Null-A Continuum (11 page)

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.”

“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.

He straightened.

Hidden in the wall was a medical coffin, surrounded by a life-support machine of the self-sustaining kind. Here also was the special distorter-and-lie-detector combination Gosseyn recognized as the products of Lavoisseur's technology.

His coffin. His birth-coffin.

Gosseyn turned. Patricia had emerged from behind her dressing screen.

“I am Gosseyn Four. The fourth version.”

She nodded. “My brother killed you.”

HE examined the settings on the distorter-detector combination. From the ranges involved, the magnitude of energy flows recorded in the system's log, it seemed as if Gosseyn Two had died even as he landed on one of the
prearranged safety spots, a hospital on Venus, to which he had trained his body to teleport by reflex when driven unconscious; but at that death-moment (for no events in the universe were perfectly simultaneous) his brain was out of the range of Enro's no-identity effect, so that his body hidden in a medical capsule here in the great palace of Gorgzid was able to quicken to life. He touched the unit with his finger: The electron tubes were dark and cold. There was no connection with the body on Venus, which was probably even now being autopsied by Null-A physicians.

Had Enro merely allowed his attacking effect to reach a higher energy potential before striking, the similarity between the two Gosseyn bodies would have been broken and Gosseyn Two's identity would have been lost. Enro would not have made this mistake had he not been blind with anger.

Gosseyn straightened and turned toward Patricia.

She was in a stately yet simple gown of gleaming metal cloth, with a chain of office around her neck, a diadem on her head, and a delicate scepter in her glove. She wore the regal ensemble with no trace of self-consciousness. Gosseyn could sense the energy source from her pistol near her thigh, but the folds of the dress betrayed nothing.

He noted that she did not seem to see his nudity. On the one hand, she must have been present when someone manhandled him out of the birth-coffin into her bed. But on the other, her beginning to disrobe in front of him seemed automatic, not a matter of coy flirting. As if …

He said, “You remember being married to me. I do not see how that could be, though. Those memories were implanted in me. They were false.”

Patricia, for the first time, looked at a loss, uncertain. She turned her eyes away from his.

But she said, “Null-A men are trained to observe psychological reactions, nuances of expression, subtle verbal cues. Unless I undertook a process of false memory
implantation—similar to yours—I would never have been able to lure you into Thorson's trap, and Thorson would not have been able to examine you up close. And it was necessary for him to examine the immortal man up close.”

Stepping over to a drawer built into the side of the medical coffin, she drew out a bundle of clothing and tossed it toward him.

“Implanted by whom? The Greatest Empire does not have that technology.”

The bundle unfolded as he caught it in the air. It was a one-piece suit, durable and inconspicuous, wrapped around shirt, shorts, tie.

“I was working with Lavoisseur,” she said.

He began dressing. He noticed that the thermostat settings on the suit were already at the temperature he liked.

“And why not have the false memories removed later?” he asked.

She motioned with her hand, and a shoe box rolled out of the automatic closet and offered him socks and shoes.

“Lavoisseur died on Earth, killed by Thorson's men,” she said.

He sat on the bed and picked up a shoe and turned it over. It was a brand made by a small firm in Chicago, one he habitually wore. The soles would adapt to different surfaces, in case the footing was rough or slippery or so on. The insides had a layer of comfortable medical foam that would chemically react to small cuts, bruises, or bunions to bandage and soothe them. Useful footgear for a man who does not know when he might step from one landscape to another.

He said, “Enro thinks Lavoisseur must still be alive.”

Patricia said airily, “Enro became Emperor because he is the kind of man who does not believe an enemy is dead unless he sees the body. Paranoia is useful to him.”

Gosseyn donned the shoes and stood up. They were in his size. “No neurosis is useful. It has already driven him
to commit unnecessary murders. Three murders, if you count me. Where is Lavoisseur? If you are his agent, you should know.”

She put her gloved hand to her mouth, trying to hide a girlish laugh quite at odds with her regal appearance. Her eyes danced with mirth. “His agent? Oh, no. No, not quite like that, Mr. Gosseyn. Gilbert? May I call you Gilbert? I mean, I am the only person you know.”