Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Anslark said, “What of Dzan, Dzan of the myriad splendors?”

  “Last I knew, your home world itself was safe, but the Dzan Protectorates and colony worlds in the M72 cluster, ninety-one hundred worlds, have been swallowed by the shadow, suns and whole solar systems eaten up. Your cousin King Indark committed suicide by pulling down a lightning bolt from the sky: The crown passed to your niece, Dsiryan the Beautiful, and she is contemplating surrender.”

  Anslark said in a voice of shock, “What am I to do? The nine suns no longer shine on the diamond towers of Tentessil; the water-world of Oss is gone, and her unsounded seas, as are the jeweled moons of Lallandur, where once I reigned as Duke.”

  Patricia said, “You do have a better legal claim than your niece, Your Highness.”

  “I am unsightly, Your Imperial Majesty; I have taken wages from the spy masters of the Interstellar League. No, I will never sit upon the Stormbolt Throne.”

  Gosseyn had been listening quietly all this time, making minor adjustments to his shadow-body, to see if he could find a combination of energy-tensions that would allow his extra brain to operate in this strange condition. So far, he found none. Unless he departed, levitating through the ceiling and out of the range of the Amazon squad and their pistols, he dared not solidify. And until he learned more, he dared not depart.

  He saw that Patricia was maneuvering to get Anslark to leave; he suspected he knew the reason why.

  Patricia merely motioned to two of her women. “Escort His Highness to the spaceport. He will be wanting to return home, because Queen Dsiryan will need his support now. Gilbert, why don’t you remind Prince Anslark that you can find him later?”

  The grief-stricken Anslark spoke no farewells but allowed the gun-women to lead him away.

  Gosseyn said to Patricia, “You’re assuming that Enro just lost his picture of us?”

  She said, “He cannot focus on you, not while you’re a shadow. He needs a point in space, an object, a person that he can attune his clairvoyance to. Is that why you sent an uncoded message about Enro to the No-men of Accolon? You must have known Enro has spies among the Special Police of the League.”

  “Actually, I thought Enro would simply send one of his own agents, not follow an agent of the League, like Anslark. Now that Anslark is not tailing me, why won’t Enro just kill him?”

  “Because, after all, you can find Anslark later, can’t you? My brother might suspect a trick, but it will tempt him to keep an eye on Prince Anslark, hoping to find you. Besides”—Patricia gave a little smile—”Anslark was quite handsome before his disfigurement, and he and I met at ambassadorial functions, and he paid me some flattering attention. Enro might still be jealous, and that will make him want to keep an eye on Prince Anslark, even now—”

  Gosseyn interrupted, “Did Enro spare this planet because you were on it?”

  Patricia frowned. “That’s what I wanted to happen, but no. I failed here. X is making my brother smarter, less brutal.”

  “He’s going to destroy the planet anyway?”

  Patricia laughed a sad little laugh. “This planet is destroyed. Do you think these xenophobes can cooperate rationally with the remaining League members to offer a defense against Enro? Their farms are burnt; their factories are idle.

  “This world was once known for her intellectual achievements, her genius, her high civilization! And now: The Porgrave neural-readers are set to identify anyone with the Nexialist training. Nexialists, you see, are too educated to be blind to what madness this economic planning is, and the Loyalty Police are rounding them up. Students get shipped off to forced-labor camps on the polar islands. The Committee calls it aversion therapy. Professors and experts, the intellectual giants, are imprisoned not far from here.”

  Gosseyn mentioned his run-in with the Petrino mind-paralysis robots. “I assumed at the time that they were meant to root out Null-A’s. Does Nexialism form similar nerve paths between the thalamus and cortex as non-Aristotelianism?”

  Patricia said, “Like Null-A, Nexialism is an attempt to break out of the primitive animal system of relating to reality. Obviously the Standardization Committee finds that untrained thinkers are easier to manipulate into voting themselves into a trap … a trap from which there is no escape.” She continued, her voice growing bitter, “All the Loyalty Machine need do is see to it that a sufficient technical base remains to keep its remote units in operation. It does not matter what political or economic reforms they vote on, because the underlying psychology of the planet has been fixed in place. The Total Loyalty system will never fall, because it can never be questioned. The population will use all their ingenuity to maintain their mass-neurosis, no matter how conditions change. This is what happens when Null-A is misused.”

  Patricia shivered slightly, frowned at her cigarette, and threw it down to the concrete, stamping it under the toe of her black boot.

  Gosseyn said, “If Enro wanted to use his long-range assassination method on me, he would have done it when Anslark and I first met. So why should he kill me now? Or is there another reason why you think I should remain in this out-of-phase condition?”

  Patricia said thoughtfully, “Now that is interesting. You actually do have blind spots built into your psychology, don’t you?”

  Gosseyn pondered the implications of that statement. “Let us assume for the sake of argument that Lavoisseur, using very advanced psychological techniques, created and organized my personality to have an inability to be interested in his actions and his origins. You seem to be implying that I should fear an immediate threat from him?”

  “From that crazed version of Lavoisseur that used to call himself X, yes, of course. I’ll always regret that I didn’t get to put the bullet into his bald, crippled body. Prescott won that privilege. Now X is young and handsome and cruel again, and, ugh! You just don’t seem to take the threat seriously. He has the memories, or most of them, of the man who designed you.”

  Gosseyn said, “My plan had been to have Anslark carry my sleeping body close enough to whatever poor soul X is possessing at the moment to trigger an exchange of thought-information. If he does not know I am coming, and does not know I have assumed the ‘lesser’ pole of power, he won’t know his thoughts are being read into me.”

  “That is what I mean: You are assuming you can survive your next encounter with him. You won’t. He will predict what you mean to do.”

  “He cannot use his Predictor power to spy on me.”

  “But he can use his brain power. What would you do, if it were you?”

  Gosseyn was startled, because the answer to the question was obvious: X was unwilling to have Gosseyn die while in mental link with him, lest the cortical-thalamic integration of the Gosseyn memories be transmitted to and cure the thoughts of the older being. This meant one of two strategies. The first was to murder Gosseyn while he was insulated from the rest of the universe—and the trap on Corthid had been meant to do that. X knew by now that trap had inexplicably failed. Which implied a second strategy.

  Gosseyn said, “If he prepared a duplicate body of himself, equipped with whatever memories or experiences he thinks would convince me of his point of view, and merely waited for me to attempt to make a mental connection with him again …”

  She said, “Nothing so elaborate. He does not need a second body. All he needs is to experiment on his own brain, to give himself a temporary form of insanity, something he could pass along to you.”

  “Insanity? I could resist it, and cure it.”

  “Not if it approached at a level you were unaware of.”

  Gosseyn remembered the lie-detector readings that showed his extra brain manifesting symptoms of madness: brain material over which he had no direct control.

  Patricia said, “He knows how your double brain works, and you don’t! He can disorganize your nervous system. All he has to do is wait for you to come into range. If your double brain were to become disorganized to the point where you could no longer use it—
disorganized or damaged the way Lavoisseur’s was on Earth when he lay dying—then you could be killed with impunity, as he was.” She shrugged. “Besides, he can bury any important information under layers of artificial amnesia, leaving only misinformation in his conscious mind for you to pick up. That is not so different from what Lavoisseur did, when he created you.”

  “Where is Lavoisseur now?”

  “Now? Dead. You saw him die. I saw him die. X, his other self, interfered with the similarity connection to his next body, and no information was passed. Lavoisseur was too disorganized to form a new connection with his extra brain.”

  “How did you see him die?”

  To answer, Patricia doffed her helmet, shaking her hair loose, and unsealed her armor, which lost its smoky shadow-aura and peeled away like fabric. Beneath, she wore a skintight suit that left her arms and legs free. Patricia stepped over to the side of the chamber away from the electrical dynamo. “I don’t have to tell you not to step between me and the image.”

  “Image!” said Gosseyn.

  The scene that formed on the far wall was that of a city at night. The buildings seemed to be the vine-covered marble and green copper typical of Petrino: In one large parkland in the center of the city, isolated, was a new building, an immense domed cathedral of dark stone, lit here and there with white-hot atomic torches. The black dome looked like a model, in stone, of the rounded hull of the primordial starship that Gosseyn once saw on Gorgzid: the Crypt of the Sleeping God.

  Only near this park and its cathedral were there signs of life: The streets were free from trash and wrecked vehicles; the houses and shops looked tidy, lived-in, prosperous, with glass in the windows and flowers in the window boxes. There was even some nighttime traffic on the roads, and the street lamps were working. The rest of the city, what could be seen of it, seemed to be in blackout conditions, the streets unlit.

  Patricia said dryly, “The Standardization Committee has determined that family and civic life is better when embraced in the context of a uniform, uniformly accepted religion. A church with a transcendent, abstract, or invisible god was deemed, by the Committee, less intellectually satisfying than a cult with a god you can see with your eyes—the Priesthood is simply denying the embarrassing fact that the High Priest burned their god to a cinder. Meanwhile, anyone who joins the Cult is free from the Standardization Committee, because religious beliefs are not subject to psychiatric review. The Cult is currently the only civilized sanctuary on the planet.”

  Patricia continued, “And in the crypts below the building you see there, the most highly trained of the Nexialists are imprisoned. The deans and tutors of the Institute are so well respected by the common Petrines, even with the Loyalty Machine conditioning, that no native can be trusted to keep them imprisoned, except members of the Cult.

  “And this complex is also where the signals controlling the Loyalty Machine are coming from. You see, X does not need to spend every hour of every day occupying the mind of someone who wants to carry out his work. If the someone is a stooge who thinks he is being visited by the Sleeping God, X only needs to make mental contact once every few months.

  “So: There it is. A building full of unarmed civilians who had no defense against the advanced brainwashing and propaganda techniques X has at his command, not to mention a cell block of innocent prisoners. Go make martyrs of them.”

  Gosseyn was a little taken aback. When had Patricia become convinced that Gosseyn was a murderous man? “That would be counterproductive.”

  “Exactly. So I am giving you a productive avenue to follow. You want to draw Enro out of hiding? He will have to appear in person to stop you, once you start taking effective steps against him.”

  Gosseyn thought about that for a moment. “There is still a great deal I don’t know—”

  Patricia interrupted, “You’ve found out everything you can find out here! Enro is using a combination of pure brutality and subtle, Null-A-style psychology to achieve his war aims. X has taught the principles of his twisted version of Null-A to the locals, and had the members of the Nexial Institute here on Petrino, who are advanced enough to see the dangers, put away in a concentration camp. X is simply not here, not at the moment. His work here was done by the locals. Find a way to return Corthid to normal time-space.”

  “Why Corthid?”

  “The biological distorter in your head, your extra brain, contains the only matrix that might still have a ‘fix’ on the planet Corthid, even in its non-identity condition….”

  At that moment, one of the women of the gun squad put her fingers to the earpiece of her helmet and cocked her head, listening. She said, “Empress! The radio reports Predictor Yanar just went blind again. X just manipulated time-space in this area. He may have just arrived on the planet.”

  Patricia waved her hand at the wall. The image changed to a scene on the Great Planet Accolon: Gosseyn recognized the mile-high towers rising above the dark leaves of the polar jungle of that warm world.

  Patricia said, “Go! Before X fully manifests himself in this time-space and gets a fix on your location.”

  Gosseyn said slowly, “Periodically, an unseen intelligence who controls my destiny—I call him the Cosmic Chessplayer—has to step out of the shadows and apply force to get me to continue along his or its planned path, shoving me like a pawn on a board. First I thought the Chessplayer was Lavoisseur; then I thought it was the Observer of the Crypt. Each time, the Chessplayer tries to convince me that he is dead. But here is his hand again. Who is manipulating my life? What does he want? Are you an agent of his, Patricia? Or is it you?”

  She said savagely, “I am just as much a pawn of the Chessplayer’s manipulations as you are, Gilbert.”

  The woman at her elbow said in a tense, rapid tone, “Empress, the blur is tapering off. The mass-energy readings indicate an incoming load far greater than one man: Perhaps a fleet, or a large-scale instrument, is attuned to this area. The attunement is reaching the critical threshold … the number of active electromagnetic brains in the Loyalty Machine has just reached maximum load … the machine may be calculating a space-time intersection of high magnitude….”

  Patricia pulled up a radio from her belt and spoke into it: “If I do not countermand this order in thirty seconds, kill Prince Anslark.” She lowered the instrument and said, “Ladies, holster your weapons! Gilbert, you may now solidify. I’ll countermand my kill order once I see you on the surface of Accolon.”

  He did not see that he had a choice.

  29

  In multivalued logic, categories of thought assumed in classical logic to be absolute, such as essence and accident, time and space, cause and effect, are subordinated to a flexible system of approximations.

  Gosseyn was on Accolon, standing on the broad, flat top of one of the immense towers. The process of mentally “photographing” his target area had been easier than normal, despite the vast distance involved: The stress created by Patricia’s remote viewing acted as a partial similarization between the two points in space.

  The air was noticeably thin at this height, as atop a tall mountain. Gosseyn saw that the service door leading up to the roof was a double-sealed airlock.

  He stooped down to peer over the edge. Looking in through the large window at an empty observation deck, he similarized himself inside. Inside was a restaurant, chairs set upside down on empty tables, an automatic unit sweeping the floor.

  At the distance involved between Petrino and Accolon, hours had passed in the Petrino frame of reference: enough that there would be no more threat to Anslark. Gosseyn had taken the precaution of memorizing Patricia when she had taken off her protective armor: He attempted to bring her to him now, to ask his unanswered questions, but the action in his double brain produced no result.

  The view outside the window caught his attention. As always at this polar latitude, it was twilight. A huge and ghostly crescent hung in the east, many times larger than Earth’s moon seen from Earth. Gosseyn used a
special system he had for relaxing his eyes and increasing the number of firings per second of his optic nerve in order to form a small, sharp, clear picture of the image in his brain: It was a ringed gas giant.

  The gas giant was in the process of disintegration. The crescent Gosseyn saw was the lit hemisphere of the mighty world: It was knotted and swirled with a pattern of storm-clouds, hurricanes larger than Earth.

  Gosseyn saw that the ring system was off-center and the worldlets, moons, mountains, rocks, and debris flying from orbit were scattered like the beads of a broken necklace. Clouds of agitated gas were also streaming from the surface in eruptions so immense that the soaring particles of gas overcame even the tremendous escape velocity of this superheavy planet. These clouds were streaming away from the sun side of the world, so that long streaks of multicolored mist, looking strangely like fire, were rushing backward from the horns of the sunlit crescent. The gas giant looked almost like the prow of a ship blazing with reentry heat.

  Next, Gosseyn sent himself to one of his three memorized locations on this world: the municipal post office. There was a clerk in the sorting room, bent over some task, standing with her back to Gosseyn when he appeared. She turned and gave an “oh!” of surprise and asked sharply, “What are you doing here?”

  Gosseyn, who was still dressed in the uniform of a Petrino teamster and wearing a pseudo-flesh mask Anslark had given him, said, “I wandered in here by mistake. I was looking for the maintenance room.”

  The girl visibly relaxed, accepting the explanation. The rumpled overalls of his uniform must have fit her preconception of what a man looking for the maintenance room would dress like. Anslark perhaps had given him a pleasant-looking face, because the girl smiled warmly. She said, “Just take the shortcut through the visitors’ lounge: There’s no one there now. But make sure you have your papers with you before you try to leave the building. The Safety Authority has a man at every public building these days.”