Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  The vision-plate on the control board showed the great space liner was resting in a launch cradle on the planet surface, but the spaceport was an ancient one, aboveground, and the domelike fabric stretched across the many acres where ships rested was little more than a sheet of synthetic material meant to keep out the rain.

  The acceleration pressed them against their couches as the space-boat shot from the side of the space liner and rocketed skyward. There was no jar as the little boat tore through the roof. The pinpoint of the Pistol Star was brighter than the sun seen from Earth, and it shined a harsh glare among the strange, gorgeous buildings of Petrino, edifices of marble and green copper. Even the tallest skyscrapers were covered with vines and yellowed with age: The overall effect was one of immense antiquity.

  Anslark said, “I don’t suppose there is any way to get back to my cabin? My extra faces and other equipment are there.”

  Gosseyn said, “Sorry, I forgot to tell you that the moment I transmitted us here, I had the vision showing that we are about to be fired upon.”

  A cylindrical machine six thousand yards long, a battlecruiser, was dropping out of the dazzling white sky. The radio on the control board clattered to life: “To unidentified space-boat, this is Petrino Civilian Air Control. Do not change velocity or heading. Prepare to be examined by non-Aristotelian robot psychologists.”

  Gosseyn’s extra brain detected a distortion effect as some remote unit, similar to a lie detector, attuned itself to his nervous system.

  And Gosseyn was fighting to retain his sanity.

  26

  In nature, the composition of a phenomenon is known by its observed behavior: Where the behavior shows consistency, a correct abstract model can be formed for events of those types, but the abstraction is limited to those types.

  In his head, Gosseyn heard the cold voice: “Target acquired! Hypo-coded reflexes to render subject compliant to Total Loyalty directive not found. Subject is in violation of thought-conformity laws. Engaging mechanism for brain-imprint.”

  He felt the mass of imprinted thought-emotions trying to force its way into his brain: a psychotic affection for the planet Petrino, combined with an infantile terror, programmed to be felt at the most basic level of the subconscious, for symbols and uniforms and slogans of the ruling party of Petrino.

  Had it succeeded, it would have been a massive overload of his emotions, even if his opinions had been otherwise: a perfect mechanical method of propaganda, a direct method of hypnotic indoctrination.

  The technology was not fundamentally different from the methods used to train interplanetary travelers with new languages instantly, except that it used Null-A technical methods to effect subconscious nerve-word associations.

  But they were the methods of an insane Null-A. The rhythms of the robot-controlled electron tubes were trying to discourage certain nerve paths and encourage others: trying to replace a delicate system of truth-to-fact word-emotion associations with false-to-fact ones.

  Instinctively, Gosseyn performed a cortical-thalamic pause.

  Normally, the effect of this pause was to break the cycle of perception-emotion-reaction by which humans form their behavior-patterns and adapt them to their sense impressions. However, in this case, Gosseyn felt a searing pain, and his vision began to turn black, as intolerable nerve-pressure was brought to bear on his central nervous system.

  “Target identified … nervous system of recalcitrant type … cortex-thalamic nerve pathways detected … incapacitate! … Adding additional voltage to neural signal now!”

  The robot-directed web of electronic forces had reacted instantly to any conscious interference in the thalamic cycle: This was a weapon specifically designed to identify and electrocute any target with Null-A training.

  The voltage jarred Gosseyn, and he could neither move nor speak, his muscles paralyzed. The joystick of the space-boat was in his hands, but his muscles were locked: The space-boat was hurling blindly through the air in low parabola, and the ground slowly swung into view while Gosseyn sat frozen at the controls.

  Gosseyn tried to similarize himself to one of his memorized spots: Nothing happened. Unable to perform the Null-A pause, Gosseyn could not break the rising tide of panic now pounding his temples. Twisted or not, X had the genius of Lavoisseur, the expertise needed to program these deadly robots with specific circuits to detect and neutralize nerve-flows in Gosseyn’s extra brain.

  Gosseyn remembered the comment of the Games Machine, that nerve-suppression circuits only affect what they are designed to affect. So when he tried to summon up his shadow-shape, nothing interfered.

  His ability to assume a shadowy form was automatic. An immense amount of technical data, a lifetime of training, had been expertly imprinted into his mind by his far-future selves. Instinctively he used a memorization technique to hold his own body in a type of coherence, to keep it “identified” to itself even as it entered a non-identity condition with the surrounding environment.

  The world around him grew blurred and foggy, though the basic shapes of objects could still be dimly seen: the shining curve of the control board, the looming figure of Anslark. There was a technique to sharpen his vision by allowing incoming photons to achieve a greater degree of similarity than the shadow-shape normally permitted, but Gosseyn dared not employ that technique yet.

  “Target attunement lost … data unclear … employ increasing voltage until incapacitated target destruction is confirmed.”

  The robots reacted: An electrical current of immense voltage suddenly appeared within the volume occupied by his shadow-body. Since his form was now made of matter out of similarity with normal time-space, his atoms and molecules no longer recognized or reacted to the molecular, atomic, and electronic patterns of particle behavior around him. The electrons surged through the space his body occupied, ignoring and being ignored.

  Gosseyn, again prompted by his buried training, made the world darker and blurrier around him, decreasing his attachment to the surrounding behaviors of the photons and electrons. The lightning bolt flashed in the middle of his body, vaporizing the padding of the acceleration couch, setting insulation smoldering. Blue sparks snapped from the bent metal framework.

  But that was all. Even as greater and ever greater voltages poured into the tiny space of the space-boat cabin, a strange shining glow appeared on all the metal surfaces within the ship, they grew brighter, but Anslark was preventing the electricity from flowing. Immense static charge was being built up, but neither the air molecules nor the metal interior of the boat was conducting it. The electricity shined from every surface, but it harmed nothing.

  With his dark and blurred vision, Gosseyn saw Anslark touch the radio control. The man said softly, “This is space-boat calling Petrino Civilian Air Control vessel. Something strange has happened to the pilot of the boat. I am utterly loyal to Petrino and will obey all lawful commands given to me. May I speak to your commander that I may identify myself to him? Are you standing near the radio set, Commander?”

  “This is Commander Contrebis of the Standardization Committee. Are you ready to land and yield yourself? Perfect loyalty demands nothing less than absolute obedience.”

  “Commander Contrebis, this is Prince Anslark Dzan of Glorious Dzan. I never yield.”

  The glow in the cabin vanished. Gosseyn could detect the communication line becoming charged with the immense voltage the robot units had been pouring into the cabin. Anslark, of course, simply prevented the electricity from returning along the path of least resistance back into the space-boat.

  The vision-plate showed smoke pouring from the shattered midsection of the battlecruiser. The great ship began to recede into the sky, leaving a trail of black smoke behind her as she sought the safety of the upper atmosphere.

  Of course, the barrage of missiles from her rear tubes came into view as the space-boat’s proximity alarm shrieked.

  GOSSEYN returned to solid form to find that the robot units had broken off their auto
matic attack: Their central control from the ship had been broken. A cortical-thalamic pause was sufficient, for now, to hold at bay the psychic damage from the brutal, robotic nerve-training method: He would need more careful Null-A conditioning to make certain all his nerve cells were clear of the artificial charges that had been impressed on them. That was for later.

  For now, swiftly, they had but a moment to defeat the missile fire. Luckily, the space-boat’s control panel had automatically focused their plates, one on each of the incoming collision-threats. All the incoming missiles could be seen at a glance. Anslark suppressed the mechanisms of the missiles’ electronic brains, while Gosseyn memorized their structures. Anslark similarized a bolt of energy from the space-boat’s reactor into one of them, heating it instantly to the ignition point: Gosseyn similarized the energy of that explosion into the others, to explode them a safe distance from the boat.

  At the moment of the explosions, Anslark deflected the radar-beams coming from the ground stations below. Meanwhile, half a dozen other warships were descending through the atmosphere toward them, hull plates redhot with the reentry speed. These ships were scattered, a search pattern, not converging toward the space-boat’s location: This told Gosseyn that they were being directed from the momentarily blind ground stations.

  While thus radar-invisible, Gosseyn drove the space-boat suddenly out from the cloud of missile debris, across several miles, and, still faster than the speed of sound, into a river nearby. He similarized a long cylindrical volume of water out of his path, creating a momentary vacuum, so that the boat did not shatter when it passed below the level of the rest of the water. The boat did not even get wet until they had decelerated on roaring jets to a near stop, gravity plates groaning, and then the collapsing hollow tube of water momentarily exploded into bubbling steam, the river water carrying away the friction-heat of their reckless passage through the atmosphere.

  Now they lay in a small underground cave Gosseyn had carved out of the rock by memorizing huge chunks of stone before the bore and similarizing them into the space behind.

  Gosseyn said, “What interests me about this prediction power of mine is that the vision showed me only the missiles, not the neural-electronic attack, nor my retreat into shadow-form.” He explained that the Predictors of Yalerta had not been able to predict the Follower: The shadow-condition obviously nullified the energy connections through time the Predictors were sensitive to, in much the same way Gosseyn’s own distortion powers did.

  He should not have been surprised to learn that Anslark knew more about Secoh than he did. The royal government of Dzan was one of the nineteen major members of the League. Of course their spies had reported thoroughly on all the members of the Gorgzid royal court before and after the war: When Secoh slew the Sleeping God of his cult, he had briefly assumed his shadow-form. It was done in a setting public enough (all the high officers and priesthood of the Greatest Empire had been present) that the identity of Secoh as the rumored Follower had been confirmed.

  Anslark said, “The Follower had been committing a series of political assassinations among the League military experts and civilian authorities in preparation for the war. This eerie shadow-shape was a figure spoken of in terrified whispers, only glimpsed, never photographed. When Enro heard of the death of Thorson by a superhuman immortal, of course he dispatched his special killer to investigate, thinking the Follower would be immune to whatever weapon had been used to slay Thorson. And, more important, Enro knew Secoh, his fanatic high priest, would be immune to whatever temptation had pulled Thorson away from his duty.”

  Anslark’s next question was an interesting one: “My information is that the Follower could use similarized energy as a weapon, even as we who are of the royal blood of Dzan. But you had to become solid to use your extra brain’s distorter on the missiles. It looked like you lost the use of your other special abilities when in your shadow-form. What did the Follower know that you don’t?”

  Gosseyn was not sure. But unless he discovered the Follower’s technique, for Gosseyn the shadow-form was strictly defensive.

  HE similarized the two of them back to Gosseyn’s cabin aboard the Star of Petrino. Anslark asked for his book back: He wanted to use it to be sure the corridor outside was clear of customs officers before he opened the door.

  Gosseyn said, “Permit me.” He foresaw a route that would carry Anslark back to his cabin without being seen by anyone. The cabin door itself was locked, as the door key had been left behind with Anslark’s clothing and gear. Gosseyn was able to step through the door in his shadow-form, solidify, and open the door from the inside. Anslark gathered his gear. This included a suit of specially woven strands that, when exposed to a controlled energy field projected from his nervous system, stiffened into impact-resistant ablative cloth. This armor would deflect nothing stronger than a small-caliber bullet or a heat-induction ray in the kilokelvin range, but it was lightweight, easily concealed.

  Gosseyn similarized them both back to the space-boat. Anslark opened a folding box, which contained nine or ten fully made up and lifelike masks, along with two more smooth flesh-colored blanks, a set of wigs, and an array of electronic medical tools. Anslark donned the face of a youngish, thin-cheeked, dark-haired man and spent a moment in the mirror adjusting the flesh tones, adding moles and marks of sunburn. Gosseyn stared in fascination at a tiny throbbing vessel in the mask’s forehead that appeared when Anslark tested the anger-blush response.

  Anslark said, “I bent the signals carrying the mind-conditioning patterns away from myself, but I notice you did not do the same. Are you now loyal to the ideals, whatever they are, of the Psychiatric Standardization Committee of Petrino?”

  Gosseyn shook his head. “Even an untrained man would not be convinced by that technique, not by a short, onetime exposure. It was actually an examination, at least at first: The imprint would have fallen into previously established nerve channels had we been previously exposed. More sinister is the fact that the robots were programmed to check for the nerve paths established by repeated cortical-thalamic pauses. These were hunting for Null-A’s.”

  Anslark said thoughtfully, “If an untrained man needed repeated exposures to be affected, then this is not the means Enro is using to take over this planet.”

  Gosseyn nodded. “As a tool of political revolution, it would be useless except in the hands of a small, highly loyal, and highly motivated cabal of professionals. And being used so openly, it is not meant to establish control, but to maintain it. Enro’s already taken over.”

  Prince Anslark’s new face had a wide range of emotions: He could curl merely part of the mask’s mouth, quirk an eyebrow, and make the artificial eyes glitter with mirth. “And did you notice the important part, Mr. Gosseyn? The robots were centrally controlled. That means the cabal maintains strict control over this technology, with all the secrecy and internal monitoring that strict control implies. In this computerized age of stat-plates and electronic brains, that means there is a thread of electrons, no matter how that thread is hidden, passed through relays, or scrambled, which links any one of those mind-control robots to the central headquarters. The real headquarters.”

  THERE was a toolkit aboard the space-boat, meant for making any of the numerous repairs needed during an emergency. The brain in Anslark’s book was intelligent enough, after they added more electron tubes to it, to pilot the boat. Anslark laid it facedown on the control panel’s stat-plate interface and wired it into the ship’s opened circuit boards. He doffed the lifelike mask he had been wearing—this was the only face of Anslark’s the space line company and, by now, the Petrino authorities had in their picture-records. He draped it over the headrest of the acceleration couch and programmed it with a few complex sets of expressions and phrases. Then he tightly focused the lens of the radio at it, in case the patrol ship made an incoming call.

  The mask was able to produce a fairly complex electroencephalograph signal. It would not have fooled a lie detector, bu
t the circuits of any mind-control robots scanning the interior of the space-boat were probably not built to search for this type of deception. Naturally, it would not react properly, it would not react at all, to the type of warped Null-A imprinting technique the robots were going to use.

  Gosseyn said, “I am going to have to leave you behind.”

  Anslark said, “Carry me. Your clothes and other memorized objects go into the shadow-condition.”

  Gosseyn said, “Organisms have a lower tolerance for non-identity. I am maintaining a complex balance of electro-chemical and gravitic forces within the shadow-molecule structure of my body when I assume that form. I can increase and decrease my interaction with the surrounding universe: That’s why I don’t fall to the core of the planet. I doubt I could maintain those delicate balances in another living person’s body.”

  So Anslark remained behind in the cave with the navigation equipment taken bodily from the space-boat. Gosseyn assumed his shadow-form, floated up through the rock to the surface, solidified, and memorized a plot of earth nearby, to which he similarized the space-boat. It was a greater mass than he usually transported, but his capacities seemed to have increased recently. Perhaps it was a side effect of the imprinted training from the far future.

  In a moment he was airborne. To save time, he asked the book to pilot the boat into the airspace above a military base and dive groundward. He assumed his shadow-shape during the dive.

  Anslark had a sense of humor. When the camera lens lit up, the mask assumed an expression of bored disdain and answered the air traffic officer’s increasingly impatient questions and commands with insults.

  After the space-boat was destroyed, Gosseyn returned to the cave. “Well?”

  Anslark was bent over the glowing surface of the electronic map, calipers and straightedge in his hand. Instead of wearing a look of concentration, his features looked blank and stunned. Since the real Anslark was concentrating, he was not using his electropathy to control the web of fine circuits in his mask.