorter arrays Illverton erected: They broadcast a specific set of positively reinforcing energies to increase the specific self-similarity of any particles caught in the field. It would reinforce the mathematical identity of shadow-matter and restore its proper atom-to-atom relations to normal time-space. The theory is sound!”

  Gosseyn said, “I am throwing in with your group. Wagering my prestige that whoever first unmasks Illverton will win eternal gratitude from the peoples of Corthid. Are you with me?”

  Yvana smiled, drew her sidearm, and touched an intercom switch.

  “Fall in, boys! Who is ready for a gamble?”

  YVANA led a squad of about forty armed men. They disembarked from the ship and were lowered toward the rooftop of the Safety Authority on pencils of force, falling as rapidly as paratroopers.

  The guards on the roof were astonished when their weapons disappeared from their hands: Gosseyn sent the rifles to the only spot available to his extra brain, the control room overlooking the airlock of Yvana’s ship.

  Held at gunpoint by Yvana and her smiling, glittering-eyed riflemen, the Safety Authority guards showed Gosseyn how to operate the gate controls. He traced the circuits with his extra brain and found no additional wires, nothing leading to an alarm.

  Gosseyn said, “You have no security cameras watching this spot?”

  The guard said in amazement, “Who would want to break into the Safety Authority?”

  But at that same moment, two of the other guards vowed to support Yvana and her group. Both men reached up to their collars and tuned the colors of their uniforms to match the patterns of the Vathir unit. Yvana handed these men their charged rifles with no further ado. They fell into her squad, apparently no more and no less trusted than any other man there.

  The corridor beyond the gate was empty. The architecture here was austere and bare of ornament. The two turncoat guards were happy to lead Gosseyn and the armed squad down the corridors, arresting any other Safety Authority personnel they came across or bribing them to lay down their arms.

  The squad went down a long flight of stairs and then into what looked like a large office: In a plain and spartan style here were fifty desks, behind which sat clerks and secretaries, each with her stat-plate and keypad, as well as small electronic filing machines. When the armed men broke suddenly into the room the women all came to their feet and then, smiling in fox-faced nonchalance, raised their hands and shrugged in surrender.

  Gosseyn did not pause to observe. At the far end of the office were large double doors, sheathed in a force-barrier of military-level strength. With his extra brain, he blasted the panels open with a charge of power similarized to this spot from his battle-suit back in the airlock of the Vathir ship.

  The chamber beyond was huge and paneled with repeater screens. Each screen showed one of the tower-sized distorter arrays spaced throughout the many gigantic caverns of the planet. There was a large desk at the far wall.

  In the tall chair was a figure slumped in sleep. A gray-haired man, dressed in the stark utilitarian uniform of Corthid, lay snoring with his head on the desk.

  Gosseyn stepped over the smoking panels of the shattered door. The man, obviously startled into wakefulness by the explosion, now stirred and raised his head, blinking.

  The face was of a thin-jawed older man: He had the mild expression of an academic. This was not a Gosseyn body.

  Nonetheless, when the man saw Gosseyn he was startled and leaped to his feet.

  And his thoughts flowed into Gosseyn’s brain.

  16

  A memory is an abstraction from reality and, as such, is not perfectly accurate. Always keep in mind that the nervous system records not sense-impressions but our reactions to and interpretations of them.

  Awareness crashed into Gosseyn. Quicker than
any spoken word could convey, memories flashed from X to Gosseyn.

  X had been asleep to keep his nervous system in a receptive state, so that he had been aware of Gosseyn’s every thought and action as he appeared in this area of space, was recovered by the Vathir Organization ship, came to the surface, prepared his rebellion, and broke in. Now that X was shocked awake, his every thought tense and focused, Gosseyn’s thoughts could not match his for speed or clarity.

  Even this was part of the plan: Gosseyn, who became the “lesser” pole of the thought-flow once X woke up, was now receiving thought, and so would leave no trace of his memories in Illverton as they both perished.

  And the thought Gosseyn received was: poor, pathetic, young fool—the impression was of a creature tens of thousands, or even millions, of years old. This ancient, ancient being regarded Gosseyn as a temporary aberration, an excess chain of memory about to be excised.

  Gosseyn said aloud, “What’s the trap?”

  X could not prevent himself from thinking the details of the trap, nor did he bother trying to hide his thoughts.

  He was not really here. Using the same technique that the so-called Chessplayer once had used to imprint Gosseyn’s consciousness on the nervous system of Ashargin, X had imprinted his consciousness into the helpless body of Illverton, a nondescript archeologist, whose long solitary sabbaticals to the remote regions of the Corthid star system made him the perfect victim. The hermit had no one who would recognize his sudden change of personality.

  And the peoples of Corthid had one blind spot in their mental makeup. They believed in extraordinary strokes of luck, and they cooperated wholeheartedly with projects that seemed to be touched with that divine fire of good fortune: including a project to protect the world from the Shadow Effect by erecting, in record time, an astonishing number of ultra-large-scale distorter mechanisms. And the true purpose of those mechanisms was …

  The repeater screens behind Illverton showed the distorter towers, hundreds and thousands of them, placed in a pattern all across the globe of Corthid, both on the surface and in the caverns beneath, all operating at their peak load. Eerie lights shined from them. When Gosseyn entered the room and woke X, that acted as the signal for those towers to erect some immense pattern of distorter-energies all across the planet.