Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  “The Machine was programmed to protect its charges: the first four stored in its medical coffins, and, later, their descendants. Do you not know who woke from the other three coffins, the empty ones? The second was Inxelendra, the Bride of the Sleeping God; she turned to evil when her husband could not wake, and stole the tablets of prophecy to the world of a far star. The third and fourth remained and wed, and became the father and mother of our race. The Observer continued to keep watch over the sons and daughters of Ptath and Aradine for ten million years: That is the age of the House of Gorgzid.”

  “Then why help me?”

  “The machine concluded that the ambitions of the Greatest Empire involved an unacceptable level of danger to its charges. It carried out its programming, and arranged matters to stop Secoh without hurting him—by breaking his weak mind, trapping him here in this madhouse. Enro was sent to exile, unharmed. And the Observer was finally rid of its burden. The only way it could allow the God to be slain was if one of the God’s own bloodline, someone the Observer was forbidden to harm or stop, was manipulated into dealing the fatal blow.”

  The needles on the machine behind drove all the way into the red. The shadow-being raised its wraithlike hands to the blankness of its face, while sparks and flares of lightning began to gather around it.

  The Follower said coldly, “For that blasphemy, Secoh must die. He was a traitor. The Awakened God himself pronounced these words: Secoh—traitor! You must die. I can still hear the words in my ear. The God Slept, and creation was unfinished, and for these reasons man is weak and false. But when he wakes, the God will complete the world, and all the dross be burnt away.”

  Lightning leaped in and around the figure, but in its shadow-state the creature could do itself no harm.

  Gosseyn detected a jump in the roentgens in the area. It appeared that the Follower was about to employ atomic rather than merely electromagnetic energy in its futile attempt to destroy its invulnerable shadow-body. Gosseyn could not calculate the damage such a discharge might do in the middle of a crowded metropolis. He similarized the mechanism keeping Secoh’s personality suppressed to the spot on the balcony overlooking Crang’s apartment. The Follower slowly began to take on substance and shape.

  But this had evidently been part of the Follower’s self-destructive plan. Its body of flesh was about to materialize in a radioactive room, surrounded by the fires started by the energies released into the room a moment before.

  Looking through the armored glass, Gosseyn selected a spot on the far side of the room, where the insulation and safety fields were still operating, and he similarized Daley’s unconscious body there. Gosseyn established a reflex in his extra brain to do the same to Secoh as soon as Secoh’s body became solid. Ringing alarms were already summoning medical technicians to the scene.

  The Follower was solidifying into Secoh, clothes and all. Gosseyn asked one last question: “How did Enro escape from his prison asteroid?”

  The Shadow Man uttered a breathy laugh. “You may ask him yourself. He watches us now.”

  Secoh appeared where the Follower had been, and then reappeared safely on the other side of the barrier, unconscious, and in the arms of the waiting technicians.

  Gosseyn felt his nape hairs tingle. His extra brain felt the buildup of space-distorting energies in the area, like those that slew Crang. He turned. There was no one there.

  The wall phone said, “Call for you, sir. Long distance.”

  Gosseyn turned, and stepped toward the phone. The handset hung next to its intercom plate, slightly burnt from the voltage released in the room.

  He picked it up. “You did not kill me.”

  7

  When the symbol-to-object relation is false-to-facts, behaviors are maladaptive. When the mind will not abandon useless behaviors, frustration is the result.

  A voice, a deep, rich baritone, spoke: “What would posterity say if I cut down a man, even an enemy, while he was helping my mad cousin to safety? I am not a monster, Mr. Gosseyn.”

  “You killed Crang.”

  “And what would posterity have said if I had not?” A charming chuckle sounded over the line. “Why, nothing, I suppose! Since my posterity will never come into existence until I marry my mate, and breed the true bloodline again. The race that springs from me shall oversweep the galaxy, and replace mankind. Crang hindered that destiny; hence he destined himself to die. It was really suicide, not murder, if you think about it, Mr. Gosseyn.”

  The wall beyond the phone stand turned to mist and seemed to open and recede. Beyond was an ocean-scape of rocky, cratered islands. It was night, and dazzling bright stars gleamed on a wild ocean whose wave crests rose to monstrous heights in the low gravity. The island mountains reared to impossibly thin peaks and lopsided overhangs.

  Standing on the cratered ground, tall beneath the stars, was a red-haired man, powerfully built, wearing a Greatest Empire naval uniform of scarlet, crimson, and royal purple, but without any other insignia of rank. His eyes bored into Gosseyn’s sardonically.

  He had a microphone clipped to one epaulette. Its wires ran to a small radio-distorter unit, half-hidden among the ribbons, medals, and jewels on his chest. The radio was the type used to transmit orders to warships in orbit or troopers in air-helmets.

  Gosseyn selected a spot behind Enro and memorized it. He half-expected something to detect and interfere, but nothing did. He now had a mental cue to allow him to step to the planet Ur instantaneously.

  Enro’s smile thinned slightly. Suspicion tingled in Gosseyn’s brain.

  Why had the dictator used his power to broadcast an image of himself across the galaxy to a room on Nirene? It was evident that he could see without being seen. Why reveal himself?

  Gosseyn recalled a similar image had appeared in Crang’s room before his death, and that the shadow-being who killed Crang had carefully positioned itself so that Crang was between it and the image.

  Enro had once mentioned a dangerous tension of space that existed between him and the images his power created: The great dictator here had used the effect as a murder weapon.

  Gosseyn realized that he must be partly attuned by Enro’s power in order to see this image. He dared not similarize himself to this specific spot of ground, not if Enro had manipulated the space-tension to erect a trap. If he was ever to find his way to this world, Enro’s base, it had to be through an image Enro showed to, and attuned to, someone else.

  Enro said, “So here is the immortal man! But it seems you have learned that your method of cheating death can itself be cheated. Welcome back to the ranks of those of us who know what it means to die: You must now do what all your fellow mortals must do to stay alive.”

  “Think…?”

  “Obey! I am here to give you an ultimatum.”

  Gosseyn sighed inwardly. Neurotic minds were not flexible and tended to fall into well-established habits. Next would come bloodthirsty threats.

  To Gosseyn’s surprise, Enro uttered no threat, not directly. Instead he said, “Thorson was greedy for immortality; he had been elevated to a high place, but he was of common birth, and you must know how that is. What a strain it must have been for him to serve a man like me! To see the gift the Sleeping God gave me, and to know his low blood made such gifts forever beyond his reach. He tried to betray me: He called off the genocide we had planned for Earth, merely to have more time to study you. You see, he thought you would lead him to the man who made you, the man who knew the secret. But there was no secret, was there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You cannot make other men as you are, can you? The great Gilbert Gosseyn does not know who he is or whence he comes, does he?”

  Gosseyn smiled in disbelief. He did not think of himself as “great.” But Enro could not admit he had been defeated by an ordinary Venusian man. “You tell me who I am then.”

  Enro simply shook his head, a look of bitter amusement on his face.

  Gosseyn waited.

  E
nro was suffering from what Null-A identified as the Violence Syndrome, the belief that when bloodshed did not solve a problem, more bloodshed would. Enro’s sense of freedom from the normal rules of morality came from the distorted idea he had of a posterity that would justify, with grateful applause, all his actions. This imaginary audience allowed him to ignore the real world, the real consequences of his actions.

  However, the imaginary audience made demands on him: He had to strut and proclaim like a stage actor for them, to do the things his neurotic imaginings told him they wanted. So he had to talk; otherwise his make-believe historians would have nothing to write down.

  Therefore it was Enro who broke the silence:

  “The stories about you say you don’t know where you come from, Mr. Gosseyn. They say a galactic traveler, one of our people, independently discovered a method for cloning men and transmitting memories from one generation of himself to the next.”

  “On Earth, he called himself Lavoisseur. The memory chain between his line and mine was broken.”

  “Your father?”

  Gosseyn shook his head. “That term is not accurate.”

  “Whatever he was, the story is false.”

  “False how?”

  “He was not a galactic traveler. Not one of us. No League world, no Imperial world, none of the neutral worlds has any such technology, or any science from which such technology could grow.”

  Strange. Once again, Enro’s speech did not seem to fall into the pattern Gosseyn expected: almost as if the great dictator were playing for time, trying to keep Gosseyn occupied.

  Gosseyn’s eyes swept the room. What was Enro waiting for?

  Of course. The medical technicians were about to take Secoh away. Enro was waiting for Secoh to be out of the line of fire.

  Gosseyn touched a button on the intercom and asked the decontamination room to sweep this area with a field to nullify the traces of the atomic energy Secoh had introduced. At the same time, with his extra brain, he similarized a connection between the phone wire and its wall socket, maintaining the electric flow between the two as he unplugged it.

  Gosseyn said into the phone, “You told your people that the genocide of Earth, the plot against Null-A, was merely a gambit meant to outrage the League Powers into going to war with you. That is not the real reason. Earth and Yalerta figure in your religion: Gorgzid’s rivals for the claim of being the original home of man in this galaxy.”

  Gosseyn opened the transparent armored wall and stepped over to the levitation trolley where Secoh lay. He walked with the technicians as they wheeled Secoh out of the room.

  The lead technician’s eyes flickered to Gosseyn. Without a word, Gosseyn nodded toward the exit. The technicians started moving that way as if it were the normal direction to take a patient.

  The man was a Null-A. He had recognized the dangerous plight Gosseyn was in and the danger Gosseyn had brought upon everyone, visitors and staff, currently on the Institute grounds. Obviously, they were evacuating the grounds. Obviously, they were hoping Enro would not release a wide-area weapon until Gosseyn was away from the buildings.

  They stepped out of the room. Gosseyn wondered if the image of Enro would move and keep pace with them. It did not. Enro did not need to be seen to see. This suggested again that the image had been presented to Gosseyn as a trap, tempting him to similarize himself to an area Enro had prepared.

  Over the phone, Enro was saying, “The attack on Earth was meant to provoke a response from the Games Machine, or, rather, from whatever Primordial Being was protecting Earth. The response seemed weak out of proportion to the threat: You appeared on the scene, killed Thorson, and let your creator be killed.”

  It seemed Enro could be prodded into continuing to talk before he struck. But for how long? How long until the pressures in Enro’s subconscious required him to kill Gosseyn?

  Enro was saying, “It seemed a small response, at first. But then, on Gorgzid, the Ashargin heir was possessed by the Sleeping God … or so he said. Reesha reappeared, but now married to a Venusian detective named Crang … or so she said. You appeared on the planet Yalerta, where the Follower had been recruiting the Predictors for my fleets. Before I knew it, Secoh was mad, the Predictors were gone, and I was forced from my throne. I discovered later that it was you, not the Sleeping God, who was possessing the brain of Rhade Ashargin. Poor, ineffective, little Ashargin! He is now Emperor once again, at least until the Interim Government decides what to do with him. So you are simply everywhere where I suffer a setback, Mr. Gosseyn! Not surprising for a living distorter, I suppose. But somehow you are less than you seem.”

  Enro had something he wanted from the conversation, perhaps a symbolic concession. Neurotics often played out scenes in their imaginations when contemplating their crimes and were disappointed if reality left out any lovingly anticipated details. Enro was a much more powerful neurotic than most: The supreme leader of a galactic totalitarian theocracy, gifted with superhuman teleclairvoyant powers, has many ways of getting his most finicky whims sated. He would delay killing Gosseyn until the moment seemed perfect.

  The path the chief technician took was a roundabout one, away from the other buildings in the Institute. Gosseyn could see that the tall arches of the Venusian architecture, peering high above the ornamental trees, were now shimmering with the telltale haze of a Nireni building. Generators were erecting anti-atomic fields. Shields were being lowered over the expansive Earth-style glass windows. The staff did not know how large a weapon Enro would unleash upon Gosseyn: They were taking every precaution.

  While they walked, Gosseyn spoke into the phone he carried. One way to keep the Emperor talking was to give him the opportunity to boast. The kind of man who does not think men can be cowed by boasting speeches does not become an Emperor.

  “You knew about Thorson’s betrayal?”

  “Oh, come now. What can be hidden from an interstellar-range clairvoyant? Of course I knew.”

  Gosseyn had doubts about Enro’s range. He suspected the dictator needed a distorter system to gather images at multiple-parsec distances. Secoh had used such a system, and it seemed a safe assumption that Secoh’s shadow-being projection was a phenomenon related to Enro’s clairvoyance.

  The dictator continued, “The only reason why I delayed spraying your planet with radioactive isotopes was that my divine sister was holding herself hostage there, if you take my meaning.”

  When they were halfway between the two buildings, Gosseyn simply stopped walking and the technicians and Secoh continued. They turned a leafy corner and were gone.

  Gosseyn said, “You found out about the shadow-substance mechanism in the Crypt of the Sleeping God by listening to the psychiatrists here interview Secoh.”

  Enro said, “Don’t be absurd. Secoh told my parents about the machine when he first found it. That is why my father, Ajjan the Wise, struggled so long to maneuver Secoh into a position of more influence in the Crypt. Once he murdered his way into a high position, Cousin Secoh was able to arrange to have me placed in one of the medical coffins as part of an ancient ceremony when I was but a baby. Later, when I was an ambitious young planetary governor, Secoh murdered his way all the way to the Chief Guardianship. Do you think such a thing could happen on my world unknown to me?”

  “But you said you didn’t know who the Follower was!”

  “Yes. So I said. I am gratified to note that you assume everything I say is truth. Would that my own subjects were so trusting! But they believed that the Divine Emperor had nothing to do with the shadow-being that slew the priests disloyal to me. I would not confess otherwise even to my court, or in private. We never know who is listening, do we?”

  A dry chuckle.

  The dictator said lightly, half to himself, “Oh, that is wry, coming from me, isn’t it? I should change the motto under my dynastic crest.”

  Gosseyn looked around, both with his eyes and with his extra brain. There was no one nearby, no pulse of nerve energy to indica
te someone hiding in the brush. Secoh was a safe distance away, in a shielded building.

  Gosseyn said, “Who are you waiting for?”

  A dry chuckle. “Surely that is obvious. Lavoisseur. I am curious to see if your creator will intervene when I dispose of you.”

  “Lavoisseur is dead. Thorson killed him.”

  “Oh, come now, Mr. Gosseyn. I understand you come from a planet with no laws, but are the basic principles of government power unknown to you? Agents are disposable; masters are not. According to my spies, Lavoisseur created two duplicates of himself. One was the cripple who Thorson thought was the chief of your Semantics Institute on Earth, the man you knew as X, who was shot by Prescott. The other was you. My spies were wrong. There were three duplicates. The third …”

  “The third?”

  “The third was the man seen by Thorson, killed by him; and with his death, all links to your original creator and the secret of deathlessness are severed. All clues are destroyed. Surely the advanced science of psychology for which your world is famous could detect that there is one thought so obvious that it should have occurred to you at once, Mr. Gosseyn. At once! Except that you were designed with a mental block, a subconscious interference that prevents you from thinking it.”

  “You are saying the third man, the one I saw die, was not the real Lavoisseur. He was another X. Another Gosseyn. Another expendable spare body.”

  Gosseyn was remembering that the dying man’s last words to him had been to assure him that there was no Chessplayer behind him, no mysterious figure manipulating his life. Those words had convinced Gosseyn to cease seeking his origin.

  “Even now you do not see it. Amazing! I am saying he was as much the ‘real’ Lavoisseur as you were the ‘real’ Gosseyn. The first version of you, Gosseyn One, was gunned down on Earth. You are Gosseyn Two, who woke up on Venus. The artificial memories of Lavoisseur One held the crucial idea that there was no Cosmic Chessplayer behind his actions: an idea he passed on to you. His mission done, he was also gunned down. And so … where did Lavoisseur Two wake up?”