Null-A Continuum (2 page)

The Players of Null-A
(published in the United States under the title
The Pawns of Null-A
) elevates the action to a galactic scale. Enro the Red, cheated of the atrocity he wished to commit so as to provoke a war, instigates without provocation the greatest war in galactic history.

With Thorson dead, Eldred Crang, as second-in-command, takes control of the galactic base on Venus and the soldiers stationed there. He disperses the army by the simple means of offering the men to regional commanders of other bases elsewhere in the galaxy. The commanders, always understaffed, gladly receive the additional troopers with no questions asked.

Meanwhile, a mysterious shadow-being known as the Follower appears on Venus and uses his uncanny ability to predict the future to arrange an assassination attempt against Gosseyn. When that fails, Gosseyn tracks the clues into the apartments of one of the agents of the Follower. The agent puts up no resistance but hands Gosseyn a shining card. On it is printed a simple message from the Follower: “You are caught in the most intricate trap ever devised to capture one man.”

Gosseyn wakes up somehow occupying the cortex of
another man on the planet Gorgzid, capital planet of the Greatest Empire. He is trapped inside the untrained nervous system of Ashargin, last survivor of the previous dynasty, now merely a pawn in Enro's political machine. Ashargin had been raised as a novice by the servants of Secoh, Chief Guardian of the state-established Cult of the Sleeping God. Ashargin is weak, childish, and neurotic, the outcome of years of ill treatment during his youth; Gosseyn resolves to train the body and brain he is inhabiting with Null-A techniques, to enable Ashargin to act effectively against Enro. These plans are thwarted by Enro's eerie power to see through walls and discover all conspiracies against him.

Patricia, now revealed as Empress Reesha, Enro's sister, arrives on Gorgzid, on the arm of Eldred Crang, apparently her husband. Gorgzid has a custom of brother-sister marriage for the Emperor and Empress, and Enro is outraged that Reesha refuses to honor it.

Gosseyn is returned to his own body and finds himself imprisoned in the Retreat of the Follower on the planet Yalerta, held in the same cage with Leej the Predictress. Gosseyn protects Leej and uses the powers of his extra brain to escape.

The pitiless ruling caste of the planet Yalerta can predict the future, apparently able to bypass the limitations of time in much the same fashion that Gosseyn can bypass the limitations of space. The Follower meant Gosseyn to be kept under the watch of the Predictors. However, Gosseyn's double brain blurs the Predictors' impressions of his future whenever he uses it to distort time-space, blinding them.

Leej conceives the desire to be Gosseyn's lover (there being no marriage or other permanent emotional relationships among the Predictors), but Gosseyn is unable to find himself interested in any woman who lacks the Null-A training.

A warship of the Greatest Empire, apparently in alliance
with the Follower, is on Yalerta, gathering Predictors into Imperial service, so that they might advise Enro of enemy military movements before they are detected and the outcomes of engagements before they occur.

Gosseyn single-handedly seizes control of the ship and, later, discovers that the Follower meant to sabotage Enro's efforts to recruit Predictors.

Meanwhile the Null-A technicians of Venus have invented a technique for mechanically dominating and paralyzing the brain of any person lacking in Null-A cortical-thalamic integration. When it is revealed that this system of mind control cannot stop the Predictor-guided warships of the Greatest Empire, the decision is made to abandon Venus. The population of Null-A's is scattered throughout the various worlds of the Interstellar League.

Gosseyn discovers a distorter circuit linking the Retreat of the Follower on Yalerta to the Crypt of the Sleeping God on Gorgzid. The Crypt is revealed to be a long-buried intergalactic vessel, the last remnant of an eons-old fleet that fled a dying galaxy and populated the Milky Way. Lavoisseur was one of the original migrants from the Shadow Galaxy; with him gone, Gosseyn was the only person the damaged Observer Machine, the electronic brain guarding the vessel, could contact.

The one remaining passenger in his medical suspension coffin is brain-dead, kept alive by the Observer Machine, which cannot act to damage a body in its keeping. The superstitious men of Gorgzid, having long ago forgotten their origins, since primitive times have worshipped the ageless yet living body as their Sleeping God.

Aboard the archaic ship is an instrument for reproducing, on a small scale, the Shadow Effect that consumed the previous galaxy inhabited by man; the Observer Machine tells Gosseyn that, years ago, while Lavoisseur was attempting repairs on the ship, a junior priest was accidentally attuned to this shadow-energy circuit and gained the ability to render himself insubstantial. That junior priest,
convinced that he was granted this power by the Sleeping God, used it to gain highest rank and vowed to see the galaxy conquered and the Cult spread to all worlds.

The Observer Machine tells Gosseyn that it was the Chessplayer transferring Gosseyn's mind into Ashargin to put Gosseyn into a position where he could be told the truth and sent to stop the Follower. But the machine says the real gods, and the real Chessplayer, have been dead for two hundred million years.

The Follower is Secoh. Secoh has organized a palace coup and wrestled control of the Empire away from Enro, who has fled. As Ashargin, Gosseyn negotiates with Secoh to lend his prestige as the remaining legitimate heir to the throne to the Cult, in return for a chance to view the Sleeping God in his crypt.

Secoh agrees, and Ashargin and the hierarchy of the Cult meet for the ceremony of viewing at the Crypt. Gosseyn has arranged with the Observer Machine to transfer his consciousness into the body of the last passenger.

To all appearances, it seems as if the Sleeping God wakes; he accuses Secoh of treason and advances toward him menacingly; Secoh, maddened with terror, assumes his shadow-form and destroys the figure shambling toward him. The mind of Secoh is unable to withstand the stress of remembering that he killed his own god, and he collapses into profound amnesia, his entire personality erased by the shock.

Null-A Three
takes up the narrative of Gilbert Gosseyn, now on an intergalactic scale. A fleet of warships from the dead galaxy from which mankind originally came is brought into the Milky Way, apparently by the malfunction of the space-control lobe of the extra brain of one of the undiscovered sleeping bodies of Gosseyn. The fleet is titanic, well over one hundred thousand warships, and manned by a troglodyte race degenerated due to eons of exposure to the Shadow Effect. The flagship finds and prematurely
wakes the body of Gosseyn Three, who is in mental contact with Gosseyn Two, both bodies alive and awake at the same time.

Enro the Red cooperates with Leej the Predictress and Gosseyn Two and Gosseyn Three to end the menace posed by this superfleet, but at the height of the crisis Enro intrigues to have the troglodytes brought under his control. Gosseyn Two summarily sends Enro to an asteroid prison remote from any contact with galactic civilization.

The tale ends with Gosseyn Three departing the Milky Way galaxy.

NULL-A THREE was composed many years after the first two, when van Vogt's health was suffering. With apologies to any purists among my readers, some of the events in the third book do not fit well with the established continuity of the first two.

I will mention four examples:

For this sequel, I have taken the license to disregard these and other inconvenient events.

ON a personal note, let me confess that
The World of Null-A
and
The Players of Null-A
are the books that in my youth most strongly influenced my mind and opened the realm of wonder to me. Gilbert Gosseyn has always represented to me what a hero truly is: A man who overcomes, not because of his strength or ruthlessness, but because of his integrity, his sanity, his ability to adapt quickly, without hysteria or regret, to the circumstance around him. I doubt I would have become a science fiction writer had it not been for the inspiration provided by the words and worlds of A. E. van Vogt.

To write the sequel to the books prized above all others in youth is a privilege granted to very few indeed. Reader, in your hands you hold the stuff of dreams come true.

I wish to express my gratitude to Mrs. Lydia van Vogt, by whose kind permission this has been made possible.

The Map is not the Territory; the Word is not the thing it represents. Our sensations are not reality, but an abstraction from reality.

Pain.

A torment of fire raced along Gilbert Gosseyn's nerves as he stood on the promenade deck of the great space liner
Spirit of Liberty.

The next moment: darkness.

A moment before, the calm voice of the captain echoed from the annunciators, warning passengers that the distorter-shift from orbit to the ship's berth on the planet below was about to take place. Through the cool armored plastic of the transparent hull, the planet Nirene hung like a black pearl in space, her ice caps a dazzling azure crown in the light of her blue-giant sun.

Then next moment …

Gosseyn's body jerked in agony, but before he could draw breath, the darkness and the scalding pain were gone. He landed on his feet in a crouch. There was carpet, not metal deck, underfoot.

He blinked. His eyes adjusted to indoor gloom. He was in a small, well-kept apartment. Behind him was a kitchenette, outfitted with the latest in electronic appliances; before him to the left, a retractable door was slid half-open to reveal a greenhouse filled with orchids. Steamy, hot air came from that door. What little light there was came from that doorway. Before him to the right was a closed door. Directly before him were a desk and chair
made of lightweight plastic-steel. The chair had toppled. Here was a corpse.

The corpse was distorted, blackened, as if the once-human body had been
twisted
by unthinkably powerful forces. Here and there a white bone fragment peered through the dark, dry mass. The bones were subtly curved, but not fractured, warped out of alignment.

The mental picture formed was one of subatomic
wrongness.

The man had been of a wiry build, lean but not tall. Few other details survived. The face of the corpse was an indistinguishable blackened mass. The head was burned free of hair. The right hand was a fleshless black claw; the left hand had been burned down to a stump. Concentric stains of decayed matter surrounded the left stump, as if the murder-energy, whatever it had been, had lingered at that spot after the man's death. Tiny glimmers of gold formed teardrops at the center of the halo of stains: Gosseyn assumed it was the remnant of a wedding ring.

Gilbert Gosseyn gently probed the corpse with a pulse of energy from his double brain. There was no return signal: He could not “memorize” or mentally “photograph” the cellular and atomic structure of the corpse.

The man's clothing, strangely, was not burnt or marred. He was dressed in the somber, loose-fitting garments favored by citizens of the central worlds of the Galactic League.

This raised the question of what planet Gosseyn was now on. How many light-years had he been carried by distorter?

THE gravity seemed the same as it had been aboard ship, which had been adjusted to match that of the planet Nirene.

The sensation of momentary darkness was familiar to him. Distorter matrices were able to form an electro-nuclear similarity between the atomic composition of
one area of space-time and another, in such a fashion that the interval between the two points became mathematically insignificant. During that moment of distortion, objects, energy, people, even giant space vessels, could be moved across the gap between the two points as if there were no gap. The lesser always moved toward the greater.

Gosseyn knew the phenomenon better than anyone else. Except for Gosseyn Three, his “twin brother” (that cell-duplicated version of himself created in the same fashion he had been), no other living person was known to have the extra neural matter, a secondary brain, tuned to the energy flows of the continuum in such a fashion as to allow him to act as a living, biological distorter machine.

Someone had acted during the moment of distorter uncertainty. While the ship moved to her home-station receivers to which she was attuned, something had attuned Gosseyn … here.

Alert, he stepped into the orchid greenhouse. The room was hot and wet but unlit. A shawl hung on a peg near the door, emitting cool air. Gosseyn assumed the thermostat on the shawl was turned down to compensate for the close warmth of the room. Something tickled his memory. Where had he seen this before?

The light came from a second door beyond, half-open. Gosseyn was through it in a moment. It was a bedroom.