Null-A Continuum (3 page)

First, he stepped to the window, turned it on. The window was bolted to what seemed a wooden wall, but Gosseyn's secondary brain could detect the residual magnetism of the armor beneath the wood veneer, nine inches thick or more. The window was a fixed-direction model, able to bring in images from beyond the armored wall but not to peer into neighboring apartments.

The view showed a giant blue-white sun glaring down on a metropolis of superskyscrapers. Despite their height, the buildings were squat, cylinders as wide as they were tall; many were crowned with rooftop gardens of vivid
blue plant life. One building, a stepped pyramid half a mile high, had acres of garden and park at every balcony.

But the scene had a grim aspect to it. Each building was surrounded by a slight haze like a heat shimmer: electromagnetic force shields heavy enough to dissipate the heat and radiation of orbital bombardments, nor did modern windows need to pierce the massive armor of their surfaces to bring in light. Air traffic was conspicuously absent, as were energy-bridges leading from roof to roof. Flying cars, or pedestrians strolling atop a solid streamer of force, made vulnerable targets.

Gosseyn amplified the window image. As a precaution, he selected a spot on a nearby rooftop and memorized it. Specialized ganglia in his extra brain felt the “tug” of awareness of that little portion of space less than a mile away. He set the trigger in his mind to jump him to that spot if doubt or pain struck him.

Then he focused the window on the posters and signs of the few street-level shops he saw. Some writing was in the script of Gorgzidi, which Gosseyn could not read but which he recognized. The automatic methods of learning spoken languages at a subverbal level did not have a means of teaching writing systems. Writing on the older buildings was Nireni, which he had learned in preparation for his voyage. He had also studied maps; he recognized place names.

This was the city New Nirene of the planet Nirene, the second city of that name. Before the throne had been removed to Planet Gorgzid, this world had been the capital of the Greatest Empire. The first city called Nirene, once a metropolis of some thirty million souls, was now a burnt, radioactive wasteland.

The military aspect of the architecture of New Nirene was merely one more legacy of the decades of iron rule by Enro the Red. The great dictator was gone, but the events the tyrant set in motion continued in their remorseless way under the vast inertia of social habit and thought.
The years of conditioning by police and military propagandists left a visible stamp on the scene below, and, Gosseyn reminded himself, an invisible stamp in the minds of Enro's subjects. To call the world a League protectorate was an abstraction, an incomplete statement. On a fundamental level, by habit and custom and all the neurotic behaviors of the untrained minds of Enro's subjects, this was still a world of the Imperium.

There was a high dome in the distance, possibly the very starport where the ship he'd traveled on was now berthed. The dome seemed solid: Distorter technology did not require the ship launching or landing stations to be open to the sky. But there were antennas atop the peak that suggested X-ray radar-photography arrays were able to examine ships in orbit for weapons before bringing them to the surface, in the heart of the city.

So Gosseyn had been carried a few miles, at most.

Why? And by whom?

GOSSEYN turned from the window.

The sense of familiarity was stronger now. There were two separate beds, with a nightstand between them. Next to one of the beds was an electric shoe rack, with several pairs of women's shoes, kept clean by the silent, invisible vibrations of the rack. Beyond, a beige suit of feminine cut was visible through a gap in the closet door. On the vanity, next to a small jewelry box, was a slender platinum cigarette case of the automatic kind. Everything on that side of the room bespoke taste, wealth, and elegance.

Next to the other bed was a bookshelf, neatly organized. The spines were lettered in English. Books of psychology, neurolinguistic philosophy, atomic theory, forensics, and other scientific works. The books were of the type that recorded spoken thoughts and notes by the reader, and were locked at his fingerprint. Atop the bookcase were several small scientific instruments, folded into black leather cases. Gosseyn picked up two of them:
The first was a unit for detecting atomic vibrations at a fine level; the second was a camera whose special lens arrangement could reconstruct photons absorbed into ordinary substances, glass or wood, and show recent events.

Gosseyn stepped to the closet, opened it. The man's portion of the closet had four suits of clothing of similar cut: One of them was an Earthman's dress suit, jacket and tie. A transparent plastic case built into the side of the closet held a heavy electric pistol with a snub-nose, several-megawatt aperture, dialed down to a nonlethal shock setting. A line of atomic batteries was fitted into a clip. Gosseyn recognized the make and model: It was Venus-made, designed with a built-in lie-detector circuit to prevent misuse.

He moved quickly over to the farther bed and picked up the pillow. There was a faint scent of perfume, a long strand of brown hair. Beneath the pillow was a recharging holster for a slenderer type of pistol: a lady's model. The pistol itself was gone. The manufacturer's brand was marked on the holster. Gosseyn recognized the model.

THERE had been a general store, run by a man named Nordegg, not five miles from Gosseyn's little house in Cress Village, Florida, that stocked sporting goods, including firearms. The slender and powerful handguns sat in a display case beneath the hunting rifles, with a small depth-illusion sign:

His wife had bought one just before her death, back when they were both young students, preparing to visit the Games Machine.

Rather (Gosseyn mentally corrected himself), he remembered such a sporting goods store. He remembered his wife's tragic death in an airplane crash. He remembered his lonely continued studies, and his trip by stratospheric liner to the City of the Machine.

Most memories are abstractions of real events. The photon strikes the eye, and the brain records the images, or, rather, its filtered impressions of the images. But Gosseyn's memories, in this area, were false: imprints on his gray matter, having no bearing on reality. He had been shipped in a medical crate to the City of the Machine, fully grown, an artificial being with no past save for recorded fictions in his brain, and set to walk from the stratospheric liner station to the hotel. Within an hour, a routine sweep by the hotel lie detector had discovered his imposture.

The emotional connotations, the love, the pain, the regret, the hopes: All these emotions were false-to-facts. The image in his mind of the courtship, the marriage, the honeymoon, their sunlit days together: a delirium placed in his mind by Gosseyn's creator, Lavoisseur.

The image of a wife had been taken from a real woman: the Empress of the Greatest Empire. The moment a lie detector had verified those images in his mind, Gosseyn had been brought to the attention of the Imperial agents secretly on Earth.

It was all false. Gosseyn's training allowed him to dismiss the whole complex hallucination with the sobriety of a man waking from a dream. Lavoisseur had not been particularly cruel to him, since he could rely on Gosseyn not to form any neurotic attachment to any memories shown to be untrue.

But … and now the thought occurred to him for the first time … how had Lavoisseur gotten the detailed information, the picture, the echoes of her voice, which were written into Gosseyn's memories?

Because the details were correct. This was Patricia's room. He recognized her things. Which meant …

GOSSEYN returned to the first room and photographed the corpse with the special camera. With the lights in the room dim, the camera was able to project the image it found holographically into the room around him.

The camera image showed only a solid, hard-edged silhouette. Here was a man, standing before his desk, his back to it. From his posture and gesture, he seemed to be talking calmly with someone. That was the overall impression in Gosseyn's mind: The unknown man was serenely calm, even as he spoke with his murderer.

The other figure in the room was also a silhouette, but this was a shadow-being, a cloud of filmy darkness, tenuous at the edges. Details of the room could be glimpsed even through the thickest part of the shadow-body. Nothing else, not even whether it was man or woman, could be seen.

The first man shook his head: a curt refusal. The second being, the shadow-creature, raised a wraithlike arm and pointed toward him. The gesture was ominous.

Behind the man, behind the desk, the wall receded and opened into mist, which parted. The impression was one of immense distances entering the enclosed space of the apartment. Where the wall had once been now could be seen a huge red giant sun glancing down on a sea of black oil, crisscrossed by large and violent whitecaps. Jagged islands with peaks like razors towered into the black sky, and the red and rocky ground was cratered as if with millions of years of meteorite impacts. Despite the ground-dazzle, stars were visible here and there overhead. The heights of the waves and also of the island peaks suggested a low-gravity world; the dark sky suggested a very thin atmosphere. A second sun, this one a mere pinpoint of intolerable brightness, was transiting across the huge, cool, dull face of the red giant. The red giant's photosphere was curled into sunspots as the tiny white star passed.

The man turned slowly to regard the gigantic sun that had appeared behind him. The shadow-being drifted to
the left, putting the man directly between him and the image. A flickering darkness passed from the shadow to the image, striking the man. The man staggered, throwing his hands over his head in sudden pain. His outline lost its sharpness and began to dissolve. He fell.

The shadow-being bent over the fallen figure, whose silhouette jerked and writhed.

The camera clicked, and the image was gone.

NEXT Gosseyn turned the atomic analysis unit on the corpse.

Every cell in the victim's body had been disorganized, complex molecules broken. The carbon atoms in the man's flesh had lost their atomic bonds with their neighbors but had not formed ions nor formed other chemical bonds: The black soot was due to a layer of this atomically disorganized carbon. It was a behavior not seen in normal space: only when the atom's location in time-space was profoundly disturbed, so that its relation to its environment fell below the crucial twenty decimal points that maintained the coherency of matter, could this effect occur. The man's flesh and bone had been melted atom by atom: a sadistically painful death.

No wonder the images from the embedded-photon camera had been merely black outlines. There were no photons embedded in the corpse, nothing for the camera to use to reconstitute an image.

The unit also detected a similar effect in the carpet. The carpet pores had automatically cleaned any visible stain, but the unit detected the invisible trail leading to the right-hand door. Gosseyn opened it. Though it seemed to be made of wood, when he swung the door half-shut he could sense the heft of the door panel, the metallic thickness beneath the veneer. It was armor. The dead man evidently had led a life of caution.

Beyond was a study. Whatever energy-ray had blackened and twisted the man had passed across this room
and left a dark trail, which crawled up the wall and lingered on a mantelpiece above an artificial fireplace: Here were three-dimensional photographs, mementos from a wedding. The line of black char had neatly sliced each picture in half. The groom had been blotted from each picture, meticulously. In each picture, only the smiling bride survived: a tanned, trim, and athletic young figure in a white silk dress, orchids in her hair, a look of determination and intelligence in her hazel eyes—Patricia.

Gosseyn returned to the first room, bent over the corpse, wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief, and delicately removed the small, hard, flat object he found at the breast of the suit. It was a private detective's badge, still tingling slightly from its self-protective energy that prevented forgery. His name was still visible, as well as an address for an office on the Avenue of the Games Machine in Venus City.

The dead man was Patricia's husband, Gilbert Gosseyn's fellow Null-A, Eldred Crang. Gosseyn's friend.

There came a knock at the door. “Open! In the name of the law!”

The Laws of Men will never be just until they are sane.

Gosseyn stepped toward the door, but the shouted command had been merely perfunctory: The lock glowed red, then white, and shattered, while Gosseyn spun and dove back through the study door. Closed to a crack, the armored door offered both cover and concealment.

Through the door crack, he saw two men enter the room. In the gloom, each had a similar silhouette. Both men were light-haired, of medium height, physically fit.
Both were dressed in formal, somber suits. Behind them, he could a glimpse a third man, a technician, bent over a projector. The projector maneuvered a portable energy curtain that flickered as it advanced into the room before the two men.

The man on the left had a drawn pistol, still whining from the heat of the bolt that had shattered the door. “Where is he?”

The man on the right was holding up a detector: Tiny cherry-red electron tubes protruded from the reader face. He spoke: “Behind that door. Don't shoot, Commissioner Veeds! The readings are consistent with those of an unarmed man. At this stage, to assume him to be the murderer would be unsupported, given the murder weapon involved, and the evidence that this was a crime of passion.”

“Let's have some light!”

The technician said, “Yes, sir.” It must have been police procedure not to touch any circuits in a crime scene, for no one stepped toward the wall switch. Instead, the electric curtain stopped advancing and grew bright in the visible spectrum range. Light flooded the dim room.