Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Gosseyn realized that there was too much he did not know. There were too many worlds in the galaxy, too many advances in technology, for one man from a world newly introduced into galactic commerce to be familiar with.

  Gosseyn merely tightened his grip, memorized the man’s body, and set up a cue to trigger similarity to a spot of deck he had memorized in his cabin that morning.

  A tense moment passed. He did not activate the cue. Gosseyn did not want to similarize himself and the man out of the room, for fear that the disappearance of his body mass would trigger the weapon. An atomic discharged in this confined space might well kill everyone on the observation deck, or even several decks of the ship, if the energy breached hull plates behind him. But if the man, or some compatriot of his, were controlling the weapon remotely, he evidently did not wish to fire at Gosseyn, not while Gosseyn held the man in his grip.

  Gosseyn turned his head to study the book lying on the table. It took him the normal long moment to memorize its atomic structure. But the moment his head was turned, a shock burned his hand, and the pain jarred his arm and made him release the man. Gosseyn cried out, startled, and began to stand up but saw a flux in the energy signature of the book at his sudden motion.

  He turned his head and looked out through the transparent hull, memorized the outer few layers of atoms, and triggered the book to go there. It disappeared from the tabletop and reappeared tumbling alongside the ship, touching the surface of the window. There was no air or relative motion, of course, so the book maintained its position, pages pressed up against the transparent hull.

  There was no explosion, no discharge. Nonetheless, the passengers noticed the pale rectangle of the book appearing suddenly out of nothing, and it seemed huge against the backdrop of the planet behind it, because there were no visual cues as to the distance. Someone shouted hoarsely, and the people at the tables came to their feet, voices loud.

  Gosseyn stood and turned, but the man had disappeared. The exit was suddenly crowded with nervous passengers eager to leave the lounge, and Gosseyn neither saw the man, nor could he pick out one nervous system signature amid the neural-electric “noise” of a roomful of startled and annoyed people.

  Gosseyn stepped away from the observation deck himself and found a quiet spot, a maintenance closet, whose electric lock his extra brain could short-circuit. He brought the book back into his hand. It was steaming with the cold of space. Again his extra brain detected the energy levels fluctuating. He opened the spine with a tool he found on the shelf here.

  The circuit inside was not a weapon. It was a simple distance-locator. The book could be set to audio, and it would read itself aloud while there was someone nearby listening, but if it detected no human-sized masses near, it would shut off. The mild electromagnetic fluctuations Gosseyn had been detecting had not been connected to anything other than the normal reading circuits.

  And yet they seemed abnormally strong. He found a tracking screen pasted to the back cover. The book had been modified to track the configurations of several people over a number of yards, each individual within the scan radius tagged according to his particular biometric contour. It was a rather clever method of tracking an individual in a crowded room, especially an individual whose unique nervous system structure rendered him distinct. Only a very close inspection—or an extra brain that could trace electronic vibrations—would have detected the reading circuit’s modification from its original innocent purpose.

  But the range was surely insufficient to track Gosseyn when he distorter-jumped from one ship to another.

  He decided he had no time to waste with this. There were lifeboats on every deck of the great space liner, fifty-foot torpedo-shaped machines, each with her own small distorter-atomic power combination engine. He strolled casually from his maintenance closet to the nearest lifeboat, paused, and used his prognostication power to examine the future. He could see small, clear pictures in his imagination of what would happen, up to about fifteen minutes from now. He would launch the boat, which would decouple from the hull of the liner with explosive bolts. The ship’s alarm would go off, and the radio board would light up with messages from the captain of the liner, which Gosseyn would not answer. He would similarize the man following him into the small cabin of the boat, with a cue in Gosseyn’s extra brain tagged to retreat at similarity speeds back to his cabin aboard the ship if he suffered any pain, shock, fear, or surprise. The man would appear, apparently in the middle of a costume change, for he would be naked from the waist up, wearing no mask. His face and upper chest should show a hideous net of scars, as if from a powerful electrical burn. The head was hideous, a fleshless skull of muscle and nerve, coated with transparent medicinal plastic, the eyes lidless, the nose cropped. The faceless man would turn and raise his hand … a flare of intense, white light … and then, a blur occluded the vision.

  Gosseyn no doubt would use his distorter power at that point, or perhaps the faceless man had some ability to distort the metric of space-time that resulted in the same effect: a break of normal, linear causation and hence a blankness in the vision of the future.

  Of course, the moment of Gosseyn’s death, when his memories were transmitted to a waiting Gosseyn body, might also distort the fabric of time sufficiently to blur the prediction-vision. Were any of his bodies, hidden long ago by Lavoisseur, even in range?

  On the other hand, if this faceless man was carrying a weapon of tremendous power, it might be better to have him away from a ship of innocent people. Gosseyn winced at the idea of the type of fantastic energies needed to overwhelm his complex of defenses being unleashed aboard the confined spaces of a starship.

  Well, the future was not set in stone. He opened the hatch—the alarms automatically rang—and launched. During the moment when the little boat spun away from the giant space liner, Gosseyn memorized a patch of deck within the lifeboat, as well as the electronic patterns of the faster-than-light distorter-radio.

  Then he similarized himself back to his own cabin and triggered the cue to similarize the faceless man into the space-boat. The space-boat was even now visible through the porthole in Gosseyn’s cabin, dwindling in the distance.

  He used his extra brain to send his voice over the radio to the space-boat. “I would still like to know how you managed to follow me.”

  Gosseyn could feel the trickle of power in the area: The circuit was open, but the man was not responding. Through the porthole, Gosseyn could see two larger sideboats had been launched by the captain, to go recover the space-boat.

  Over the radio he mentioned the approaching rescuers. “I suspect you have some weapon of sufficient power to destroy the sideboats approaching your position. If you open fire on them, I can similarize you out into the vacuum.”

  The man’s voice was remarkably cultured and smooth toned. “Obviously I cannot reveal my methods over an open radio. Can you remove me from this embarrassing situation? My poor rescuers would be shocked to see my face in its current state. Perhaps we could meet in person? We have much to discuss.”

  Gosseyn attempted to see the future, but, of course, no picture could form. A moment from now he was going to distort the faceless man into this cabin, and this blocked further visions of the future.

  What happened was this. The man appeared in the cabin, between Gosseyn’s bed and the half-open door leading into the water closet, where there was a mirror over the sink, and sockets for self-moving razors and the like. The man was unarmed. Instead of turning to face Gosseyn, who was behind him, the man cocked his hideously scarred, bald head to one side, staring toward the half-open door. Because it looked so much like the skull-face was staring at itself in the mirror, Gosseyn did not immediately recognize the gesture, though it was one he himself did every day.

  The faceless man was memorizing the power output from the electric socket. Gosseyn realized this only when the lightning bolt struck him, knocking him into painful unconsciousness.

  25

  Every model of
the universe, being an abstraction, is inaccurate: The process itself of modeling creates structural barriers to the comprehension.

  Don’t worry, Cousin. I used a nonlethal voltage,” came the cultured, melodic tones from the horrid, skull-like face. “I had to guess about your body weight, though: There should only be a small scar.”

  Gosseyn came groggily to consciousness. He was in some storeroom or hold belowdecks, lying on his back on his numb arms. From the strange silence in the air, the lack of the whisper of ventilation or the throb of engines, he guessed that the ship had landed, making the final distorter jump from orbit to a surface berth.

  The faceless man was seated cross-legged on the metal deck. Crates, chained down, loomed to either side, forming a little nook where the two were hidden. Gosseyn noted that he sensed no neural flows from the man: The electric system of the ship, the atomic pile in the stern, were likewise blank to him. When he attempted to memorize the area just behind where his captor was sitting, nothing happened.

  Gosseyn said thickly, for his tongue and his jaw were still numb, “What did you do to me?”

  “I injected your brain stem with a mild neurotoxin, which is temporarily relaxing your space-distortion-control lobe. Amazing, isn’t it, that even one of the Higher Orders can be neutralized, if one knows the precise situation.”

  Gosseyn shook his head. “But you don’t know. That part of my brain was balancing the energy flows in the primal moment of the universe, fifteen billion years ago. If you relaxed it, there will be a reaction. Similarization effects are not instantaneous, but something has been set in motion.” Gosseyn was not sure about the details of such immense energy structures, but assuming the similarity properties were roughly the same as sending an equal mass of electron volts across fifteen billion light-years, the effect, whatever it was, should manifest within his local frame of reference in roughly …

  Gosseyn did the calculation in his head and then smiled to himself. “Never mind. There is no immediate danger.” Twenty-decimal-point accuracy worked out to be about ten hours for every thousand light-years, so the time span involved was one and a half million hours, or 171 years.

  The man said, “Enlighten me. Which Gilbert Gosseyn are you? The one who killed every man on the Security Council of the Interstellar League? Or the one who kidnapped the Empress Reesha, in order to whip the Imperial planets up into a war frenzy? Or the one who was spotted by long-range satellite orbiting the planet Corthid a few hours before the whole world was swallowed in the same Shadow Effect that is currently spreading throughout the space of the Core worlds, spreading faster than the speed of light, and increasing in speed?”

  Gosseyn tried to sit up and found that his hands were bound behind him by electronic handcuffs, the kind that could shock or stun a prisoner upon a radio signal.

  Gosseyn said, “Who are you, and how did you trace me?”

  The horrid fleshless face could form no expression, but the voice betrayed a hint of condescending humor: “Come now. You are my prisoner. I ask; you answer. It’s traditional.”

  Gosseyn leaned back to ease the pressure on his arms. “It’s not that simple. If you were an officer, if you were within your jurisdiction, we would be in a police station, not hiding here.”

  “My court sits wherever I sit, and I am all my officers,” the faceless man said, his voice smooth with an ironic, self-deprecating humor. “And yes, we are hiding. From your foes, I think, as well as mine.”

  “Court?”

  “I am Anslark Dzan of Glorious Dzan.”

  “I don’t recognize the name.”

  “Prince Anslark. Anslark the Marred. Are you from some newly discovered world?”

  “Yes. From Venus in the Sol System. How would you know the location and composition of my extra brain but not know my origins?”

  “The space-controlling centers of the brain are located in neural ganglia just above the spine. It is a family trait of the royal house of Dzan, and my spies tell me the Predictors of Yaltera have the same structure in a stunted form. So you are not a cousin? I had been meaning to ask you how you moved my whole body from one point to another.”

  Gosseyn said, “You can control electronic flows between two memorized points, but nothing more complicated than that.”

  Anslark of Dzan nodded briefly.

  Gosseyn estimated that the Dzan prince could form a fifteen-decimal-point similarity. Electromagnetic waves differed one to the next so little that, for all practical purposes, they were already similar to five to ten decimal points to any given spot in the universe.

  Gosseyn said, “I can perform a more exact similarization than you can, on the order of what a distorter circuit can do. How did you find me?”

  “Caleb the No-man sent me. We knew your destination was Petrino. Once we confirmed your identity, the man who cannot be killed, who can be anywhere in one step, my superiors decided I was the only one qualified to keep an eye on you. After that, it was just a matter of putting agents with portable distorters hidden in briefcases on every ship in every port you visited, so that I could swap places with them and be sent from ship to ship as you were sighted. How did you find me? I have been trained by an Accolon No-man in how to avoid patterns of behavior that attract intuitive notice.”

  Gosseyn said, “After we come to an agreement, I’ll tell you.”

  The fleshless red skull-face nodded. No expression could form in those lidless eyes, but Gosseyn sensed a wary tension in the man’s neuroelectric patterns.

  Gosseyn said, “Enro’s people have already taken over Petrino, haven’t they? You are hiding from the customs officers. Since you have both a portable distorter tuned to a planet of a distant star as well as the ability to control electric circuits around you, I am assuming the customs officers are equipped with some special technical advantage you estimate is overwhelming.”

  Again there was no expression, but a hint of cautious admiration crept into Prince Anslark’s voice: “You are trained in some logic system that allows you to make intuitive deductions?”

  Gosseyn said, “It is not intuition but a flexible mechanism to adjust the nervous system to reality based on learned habits of multivalued, scientific thought. Your behavior does not fit into any other model.”

  The man stood up. “Surely the resemblance between this system, the No-men of Accolon, and the Royal Family of Dzan cannot be coincidence. The matter bears investigating. Do you have myths on your world of a universal disaster, from which a pair of men and a pair of women survived?”

  “Something like that,” admitted Gosseyn. He heard the lock of the handcuffs click open behind his back. Anslark apparently had very fine control over electric circuits in his environment. Gosseyn brought his hands in front of him and removed the remaining cuff. He asked, “Does your Royal Family have a custom of placing its royal infants in some sort of sensory-deprivation tank for an extended period?”

  Anslark said, “It is no secret. We sleep for several months within that prehistoric starship which brought our first parents to Dzan, and the electronic brain aboard—which my great-grandfather Urien Dzan had partially repaired—modifies our nervous systems. I am the last of my line. Enro’s troops bombarded our Sacred Dome and destroyed the ancient machine, thinking it was a blasphemous mockery of their Crypt of the Sleeping God. How did you know?”

  Gosseyn said, “My creator enforced a similar regime of electronic training on me, when I was lying in a full-grown but dormant state.”

  “Count yourself lucky, friend.”

  “Why?”

  Anslark pointed at his own ruined features. “You have no family. No fierce competition for royal prerogatives.”

  Gosseyn said, “I have a twin.”

  “Would he run lightning in a brother’s face for pleasure?”

  “He has a larger target, and his motivations are more neurotic than that, but his crimes are basically the same as that, yes. Except he seeks to create a totalitarian state embracing every world. How long till yo
ur drug works its way out of my nervous system?”

  “What is to be our agreement?” asked Anslark.

  Gosseyn said curtly, “That we shall both act rationally.”

  Anslark said, “Coming from you, I will trust that means what I think it does.”

  Anslark stepped around behind Gosseyn. Gosseyn felt the cold sting of a needle on his neck. A moment later came a warm, slightly painful sensation, tingling in his neck muscles and the back of his skull.

  “How did you find me?” Anslark reminded him.

  “Prediction power. It operates by similarization of the brain pattern of the Predictor in two time-segments to negate the illusion of space-time, and allow thought-information across the gap. I have the ability of one of the visionaries of Yalerta….”

  Then he stopped, for his awareness of the energy flows in the area had returned. A clear, small emotionless voice spoke into his brain: A second target has become aware of this unit. Direct additional circuits XX-0112 through XY-6705 to recalcitrant area … effect negative … stepping up power to secondary backups … redirect … effect negative … engaging tertiary circuits—

  Robot brains were directing a pattern of mind-control force-fields into this area. Gosseyn could also sense the neuroelectric excitement of Anslark’s secondary brain, like a bright, hot point of fire burning at the top of his brain stem.

  Gosseyn said, “Are you aware of what the robots are saying?”

  Anslark said calmly, “No. I am redirecting their electric forces into safety contact points in the ship, to ground the signal. It is only a matter of time until my defensive system is overwhelmed. Can you do anything? Get us out of here?”

  Gosseyn said, “Getting out of places is my special talent.” By the time he was finished speaking, they were aboard the space-boat, which had been restored to its launch tube in the hull of the Star of Petrine.