Null-A Continuum Read online

  Gosseyn said, “No, thanks. I don’t drink.”

  “Too sane to have bad habits?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I was expecting you to vanish from the car. Why didn’t you?”

  That explained the lack of precautions during the ride. There had been no vibration field surrounding the sedan. “I’m innocent.”

  “Either you are abnormally naïve or your world must have abnormally honest police.”

  “My world has no police at all.”

  Veeds looked skeptical. “Who runs your prison colonies and concentration camps?”

  How could he explain that there was no need for madhouses on a world with no madmen? Gosseyn turned away. Looking out, he could see boat and hydrofoil traffic on the river. The highway bridges, despite their size, were designed to be retracted into the concrete banks of the river. The multitude of low, flat barges floating along the bay Gosseyn took to be factories, which could be dispersed or submerged during emergencies.

  Veeds had been raised in an environment where war and crime, with all the fear and sorrow that entailed, had shaped his basic assumptions. Gosseyn could not bridge the gap between them with mere words.

  Veeds said, “Wonderful thing, those windows. You tend to forget it’s just an image produced by rays. The outside of the building is opaque to visible light.”

  “You have evidence the building is opaque to Enro as well?”

  Veeds studied his glass with evident relish, downed it swiftly. Whatever he was drinking was potent enough to bring a touch of pink to his cheeks, and he blinked and rubbed his eyes. “No evidence. Guesswork. No one knows how it is Enro can see through walls. No one is sure how far he can see. But—you are a scientifically trained man, Mr. Gosseyn. What would you say?”

  “It is a distortion effect. Biological, like mine.”

  “So we hope. When this system was first invented, volunteers would plot against the throne in rooms such as this one. Some were arrested; some were not. We still do not know. Perhaps Enro can see through the suppression field, and merely toys with us. Perhaps he is not watching us now. Perhaps.”

  “You cannot believe Enro can see so far.”

  “See and hear.”

  “He is in a cell—a very comfortable, large, well-equipped cell, a cell the size of a small planetoid, but a cell nonetheless—a quarter million light-years away. Surely his power only works on a limited range.”

  “Surely? And I thought you Null-A types never made assumptions.”

  Gosseyn was silent. The man had a point. Gosseyn’s own power had recently expanded from a twenty-one-light-hour range to an interstellar one, due to his study under the Yalertan Predictors. And Enro’s people had been the masters of Yalerta, with years to study there.

  “Still, there is no distorter record of that asteroid. I am the only one who could have freed him, and I haven’t.”

  “No one else?”

  “There is another version of me. He woke prematurely, before I had a chance to die. Our memories have diverged since that time.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He joined an expedition to the Primordial Galaxy. An experimental ship using engine designs taken from the Crypt of the Sleeping God, together with the powers of Gosseyn Three, artificially amplified, was able to cross the intergalactic distance in a matter of months rather than centuries. He hoped to find traces of the ancient, original civilization of the Forerunners of Man, discover the causes of the Shadow Effect that ate their galaxy and extinguished all their suns. He has been gone for over a year.”

  “Maybe your second brain has gone insane, and freed him without your knowledge.”

  “Why?”

  “Your people are the expert psychologists. Can you think of no reason?”

  Gosseyn could: Freeing Enro to commit the murder Gosseyn could not consciously contemplate would satisfy this hypothetical psychotic jealousy in his secondary brain. And the lie detector had not confirmed that Gosseyn was not psychotic.

  Gosseyn’s training permitted him no emotional connections to fictitious memories of a fictitious marriage. But could that training have been removed from his extra brain without his first brain’s knowledge?

  GOSSEYN said, “You recognized the world of two suns at my mention of it. But there are more double-star systems in the galaxy than single-star systems, are there not?”

  “Twin stars with planets are rare. Low-gravity worlds with oceans are rare. Both together are impossible. Nonetheless, the followers of the Old Religion say that the original home world of man was one such: a planet called Ur. Their doctrine says that the Sleeping God tarried on Ur before he came to Gorgzid to sleep. Spacemen say the world is haunted. Enro occupied the prehistoric cathedral some ancient race built upon that world, garrisoning it as his stronghold: an act meant to humiliate the Old Religion and confirm the supremacy of the Cult of the Sleeping God. Ur is Enro’s fortress-world. No chart shows in which decant it lies. They say the world of Ur is invisible. They say Enro found it with his special power.”

  Gosseyn’s interest was piqued. “My people think men evolved on Earth.”

  “How then to explain why men are found on so many planets?”

  “Earth has cognate species, monkeys and apes.”

  “As do other worlds. All the scientific evidence points to an evolution, but …” Veeds shrugged. “We all must have started somewhere. Man did not create himself.”

  “The extragalactics—the ones who built the ancient starship you call the Crypt of the Sleeping God—say man originated in the Shadow Galaxy.”

  Veeds spread his hands nonchalantly. “Nirene was settled from Gorgzid, as were most of the worlds in this decant. If there is any record of Gorgzid being settled from an earlier world, that record did not survive the Inquisition under Secoh.”

  Gosseyn said, “What did your scientists conclude of the limits on Enro’s powers?”

  Veeds said with a snort, “Scientists? The Greatest Empire was never a place where one could inquire into the Emperor’s divine powers and walk free. I know only rumor.”

  Now his voice became soft, as if, even now, even here, he feared who might be listening.

  Veeds continued, “When Enro first wrestled the throne from the Ashargin of Nirene and returned it to the old capital on Gorgzid, his secret police network was highly organized, highly professional, and equipped with the lie-detector technology. Everyone believed that was all he had. The Ashargin, they had told us Enro’s clairvoyance was all fakery, the superstitions of a senile planet. They said that even up till the moment when Enro’s agents had them all slaughtered; only the feebleminded boy, young Rhade Ashargin, was spared, due to the cunning, or perhaps it was the mercy, of the Empress.

  “But then Enro began to show his powers to ambassadors, courtiers, and rival lords of outer worlds. They would see the images form in the air before them. Perhaps he would show them their wives in bed, their buried armories, their secret shipyards, or the settings on the encryption machines hidden in orbital vaults.

  “Enro would just show them and they would fall down in fear. He commanded them to worship the Sleeping God, and to make this worship the law of their world.

  “Because there was no mechanism. No plate, no spy-ray. He would just close his eyes and open them again and what he saw became visible around him. Mirrors worked better than other surfaces to catch the images: He surrounded himself with mirrors, not because he was vain. No one knew how he did it.”

  “There is one man who might know. On this planet. I’ll need to be able to move around. You’ve made arrangements?” Gosseyn stood up.

  Veeds nodded genially. “You are a perceptive man, Mr. Gosseyn. I had been assuming you would teleport back to your home world, and flee the death that awaits you here; but, of course, I made plans in case you decided otherwise.”

  Gosseyn did not see what button he pressed, but to one side of the room a section of the wall slid open, and a white closet with glass shel
ves was revealed.

  “There are masks made of pseudo-flesh in the drawer yonder, wigs made of living fiber, and so on. The suits can inflate or deflate in sections to alter your build to a casual glance. We will have your Earth clothing passed to Mahren, who is even now being made up to look like you. Brave men, you Venusians! Maybe Enro will be fooled. Maybe Enro cannot see bone structure. We think he cannot see the interior structure of solid objects. We think.”

  Veeds drained his tumbler and sighed loudly. “Some members of my cell threw their disguise equipment away, during the celebrations following Liberation Day. Fools. After the galactic war, the League-backed Interim Government refused to hang Enro; they think it is uncivilized to kill one’s foes! Fools. And the Church of the Sleeping God still forms the backbone of Enro’s political machine, but the Interim Government must follow the League Charter, which does not allow us to abolish a religion. Fools. All fools.”

  “I assume this equipment fell into your hands after you arrested some cells in the resistance? And you just continued their work. Why? You, a police commissioner under Enro? You were not loyal to the Ashargin.”

  “No. They let the worlds of the Greatest Empire slip through their fingers. League Powers encouraged rebellion and dissatisfaction, while the Ashargin dithered. The Empire needed a strong hand to set her back on course. So I told myself when I was a younger man, stupid with a young man’s stupidity. I suppose you Venusians do not lie to yourselves?”

  “The training is not difficult. Talk to Mr. Mahren.”

  “Bah. I need no training to see through that lie. I was invited to Court once; do you know that? After my men liquidated a particularly well-connected League spy-ring. It was the supreme moment of my life, the one day from which I count forward and backward to mark the years. I met the Empress. She was as pure and regal as they say. Have you ever met a woman for whom you would do anything, betray anything? I stepped up to the throne, and she asked me about my wife and children by name. By name! Monarchs do not need to flatter and beg for votes, but she took the time to have someone read her my file. And she smiled and told me to continue my work. The Empire needed men like me. Her exact words. There was a small bruise on her cheek, here.” Veeds raised a finger to touch his cheekbone. “Just here. Makeup covered it, but I am a policeman; I notice these things. No one in our Empire would strike the Divine Empress. Except Enro. You must kill him. He killed your friend.”

  Gosseyn shook his head. “The war is over.”

  “Only you can do it: You are like him. Beyond human.”

  Gosseyn said, “Enro is a man. He is limited by the logic of his passions.”

  “He gained divine powers after sleeping in the Crypt of the Sleeping God. Others in history attempted to sleep as he did, but they were not of the royal house of Gorgzid, not of the unbroken bloodline of primordial Ptath-Reesha, and so they died. Enro the Red is not merely a man.”

  Gosseyn paused, struck by a thought. “And did Patricia? Sleep in the Crypt?”

  “The common folk were outraged when Enro’s parents allowed him to sleep in the coffin of the God for the first three months of his life. They would have been more outraged at the thought of a girl-child. But Reesha is younger than Enro, and the Royal Family’s control of the priesthood had grown in the intervening years. There were rumors that she was incubated secretly in the most sacred coffin. Some say she has the power to know things from afar; some say she has another, to see patterns in the structure of time, to sense fate.”

  Gosseyn wondered. Patricia did seem always to be at hand when crucial events were in the offing.

  Veeds said, “Many of us think Reesha was the genius behind their early success. She reformed the navy, outlawed the selling of commissions. The wrath of Enro was without bounds after his sister the Empress left him. Enro sent whole worlds to the executioner: Whole seas were filled with blood, whole atmospheres with fine ash. They do not call him ‘the Red’ because of his hair. Come now! The blood of your friend calls out for vengeance, and the League-backed Interim Government will do nothing.”

  “You think Patricia will assume the throne of the Greatest Empire and overthrow the Interim Government once I kill her brother. That is your real motive.”

  “Enro is a beast. That is my real motive! Seeing the Divine Reesha enthroned is merely a … a fortunate side effect.”

  “She is loyal to Null-A ideas. Totalitarian dictatorship cannot hold much romance for her.”

  “Thorson died on your world: Enro’s loyal right-hand man, and her rival at Court, or so I’ve heard.”

  “I killed Thorson.”

  “You alone? Or was her hand in it?”

  Gosseyn pursed his lips. Patricia had been the one who introduced X, the crippled, psychologically damaged version of Gosseyn, into the household of Hardie, the President of Earth, when that schemer had been using smuggled galactic technology to corrupt the government of Earth. The conspirators thought X was Lavoisseur, the chief of the Semantics Institute, and therefore a crucial ally to their work on Earth. Unknown even to himself, X had been a copy of Lavoisseur, whose specially constructed and warped brain was designed to transmit thought-echoes, including all the inner plots of the conspirators, to his creator, the real Lavoisseur.

  Later, X had been shot to death by Prescott, another galactic agent. Gosseyn assumed Prescott had done this on Thorson’s orders.

  But Patricia had been Thorson’s sovereign; he could not have failed to recognize her. He knew her brother the Emperor to be hunting frantically for her. What hold had she held over Thorson to keep him in check? Which of his men had been loyal to her?

  Veeds smiled a thin, triumphant smile. “Do you think she is not cunning enough to pretend a loyalty to your Null-A philosophy long enough to persuade you and your people to overthrow her brother?”

  Gosseyn was silent. Patricia had not shirked personal danger. She had acted with bold confidence during her adventures on Earth and during the galactic war, a woman of abnormal intelligence and drive, even if not Null-A trained. Cunning? The word had implications he didn’t like.

  “Besides,” Veeds said, “you have to kill him before he kills you. Oh? You cannot die. Well, then—then kill him before he kills me.” Veeds poured himself another stiff drink.

  “Illogical to fear him. Recapturing Enro, if he’s at large, is merely a problem to be solved as efficiently as possible. Fear saps efficiency; therefore, I do not fear Enro.”

  Veeds snorted. “And they say men from your world are sane!”

  4

  Analyzing the universe into simple binary opposites, while necessary, has limited value.

  Gosseyn watched from a balcony as Mahren, dressed in Gosseyn’s clothing and wearing a convincing flesh mask, departed the police station. Gosseyn, dressed in Nireni fashion, departed a few minutes later, going the other direction.

  The papers he had been given by Commissioner Veeds included a badge: With this Gosseyn was able to hire a robotic cab.

  A half-an-hour ride found him two hundred miles south of the city, in a metropolis that on a smaller world would have been a major city but here was merely a suburb. The lawns and campuses of the Semantics Institute shined with the blue vegetation typical of Nirene, but in certain flowerpots were the roses and lilies of Earth. The architecture was airy and light, all soaring arches and weightlessly high roofs, in sharp contrast to the heavy and blocky Nireni buildings.

  One building made of blue-gray metal, in a dell surrounded by trees and flowering bushes, was the medical center. He showed his pass to the clerk at the wicket.

  The clerk was a Venusian Null-A. The rapid glance at Gosseyn’s face, the suppressed smile, the small nod, told him his disguise had been penetrated.

  The clerk said, “You cannot travel the grounds without an escort, who, in this case, is me. Now I have one errand to run first, to check the power switches in the dynamo room, so you’ll have to come with me while I do that, and then we can see the patient you requested.”
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br />   The dynamo room had one wall filled with power sockets of the atomic type, as well as step-down converters for changing the energy to electromagnetic, nucleonic, or gravitic energy of various types and wavelengths. During the clerk’s system check, energies of various types pulsed through the rooms and Gosseyn memorized dozens of sockets of various voltages and roentgens.

  Gosseyn was impressed. The clerk, whose name was Daley, had recognized not merely that the impostor was a Null-A Venusian but also which one he was and what needed to be done to provide him with a well-stocked armory.

  Gosseyn said, “As a security precaution I assume you have all visitors pass a lie-detector test?”

  Daley shot him a quizzical look but, for the benefit of any unseen eyes watching them, said only, “Of course.”

  They stepped into one of the unoccupied rooms. The medical appliances were, for the most part, hidden: A complex structure of electron tubes and neural psychology machines was built into the bed and walls. Otherwise, it looked like a well-appointed hotel room. A broad window (and this was an Earth window, made of glass) showed the lawns and grounds outside.

  Gosseyn merely put his hand on the pillow. His extra brain sensed the electron flows from the lie detector were hidden under that spot. “Analyze the insanity afflicting me.”

  The lie detector spoke: “It is a possessive jealous obsession, combined with incest-guilt, of the typical Violent Man Syndrome. The false image of the object of your romantic obsession has been mutated by repeated subconscious neurotic redactions of your memory: It is tied to deep impulses of your most fundamental identity-concepts—a leader of men, a defender of the One True Faith.”

  Gosseyn said, “But—I have no such concepts.”

  “The concepts did not arise in your mind. Your mind merely interpreted them according to its own structure.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “The question is beyond the capacity of this unit to answer.”