Null-A Continuum (20 page)

Gosseyn said, “How can your world maintain its predominance? Your space fleet is larger than that of Accolon or Petrino, who are the other major interstellar powers in the League. You have more colony planets under your sway even than Gorgzid. And yet your natural resources and raw materials must have been exhausted long ago.”

Yvana smiled at him, a dazzling smile. “You know better than that. Predominance is caused by having a superior form of organization. Our system rewards and encourages brilliance but also rewards hard and steady work, team-loyalty. Because those other worlds we visit are richer after we depart, they welcome us again.”

Evana rolled her eyes. “That's what we tell people. Actually, it's just luck.”

The ship hung in the dark air of the cave, above the dazzling, jewel-like display of the capital city of Corthindel, on the rocky shores of a buried sea. Through a floor-plate, Gosseyn studied the scene underfoot. There was a squat cubelike building, the center of several power plants and communication grids, which Evana told him was the headquarters of the Safety Authority. Across a large, parklike area from this, a stepped pyramid arose, its peak shining with a flare of atomic light. Rank on rank of that mighty building was merely the housing of electronic brains linked in series. So huge was the thinking machinery that the colonnades and schoolrooms dotting its lower levels only gave a slight texture to the sweep of metal. The Games Machine.

He asked Yvana about it.

She said, “It was installed by a small colony of Earthmen who have taken up residence during the war. Recently certain citizens have volunteered to be rated and graded according to the Null-A methods taught by the Machine. Our callidetic adepts can sense the increased ‘luck,' the ability to shape events, of anyone so trained, and therefore organizations are automatically forming around the Null-A's here: We predict they will skyrocket to positions of great influence in politics, sciences, arts, and business.”

Gosseyn realized that the psychological pressures brought to bear on the Corthid culture in the coming years would be slightly terrific. If their leadership was based on self-promoting individual initiative, they would be eager to “exploit” the advantages of the Null-A training but would grow increasingly uneasy as the Null-A training “exploited” them by changing them to personality types more stable, more group oriented (in one sense) than the average callidetic Corthidian but utterly individualistic in another sense.

Gosseyn said, “I cannot reconcile what you told me about your government system, which seems to rely entirely on the self-initiative of self-appointed leaders, with
this Safety Authority, which apparently has no limit to its powers.”

Yvana told him the Safety Authority was a recently created emergency agency. “Originally it had started in the same self-promoting fashion as other organizations, but when the technology was discovered that held out a promise of being able to drive back the Shadow Effect …”

Gosseyn was startled by the news. Stepping to a magnifier, he swept his gaze suddenly back and forth across the dark cavern floor below, following the power lines coming from the huge cubelike building of the Safety Authority. There! How could he have missed it? Distorter arrangements the size of skyscrapers, one after another, spaced across the city. Gosseyn focused the viewing plate at a farther point on the cavern floor. There, among the farms and fields under the blazing artificial lights, rose another distorter bank, a four-hundred-foot-tall spire: There was another beyond that some six miles away, and a third, dimly visible in the distance, beyond that. All were connected by heavy insulated cables and power couplings, and farms had been abandoned or other structures torn down, and cleared, to make the wide paths across the cavern floor for these hastily erected cables to pass.

“… We had to organize ourselves quickly, and with absolute loyalty, behind the leadership of the Safety Authority. The other organizations were pressured by public opinion to fall into line….”

Gosseyn said, “How did this man make this discovery?”

Yvana said, “Illverton is a paleoarcheologist, who goes alone to explore the outer asteroids of our system for years at a time. His publicists claim he came across a working starship of the Primordials and the machines aboard were still operational after two billion years, including a model of a device to inhibit the Shadow Effect.”

Gosseyn said, “Doesn't it strike you as unlikely that he
would happen to come across such an astonishing find so recently, just in time to save your planet?”

Yvana smiled. “Among a race of people with the Callidetic talent? Unlikely? We don't ask such questions.”

Gosseyn said, “I suspect this Illverton is an agent of Enro's. There is no way he could hide a naval base on the most well-defended enemy planet of the League, unless the local government—in this case, your Safety Authority—was firmly in his camp.”

Yvana looked at Gosseyn with astonishment. “Are you asking us to rebel? The Safety Authority is our only hope for our planet to escape destruction! Scientists have examined the distorter arrays Illverton erected: They broadcast a specific set of positively reinforcing energies to increase the specific self-similarity of any particles caught in the field. It would reinforce the mathematical identity of shadow-matter and restore its proper atom-to-atom relations to normal time-space. The theory is sound!”

Gosseyn said, “I am throwing in with your group. Wagering my prestige that whoever first unmasks Illverton will win eternal gratitude from the peoples of Corthid. Are you with me?”

Yvana smiled, drew her sidearm, and touched an intercom switch.

“Fall in, boys! Who is ready for a gamble?”

YVANA led a squad of about forty armed men. They disembarked from the ship and were lowered toward the rooftop of the Safety Authority on pencils of force, falling as rapidly as paratroopers.

The guards on the roof were astonished when their weapons disappeared from their hands: Gosseyn sent the rifles to the only spot available to his extra brain, the control room overlooking the airlock of Yvana's ship.

Held at gunpoint by Yvana and her smiling, glittering-eyed riflemen, the Safety Authority guards showed Gosseyn how to operate the gate controls. He traced the
circuits with his extra brain and found no additional wires, nothing leading to an alarm.

Gosseyn said, “You have no security cameras watching this spot?”

The guard said in amazement, “Who would want to break into the Safety Authority?”

But at that same moment, two of the other guards vowed to support Yvana and her group. Both men reached up to their collars and tuned the colors of their uniforms to match the patterns of the Vathir unit. Yvana handed these men their charged rifles with no further ado. They fell into her squad, apparently no more and no less trusted than any other man there.

The corridor beyond the gate was empty. The architecture here was austere and bare of ornament. The two turncoat guards were happy to lead Gosseyn and the armed squad down the corridors, arresting any other Safety Authority personnel they came across or bribing them to lay down their arms.

The squad went down a long flight of stairs and then into what looked like a large office: In a plain and spartan style here were fifty desks, behind which sat clerks and secretaries, each with her stat-plate and keypad, as well as small electronic filing machines. When the armed men broke suddenly into the room the women all came to their feet and then, smiling in fox-faced nonchalance, raised their hands and shrugged in surrender.

Gosseyn did not pause to observe. At the far end of the office were large double doors, sheathed in a force-barrier of military-level strength. With his extra brain, he blasted the panels open with a charge of power similarized to this spot from his battle-suit back in the airlock of the Vathir ship.

The chamber beyond was huge and paneled with repeater screens. Each screen showed one of the tower-sized distorter arrays spaced throughout the many gigantic caverns of the planet. There was a large desk at the far wall.

In the tall chair was a figure slumped in sleep. A gray-haired man, dressed in the stark utilitarian uniform of Corthid, lay snoring with his head on the desk.

Gosseyn stepped over the smoking panels of the shattered door. The man, obviously startled into wakefulness by the explosion, now stirred and raised his head, blinking.

The face was of a thin-jawed older man: He had the mild expression of an academic. This was not a Gosseyn body.

Nonetheless, when the man saw Gosseyn he was startled and leaped to his feet.

And his thoughts flowed into Gosseyn's brain.

A memory is an abstraction from reality and, as such, is not perfectly accurate. Always keep in mind that the nervous system records not sense-impressions but our reactions to and interpretations of them.

Awareness crashed into Gosseyn. Quicker than any spoken word could convey, memories flashed from X to Gosseyn.

X had been asleep to keep his nervous system in a receptive state, so that he had been aware of Gosseyn's every thought and action as he appeared in this area of space, was recovered by the Vathir Organization ship, came to the surface, prepared his rebellion, and broke in. Now that X was shocked awake, his every thought tense and focused, Gosseyn's thoughts could not match his for speed or clarity.

Even this was part of the plan: Gosseyn, who became the “lesser” pole of the thought-flow once X woke up,
was now receiving thought, and so would leave no trace of his memories in Illverton as they both perished.

And the thought Gosseyn received was:
poor, pathetic, young fool
—the impression was of a creature tens of thousands, or even millions, of years old. This ancient, ancient being regarded Gosseyn as a temporary aberration, an excess chain of memory about to be excised.

Gosseyn said aloud, “What's the trap?”

X could not prevent himself from thinking the details of the trap, nor did he bother trying to hide his thoughts.

He was not really here. Using the same technique that the so-called Chessplayer once had used to imprint Gosseyn's consciousness on the nervous system of Ashargin, X had imprinted his consciousness into the helpless body of Illverton, a nondescript archeologist, whose long solitary sabbaticals to the remote regions of the Corthid star system made him the perfect victim. The hermit had no one who would recognize his sudden change of personality.

And the peoples of Corthid had one blind spot in their mental makeup. They believed in extraordinary strokes of luck, and they cooperated wholeheartedly with projects that seemed to be touched with that divine fire of good fortune: including a project to protect the world from the Shadow Effect by erecting, in record time, an astonishing number of ultra-large-scale distorter mechanisms. And the true purpose of those mechanisms was …

The repeater screens behind Illverton showed the distorter towers, hundreds and thousands of them, placed in a pattern all across the globe of Corthid, both on the surface and in the caverns beneath, all operating at their peak load. Eerie lights shined from them. When Gosseyn entered the room and woke X, that acted as the signal for those towers to erect some immense pattern of distorter-energies all across the planet.

Machinery does not activate with perfect speed and synchronicity on a planet-wide scale, but the massive
flow of power across millions and trillions of circuits across the continents and hemispheres of Corthid had initiated its chain of consequences … not even X could stop it now….

Some of the repeater screens filling the huge walls of the chamber were tuned to views of distorter towers projecting above the surface of Corthid. The sun vanished from the dayside sky, and the stars winked out from the nightside sky. Above the atmosphere of Corthid was … nothingness … a smoky, insubstantial void of non-being.

The distorter towers, at that same moment, shined with a strange greenish light, quivered like images in a rippling pond, and vanished, their basic structures and elemental components similarized away from Corthid. Whatever it was X had done to alter the machines and make them so lethal, the evidence vanished with the speed of twenty-decimal-point similarity.

At that same moment, the thought-flow from the enemy stopped. Gosseyn could detect that the similarity effect, the same one that precipitated the whole planet Corthid out of the ordinary realm of energy and matter, had already triggered the removal of the thought-patterns of X from the body of Illverton.

There was no way to stop the faster-than-instant retreat, not of a man who had never really been here to begin with.

Illverton swayed on his feet for a moment and then sagged, clutching the huge desk for support.

Gosseyn jumped to the man's side. “You were in contact with his mind! Wake up! In his knowledge was there a way to reverse the process? Is there a way to bring Corthid out of the shadow-condition?”

Yvana and her men surged into the room. They had not yet grasped the implications of what had happened: The men were still pointing their hand weapons at Illverton, calling on him to surrender.

If one or two of the excited young men had noticed
the repeater screens, the implications of the sunless and moonless landscape had not yet sunk in: Their untrained nervous systems would automatically attempt to fit the pattern of what was seen into a “set,” that is, the nearest approximation of something familiar; it would happen without awareness. They saw merely unexceptional pictures of moonless nighttime scenes. They would for several moments be unable to see or understand the much stranger horror actually here: a world de-similarized from the laws of nature of normal time-space.

Illverton was saying, “No, no, there is nothing … the theoretical basis used to erect the towers was flawed.”

Yvana shouted for quiet. Her men looked startled and slowly lowered their weapons. Several of them examined the repeater screens, looks of awe and fear beginning to dawn on their faces.