Null-A Continuum (33 page)

Gosseyn, again prompted by his buried training, made the world darker and blurrier around him, decreasing his
attachment to the surrounding behaviors of the photons and electrons. The lightning bolt flashed in the middle of his body, vaporizing the padding of the acceleration couch, setting insulation smoldering. Blue sparks snapped from the bent metal framework.

But that was all. Even as greater and ever greater voltages poured into the tiny space of the space-boat cabin, a strange shining glow appeared on all the metal surfaces within the ship, they grew brighter, but Anslark was preventing the electricity from flowing. Immense static charge was being built up, but neither the air molecules nor the metal interior of the boat was conducting it. The electricity shined from every surface, but it harmed nothing.

With his dark and blurred vision, Gosseyn saw Anslark touch the radio control. The man said softly, “This is space-boat calling Petrino Civilian Air Control vessel. Something strange has happened to the pilot of the boat. I am utterly loyal to Petrino and will obey all lawful commands given to me. May I speak to your commander that I may identify myself to him? Are you standing near the radio set, Commander?”

“This is Commander Contrebis of the Standardization Committee. Are you ready to land and yield yourself? Perfect loyalty demands nothing less than absolute obedience.”

“Commander Contrebis, this is Prince Anslark Dzan of Glorious Dzan. I never yield.”

The glow in the cabin vanished. Gosseyn could detect the communication line becoming charged with the immense voltage the robot units had been pouring into the cabin. Anslark, of course, simply prevented the electricity from returning along the path of least resistance back into the space-boat.

The vision-plate showed smoke pouring from the shattered midsection of the battlecruiser. The great ship began to recede into the sky, leaving a trail of black smoke behind her as she sought the safety of the upper atmosphere.

Of course, the barrage of missiles from her rear tubes came into view as the space-boat's proximity alarm shrieked.

GOSSEYN returned to solid form to find that the robot units had broken off their automatic attack: Their central control from the ship had been broken. A cortical-thalamic pause was sufficient, for now, to hold at bay the psychic damage from the brutal, robotic nerve-training method: He would need more careful Null-A conditioning to make certain all his nerve cells were clear of the artificial charges that had been impressed on them. That was for later.

For now, swiftly, they had but a moment to defeat the missile fire. Luckily, the space-boat's control panel had automatically focused their plates, one on each of the incoming collision-threats. All the incoming missiles could be seen at a glance. Anslark suppressed the mechanisms of the missiles' electronic brains, while Gosseyn memorized their structures. Anslark similarized a bolt of energy from the space-boat's reactor into one of them, heating it instantly to the ignition point: Gosseyn similarized the energy of that explosion into the others, to explode them a safe distance from the boat.

At the moment of the explosions, Anslark deflected the radar-beams coming from the ground stations below. Meanwhile, half a dozen other warships were descending through the atmosphere toward them, hull plates redhot with the reentry speed. These ships were scattered, a search pattern, not converging toward the space-boat's location: This told Gosseyn that they were being directed from the momentarily blind ground stations.

While thus radar-invisible, Gosseyn drove the space-boat suddenly out from the cloud of missile debris, across several miles, and, still faster than the speed of sound, into a river nearby. He similarized a long cylindrical volume of water out of his path, creating a momentary vacuum, so that the boat did not shatter when it passed below
the level of the rest of the water. The boat did not even get wet until they had decelerated on roaring jets to a near stop, gravity plates groaning, and then the collapsing hollow tube of water momentarily exploded into bubbling steam, the river water carrying away the friction-heat of their reckless passage through the atmosphere.

Now they lay in a small underground cave Gosseyn had carved out of the rock by memorizing huge chunks of stone before the bore and similarizing them into the space behind.

Gosseyn said, “What interests me about this prediction power of mine is that the vision showed me only the missiles, not the neural-electronic attack, nor my retreat into shadow-form.” He explained that the Predictors of Yalerta had not been able to predict the Follower: The shadow-condition obviously nullified the energy connections through time the Predictors were sensitive to, in much the same way Gosseyn's own distortion powers did.

He should not have been surprised to learn that Anslark knew more about Secoh than he did. The royal government of Dzan was one of the nineteen major members of the League. Of course their spies had reported thoroughly on all the members of the Gorgzid royal court before and after the war: When Secoh slew the Sleeping God of his cult, he had briefly assumed his shadow-form. It was done in a setting public enough (all the high officers and priesthood of the Greatest Empire had been present) that the identity of Secoh as the rumored Follower had been confirmed.

Anslark said, “The Follower had been committing a series of political assassinations among the League military experts and civilian authorities in preparation for the war. This eerie shadow-shape was a figure spoken of in terrified whispers, only glimpsed, never photographed. When Enro heard of the death of Thorson by a superhuman immortal, of course he dispatched his special killer to investigate, thinking the Follower would be immune to
whatever weapon had been used to slay Thorson. And, more important, Enro knew Secoh, his fanatic high priest, would be immune to whatever temptation had pulled Thorson away from his duty.”

Anslark's next question was an interesting one: “My information is that the Follower could use similarized energy as a weapon, even as we who are of the royal blood of Dzan. But you had to become solid to use your extra brain's distorter on the missiles. It looked like you lost the use of your other special abilities when in your shadow-form. What did the Follower know that you don't?”

Gosseyn was not sure. But unless he discovered the Follower's technique, for Gosseyn the shadow-form was strictly defensive.

HE similarized the two of them back to Gosseyn's cabin aboard the
Star of Petrino.
Anslark asked for his book back: He wanted to use it to be sure the corridor outside was clear of customs officers before he opened the door.

Gosseyn said, “Permit me.” He foresaw a route that would carry Anslark back to his cabin without being seen by anyone. The cabin door itself was locked, as the door key had been left behind with Anslark's clothing and gear. Gosseyn was able to step through the door in his shadow-form, solidify, and open the door from the inside. Anslark gathered his gear. This included a suit of specially woven strands that, when exposed to a controlled energy field projected from his nervous system, stiffened into impact-resistant ablative cloth. This armor would deflect nothing stronger than a small-caliber bullet or a heat-induction ray in the kilokelvin range, but it was lightweight, easily concealed.

Gosseyn similarized them both back to the space-boat. Anslark opened a folding box, which contained nine or ten fully made up and lifelike masks, along with two more smooth flesh-colored blanks, a set of wigs, and an array of electronic medical tools. Anslark donned the
face of a youngish, thin-cheeked, dark-haired man and spent a moment in the mirror adjusting the flesh tones, adding moles and marks of sunburn. Gosseyn stared in fascination at a tiny throbbing vessel in the mask's forehead that appeared when Anslark tested the anger-blush response.

Anslark said, “I bent the signals carrying the mind-conditioning patterns away from myself, but I notice you did not do the same. Are you now loyal to the ideals, whatever they are, of the Psychiatric Standardization Committee of Petrino?”

Gosseyn shook his head. “Even an untrained man would not be convinced by that technique, not by a short, onetime exposure. It was actually an examination, at least at first: The imprint would have fallen into previously established nerve channels had we been previously exposed. More sinister is the fact that the robots were programmed to check for the nerve paths established by repeated cortical-thalamic pauses. These were hunting for Null-A's.”

Anslark said thoughtfully, “If an untrained man needed repeated exposures to be affected, then this is not the means Enro is using to take over this planet.”

Gosseyn nodded. “As a tool of political revolution, it would be useless except in the hands of a small, highly loyal, and highly motivated cabal of professionals. And being used so openly, it is not meant to establish control, but to maintain it. Enro's already taken over.”

Prince Anslark's new face had a wide range of emotions: He could curl merely part of the mask's mouth, quirk an eyebrow, and make the artificial eyes glitter with mirth. “And did you notice the important part, Mr. Gosseyn? The robots were centrally controlled. That means the cabal maintains strict control over this technology, with all the secrecy and internal monitoring that strict control implies. In this computerized age of stat-plates and electronic brains, that means there is
a thread of electrons, no matter how that thread is hidden, passed through relays, or scrambled, which links any one of those mind-control robots to the central headquarters. The real headquarters.”

THERE was a toolkit aboard the space-boat, meant for making any of the numerous repairs needed during an emergency. The brain in Anslark's book was intelligent enough, after they added more electron tubes to it, to pilot the boat. Anslark laid it facedown on the control panel's stat-plate interface and wired it into the ship's opened circuit boards. He doffed the lifelike mask he had been wearing—this was the only face of Anslark's the space line company and, by now, the Petrino authorities had in their picture-records. He draped it over the headrest of the acceleration couch and programmed it with a few complex sets of expressions and phrases. Then he tightly focused the lens of the radio at it, in case the patrol ship made an incoming call.

The mask was able to produce a fairly complex electroencephalograph signal. It would not have fooled a lie detector, but the circuits of any mind-control robots scanning the interior of the space-boat were probably not built to search for this type of deception. Naturally, it would not react properly, it would not react at all, to the type of warped Null-A imprinting technique the robots were going to use.

Gosseyn said, “I am going to have to leave you behind.”

Anslark said, “Carry me. Your clothes and other memorized objects go into the shadow-condition.”

Gosseyn said, “Organisms have a lower tolerance for non-identity. I am maintaining a complex balance of electro-chemical and gravitic forces within the shadow-molecule structure of my body when I assume that form. I can increase and decrease my interaction with the surrounding universe: That's why I don't fall to the core of
the planet. I doubt I could maintain those delicate balances in another living person's body.”

So Anslark remained behind in the cave with the navigation equipment taken bodily from the space-boat. Gosseyn assumed his shadow-form, floated up through the rock to the surface, solidified, and memorized a plot of earth nearby, to which he similarized the space-boat. It was a greater mass than he usually transported, but his capacities seemed to have increased recently. Perhaps it was a side effect of the imprinted training from the far future.

In a moment he was airborne. To save time, he asked the book to pilot the boat into the airspace above a military base and dive groundward. He assumed his shadow-shape during the dive.

Anslark had a sense of humor. When the camera lens lit up, the mask assumed an expression of bored disdain and answered the air traffic officer's increasingly impatient questions and commands with insults.

After the space-boat was destroyed, Gosseyn returned to the cave. “Well?”

Anslark was bent over the glowing surface of the electronic map, calipers and straightedge in his hand. Instead of wearing a look of concentration, his features looked blank and stunned. Since the real Anslark was concentrating, he was not using his electropathy to control the web of fine circuits in his mask.

“They scanned the space-boat with the warped Null-A robots before opening fire. I have the source of the robot control-signals narrowed down to a quarter-mile radius: this block in the city of Munremar on the Great Isthmus linking the Western to the Eastern Continent. There is an energy system there: The pattern reminds me of electromagnetic brains running off an atomic-powered dynamo, but the system is linked in a series configuration, with a continual high-speed feedback into itself, so that the pattern seems to change from moment to moment. It's gigantic. I've never sensed anything like it….”

Gosseyn said somberly, “It's a Games Machine. Programmed not to see if the people of Petrino are sane but to see to it that they have the neurotic complex that creates slavish and unthinking loyalty. An insane Games Machine.”

The process of false identification takes place at a subconscious level: With proper training, the mind can be made aware of these subliminal processes and subject them to human, as opposed to animal, abstraction.

While the sun was up, Gosseyn could cover ground quickly. His time on Venus had introduced to him the simple, animal pleasure of tree-climbing. From a high vantage he would select a spot on the horizon. Usually, Gosseyn descended from branch to branch to the ground before bringing Anslark to where he was, to spare him the surprise of appearing among the branches of a high tree.

After sunset, going was slower. They hiked several miles until they reached a highway. The machines that sped down the lanes were large, bullet-shaped affairs, rushing by at astonishing speed, but the ten-lane road was strangely vacant of traffic.