Null-A Continuum Page 6

  Then, a shift of perspective: The tiny grains and droplets he was memorizing were dead worlds and dead stars; the clammy clouds of mist were nebulae two hundred light-years wide.

  Only one thing was alive within the dead galaxy: the Sphere network. Like a warm ring of fire, the electronic and nucleonic circuitry of the mighty Spheres tingled in Gosseyn’s brain, sending his perception further and further….

  Experimentally, Gosseyn selected one of the millions of star systems he had memorized: two neutron stars with a companion brown dwarf, surrounded by dozens of frozen gas giants and hundreds of smaller ice-planets and asteroids. He shifted this system from its location in one of the outer spiral arms to a position less than a light-year from the Ultimate Prime.

  The transition was smooth and effortless.

  Gosseyn reached out and out with his perceptions. Some of the neutron stars he was memorizing seemed oddly smeared, as if he were perceiving them over more than one period of time at once…. All the stars in the galaxy were “blurred” along lines radiating from a single point, centered on a vast disturbance in space-time, a bubble of antigravity filling a superhot, superdense area of space … no, not of space … of the medium, whatever it was, that the early universe occupied before the balancing relations of space-time and matter-energy were settled. Pre-space. The Sphere-energies rushing through Gosseyn’s extra brain were trying to take a photograph of the early universe, the origin point of all things.

  Gosseyn opened his eyes. Dimly, he heard the ship’s alarms ringing. The acres of vision-panel had gone a dark gray hue, and, even as he watched, they swelled outward and away from him, becoming misty and semitransparent. The ship was gone. Instead was a black misty nothingness, a shadowy cloud whose dim billows could be glimpsed by the stray sparks of some unknown energy that flickered between them.

  Gosseyn Three remembered seeing such an effect before, when Secoh, the High Priest of the Sleeping God, had assumed his guise as the shadow-being called the Follower. But this time, it was not a human body but the ship, and the galaxy surrounding, and the circumambient universe that had lost its identity.

  Through the black mist, toward him, a vaguely human figure, a man made of shadows, was walking. The figure seemed, in some strange, impossible way, to be walking forward across eternity, out from the origin point of the universe, down along the strands of blurred time-energy toward the present moment. An aura of colorless and deadly light was around him, making him visible: a smoky black figure against a smoky black background.

  Immediately Gosseyn Three felt the tug of an attunement between the two of them. When the shadow-figure raised its hand, he felt his paralyzed hand rise of its own accord in response.

  The rapid thoughts of the other being leaped into his brain: “I detect that the amnesiac version of Lavoisseur called Gosseyn has almost achieved the no-time, no-space condition: But he has not yet attuned. His death must be instantaneous, for he is aware of my thought-patterns, but has not realized my identity. The isolation technology of the primal Ydd life will distort his relation to the continuum below the twenty-five decimal places needed for existence to maintain self-identification.”

  The figure reached out its shadowy hand, pointed a wraithlike finger. Gosseyn Three felt his mind dissolve into agony.

  Gosseyn Three’s final thought was the sudden awareness of a reflex that Lavoisseur must have built into his brain stem, a hidden reflex that would try to reach across time and space to any of his twin-brother organisms within range.

  Gosseyn Three’s last act was to similarize himself to Gosseyn Two.

  The intergalactic space was far beyond Gosseyn Three’s normal range, but the galaxy-wide circuit of ancient alien technology bent space to shorten the distance, allowing this last, desperate jump all the way back to the Milky Way, back to the planet Nirene.

  Einsteinian considerations prevented any true simultaneity of events, so the final connection had been suspended until the moment when Gosseyn Two, in the relaxation of the sensory-deprivation tank, attuned himself to his twin. The pain signal of his death, arriving when he arrived, accidentally sent Gosseyn Two across the city to the balcony opposite Crang’s.

  Gosseyn Two, lying on the bed in a small room in the Institute, now opened his eyes.

  He said to Daley, “I killed him.”

  6

  Insanity is the confusion of symbol for object at a preconscious level.

  Because Enro might be eavesdropping, Gosseyn could say no more to Daley about the unknown, murderous version of himself, a Gosseyn version who had slain Gosseyn Three, but it was clear that the rage Gosseyn Two picked up with his double brain had been coming from this new and deadly twin.

  Had the two not been duplicates on a molecular level, the attunement of thought from one brain to another could not have taken place. The killer had to be a version of himself.

  In the third subbasement below the ground, Gosseyn looked through the one-way wall at the tall, gaunt middle-aged figure seated, motionless, eyes dull and blank, in the white chair. The room was comfortably appointed, but the slight telltale haze around certain of the objects betrayed the presence of force-fields ready to catch the patient if he fell, or tried to hurt himself.

  Gosseyn entered the room quietly. “Secoh,” he said.

  Secoh lifted his dull eyes and stared at Gosseyn without recognition. Then, his face, thin but strong, lit up with a smile. Some of the old charisma of the High Priest of a galaxy-conquering religion was still there: Gosseyn noticed how handsome the man seemed.

  “Ya wanna play? Play wif me? I’m Secoh! Who’re you?”

  Gosseyn looked toward Daley, who had come in with him. “The memory-layering technique,” Daley said.

  Gosseyn nodded. The doctors were restoring sanity at each level of development, chronologically.

  Gosseyn said, “Can you adjust the neural flows so that later layers of memory, adult memories, are available? I don’t want to hurt him, but he may know something useful to an investigation I am pursuing.”

  Daley opened a panel in the wall, where banks of lie-detector-type circuitry were glowing. He made one or two adjustments.

  Secoh said, “Play!”

  Gosseyn picked up a child’s ball that was one of several toys on the floor: a transparent sphere with a glittering many-armed spiral inside. He tossed it to Secoh.

  The man caught it with both hands but then forgot the game and stared in wonder at the spiral image in the ball. “Galaxy. The whole galaxy. Mine. In my hand.”

  Secoh stood up from the chair, swayed, but then knelt down. “Mommy says I have to pray. Pray to the Sleeping God before I sleep. Both of us sleeping. Ain’t that funny. Pray to … pray to … He screamed when I killed him….”

  Tears welled up in Secoh’s eyes, and a sudden grief, deeper than agony, contorted his features. He screamed in stark, terrible rage, clawing at his own face with his fingernails.

  Daley adjusted the circuit. Secoh smiled and collapsed on the floor, drooling and cooing happily.

  Daley said, “The difficulty is that all his major memory chains, even to his youngest, are caught up in the worship of the idol he killed. However, we have been getting some success with a more dangerous technique: one you must be familiar with.”

  Gosseyn looked at him quizzically.

  “A second personality can be created from the main stem, unaware of the memories of the parent mind. We call it the Lavoisseur technique. We will have to step back behind the protective barrier to use it.”

  “The patient becomes dangerous?”

  “Very. Secoh occupies more than one vibration state of matter-energy. His other form enjoyed state-specific memories, and can be layered to a more adult level.”

  When they were watching, once again, through the transparent wall, Daley donned a pair of thick, leaded goggles and handed a similar pair to Gosseyn. Then Daley turned to the control panel governing the electron tube energies flowing through the brain of the patient in the next roo
m.

  Daley said, “The system works by negative suppression. If the energy from the board is cut off, his normal pre-adult brain-wave pattern will emerge.”

  Daley made the delicate adjustment.

  In the other room, Secoh, his eyes glittering, his face expressionless, rose to his feet. The body of Secoh began to blur and darken. In a moment, his flesh was dissolved; instead, a being made of shadow hovered there.

  Gosseyn was amazed. “How is he able to do that without a distorter?”

  Daley said significantly, “Certain specialized cells in his brain act as a biological distorter. However, he cannot cast the shadow-image beyond a limited range without artificial amplification.”

  Gosseyn opened the microphone and said, “Secoh. I’ve come to talk to you.”

  From the shadow-being came a deep, dispassionate voice: “Not Secoh. That name is nothing to me.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the Follower.”

  “I need to ask you some questions.”

  The shadowy silhouette of a head tilted forward. There was no face, but the hint of posture seemed to indicate intensity. “Ah! Gosseyn. I see your energy patterns. I know you.”

  The lightning bolt that flashed from the core of the shadow-being sputtered against the insulated transparency. The internal force-fields in the room flickered into full strength, and only this prevented the bed and chairs and other flammable objects from igniting.

  GOSSEYN turned up the gain on the microphone, to make himself heard above the terrific discharge in the other room.

  “Follower! I’ve come to ask you about the Crypt of the Sleeping God.”

  Daley put a hand on Gosseyn’s elbow, pointed to one of the readouts on the psychology machine. The needles on several dials were inching their way toward the red. This topic was the main psychological danger to Secoh.

  Gosseyn said, “There is someone else who can manifest a shadow-body.”

  The needles crept down. The dark, translucent figure nodded. No features of its face could be seen, but the posture was one of a man intent, watching.

  The Follower said, “The Observer said this body was to be my particular sign of favor from the Sleeping God.”

  Gosseyn was taken aback. “Observer? You mean the artificial brain controlling the Crypt?” Gosseyn had called that machine the Chessplayer. He knew no other name for it. “It told me that when you were a novice at the Crypt you accidentally operated the shadow-substance mechanism, which was one of few devices still operating in the Crypt. It attuned itself to you.”

  The dark, sardonic voice of the Follower said, “Amusing! If you call the months of instruction spent repairing the shadow-attunement mechanism, and being trained in the space-deception and control techniques ‘an accident,’ well, then an accident it was.”

  Gosseyn said carefully, “But—it told me that when it tried to make mental contact with the peoples surrounding the Crypt, they grew frightened, and fell into worshipping the Sleeping God. That they did not understand his true nature.” Gosseyn said nothing about the so-called god being nothing more than a crippled intergalactic space-traveler. He did not want to challenge Secoh’s neurotic beliefs.

  “Is that what it told you? Frightened of it, were we?” Again, a deep chuckle came from the wraithlike figure. “The Inner Circle of Priests knew what the Observer Machine was, Mr. Gosseyn. Ever since the early days of our industrial revolution, we knew what machinery was. The scientific advances produced from secret studies of the systems allowed the priesthood to hold its grip on power for thousands of years. Yes, we knew. The science was a gift of the Sleeping God. And we knew the Observer Machine was not reliable. The machine had a God that it was entrusted to keep and watch as He slept, and it schemed forever, forever seeking to escape its duty, and find a way to destroy Him.”

  But this thought was too near the forbidden, horrible truth that Secoh could not bear. The needles fell all the way to the red. Daley reached toward the control to sever the circuit keeping Secoh’s real personality suppressed, but the needles suddenly fell into the normal range.

  The shadow-being straightened. He said, “The other priests communicated with the Observer, and thought the body in the Crypt was merely a man. But what do you call a creature that cannot die, who can see the future and view events remote in time and space, who can step through walls, control matter and energy, and whom no mortal weapon can touch? Would he not be, indeed, a god?”

  The Follower stepped forward. The armored glass wall separating them shimmered oddly when the shadow-being stepped through it.

  Daley’s quick reaction was to use the wall circuits to place an insulation force-web around himself and Gosseyn. That split-second action saved Daley’s life: The bolt that came from the Follower threw Daley back across the room, away from the controls, but Gosseyn could still detect the young man’s nervous-system action, his vital energy: Daley lay motionless on the ground but was alive. Gosseyn merely similarized the lightning bolt thrown at him into grounding points in the Institution dynamo chamber.

  The Follower now took up position between Gosseyn and the control panel. Gosseyn could not tell which way the odd being was facing. Perhaps it was studying the controls that maintained the thought-pressures allowing it to think and move; perhaps it was contemplating Gosseyn.

  Gosseyn said, “If you move away from the range of the field, or damage the control unit, your artificial state will collapse back into your base personality. You cannot escape.”

  The Follower said nothing. There was a slight hiss in the air, as if the shadow-creature were building up a static charge.

  Gosseyn said quickly, “If the other shadow-being commits murders that do not honor the Sleeping God, the Follower will be blamed, his name dishonored.”

  The Follower spoke in a voice of amused contempt: “Do you think it is for the praise of men I do my work? Do not toy with me, Gosseyn of Venus. You think the Sleeping God is a cripple, a mortal man maintained by an ancient robotic brain. You think man evolved upward from apes. Surely all the evidence points to another conclusion: that man degenerated from a higher state.”

  Gosseyn said, “Are you saying the other shadow-being is a higher form of man?”

  “No. Obviously, it is my cousin Enro.”

  Gosseyn was surprised. “Cousin?”

  “Of course. The Emperor is my cousin. I am a bastard son of the House of Gorgzid. The blood is in me, though only the God recognized me. All other men despised me. But had I not been of ancient and royal blood, the God in the Crypt would not have been able to stimulate the growth of special space-control nerve ganglia in me, or train me to control the non-identity condition.” The Follower raised a shadowy hand, its fingers like wisps of ghost-stuff. “Lesser men thrust into this state simply die.”

  Gosseyn was shocked by the implication. Enro and Secoh seemed to have suffered a process similar to the one that grew a double brain in him.

  And yet it made sense, suddenly, of a number of things.

  But he did not see how this second shadow-being could be anything other than another Gosseyn body. How else had the mental connection, the automatic awareness of the murderer’s thoughts, leaped to Gosseyn Three?

  The Follower was speaking. “When the newborn Enro was operated on by the Observer of the Sleeping God, the work done was repair work, correcting genetic errors due to degeneration of the superhuman species from which we descend. Surely you did not think those coffins, those life-suspension units, were designed to mutate the patients placed inside them?”

  Gosseyn said, “I was told the double brain was found in the brain stem of ordinary humans in a stunted form, undeveloped. You were subjected to a similar technique related to a different nerve cluster area of the brain.”

  “Such a nerve cluster is an atavism, a stunted relic, not an undeveloped potential. The Primordials suffered genetic decay due to inbreeding after their galaxy was destroyed. But the coffins were designed to repair years and centuries
of accumulated cell damage, and they can restore to proper function the organs of those in whom the ancient blood runs true. The ancient gene combinations can be found in the Vestals of Ur, the Savants of Petrino, the No-Men of Accolon, or the Predictors of Yalerta, or any other worlds, not yet discovered, where the Primordial Men first touched down when they colonized this galaxy. The Royal Family of Dzan is magnetoelectrokinetic, but the trait was once common among their general population.”

  “That’s why the Greatest Empire sought and found Yalerta.”

  “Yalerta is a planet isolated and unaware of the galactic civilization around her. The Greatest Empire also found Earth, and also prevented other worlds from making contact with her. It served our purposes to hoard the planets with remnants of extragalactic technology. Petrino and Accolon discovered the galactic culture before our ancestors could stop them. Remnants of the science and wisdom of the Primordials are found there: They rose quickly to predominance. These two worlds formed the League to stop the spread of the Greatest Empire.”

  “So if there is a second Follower, a second shadow-being …”

  “It is Enro. The Second Follower must be of the House of Gorgzid, one who slept in the coffin of the Sleeping God. That is: Secoh or Enro or Reesha; the Lord Guardian or the Emperor or the Empress. But she is fallen from the ancient ways, and brings shame on House Gorgzid. And I am trapped here.”

  So Patricia had been exposed to the mutative nerve-surgery of the Crypt!

  Gosseyn said, “Why would the Chessplayer, the one you call the Observer, have lied to me?”

  “Why would it tell the truth? Its builders, despite that they were gods, were desperate, fleeing galactic disaster. They would not have given the machine scruples: It was meant to carry out its task, no matter the cost.”

  “What task?”