Null-A Continuum (23 page)

Patricia called from the kitchen, “Wake up, sleepyhead! Breakfast time! The wolf is at the door and so is the bill collector!”

Gosseyn stood and stared in the mirror a moment. He attempted something he had never tried before: He used his extra brain to “photograph” the atomic structure of his main brain. Gosseyn took the time to don his pants, shirt, and tie. He went through these routine tasks in order to see how automatically they came to him. Next, he took a second “photograph” of his brain and used a
posthypnotic cue in his extra brain to superimpose the structural images.

He walked out into the kitchen. There was Patricia wearing an apron, her hair tucked up into a scarf, carefully pouring coffee into a white china cup, adding just the amount of cream and sugar he liked.

Gosseyn sat down and took a forkful of eggs into his mouth. He chewed in slow surprise. He had forgotten how good fresh eggs tasted … what a good cook his wife had been.

Without bothering to take a second bite, he put the fork down.

“This is a very convincing illusion,” he said. “I cannot detect any chromatic or astigmatic errors in any visual images reaching my eyes, including the parallax of distant objects; tactile sensations seem perfect down to the tiniest detail: binaural hearing, sound both high-pitched and low-pitched … everything. Even smells and tastes, which are processed by a different and older segment of the brain, seem correct to this time, place, condition, and period. Except that I know this cannot be real. How is it being done?”

Patricia was sitting opposite him and had taken a nibble of toast, just beginning to read the textbook she had brought to the table. She had the book open, her head bent over it, but now her wide hazel eyes turned toward Gosseyn's face, so that she was looking up across her forehead and bangs at him, toast hanging, forgotten, unbitten, between her white teeth.

“This is a hypothetical?” she asked, nodding toward her book with a motion of her eyes. It was a textbook on general semantics. “At a guess, I would say you have to check your axioms. You are making an assumption either about the nature of reality or about the nature of whatever leads you to conclude the reality you see is not real. There! If the Games Machine asks me that question, I'll have the answer ready!”

He said, “All this … the farm in Cress Village, my
marriage to you, our studying for the Games … comes from a memory I know to be false, implanted by Lavoisseur when he made me…. I was meant to die and wake up again alive, in order to distract the invaders from another planet from their schemes of conquest.”

“Charles Lavoisseur of the Semantics Institute?”

“Yes. He is actually an ancient extraterrestrial being, one who knows the secret of immortality.”

She squinted, flipped to an index at the back of her book, and ran a slide down a row of fine print to bring other text to the surface of the page. Then she shook her head. “Nope. I don't recognize it. You don't have the other symptoms of paranoid delusion. Unless … am I part of the conquest scheme?”

A line appeared between Gosseyn's eyebrows. “As a matter of fact … you are pretending to be the daughter of the World President …”

“President's daughter! Nice. Do I get to live in a palace?”

“… you are actually Empress Reesha of the planet Gorgzid.”

Patricia sighed. “Well, that's good to hear. It's nice to be someone important. Look, there is no explanation I can think of as to why my husband of four wonderful years of marriage should wake up one morning convinced that I am a Space Empress and that he is a robot made by the most famous neurolinguist on the planet. But there has to be an explanation. Don't bother to tell me how serious you are: I can see that you are serious. I have but one request.”

“What is that?”

She sipped her coffee, which she drank black and sweet. “Don't kill yourself. In case your belief that you are immortal turns out to be … um … inaccurate.”

He inclined his head in agreement. “There may not be any other Gosseyn bodies within range. And this body is not a robot; it is a duplicate organism, created artificially.”

She made a little shrug of her shoulders. “I'll tell your parents. They'll be shocked. Albert and Harriet. Remember them?”

He looked at the wall clock, which also showed the date. “Five years.”

“What?”

“You said ‘four wonderful years,' Patricia. According to my implanted memories, we've been married five years.”

“Year number three was a little rocky. Being a farmer's wife takes some getting used to, especially considering I was a gal from the big city before that.”

Gosseyn smiled, picked up his fork, and began eating.

Patricia raised an eyebrow at that. “How is the illusionary food?”

“I've missed it,” he said. “I've missed your cooking. Every meal I have ever eaten has either been prepared at a hotel or at mess aboard a ship, or by a Venus food cooperative. Except once when I ate at Enro's table, but I was using Ashargin's taste buds then, so the skill of the chef did not matter much to me. Here is what I cannot explain: If this environment is artificial, illusionary, how was my nervous system influenced? I've noticed that I have subconscious habits. I reached for the shaving razor before I remembered where in the medicine cabinet it was kept. That indicates that something manipulated my nervous system at a basic level.”

She smiled at him warmly, but he merely frowned and shook his head.

He said, “If this is an illusion, then we are not really married.”

Her lips compressed and her eyes flashed, and she threw down her napkin. “Well! You are going to go visit a psychiatrist as soon as possible. People simply do not go insane any longer, not in the modern day and age.” She stood up, picked up the telephone from its nearby niche, and slammed it down angrily on the table in front of him.

“Go on,” she said. “Make the call.”

He studied the phone for a moment with his extra brain, sensing the flow of electrons in its circuits. He identified the proper contacts, and instead of raising a hand to touch the phone, he merely similarized the two contact points within the machine itself, so that the electricity flowed across the gap as if there were no gap, completing the circuit.

Patricia looked startled and alarmed when the phone screen lit up.

“Yes?” said the robotic operator.

“I'd like to make an appointment with the nearest qualified psychiatrist that I can afford to see. I am not willing to spend more than fifty credits.”

“That would be Dr. Augustus Halt of 5200 Babcock Street Northeast, in Palm Bay. He can see you this evening at 7:00 City Time.”

Gosseyn hung up by breaking the circuit he had caused and replaced the telephone in its niche by memorizing the phone base, memorizing the niche, and forcing a similarity. Patricia watched the phone disappear from the table and reappear in its little cupboard.

She touched the telephone gingerly with her hand, as if expecting it to disappear again.

“Why don't you tell me the whole story?” she said at last.

After he was done, she leaned back against the kitchen counter. Her pose was semirelaxed, her long legs crossed at the ankles, her shoulders slightly hunched as her weight rested on her spine. Her eyes were bright and her expression thoughtful.

She said, “The safest assumption is that this is time-travel. The Shadow Men put you back into your own past. If this were an illusion set by an enemy, I would not be here, nor would you have your extra brain and all its capacities still intact.”

Gosseyn said, “It cannot be the real past. You, or rather, Reesha of Gorgzid, had not yet arrived on the planet in 2558 A.D.”

She said, “How did I die?”

“What?”

“In your memories—which are apparently being given real form around us here—when I was your wife, how did I die?”

“An airplane accident. There was a sudden storm, a crash landing at sea. Your father, Michael Hardie …” Gosseyn stopped. How accurate was this illusion? How many details were present? “… is he here? In Brevard County? Living in Cress Village?”

“Of course,” she said with a little shrug. “After his business failed, he wanted to move away from Tampa. So he put up that strange-looking house, using Mom's money. I thought you remembered all this? You think the memories are false, but they have not vanished from your head, have they? We met because you were doing part-time construction work as a carpenter's ‘prentice. You used to bang outside my window and walk back and forth with your shirt off. But Daddy is not a member of a conspiracy to overthrow the world government, if that is what you are asking.” She pushed herself lightly to her feet, came over, draped her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “So what is your plan in the meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile?”

“The invasion from the space empire does not happen, according to you, until 2560. That is two years away. How are we going to eat and pay our mortgage in the meanwhile?”

So he ended up spending the day doing farmwork.

THE bouts of dizziness came twice more as he moved from task to task on the fruit farm. Each time, his vision blurred and a darkness seemed to enter his brain. On the second occasion, he attempted to use his extra brain to “photograph” the atomic structure of his own body, including his nervous system. That seemed to have a stabilizing effect, for the dizzy spell ended abruptly.

The sun had set. He could see a gibbous moon rising
in the distance as he walked back across the fields from the orchids. His muscles ached in a fashion he found refreshing.

How long had it been since he'd put in a good day's work?

Actually, never. None of his memories of farm life were real. Gosseyn One had lived a few days on the money he'd found in the wallet in his jacket, presumably Lavoisseur's. Gosseyn Two had lived on Venus, where money was not used to track labor value. He had also drawn a pension from the Semantics Institute, since he was legally the same person as Lavoisseur, the head of the Institute until such time as the Board of Governors selected a new one. Gosseyn Three had joined the expedition to the Shadow Galaxy, funded by the Nexialist Committee of Planet Petrino, and had lived off what the ship's quartermaster provided. Only Gosseyn Four had ever done manual labor, serving for a day or two as a roughneck aboard the tramp freighter that carried him to Venus. The Corthidian organizations had made him their guest during the emergency and asked of him nothing more onerous than giving interviews to their press and meeting with their scientific leaders: His “wage” on Corthid was their highly abstract system of estimating fame and influence.

Lavoisseur, the foremost Null-A psychiatrist of the age, had selected well when selecting these false memories to implant, Gosseyn decided. Hard as the farmwork was, it formed an almost mystical connection to Mother Earth. There was a wide variety of false-to-facts, even neurotic, beliefs the comforts of technological civilization encouraged, to which farmers tended to be immune. They knew in their bones that there was no reward without labor, no certainty of harvest despite the labor; and they knew the value of self-reliance.

Gosseyn, standing outside his little cottage, put his hands on his back and gave a great rolling shrug of his shoulders, grunting. Yes, if ever the danger posed by Enro were to pass away, if ever he were to retire to private
life, this would not be a bad choice: his own land, his own work, his wife …

He looked up at the night sky, smiling.

The smile slipped and vanished.

The sky was cloudless, and yet it was blank. There were no stars.

GOSSEYN'S sharp eyes caught the red dot of Mars, one or two flecks of light that might have been Telstars … and nothing.

He ran back into the house. “Where are the stars?”

Patricia blinked blankly at him. “The what?”

He jumped over to the phone and thumbed the switch for the operator. “Operator! What is the most distant location I can call?”

“There is a scientific station beyond the orbit of Pluto, studying the formations of ice asteroids at the edge of the universe.”

“The edge … define that term.”

“At a distance of roughly one-point-three light-years from Sol, particles enter a condition of non-identity. Atomic structures lose all coherence; photons suffer redshift and become unlocalized. The boundary is a slightly flattened hollow sphere, centered on the sun.”

“What about the stars?”

“This unit has no references for that term.”

“Other suns like our own?”

“Would you like to speak to the fiction desk of your local library?”

Another spell of dizziness struck him at that moment. His vision went dark; his eyes blind, he clutched the edge of the cabinet where the phone rested, and performed a cortical-thalamic pause to quell his rising panic.
Every sensation is not itself only but a complex of thought-and-feeling, an interpretation rising from the layers of my nervous system: Sensations enter the brain, pass through the thalamus, where they are given emotional meaning,
and only then are they passed along to the cortex. But the meaning is no more than an interpretation….

When he opened his eyes, Patricia was looking at him with grave concern.

“I'm going with you,” was all she said.

They walked the two miles to the bus, paid their dimes, and were carried into the city. Dr. Halt had his offices on the top floor of a four-story building, set back away from the busy street. The building was surrounded by palm trees that rustled in the night gloom.

The psychiatrist was a Venusian Null-A. Gosseyn had only begun to tell his story when the man interrupted him. He said, “Full-grown psychosis does not occur without cause. And I assume”—he cast a glance at Patricia—”there is no history of any neurotic behavior before this? No exposure to psychoactive chemicals or radiations which might produce a sudden change of basic neurochemical structure?”