Null-A Continuum (17 page)

There was also a military response from a four-thousand-foot-long frigate: A warship of the Interstellar League, by chance, had been trapped within the black sphere. It rose above the skyscrapers on invisible anti-gravitic pulses and opened fire.

Gosseyn watched carefully as the counterfire destroyed the incoming missiles one by one and sharpshooter pencil beams knocked out the frigate's main projectors with a series of nearly impossible perfect shots. The dreadnought was under the guidance of a Predictor of Yalerta, who was feeding precise coordinates to the gunners minutes and seconds before the Accoloni ship was even firing.

The hulk of the frigate toppled from the air. It must have had partial control, and the piloting crew stayed at their posts, for rather than crash into the mile-high buildings of the city, the huge machine toppled into a large civic park, erupting in flame. Some figures jumped from the hull and floated slowly groundward; some few others perhaps escaped by means of onboard distorter, but most of the crew did not escape.

From the prow of the triumphant Greatest Empire vessel reached a hollow tube of force, smashing buildings and streets to flinders, and boring deep into the bedrock.
Down this hollow tube descended a superatomic torpedo. The warhead was housed in a cylinder some two hundred yards long. The recognition program in the range finder in Gosseyn's hand lit up with red letters: This was a Nova-O-type warhead, able to reduce the planet to a seething mass of lava. The flimsy civilian screens of the buildings below had no chance of withstanding the blast.

After memorizing the torpedo, Gosseyn focused the aiming beam of the range finder at the still-open hatch from which the torpedo emerged. It took him a long-seeming second, but he memorized the atomic structure and space-time contour of the ship's launch bay.

For the dreadnought could not move away from the blast radius: It had to stay within the zone of force that was pinning Gosseyn into this location. Nor could it use a distorter to retreat to a distant star, because the black zone prevented similarization. Which meant …

Blindingly white-hot protective shells concentrically one after another appeared around the superwarship, more and more powerful screens than Gosseyn had seen even during space battles. He estimated that more than half of the immense volume beneath that two-mile-long hull must be taken up with force-projection machinery and atomic dynamos to power it.

The Predictors aboard the dreadnought would know when Gosseyn used his double brain, because the action created a blur across their vision of the future. They could not see what lay on the other side of that blur….

And, of course, the protective shells were designed to be potent enough to withstand the torpedo's explosion. As with most high-energy phenomena, the shells maintained their magnetic coherency for that crucial microsecond after the generator-complex projecting them and the ship containing it was reduced to white-hot radiation. When the force-shells vanished, the molten debris from the ship, and the superheated spherical volume of air it once occupied, expanded and washed over the city, a
titanic ball of flame, but this was a minor explosion, an afterthought, and the civilian-strength defensive shields, gleaming in the light of the reddish sun of Accolon, were sufficient to withstand most of the blow.

But it was a near thing, not without casualties: Gosseyn could see cracks running through some of the towers, shattered antennas, toppled vehicles, and bodies motionless in the streets below. He heard both wails of sirens and the faint shouts and screams of victims and survivors.

The marine was standing at Gosseyn's shoulder. He said, “The ambassador …? I assume that since you are alone, he is dead.”

Gosseyn nodded grimly. “Murdered by Enro's agent. The older version of me, the Lavoisseur who was helping the Hardie gang corrupt the Earth government selection process, is at large. At that time he was wheelchair bound, horribly wounded, and he called himself X. Now he is occupying a seventeen-year-old copy of my body, so his fingerprints, voiceprints, and brain patterns are the same as mine. Warn the Earth government not to trust any mental communication from me, or electronic messages, even those verified by a lie detector.”

The guard seemed startled. “But how do we protect ourselves … from you?”

Gosseyn said, “That Shadow Effect projected by the dreadnought will stop—”

At that moment the secretary leaned from the window and, pointing, shouted, “Look!”

For there were still films and thin clouds of the shadow-substance hanging in midair, the residue of the vanished globular screen that had entombed them. Some clouds were high above the city; others were burning a long, thin, broken line in a great curve along the ground. Clinging, tenacious, and black, the dark fog writhed and solidified, in places growing larger and darker. Gosseyn tried to memorize a section of the nothingness, but no mental picture formed in his extra brain. The shadow-substance
was neither matter nor energy, and the condition of space-time returned no signals where it was present.

In other places, the darkness was thinner and the foggy non-substance was returning to normal matter, becoming molecules of air, droplets of water, photons of sunlight.

Gosseyn took mental “photographs” of what was happening in the areas surrounding where the Shadow Effect was diminishing. As best he could tell, the broken energy-connections creating the local contour of space-time were reasserting themselves. But why?

He attempted to memorize two volumes of air, one on each side of a growing patch of darkness, and similarize them. He noticed the darkness effect slowing. Where he concentrated his efforts, he could break the clouds of darkness into smaller clouds and, after many minutes of work, the remaining wisps of cloud were small enough that they were naturally re-identifying themselves with their surroundings; matter and energy were returning to normal.

But it was an agonizingly slow and difficult process.

Gosseyn guessed the crucial factor was that space-time had not been stressed beyond a certain limit, or had been shadowless some small amount of time. How much energy did it take to establish all the atomic and molecular interactions, electromagnetic and nucleonic, all the vibrations and kinetic motions, all the matter-energy relationships of time-space and gravity within even one cubic inch of normal matter?

Gosseyn said, “I suspect the warship commander had not been willing to trust to a new and untested weapon. Otherwise, he would have simply placed his ship a light-year or two away, created a large field of darkness, and retreated. In a month, or perhaps only a week, the expanding Shadow Effect would have swept through this area of space. This phenomenon is not restricted to the speed of light, which, after all, is a by-product of the particular geometry of time-space that this non-identity effect is rendering null.”

The secretary said, shocked, “Then there is no defense?”

Gosseyn did not answer her.

GOSSEYN reappeared in the Council Chambers of the League. Here were the corpses, still undisturbed, in spreading pools of red, and the smell of ozone and charred flesh still hung in the air. The emergency was less than fifteen minutes old, and no one had yet battered down the magnetically sealed chamber doors.

With no wasted motions, Gosseyn picked up the damaged lie detector X had shot and unplugged it from the surrounding electronics.

From there it was but one step to the post office in Accardistran Minor, where he had the damaged lie detector carefully sealed into a plain brown package. It was a short stroll to the local spaceport.

He walked onto first one interstellar cruiser to select a cabin, announced that he was changing his mind, disembarked, and then boarded a second ship.

By the time the local police put out a planet-wide bulletin, searching for the only witness to the death of the Interstellar League leaders, and ordered first one and then the second cruise-ship where he had been seen back to the surface, Gosseyn, smuggled aboard a third ship, a tramp freighter, into whose open airlock he had merely glanced in passing, was far beyond their reach.

The freighter captain was willing to put the stowaway to work to earn his passage. Gosseyn spent the next few days' ship-time moving crates.

THERE were Interstellar League patrol ships waiting in orbit around Venus. Gosseyn was able to persuade the freighter's supercargo to let him borrow a camera with a radar attachment to allow him to take a photograph through the thick clouds of the Venusian atmosphere.

Once the mind and body are conditioned, at a pre-verbal level, to operate beyond the assumptions of Aristotelian categories, and to be aware of the self-reflexive nature of abstraction, then the mind is ready to adapt itself to reality as it is, not as we wish it were.

When Gosseyn appeared on the roof of the Venus City spaceport, a man in a wide-brimmed hat, green coat, and dark glasses was waiting there for him.

The spaceport was situated on top of the flattened peak of a mountain, one of the few mountains on Venus lofty enough to reach above the five-thousand-yard-tall trees of that light-gravity world. This spaceport had been built by Earthmen before the distorter technology had been known to solar system science. It was designed to allow ships to land and depart through the thick atmosphere, guided down by radar-beams to platforms held high above the surrounding canopy, and highly visible on many bands of the spectrum.

The view of Venus was breathtaking: a forest canopy of endless green extending underfoot in all directions, beneath a rippling pearly white sky of cloud extending equally as far overhead—a plane of green facing a parallel plane of silver. The huge sun was invisible, but the whole sky was lit with shadowless cloud-dazzle.

The man approached. His coat was refrigerated against the blazing heat here above the forest canopy; Gosseyn could feel the breath of cool air coming from the emerald fabric. He was a small man with a wiry build.

With no introduction, the man spoke. “There are not that many places a man with your powers and limitations can materialize on Venus, Mr. Gosseyn. Our houses, for the most part, are burrowed into the solid wood, our
cities hidden under miles of greenery, and cannot be distinguished, from orbit, from any other tree or grove of Venus, even with a powerful telescope.”

Gosseyn looked the man up and down, “You are a Venusian detective?”

“Peter Clayton. As of now, I am in charge of the investigation.”

“As of now?”

“One of the other detectives in my voluntary group is watching your apartment. He estimated that, by now, you would have overcome the last known limitations of your twenty-decimal-point similarity system, and would be able to appear there, despite the time-distance since your departure for Planet Nirene … unless I am speaking to the Gosseyn who went to the Shadow Galaxy aboard the
Ultimate Prime
?”

Gosseyn said, “Your information is out of date. He is dead, as is the version of me who went to Nirene, both slain by a person employing the Shadow Effect we first saw the Follower using. I am Gosseyn Four.”

Clayton nodded. “In either case, the voluntary group decided to use a common-sense approach for selecting a coordinator to decide what to do about the Enro situation, and, as of now, no other detective's estimate as to your motions has proven to be as accurate as mine. As soon as I make a determination, I'll have the Games Machine of Venus broadcast assignments to the population of Venus and, by distorter-radio, to the Null-A groups colonizing the galaxy.”

Gosseyn noted with wry amusement that this man, this ordinary Venusian Null-A detective, would temporarily command the men of Venus in a fashion more absolute than Enro the Red could even imagine: because the commands would be followed imaginatively and voluntarily, with no other sanction for disobedience than each man's own sense that he should do what logic demanded.

Clayton said, “I assume that package under your arm
contains the remains of the lie detector the seventeen-year-old variant of Lavoisseur shot? I have a scientific team standing by, including experts in robotic-memory reconstruction.”

Clayton took off his dark glasses once they were downstairs, away from the cloud-dazzle. They paused in the spaceport annex to outfit Gosseyn in the local fashion. Once they were beneath the cool green shadow of the endless canopy, Gosseyn did not bother to turn on the air-conditioning circuit in his jacket. Instead, he adjusted his fabric to open the weave, to feel the soft breeze wandering beneath the trees of Venus.

Underfoot was soft, thick grass. The trees, some of them half a mile high, were spaced so far apart that the brown and black trunks seemed like the posts of some immense world-cathedral; and Venus, a world with a whispering sky of leaf-green. A robocab was sitting on the grass not far away.

Gosseyn enjoyed a moment of homesick pleasure. The machinery, the clothing, all the devices of Venus were so well made; the landscape was gardenlike, beautiful. It was good to be back.

Clayton opened the vehicle's fusion motor and let Gosseyn examine the interior of the power core through a viewing device. “In case Enro attacks us here,” Clayton explained curtly.

When they were airborne, Gosseyn said, “The League police showed you the security recording of the murder scene?”

“An edited version, but I was able to deduce what they didn't show us.”

“Are you going to cooperate with the League police and turn me in? Their desire to question me regarding the murders of the Councilors is understandable—”

Clayton waved his hand, a short, chopping gesture. “The future of the human race has more need of your time and talents elsewhere. I am hoping there will be a
sufficient ‘imprint' of the X variant of Lavoisseur lingering in the remaining lie-detector tubes to force a similarity between the two of you. Once we know everything he knows about Enro, we can take the next step.”

Gosseyn said, “Does that next step include organizing a Sphere-technology defense against the Shadow Effect?”