Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  He recalled Patricia saying that the special conditions on Ur would help Enro avoid dangerous side effects from his powers. Gosseyn now saw why. A small-scale version of the Stability Sphere was at work here: a system to return any atoms of the “memorized” atmosphere back from space. For the system to work, every atom of the atmosphere, and a larger mass of the planetary crust, would have to be maintained. Each particle of this world would be abnormally resistant to any non-identity process.

  Underfoot, darker streaks of mineral grit ran through the scarlet sands, as well as bright tawny patches. The beach was striped like a coral snake. The lighter gravity was like being underwater: Gosseyn’s first footstep carried him yards across the gritty sand, and the plume of black specks that rose at his footfall climbed into the air higher than his head. A single jump took him to the top of the cliff.

  From there, he beheld a landscape of broken peaks and jagged outcroppings, leaning rocks and strangely elongated miters of stone. To his left was a deep river valley. The waters were white, but falling with ghostlike slowness.

  Atop eight gigantic pillars was a pagoda, with tier on tier of ornamental stories rising, each higher above the next. Gosseyn recognized the building material and structural style: This had been made by the Primordials, perhaps by one of the first landings in this decant of the galaxy during the Great Migration.

  Gosseyn kept adjusting his estimate of the building’s size upward. Clouds hung about the middle of the structure. Four of the huge legs on which the building rested had touched the ground at a point beyond the nearby horizon of this tiny world. The vast building straddled the world. When he saw a landing platform near the top of the pagoda held not one but several of the mile-long superspaceships of the Greatest Empire, as small as a lady’s dangling earring at this distance, Gosseyn gave up trying to form an estimate of the height.

  Instead, he closed his eyes and studied the structure with his extra brain. Atomic and superatomic piles, coolant systems, amplifiers, and generators were in the core, along with thousands of robotic brains and distorter systems linking this hub of the Greatest Empire to its sixty thousand star systems and eighteen hundred thousand ships. Gosseyn’s extra brain could feel, like sharp metallic pings of radar, the fluctuation in time-space when a distorter carried men, war machines, or cargo to or from the many cubic miles of warehouse and barracks inside the titanic pagoda-building. The distorters were in constant use. The nervous energy traces of men and women—the personnel were in the tens of thousands—were not evenly distributed. In one place was an immense gathering, and, as if he could hear the dim roaring of a distant mob, Gosseyn could detect a state of nervous excitement, of alarm, gripping the immense gathering.

  Without bothering to open his eyes, Gosseyn used his Enro-like method to view the area remotely. It was a huge military amphitheater occupying most of one deck of the colossal pagoda. Memorizing a spot with his extra brain, he stepped there.

  Gosseyn appeared in a crouch behind a massive floral arrangement to one side of the altar. The silver vase lush with white blooms hid him from the gathered battalions of Greatest Empire soldiers standing at attention across the acres of metallic floor. A priest Gosseyn did not recognize (but who, from his robes, Gosseyn assumed to be the Lord Guardian of the Sleeping God who had replaced Secoh) was standing a yard or two from Gosseyn. There was also a marine guard with a high-energy rifle a little ways to one side of him. But neither this guard nor the priest saw him. Their eyes were locked on the scene before the altar.

  Here was Patricia in ornate robes and jewels and a barbaric headdress. She had dropped her bouquet of white roses and drawn a gun from her garter belt. She was struggling with the figure that gripped her slender wrist in one fist.

  The man who held Patricia’s forearm in a crushing grip was Enro the Red, wearing a breastplate of shining red steel, ornaments and jewels draping his wide shoulders and massive chest, his arms and legs clad in a dark red uniform of military cut. A steel helmet with a crown of royalty bolted to its top lay at his feet, as if he had been holding it under one arm but dropped it to raise his hand. There was no weapon in his hand, but his fingers were glowing with an unnatural light, like Saint Elmo’s fire.

  A scepter topped with three jeweled eyes had fallen down the red-carpeted steps leading from the altar. There was a boy, perhaps an ensign or squire, lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood. Toppled from the dead boy’s hands was a velvet pillow on which were the bracelets and rings of the Gorgzid wedding ritual. Murder had interrupted the ceremony.

  Slowly sliding up the stairs in the ominous silence was a shadow-being.

  Thousands and tens of thousands of Greatest Empire soldiers tracked the apparition with their rifles and pistols, and all were awaiting the order to open fire.

  The pitch of the voice that came from the shadow-being was that of the seventeen-year-old Gosseyn, but his words rang out with the majestic and commanding tones and word rhythm of Enro the Red, not the voice of the man called X.

  The Shadow-Enro said, “Stand away from her. Stand away from my woman!”

  Enro, the solid Enro, threw back his head and laughed. He straightened his arm holding Patricia, so that her jeweled slippers were kicking inches above the bloodstained carpet, though the many folds of her white gown, and the long train, still reached the floor. “My sister is mine,” he called out in a booming voice. “The laws, the ancient practices, the Sacred Writings of the Sleeping God: All agree that she is meant to be my bride. The hate I feel toward any man who touches her is proof of that. It is a divine hate: It is the God’s own fury, placed in me like fire.”

  Patricia kicked her feet so that she was facing toward Enro and could jam her pistol barrel into the buckles of his breastplate, near his ribs. But she did not shoot. Her eyes were on the shadow-figure, narrowed thoughtfully.

  Gosseyn was preparing to memorize her and distort her out of danger. It was her expression, nothing more, that made Gosseyn pause. What was happening here was not what it seemed. He looked left and right, wondering what he had overlooked.

  The immediate future was blurred, so no clues were there.

  Then Gosseyn noticed the glassy-eyed stare of the soldiers, thousand of them. The nerve rhythm issuing from their bodies was strangely synchronized. Enro’s own troops he had exposed to something more intrusive than mere Loyalty Machine conditioning. Gosseyn suspected he was seeing the result of radical hypnotic surgery: the ultimate perversion of Null-A knowledge. None would fire without orders.

  And some of the weapons—Gosseyn had not noticed at first, because the two figures were standing so close—some were pointed at Enro, not at the shadow-figure.

  Gosseyn concluded that the men were controlled by a system of signals. The troops would obey anyone who knew the correct signal combinations. Both Enros had ordered the soldiers to cover the other and had been obeyed mindlessly.

  Enro was speaking in a soothing tone: “My dear copy—for that is all you are, you know—my dear shadow: I suspected that X would prove weak. When he convinced me to have the Observer imprint my memories into his cortex, it was too good an opportunity to miss. Because a strategist knows to cover all eventualities. What if, despite my best efforts, Gosseyn succeeded in changing the mind of X back to his former, soft-hearted state? Would my consciousness, my very self, become trapped in his skull with him, a man whose personality transformed to be that of my enemy? So I used what I knew from the Ydd. I knew their special system of overlapping energy fields to make a deeper and more permanent imprint. Whether in success or failure, X and all his powers and knowledge would become me, would be one with my imperial self. Such a beautiful solution! Because now I need not rely on anyone, no courtiers, no generals, no advisors, no treacherous cousins. The children my sister will bear me will be imprinted with the same personality matrix. I can trust myself. I know my goals, my methods, my judgment. Who better to be my court and bureaucracy? One mind to serve both as God-Emperor and all his military governors
and regional officers! One mind to rule the galaxy!”

  The shadow man’s voice was younger and higher-pitched, but otherwise it was the same voice: “Of course I recall all this, brother. I was the one who decided it. The plan is flawless. We can trust our royal self, no matter what body we inhabit. How can we not agree with our own person? And yet one small detail remains.”

  The solid Enro flexed the fingers of his upraised hand, and the deadly light shining from them brightened. Gosseyn could feel the energy-potentials building between two points in space.

  “Detail?” asked Enro in a voice of dangerous quiet.

  “I cannot have you touching her,” the shadow man said with a rich chuckle. “It keeps me up at night, the thought of it. Surely I will die without her. The only thing I have ever been denied in all my life. She is mine. Rightfully mine.”

  Enro said, “We are one, you and I.”

  Shadow-Enro said, “Then you will not object to stepping away from her, and letting the Lord Guardian Enleel complete the ceremony. What would posterity say if I am not married in a proper ceremony?”

  Enro raised his voice and spoke without turning his head: “Why, Mr. Gilbert Gosseyn of Venus is here! Gosseyn the Anarchist, no doubt here to spread a little anarchy. Did you think a flowerpot could block my view? I can see through the core of a planet, and watch the people walking upside down beneath me, the little ants I rule.”

  Gosseyn stood up slowly. He felt a pulse of radio-energy pass from Enro. At this silent signal a few platoons of the soldiers in the chamber swung their rifles to cover Gosseyn.

  Counting by hundreds, Gosseyn tried to estimate the erg output of the weapons, should all the soldiers here fire at once. The figure he got was slightly enormous. Enough to cause the air molecules in the area to break down into plasma, at least. Even if the men had personal shields, and even if those could be raised immediately, there was no escape avenue for the waste heat.

  Every mortal in the chamber would die if the soldiers fired. Because Enro’s training process—the Ydd method of mind control—had robbed each man of independent judgment, no soldier here would have self-awareness enough to disobey a self-destructive order.

  Gosseyn turned his eyes to the left. Here was a box where dignitaries, generals and admirals in splendid scarlet uniforms, were standing. He assumed that they had been left mentally alert; otherwise they could not perform their tasks.

  From the time he had been possessing Ashargin, Gosseyn knew their names: “Admiral Paleol! Admiral Nishur! General Greelin! For the sake of sanity, order the men to stand down! If all these weapons are used in this confined space …”

  But then he noticed the sameness of expression on all their faces. It was a combination of jovial mirth and reckless rage. All these men were red-faced with anger, but their eyes glittered with vast good humor: The expression of a man who thinks himself invincible. A man whose every whim, whose every neurosis, both sexual and political, had been indulged since birth. A man who believed more violence and more could solve any problem.

  The generals in the high officers’ box all drew their pistols at once and leveled them at Enro. The different voices, high pitched and low, all spoke in the same tone and rhythm of speech: “Unhand her!” “The woman is mine!” “My sister—get your filthy hands away!” “Oho! What would posterity say (my posterity!) if I did not claim what was mine?”

  Enro’s voice, repeated from a dozen throats.

  Gosseyn saw the madness in the eyes of the generals. Enro’s madness. He saw the blankness in the eyes of the thousands of soldiers.

  Gosseyn was memorizing Patricia, but before the process completed, she fired point-blank. Enro assumed his shadow-form at that same moment, so the bolt passed through him; but his cruel fist, suddenly insubstantial, passed through Patricia’s arm and she fell free.

  Enro’s shadow-body was between Gosseyn and Patricia, and Gosseyn’s double brain could not operate through the shadow-substance to get a fix on her and memorize her.

  Patricia’s bolt had hit one of the generals, who fell backward, his face a burning mass of blood. Several officers in the box opened fire on Enro. The bolts passed through his shadow-body, but the energy Enro released in return electrocuted dozens of the general staff.

  A cry of rage issued from the unseen lips of the smaller shadow-being: rage and also fear. Not for himself. Enro did not believe in his own mortality. The shadow man’s arms were straining toward Patricia where she fell, thunderbolts of energy-weapons flying back and forth above her, her dress starting to smolder from the heat. Gosseyn could feel space-time ripple under the sudden strain of the thin shadow’s attempt to control the energy in the area. At the same time, the boyish silhouette launched his shadow-body toward her protectively.

  His shadowy arms merely passed through her as she fell down the stairs.

  To the larger shadow, the one representing the original Enro, this sudden lunge must have seemed an attack.

  A flare of white light, bright as a lightning bolt, roared into existence in the chamber between the two shadows, the larger Enro and the smaller Enro, as they each sought to find the frame of reference needed to destroy the other. Gosseyn was standing too near to them: He had to assume his shadow-form before the radiation slew him.

  Patricia, her dress ablaze, fell down the stairs. Gosseyn memorized her and established a similarity to the spot where he had first appeared on the beach of Ur. He triggered the mental cue … nothing happened.

  Rage. He grew aware of the boiling rage in his extra brain, the emotion it was picking up from the extra brain of X, now possessed by the maddened memory-copy of Enro. During this crucial moment, Gosseyn’s nerve paths were all flooded with the clamor of insane emotion. He had to take the moment to perform the cortical-thalamic pause.

  Patricia, lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face bloody, flames consuming her long train, raised her head and shouted, “Fire!”

  The soldiers evidently had been programmed also to obey the Empress Reesha.

  For a moment it was brighter than the sun.

  GOSSEYN tried to deflect and absorb as much of the energy as he could, to keep it away from the body of Patricia. The Shadow-Enro must have been trying the same thing. But even with 99 percent of the radiation deflected, the remainder was enough to char her body into something almost not recognizable as a human shape: merely a long, slender lump of blackened meat, a grinning black skull, eyes and tongue burned away, sitting atop it.

  In an obscure way, Gosseyn was glad Enro destroyed the nearest two or three battalions of men with a vast sweep of atomic energy that spurted from his fingers like the bolt from an angry god. But then Gosseyn recognized that this unbalanced emotion was a rage cycle he was picking up, not one natural to him.

  Nor could it be coming from Enro. Enro did not share Gosseyn’s brain structure.

  Gosseyn performed the automatic mental action he had readied ever since Leej, or Inxelendra, had brought the truth about X to his attention. A pulse of energy, directed by Gosseyn’s tertiary brain, swept throughout the area.

  The rage in Gosseyn’s secondary brain … halted.

  By then, Enro had assumed solid form, standing over the corpse of his bride. And then the rage that had sustained him his whole life collapsed.

  His eyes were vacant. Gosseyn detected a strange blockage and stuttering coming from the nervous energy flows of Enro’s brain. Here was a loss, the only real loss his life of endless victories had ever known.

  It was a problem violence could not solve.

  Gosseyn recognized the terminal stages of the Violent Man Syndrome. Males whose whole egos were propped up by the fear and terror they caused in the victims around them could only maintain their exaggerated masculinity while there was a woman, real or imaginary, who could fill the role of feminine supporter. Whether the female was willing or unwilling did not matter. The violence-addicted male usually beat, humiliated, or mentally tormented his love object as he did everything else in his l
ife. Jealousy was the usual excuse, but that was just an excuse for a deeper, sicker, neurosis. Enro’s routine humiliations of the high-born young ladies waiting on him at his bathtub had been the first signs to Gosseyn of the syndrome.

  Every drunken sailor who terrorized a waterfront bar or threatened his hired girl with a knife was in the grip of a similar syndrome. In Enro’s case, he had an empire in his hand, not merely a knife.

  It was always an accident that killed the Violent Man’s woman, but that was always the last prop holding up his sense of self, his ego, the series of makeshift identifications and excuses by which he justified his black crimes to himself.

  Enro’s mouth opened, as if he were about to make a statement. But now the imaginary posterity he addressed would never come to be: The invisible audience of history was not listening.

  Enro stooped, picked up Patricia’s pistol.

  Gosseyn would have interfered, but his own voice spoke softly from behind him: “Let the syndrome run its course. We have no way to confine him, no way to prevent him from contacting the Ydd, no cell to hold him.”

  Gosseyn spun. His younger self, the seventeen-year-old, solidified out of shadow-substance. There was no trace of Enro’s nerve-muscle tension patterns in his expression or posture. The brainwaves were steady and sane.

  The young man said, “What did you do to me?”

  Gosseyn did not answer aloud, but his thoughts were shared between them.

  The thought was that X was a created version of Lavoisseur, like Gosseyn. Gosseyn had a ganglion in his nervous system, unknown to him until it activated. It was a death-reporting circuit. When Gosseyn Three died in the Shadow Galaxy his brain information was transmitted across intergalactic distances to find Gosseyn Two. The conclusion was that if a similar ganglion existed in X, he would know nothing of it.

  All Gosseyn had needed to do was examine his own neural structure for the stimulant. He did not have to kill X to trigger the nerve-signal. The map was not the territory. If the ganglion was stimulated by a simple electromagnetic pulse, a pulse carrying a false report of death, the ganglion would act as if the brain around it had died, the reflex would trigger, and he would make total mental contact with any available Gosseyn bodies. The levels of logic established by the Observer Machine in the older Gosseyn would operate to cure the younger at a swift, subconscious level, where it could not be detected or stopped.