Null-A Continuum
Page 43
But what had happened to the Enro memories dominating X?
The young man used a parasympathetic auto-stimulus trick to increase his heart rate and electrolytes. When his life-force jumped, his thoughts flowed toward the thirty-year-old: “Enro’s memories in me have already entered a self-reinforcing catatonia, allowing me to emerge to the fore. He suppressed me after the curative hypnotic-training sequence you implanted during our mind-battle started to operate. He no longer trusted me. The thoughts I am now receiving from you have completed the process Lavoisseur designed with my nervous system. I am no longer X.”
When the young man’s stimulus passed and his nerve-pressure fell back to the norm, the thought-flows from Gosseyn carried back his answer to the other: “Enro is a genius, a man of magnetic personality and great talent. If we can train him, cure his obsessions, his greatness will serve civilization. A sheepdog rather than a wolf.”
Younger Gosseyn used his nerve-trick to send back: “I have seen him at close range, shared his thoughts. He would not volunteer. To make a man sane against his will is a contradiction in terms. In his shadow-form, he is invulnerable to all weapons. This is the only way to stop him.”
“It is a waste.”
“It is justice. Think of Nirene. Think of the millions he’s slain. Countless millions.”
In the end, Gosseyn did not interfere. For the longest time, Enro stood with the pistol in his hand, hefting it.
After many minutes of hesitating, the blank-eyed and deathly pale creature that raised an arm with awkward and slow motions to put the trembling muzzle in his sagging mouth hardly looked like Enro at all. In a sense, the great dictator was already dead even before he pulled the trigger.
The echo of the energy bolt slowly faded in the depths of the vast amphitheater.
The two Gosseyns, the younger and the older, stood looking down at the corpse for a minute without speaking. Enro had fallen atop the bridal-gown-clad corpse, his thick hand still reaching toward the charred bones of her arm as if to take possession of her.
Gosseyn stood breathing slowly and deeply, not letting the sensations of grief and rage overwhelm him. He forced himself to think, to think carefully. The true picture of these events was not yet clear.
The seventeen-year-old was saying, “I have all his memories, codes, and secrets. Not everyone has been mind-controlled. But each officer was set to watch the next one in the blackmail pyramid, with Enro at the top, able to watch all the secret dealings. Well, that whole system is now mine. I can order Commissioner Thule of the League Safety Authority to organize a bloodless surrender to the Greatest Empire.
“The Empire, once it envelops the League, will continue to exist in name only. It will be used as a basis to establish a true Null-A universal state.
“Since we can undo the Shadow Effect now, when we can use the graduates of the secret system of Games Machines operating through the Cult to select candidates to follow Ashargin—he will be surprised when the Games Machine of Corthid pulls him alive out of the shadow—to follow him when his expedition leaves to restore and repopulate the Shadow Galaxy. It will be to this galaxy what Venus was to Earth.”
Gosseyn was squinting at a glitter of gold. He walked over. It was one of the marriage rings. It had fallen from the velvet cushion during the fight but had somehow escaped being melted.
He frowned at it, bent over, picked it up. It was slightly warm in his fingers. It was clearly that same ring he had just seen on Eldred Crang’s hand a few minutes ago. Strange.
Aloud, he said, “One thing I don’t understand.”
The seventeen-year-old raised an eyebrow. “Only one? The universe is a confused place. Count yourself lucky.”
Gosseyn said, “You are not the original Lavoisseur, are you?”
The youth shook his head. “No. I was made as a copy, with certain memories blacked out. As soon as the curative process concludes, you and I will be one, no matter where our two bodies might be. My mind was carefully made to fall back into sanity once my task was done. Made! Logically, I cannot be the real Lavoisseur.”
“Then he is dead?”
“No. The Lavoisseur I killed in the Semantics Institute on Earth was obviously a copy also.”
“Then where is the real one?”
The seventeen-year-old smiled quite a charming smile. It was the first innocent and cheery smile Gosseyn remembered seeing on his face.
“Come now!” said the boy. “Put the clues together. She has the skills to impersonate the body language and speech patterns of an emotional, highly-strung woman, but all her actions betray the cool calculation of a trained Null-A. This was all done according to plan. Think! She is the one who gave the order to fire when she was still in the line of fire. Why do you think she picked the name Patricia? Ptath-Reesha. The name of the mother of the Gorgzid race, the Eve of her world. No matter how farfetched a ‘long-lost sister’ story sounded, the first ancestor could pass the biological scans needed to prove herself a member of the Royal Bloodline. She founded it! She was the fourth passenger of the Gorgzid migration vehicle. Where do you think she is?”
Before the youth was finished speaking, Gosseyn stimulated that buried cue attuning him to the spot he had memorized on the floor of Patricia’s apartments on Gorgzid.
The apparatus was still there, behind the panel Gosseyn had cut free from the wall. The panel had not been repaired, so the medical coffin and its associated neural machines, broadcasters, and cell stimulators were still visible.
What had not been visible before was the panel to the rear of the medical coffin, hiding from view the second and smaller coffin hidden beneath. It was from this that Patricia, blinking and wiping nutrient fluids from her flesh, climbed on unsteady legs.
Her hair was plastered to her skull. Her new body was still pink and tender as a baby’s, although she looked to be in her early twenties.
She glared at him. “What a stupid plan! Next time, come up with a better one!”
Gosseyn blinked at the naked, wet, dripping, angry Empress. “Whose plan?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Still slower at this than we all assumed!”
Then her gaze fell upon the ring in his fingers. Suddenly her expression turned soft. Patricia plucked the ring from his grasp and stood toying with it, turning it over and over in her swift, finely molded fingers.
She turned away from him, still toying with the ring, and she pulled a sheer silk robe from her closet to throw nonchalantly over her shoulders.
“The Chessplayer, Inxelendra, Gorgzor-Reesha, the Bride of Gorgzor, agreed to help you with the whole duplication process. She is the biology expert. She is the one we will have to go to next to get you outfitted to look like Crang. We cannot go to her until we visit the old site of the temple complex, and get her husband’s sleeping body.”
Patricia opened her bureau, drew out a holster that she strapped to her inner thigh, and slipped her miniature electric pistol into it.
That done, she sat at her vanity and brusquely toweled dry her hair, attacked it with a brush.
“She doesn’t like you much, but she knew that once you became a time-traveler, and returned through these last two years as a copy of her hired man, Eldred Crang, you’d be in a position to get the cell samples you need from the Crypt of the Sleeping God, make a duplicate of the medical patient you are going to kill, and set up a serial connection using your method so his brain-patterns and personality (what remains of it) will flow into the next body. Since this one will be undamaged, and will have a working secondary brain with Yalertan training imprints, it should be able to automatically reach back through the centuries to its past, and establish a connection to its current brain, recovering all the lost memories.
“Gorgzor will be alive again, and his knowledge of specialized political-economic callidetics is what the galaxy needs to be guided smoothly to a unification.”
Patricia applied a small amount of lipstick, pursing her lips in the mirror, smoothing out irregularit
ies with her pinkie.
She was still speaking. “Long, long ago, we all agreed. Everyone else, the whole galaxy of migrants, allowed themselves to be reduced to amnesia and barbarism, so that no future history would ever lead the Ydd to them. We three were spared. We were left with our memories intact, to watch and wait over the millennia for signs of the enemy.
“There was only one way to find him.
“You see, the strain of galactic civilization, the complexity of the modern understanding of the universe, was forcing man back into the psychological and neural patterns of the Primordials, bringing out potentials they had encoded there. The ancient neurochemical structures were beginning to reappear. Traces of the secondary brain, in primitive form, were cropping up in many places every few generations in the galaxy, but three planets in particular had a higher statistical potential. They were selected for our purposes.
“On Earth, on Yalerta, and on Gorgzid, over many centuries, the three of us introduced three different variations of the Primordial technology. We watched to see who or what would come to destroy us.
“On Gorgzid, it was easy for the Observer Machine, during his interment in the Crypt, to introduce false memories into Enro to convince him I was a long-lost sister, kept in hiding since birth. On Yalerta, Inxelendra could pick up the thoughts from the younger-universe version of herself, Leej, who went to the island where the Follower had established his retreat. And on Earth …
“It was the year that Hardie hoaxed the Games and won the world presidency that we finally knew who was behind the tampering you had detected in the Games Machine you had built, and so you and I moved to Cress Village. Living on a small farm only a few miles from the Hardie country mansion, with the Observer-designed amplifiers in our basement, we watched the conspirators.
“But even with Eldred Crang, and me, and X infiltrating the inner circle, it was still not enough to tell us who was the real leader behind the Follower, that mysterious shadow-being serving the Ydd, determined to wipe out Null-A before a Null-A political philosophy became galaxy-wide.
“And so one last desperate move was made, a sacrifice move, meant to show the unknown man behind the Follower that the rebirth of the Null-A galaxy could not be stopped, not even by a galactic war. You had to show the enemy ‘Chessplayer,’ whoever it was (we now know Ydd was working through Enro), that the secret of immortality was about to reappear in this galaxy.
“So you decided to step onto the cosmic chessboard yourself.
“The false memories of being married to me were only made to seem false in order to convince Enro not to kill you, but enough of the memories had to stay intact to bring you to the notice of the Hardie gang. Even as it was, it was a near thing. For obvious reasons, we kept our marriage secret. Even Nordegg, the man who ran the store on the corner, did not recognize you, once you took off the flesh mask you had been wearing for two years.
“You made an older copy of yourself and put him in the Semantics Institute, and also a maddened copy of yourself to infiltrate the Hardie gang, and then you subjected yourself to the amnesia process. And so one afternoon, you simply walked from our little house in Cress Village to the air terminal to go to the City of the Machine. You had forty dollars in your pocket. I packed your lunch.”
She opened a small drawer, drew out a fine gold band, and slipped it onto the ring finger of her left hand.
Then she rose gracefully, and her silk robe slithered as she turned toward him, one eyebrow arched, her eyelids half closed, her expression one of impatience held in check by amusement. She was trying not to smile at him.
Gosseyn had almost not been able to listen after the words “recovering all the lost memories.” Because the method had been clear. The Observer had told him, although, in the press of events, he had no time to act on the knowledge.
Now she picked up the other ring, his ring, from where she had laid it on the vanity table. She took his left hand softly, and ceremoniously placed the ring on his finger, grasping his hand with her hand.
The contact was like a shock. The energy, the spacewarping force of an emotion that had persisted though the death of one galaxy and the birth of another, was a reality he could feel with his extra brain. It reached from her to him … and elsewhere.
Time and space were not barriers to this, the fundamental force. Even the primal particle of all universes was nothing more than this. Love reflecting itself. Attention.
It was a simple matter to reach out back across less than two years following the path. The seventeen-year-old version of himself, now Enro’s heir and running his empire, was connected to Patricia through that emotion, and so was the version who lay dying on the floor of the Semantics Institute, two years ago … and so was …
… the version of himself that paused, a month before that, before going to sleep in the hotel room, a sleep of less than a minute, but enough to trigger the final amnesia. Even as his eyes closed in sleep, that version could hear the floor loudspeaker already beginning to sound: “The occupants of each floor of the hotel must as usual during the games form their own protective groups. …”
No matter where they were in time-space, it was still his brain, identical with him. Lavoisseur and X and Gosseyn had sufficient similarity that the memories could be reintegrated: And, in an illusion universe, no signal, no memory, could ever really be lost.
It took only an effort of will to force the similarity.
And then … oneness.
He opened his eyes and saw her staring at him.
Her eyes shined with impish good humor. “Do you remember who I am, now?”
“Patricia Hardie.”
“Patricia Lavoisseur. Mrs. Patricia Lavoisseur. Your wife.”
He kissed her. It seemed the sane thing to do.
Praise for Null-A Continuum
“John Wright is a marvelous craftsman…. [Null-A Continuum] is not the first sequel to a van Vogt novel, but it is the only one worth reading.”
—The New York Review of Science Fiction
“Anyone curious about the grand old days of gosh-wow, whiz-bang, golden age SF need look no further than this homage to A. E. van Vogt. Packed with intergalactic adventures, the cliff-hangers and plot twists of the pulp era—and space princesses!—this is a rollercoaster ride.”
—Michael Flynn, author of Eifelheim
“[The book is] no slavish copy…. In Wright’s hands the pulp original turns into a pulp-meets-hard-SF meditation of cosmological evolution…. Wright is a born novelist. And Null-A Continuum is a novelist’s novel, bristling with ideas and characters that demand novel-length treatment…. Wright’s book is an erudite homage to the pulp tradition by a twenty-first-century master.”
—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“For continuing the adventures of van Vogt’s superhuman, double-brained protagonist, Gilbert Gosseyn, no one is better qualified than rising star Wright…. Wright faithfully emulates van Vogt’s labyrinthine plot twists and energetic prose while answering questions about Gosseyn’s origins that have burned in fans’ minds for decades.”
—Booklist
“A novel made of love.”
—George Zebrowski, award-winning author of Brute Orbits
“Wright attempts to flesh out and make sense of van Vogt’s world while retaining a respectful distance from the original story…. The characters’ individual voices are sound…. inventive.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wright out–van Vogts van Vogt…. Null-A Continuum is an impressive achievement in both style and storytelling. Wright settles for nothing less than telling a van Vogt tale the way the late, great ‘Van’ would have told it himself.”
—SciFiDimensions.com
“John Wright has revived and extended the magically brilliant work of A. E. van Vogt. I cannot think of any writer better suited to this task.”
—Charles Platt, author of The Silicon Man
Tor Books by John C. Wright
The Golden Ag
e
Phoenix Exultant
The Golden Transcendence
The Last Guardian of Everness
Mists of Everness
Orphans of Chaos
Fugitives of Chaos
Titans of Chaos
Null-A Continuum
About the Author
JOHN C. WRIGHT is an attorney turned SF and fantasy writer. He has published short fiction in Asimov’s SF and elsewhere, and wrote the Chronicles of Chaos, The Golden Age, and The War of Dreaming series. His novel Orphans of Chaos was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2005. You can sign up for author updates here.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright Notice
Author’s Note: What has Gone Before
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