Null-A Continuum (14 page)

The flashing mental pictures, images of possible future events, began to appear. He saw shadows engulfing the galaxy, whole planets warped and burnt even as Crang's body had been … suns dying, turning black, falling inward on themselves, while their planets froze … he saw a warship of the Greatest Empire hanging above some metropolis beneath an alien sun, dropping an atomic warhead … he saw a young man, strangely familiar: a seventeen-year-old version of himself … a chamber full of burning corpses … he saw Patricia being killed by Enro in a fit of jealous rage….

He made no attempt to examine the pictures that appeared and disappeared in his brain. These images pulled at his fear and curiosity with powerful magnetism, but he held himself aloof. Lingering would snap him out of his trance. Leej the Predictress had once explained that any attempt by a Predictor to read his own future too closely would create a positive feedback, as he would start to see visions based on the hypothetical futures where he reacted to the visions, and then more futures, and more, resulting from visions resulting from reactions to visions … eventually he would see nothing but dream extrapolations so unlikely as to have no meaning.

So Gosseyn let the images wash through him, his mind receptive to signals from the future sections of space-time.

Gosseyn rose to his feet, naked and dripping, in the general delivery room of the post office in the city of Accardistran Minor on the planet Accolon.

In a small cubby nearby, a sorting machine was now placing the postcard he had bought, and whose atomic structure he had memorized, on Gorgzid.

The predictive image had been clear enough to allow him to select the proper moment: The total mass of a nearby robotic sorter machine was enough that, while the postcard was gripped in its magnetic slot, Gosseyn
crossed the gap to it, rather than merely bringing the card back to him.

GOSSEYN did not even bother to explain his nakedness to the post office security officer, nor to the Accoloni police. The police allowed him to call the Earth Consulate on Accolon, but the secretary who appeared on the vision-plate would not put him through to the ambassador. Gosseyn could see a spot through the vision-plate of the office behind: The picture was clear enough for him to memorize it. He stepped there. Had it not been an emergency, perhaps he would have taken the time to negotiate through complexities of the various bureaucracies of two worlds, the complexes and neuroses of the bureaucrats. As it was, this seemed the best method to quickly establish his identity and put himself on home soil.

Fortunately, the Earth ambassador, James Norcross, was at least partly trained in Null-A techniques, so he could adjust his mind quickly to the situation. He arranged to have a tailor fit Gosseyn out with a new suit of clothing, at about the same time that he arranged an interview for Gosseyn to meet the members of the Security Council of the Interstellar League, in their headquarters in Accardistran Major, not ten minutes' flight away by air-limousine.

Through the tinted windows of the air-limousine, he saw the horizon twice as distant as that of Earth, or more. On the horizon, flattened and red, the setting sun bathed the mile-high towers of the supermetropolis, turning acres of windows to yellow and red gold. As on the planet Nirene, the architecture showed its military nature: The windows were merely repeater screens.

Seeing Gosseyn's stare, Ambassador Norcross explained that the world was many times the diameter of Earth but so much less dense that the gravity was only slightly above Earth-normal. “Between the buildings, you can glimpse the jungle canopy below us. Looks just
like the Amazon, doesn't it? Except this is the polar region. The sun won't finish setting for another half year. The equator of Accolon is a lava belt. The life at the North and South poles here evolved in isolation.

“Accolon is also one of the only planets in the galaxy with monkeys and apes in her jungles, and other members of the primate family. Someone went to a lot of trouble, including burying evidence in the fossil record, to make this look like the world where man evolved, not Earth.”

Gosseyn said, “I was looking at the defensive fortifications.” For they were passing over a vast spaceport, with commercial ships and warships more numerous than any he had seen on any world. “There is nothing here that can stop the Shadow Effect.”

Moments later, they had arrived on the roof of the Interstellar League Organization building. A distorter-type elevator transmitted them to the anteroom of the Security Council, buried somewhere deep below the mile-high structure. From there it was a short walk down gleaming corridors and past armed space marines in dress uniforms.

When Gosseyn stepped into the main chamber, an energy force entered his brain, and he was overwhelmed.

Hanging near the ceiling was a small, round machine, emitting a number of complex vibrations on a wide number of bands. As in the Nirene police station, Gosseyn felt the nerve organization of his extra brain overstimulated by the electro-gravitonic white noise: His powers were cut off while that machine was active. He could use his extra brain to suppress the energy flows in the machine and neutralize it, but this would have taken the full attention of his extra brain, with nothing left over to do anything further.

He drew down his eyes. There, behind the wide expanse of a gleaming oval table, sat nineteen men: the various ambassadors and officers of planetary governments, each
with a robotic translator button in his ear. Norcross had explained that only three of the men had any real power: the Councilors for the worlds of Petrino, Corthid, and the Great Planet Accolon.

The Accoloni Councilor, a No-Man named Edwenofer Prin, saw the direction of Gosseyn's gaze and said, “We have it here as a security precaution against assassination by distorter.”

But Gosseyn could see by the stiff and uncertain demeanor of the other sixteen Councilors that this was not the whole truth. The men were alarmed, dangerously alarmed, merely to see him.

Gosseyn reminded himself that these were men who lived in a binary Aristotelian universe. Whatever rumors, exaggerations, or outright lies they had heard of Gilbert Gosseyn they would believe, consciously or unconsciously, and pattern their actions on assumptions as if those assumptions were the whole truth, not a partial picture of the truth.

Prin's special training must have made him sensitive to nuances of expression other men would miss, or perhaps he had a special instrument trained on Gosseyn, measuring his capillary and nerve responses, for he said, “Forgive our precautions. The intuitional science of my people needs only to observe ten percent of the data-pattern of an event to deduce the whole sequence. Based on just such a sequential-intuition model, it is certain that a deadly attack on the Security Council is the next step in the coming galactic war.”

Gosseyn felt a sense of great relief. At least, that basic fact was beyond dispute.

But his relief evaporated when Prin continued, “The intuitive model deduces that the war will proceed by stealth and misdirection, a matter of rare acts of piracy, while Enro's men, without his leadership, play for time, and maneuver to secure his release.”

Gosseyn was astonished at the unreality of the mental
picture the Interstellar League government had permitted itself. He said, shocked, “You mean—you have not yet mobilized your worlds onto a wartime footing?”

Cevric Nolo was the Councilor for Petrino and was a trained Nexialist, an expert in that strange gestalt-science that studied the areas of overlap, the parallels, between other sciences. Nolo spoke: “We are aware of the recent disappearances of veteran soldiers and military scientists from Imperial worlds. Also we are aware that roughly six hundred Imperial warships are unaccounted for during the supervised decommission. Some were reported destroyed in combat, where there is no League ship credited with the destruction; others are missing due to clerical errors.

“Since the recent war involved the industrial production of hundreds of thousands of ships on tens of thousands of worlds, this handful—three percent of the eighteen-hundred-thousand-ship fleet of Imperial Gorgzid—can have no significant influence on the events of galactic history. It is an armed force insufficient to conquer and hold more than twenty planets. And at that, six hundred ships could hold twenty planets only until the League Fleet arrives in overwhelming numbers.

“The nexus of the sciences involved (military history, economics, the metallurgical and electro-nuclear industrial production sciences, and, in this case, theology) indicates that Enro's men will surprise a score of planets, and cut them off from the galactic distorter network by destroying all local distortion-circuit recordings. This will give them a respite of a few years to build up ship production on those few planets, while the League Fleet travels slowly through normal space.

“As best we can tell, their plan is futile, irrational. Enro's men must be staking everything on the hope that the Sleeping God will wake and reward their devotion with some miraculous, divine intervention.”

Nolo finished his speech in a voice of self-satisfaction: “These religious fanatics cannot possibly overcome a
galaxy-wide civilization, rationally organized to a rational police effort.”

Gosseyn said, “Gentlemen, your model is based on two false assumptions. First, Enro is at large. He has secretly traveled to the Shadow Galaxy, and presently controls certain of the technologies of the Primordial Humans. Second, you are thinking in terms of the last war. The space-superdreadnoughts of the last war will be of no use whatsoever against the Shadow Effect. Enro intends to unleash in this galaxy the same all-destroying phenomenon which wiped out the Primordials, whose technology was more advanced than ours. Six hundred ships, crewed by Yalertan Predictors, is more than enough to accept the surrenders of fleets and planets with no defense against him.”

He saw the disbelief on the faces of the Councilors.

White-haired Councilor Ifvrid Madrisol of Corthid, the so-called World of Luck, a planet famed for the high number of callidetic geniuses amongst her people, spoke next. “Mr. Gosseyn, let us assume matters are as dire as you suggest; what is your proposal? If Enro were free, and in possession of the Shadow Galaxy technology, what would you have us do?”

Gosseyn said, “Abandon the Milky Way.”

He succinctly outlined his plan: a fleet of ships to be built using the experimental engines of the
Ultimate Prime;
a concerted effort to be made to find wherever Lavoisseur had hidden the next group of Gosseyn bodies. Perhaps there were enough of them, and perhaps even a seventeen-year-old might have the trained double brain needed to reproduce what Gosseyn Three did to carry the
Ultimate Prime
, with its half-understood primordialtechnology engines, to the Shadow Galaxy. The shipboard Gosseyns, interacting with the Spheres, could begin the whole-scale transmission of planets to stable orbits circling the suns of various nearby galaxies. Meanwhile, Sphere technology could be brought back here to combat the Shadow Effect, which, by then, Enro would have
released into several areas of space-time inside the Milky Way.

The Councilors exchanged wary glances among themselves. One or two men broke into open laughter.

Prin said archly, “I notice this new setup—shall I call it a new form of government?—would involve no one but copies of yourself in control of the technology to move and remove stars and planets.” Turning his head, he said to the other Councilors, “It is as we were warned.”

The accusation was so astonishing that Gosseyn could say nothing.

Nolo said in a voice of heavy condescension, “Mr. Gosseyn, your planet can be proud of the advances she has made, while isolated from the mainstream of Galactic Civilization, in the psychological sciences, what you call Null-A. But you may be unaware of where such a science fits into the grand scheme of things, into the overall picture. You see, yours is not the first world to have developed a unique approach, and you are not the first man to fall into the philosophical and psychological trap of judging everything in terms of your own inflexible system of ideas.”

Gosseyn said, “You haven't studied Null-A if you regard it as inflexible.”

Nolo raised his hand. “Nonetheless, I have studied it enough to know that it predisposes the mind to make rapid alterations in behavior based on small changes in circumstances. But all the other sciences, from anthropology to engineering, predispose a more careful approach. Organisms and machines need adaptation time. Even to heat or cool the strongest metal in too brief a time will shatter it. Enro's men cannot possibly study and reproduce an unknown supertechnology and reduce it to military practice under a trained cadre in anything less than months or years. The Interstellar League cannot even consider the possibility of making you dictator for the duration of the emergency—and this is, in effect, what you have just asked us to do.”

Gosseyn realized that government structures produce their own rigidity, which they seek, by their own accord, to keep intact. When an emergency calls for a response not permitted within that perception-structure, that rigidity must be set aside. Aloud he said, “Gentlemen, you can draft me into your military, or assign me whatever post you like in your system, and place any oversight on my actions, but the fact is that no one else available at the moment has the ability to use the Sphere technology to preserve the galaxy from the Shadow Effect.”

Nolo said, “Nonsense. You are a man with a biological version of a distorter in your skull. Our industrial planets produce millions of units per year of mechanical distorters.”

Elderly Madrisol raised a thin hand. “The point is moot. Mr. Gosseyn, you are the one operating under several false assumptions, not this council.”

He must have made some signal to the marine standing near the door, for at that moment a technician wheeled in a large depth-video tank, which he connected by a cable to a plug in the floor.