Null-A Continuum Read online

  “Why do you assume he is still alive?”

  “Oh, I do not. Not really. Because the Lavoisseur who created Lavoisseur One, the original and unknown Lavoisseur, perhaps had no more need for a Lavoisseur Two, and simply let that line die. Gosseyn Two he needed to corrupt Thorson’s loyalty to me. But the Lavoisseur Zero, the Unknown, he is surely still alive. You don’t see it, do you? You are an intelligent and curious man, Mr. Gosseyn. But you have one blind spot, placed in your mind by your creator. You are programmed to overlook clues leading back to your creator. A little over two years ago, the last and highly degenerate remnants of the extragalactics, the Primordial Men who fled from the Shadow Galaxy, stumbled across one of the asteroids where Gosseyn Three was held in a medical suspension capsule. An accident woke him prematurely. This just so happened to place a Gosseyn at the right place at the right time to quell the threat posed by the extragalactics. It was during my investigation of the extragalactic men and their technology that Gosseyn Three, with no warning or formality, teleported me to a remote asteroid prison. I recall the incident well. So very well. Now ask yourself why this astronomical coincidence happened.”

  Gosseyn said nothing.

  Enro continued in an amiable tone, “I admire the economy of his moves. Lavoisseur Zero is clearly one of the Primordial Men, perhaps the last of them. I require his knowledge and technology to serve me. So far, I have been content to leave you alive, hoping you would lead me back to him. He has not seen fit to contact you. Surely you wish to find him?”

  “I hardly have any reason to cooperate with you, Enro.”

  “You have no reason to be loyal to him, do you? He created Gosseyn One for the express purpose of dying, merely as a stunt, to impress Thorson. So much blood, just for a gesture. No, Lavoisseur does not care if you live.”

  “Lavoisseur, if he is alive, would not want the secrets of his technology in your hands.”

  “Nonetheless, you will help me find him, willingly, in life, or unwillingly, by your death.”

  “You are asking me to join you?”

  “To serve me, yes.”

  “I refuse, of course.”

  “Is my cause so ignoble? Since the dawn of time men have yearned for universal empire, and dreamed of the end of all wars.”

  “Imperium obviates the need for external wars, but the civil wars and revolutions are just as bloody, or more so. Even decent men are trapped by the need to betray or be betrayed; armistice and honorable surrender are impossible to rebels.”

  “Nonsense!” Enro’s tone was dismissive. “If the Empire is well run, there will be no rebellions. If the Emperor is immortal, there will be no wars of succession. If he is clairvoyant and prescient, there will be no chance of conspiracy against him. There will be one law, eternal and all-powerful.”

  “Enforced by whom? Unless there is universal agreement on the principles behind the government, there can be no universal peace. Only a scientific principle has the necessary objective truth behind it: such as Null-A neurolinguistic psychology.”

  “Oh, I have plans along those lines, Mr. Gosseyn,” Enro said airily. “But come now! I am not unreasonable! I offer a temporary partnership: You wish to find your creator for your reasons, and I for mine. We cooperate until our interests no longer intersect. Surely that is preferable to immediate, painful, and permanent death?”

  Gosseyn said, “Very well. I agree.”

  “I will wait while you get a lie detector to confirm that for me. From the Institute, please! I do not trust the lie detectors used by the Nireni police.”

  So Gosseyn walked back into the building. As he expected, it was deserted. The fires had been extinguished in Secoh’s room. There was a bank of lie detectors built into the wall: Gosseyn opened a panel and touched one.

  “Confirm that I am sincerely willing to help Enro find Lavoisseur, if he is alive. I believe the attempt will be futile; if Lavoisseur allows himself to be found, it will only be under such conditions as will defeat Enro’s schemes. I also honestly believe that Enro, even knowing that I have these mental reservations, will not be psychologically able to believe that he has no chance of success.”

  Again the dry chuckle came from the phone. “I see we understand each other, Mr. Gosseyn.”

  But the lie detector said, “The subject is sincere on a conscious level, and speaks what he believes to be the truth; however, on an unconscious level, he is consumed with rage and jealousy, to the point where he intends to kill Enro at the earliest opportunity. The subject regards Enro as a rival for the love of Patricia Hardie, his wife.”

  Gosseyn yanked his hand away from the unit. “Enro! If you overheard my conversation with Daley, you know those emotions came from an exterior source.”

  Enro said slowly, “My spies tell me that the way Lavoisseur made sure you came to Thorson’s attention was to have the false memory that you were married to my sister placed in your brain. I had been assuming this was merely a surface delusion, like a hypnotic suggestion. Lie detector! Did he touch her? Does this baseborn infidel vermin remember touching my sister’s divine flesh with his filthy hands?”

  Gosseyn crushed the phone in his fist, but it was too late. The machine had heard the words and responded, “Subject memories include many instances of an erotic congress with his wife after their honeymoon, which are neither delirium nor fantasy, but neither do they seem to be true memories of this body….”

  Enro was apparently not listening to the qualifications. If he had any last words or threats to accompany his attack, Gosseyn, broken telephone in hand, did not hear them.

  The room around Gosseyn turned to black mist and swirled away from him in all directions. He still felt the solid floor underfoot, but his eyes beheld the cratered landscape and the wild seas of the twin-sun world of Ur. Where Enro had been standing now a shadow-figure loomed, eyes burning. Enro had no need to move to a position to put Gosseyn between him and his projection: The projection was all around Gosseyn, and above, and below.

  Gosseyn felt the intolerable pain of space-time being distorted around him. The shock of death came faster than he could consciously react.

  He felt his extra brain acting of its own accord, automatically.

  Darkness.

  He woke naked between the satin sheets of a four-poster bed. Dazzling pale sunlight shined from the marble floor and was reflected by the ornamental carvings in the painted ceiling. Seated before a vanity mirror in a sheer negligee was a woman brushing her brown hair, which shined like polished amber. The mirror was one of those television types that could show the room at any angle: The image held both the seated woman and the bed where Gosseyn stirred.

  She turned. Her eyes sparkled playfully, and her white teeth flashed in a mischievous smile as she said, “Well, well, sleepyhead! It is about time you woke up!”

  It was Patricia.

  8

  The function served by a tool can be inferred by its design.

  Gosseyn saw the gun when he started to sit up. Patricia half-turned in her seat, hairbrush still in one hand. In her other hand, shining like a jewel, was an electric-voltage pistol of powerful design.

  Gosseyn noted abstractly that it was a Lady Colt 1.6 megavolt. The gun she bought on Earth, in Cress Village. But those memories were false.

  Weren’t they?

  Noticing the direction of his stare, Patricia smiled slightly and inclined her head toward the deadly weapon held in her slender, rock-steady fist. “A woman can’t be too careful. Last time we were alone in my bedroom, you tied me up and gagged me. You’re a dangerous man.”

  He said, “At that time, you were Patricia Hardie, member of a conspiracy to destroy Null-A. Who are you now?”

  She flipped on the pistol’s gyro, so it would continue to point at Gosseyn, and turned on the pinpoint microphone in the grip, so she could fire by voice command. The pistol balanced itself on the back of her chair and continued to cover him. This freed up her hands to continue putting her hair up.

 
; She said casually, “Reesha. Her Radiant, Divine, and Imperial Majesty, the Gorgzin and Holy Imperatrix Reesha vor Ptathrandu of the House of Gorgzid, Bride of the Sleeping God, Shepherdess of the People, August Mother of the Greatest Empire Ever to Exist in Time and Space, Protectress of the Mirabel Cluster, Grand Duchess of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and the Stars beyond the Hercules Nebula, Sovereign Queen Absolute of all the stars, systems, and constellations of the Seventh Decant. I’ve got a dozen other titles to go with it. It’s quite a mouthful.”

  “At that time, your bedroom wall was the one holding the mechanism that had driven the Games Machine insane, and forced it to select your father—the man pretending to be your father—as President of Earth, instead of a qualified candidate. Even then, I should have wondered why the President of Earth would put himself in the position where his so-called daughter, by wrecking one unprotected machine, could send him to a criminal-psychiatric ward.”

  Patricia sat with her elbows up, fixing her hair into a net. Her eyes tilted sideways, not looking at him; she talked without moving her teeth, for she was holding pins in her mouth. Every now and then she drew one from between her lips to pin her hair up in place.

  “Mr. Hardie was an Earthman, an ambitious native chieftain of a backwater world. Originally, that was Thorson’s room, but I outranked Thorson and so I booted him out … and sweet little Vorgul would have done anything for me anyway.”

  “ ‘Vorgul’?”

  “Vorgul Xor Xayan of Gorgzid. You did not think his real name was Jim Thorson, did you?”

  Gosseyn was trying to imagine calling the hulking, cold-eyed murderer he knew as Thorson sweet or little. He could not.

  Patricia gave a slight moue of distaste and prodded a last strand of hair into place. “No matter,” she said, lowering her hands. “We have more important things to do than to chat about old times. Will you give me your word that you will not teleport away, blast anything with lightning, or do anything rash, while we talk?”

  Gosseyn, leaning on his elbows, half-reclining, shifted his eyes left and right, using an eidetic method to take in all details at one glance. There were tall windows to one side of the room opposite where Patricia sat, but covered with a semitransparent force-barrier, so that sunlight entered, but details of the world outside were blurred. Gosseyn saw green shadows, a sway of motion he took to be a fountain, and guessed the blurred glass looked out upon a walled garden.

  Across the chamber from the bed were tall doors, paneled with ornamental designs, hanging half-open. Through this, a lavishly appointed suite could be glimpsed. Larger doors on the far side of the suite were closed, and also were dimmed by an energy barrier. The impression was that of a place under siege.

  The wall opposite the windows, behind Patricia, registered on his extra brain: a complex of circuits, as of some large machinery, but none of the energies he detected was lethal.

  His only danger came from the gun. Gosseyn took a moment to memorize it.

  He said, “I agree.”

  There must have been a lie detector in a drawer in her vanity table, because a mechanized voice said, “The subject is speaking the truth without mental reservation.”

  Gosseyn sat up in the bed. “Lie detector! What is the name of this woman here?”

  “She thinks of herself as Mrs. Patr—”

  “Don’t answer that!” Patricia’s voice, suddenly sharp, cut off the lie detector in mid-syllable.

  But she did not seem angry. Her green eyes glittered with amusement. Her hair done, she stood and took the pistol in hand again. The mirror behind her formed a bright backdrop, making her filmy nightgown insubstantial: The slim curves of her alluring silhouette shined through it.

  But Gosseyn kept his eyes on the pistol.

  “Are you going to holster that?”

  “It’s for me.”

  The idea that she might be in so much danger should not have surprised him, but her comment came like a blow. He searched her features. “You … you would kill yourself rather than marry Enro?”

  She shook her head. “I fear him, but not to the point of death.”

  “Then who?”

  “The League Powers. The Interim Government. They are using something like Null-A technology in ways that are nightmarish, abhorrent. A technology your people foolishly gave into their hands.”

  GOSSEYN said nothing. The detectives of Venus had discussed the ramifications of giving the secrets of their Science of the Mind into the hands of unsane and insane men. The grim decision had been to proceed. The theory was that once the technology was spread widely enough, those who misused it must inevitably be detected and cured by the efforts of those who used it correctly. The Games Machine of Venus had seconded the decision.

  A science that taught men how to control their own minds was the only science, which, by its very nature, in the long run, could not be abused.

  But in the short run, it could.

  She said, “Imagine a torture chamber equipped with Null-A-qualified lie detectors, so that every nuance of pain can be studied carefully to increase its effect. Imagine using electron tubes to suppress the higher brain functions where moral reasoning takes place. Your people’s theory is that correct use of language can make men sane: Obviously the incorrect use can make them insane, and, if used skillfully, can make them all insane along similar lines. Do your people understand the nuances of mob psychology? My brother is not the only one who knows how to sway the huge planetary populations of the ignorant.”

  “The League Powers are a democracy.”

  “Which means, in order to secure their elections, their politicians there must study mass psychology as closely as any dictatorship. The planet Petrino, one of the main League Powers, has already voted itself under the control of a Psychology Standardization Committee, one that defines disloyalty to Petrine ideas as a form of mental aberration to be cured by the state. They are using highly sophisticated neuropsychological techniques to do it. If this is what they are doing openly, I can only wonder what their military intelligence bureaus are doing secretly.”

  “Do you expect to be attacked any minute? Any second?”

  That was the moment when he allowed his extra brain to memorize her molecular and atomic composition. He combined the cluster of cells in his extra brain to track her location and monitor her levels of neural pressure for signs of danger-anxiety.

  She said, “Several people from the palace have already vanished: Someone focused a distorter on them from orbit and snatched them away. The Interim Government won’t let us take proper precautions, won’t give us the military electronics we need to protect ourselves….”

  “Us? Where am I? What planet is this?”

  She tilted back her head and gave a ringing peal of laughter. “Are you lost? The man who can cross the universe in one step, lost!” She turned her back to him, setting the pistol down on the vanity table and taking a cigarette out of a jewel-studded holder. The little box lit the cigarette for her automatically. She turned again, breathing in the translucent bluish smoke and studying Gosseyn thoughtfully.

  Gosseyn stood up but drew the silk sheet up with him and draped it over one shoulder, an impromptu tunic. His act was based not on modesty but on calculation. Nudity would distract this fascinating woman from answering his questions. Somewhere in the galaxy, great events were taking place; dangerous forces were set in motion. Gosseyn felt a sense of impatience inside him. Enro had already struck once, and Gosseyn did not know why the blow had failed.

  “Where am I?”

  He must have sounded more forceful than he meant to, or perhaps there was a cold look in his eyes, for Patricia took half a step back and picked up her pistol. And yet she did not seem flustered—Gosseyn could not recall ever seeing her at a loss.

  She took a slow puff of her cigarette, tilted back her head, and blew a plume toward the ceiling. She spoke in a lighthearted tone: “You are in the one place where Enro, even if he can see you, cannot kill you.”

&nb
sp; “Where?”

  “Near me.”

  PISTOL in hand, she turned her back to him and walked over to where a dress of glittering, finely woven metallic cloth hung on a mannequin. There must have been a concealed holster woven into the fabric of the skirt, for the pistol disappeared into its folds.

  Then the filmy nightgown came off her shoulders and began to slide toward the floor. The action was entirely spontaneous, unconscious. It was only with a slight gasp of surprise that she caught herself and clutched the robe about herself before it fell farther. Pausing to flick her cigarette into a nearby disintegrator tray, with a sidelong, cryptic look at Gosseyn, now she stepped behind a screen. The mannequin stepped after her and helped her dress. Gosseyn could only see her feet and ankles as she dropped her lacy garments and went through the motions of donning her stockings and shoes.

  He said, “This is the Imperial Palace of Gorgzid.”

  Patricia said, “Obviously. You must be slower on the uptake than the last Gosseyn.”

  Gosseyn saw the implications of that comment. He examined his hands: no evidence of calluses. He threw the bedsheet from his body. No sunburns, no moles, none of the tiny little evidences of a man living an active life.

  He felt with his extra brain for the energy connections leading to his various recently memorized spots, such as the balcony across from Crang’s apartment, or the Semantics Institute on Nirene: nothing. He was cut off.

  It was as if his secondary brain had not been used before.

  With swift steps, he leaped toward the section of the wall where he had detected a complex machine circuitry. He could not find the secret switch to open the panel, but he could detect the magnetic locks holding the panel in place. The energy circuit from Patricia’s gun was already memorized. He took the long moment for his extra brain to negate the space-time relation between the power cell inside her gun and the magnetic bolts in the walls. There was a flash of lightning and a loud shock of noise, and the panel toppled slowly outward. It was heavy, but Gosseyn’s training allowed him to increase the muscular pressure in his limbs, and so he caught the massive slab and lowered it quickly to the floor.