Null-A Continuum (54 page)

The remainder of the message was a routine report saying that the Shadow Effect was continuing to spread in the very area where the map showed it was being pushed back.

At the same time, Gosseyn overheard a second set of robot information-pulses:
Message 002565AA21 to Games Machine of Corthid … Planet Xanthilorn … coordinates in time and space … recovery operation complete—

Message 002565AA21 … Planet Tentessil
…
N-dimensional coordinates in non-time non-space taken
from primary record … frames of reference convergence information … recovery operation initiated … Corthidian distorter tower system meshed with Accolon orbital station distorter tower system … target location in time and space identified—

Gosseyn felt a pulse of immense distorter-type energy register on the sensitive areas of his tertiary brain. The Sphere of Accolon had performed a time-space manipulation of titanic magnitude. The overhead amplifier swung its glassy panels and focused a reading beam on another area of the map, where another shining crescent was emerging from the smoky arms of the shadow-cloud.

Gosseyn said in a whisper, “What about the worlds of the Shadow Galaxy? Two hundred million years is as meaningless in the no-identity condition as two seconds.”

“Every passenger saved from that galaxy had those coordinates recorded into the base level of their neurogenetic structure.”

Then it was true. The worlds of that supercivilization, with all their advances in arts and sciences, all their populations of men and women evolved to the final levels of sanity and human perfection, would emerge shining from the shadow-clouds that swallowed them so long ago. Their towers of light would rear toward the stars they ruled once again.

The idea was so bracing, so calming, to Gosseyn that he began to sense the memory from the seated man.

IT was a memory of death.

Gosseyn had slowly turned, to see Enro the Red standing—the image was almost perfect, though broadcast from light-years away—in the living room of his apartments on Nirene. To one side, an open door admitted the scent of Patricia's orchids.

To the other side were the desk and materials where Gosseyn had been working apparently on Crang's Nirene case: The documents were readings from the personalityassessment machine of several of the ringleaders of the
political party seeking to restore Patricia to the throne of the Greatest Empire. This was merely window-dressing: Gosseyn's tertiary brain for many weeks had sensed the subtle space-distortions caused by Enro's spying.

His vocal cords and mannerism of speech, of course, were Crang's. So it was as Crang that he asked, “How did you escape your prison-asteroid?”

“It never confined me,” Enro's rich, vibrant baritone rang out. “Gilbert Gosseyn was unaware that the shadow-form of the Leader, like that of the Follower, had been attuned to a galaxy-wide system of distorters. I could have left at any time. I delayed only until an actor to impersonate me could be found, imprinted with my personality to fool trained Accolon observers, and transmitted to my cell by someone who … well, let us say that one of my inner circle of my court has access to certain Gosseyn memories. And now—as you were once in that inner circle; do you need to be reminded of what I am capable of? Do you think I will spare you if you disobey me, when whole worlds who defied me died?”

Gosseyn answered in Crang's voice: “Had you kept your escape secret, your plans for conquest could have matured to the point where no one could have stopped them. You take an immense risk by revealing yourself to me. Why?”

The great dictator came immediately to the point: “You must divorce the Gorgzin-Reesha. She is mine, my property, my sister, queen, and wife. We were separated at birth, and it was only by a miracle, the intervention of the Sleeping God, that she was found again.”

Gosseyn raised Crang's eyebrow slightly, and his strange yellow eyes showed no expression. “I am sure the paperwork for a court appearance is relatively straightforward here on Nirene. But what do I tell your sister?”

Enro did not answer, but his pale face began to darken, his pupils to dilate to dark pinpoints. He was shivering with anger.

In cold and hollow tones Enro spoke: “Paperwork! I
am sovereign of this world and many others: Merely your word aloud to me is sufficient. The word of Enro the Red, Enro the Magnificent, founder of the forty-thousand-year dynasty to come, is all the memorial this legal process needs. But you must ask for the divorce. I must hear it from your lips.”

By the time he was finished speaking, his body had blurred into a shapeless shape of dark mist, with little flickers and glows of controlled energy burning in the core of the shadow-substance.

Gosseyn gave Crang's head a curt shake. Crang's voice was unafraid: “You cannot permit me to live, now that you have revealed to me that you have escaped prison, and that you control the Shadow Effect. So any divorce, legal or not, has no meaning … except to you. It was important enough to you to risk discovery of your plot. My death will be investigated by a Null-A, and he will discover you. It is already too late for you, Enro. You have ruined your sick daydreams for Galactic Empire, Enro. Whether you kill me or not, the clues you have already left behind will betray you, just as your neurotic obsession with your sister betrayed you.”

The shadow-being raised his wraithlike hand and pointed: an ominous gesture. “Declare yourself no longer wed to my Reesha! Say it!”

“Words that have no relation to reality mean nothing.” Crang's voice had almost a lilt of humor in it.

It was to see the image of the planet Ur, Enro's base of operations, that this whole charade had been enacted. Enro's attack method required that space-stress exist between him and his target, so it was Enro's true location, and no other point in space, that had to be projected behind Crang to kill him. Gosseyn turned his head and memorized a few square feet of the soil there.

When the Shadow Effect interrupted his biological functions, Gosseyn found the similarity connection with the now-empty Crang body broken.

Gosseyn's mind was no longer in the body, but he did
not die with it: a trick he had learned from seeing X possess Illverton.

THE memories were halted at that point: The figure in the chair had lowered his life-energy and sat without motion. His eyes were half-closed; his head was lowered, his chin on his collarbone.

His voice was soft: “To grow another duplicate body to match Crang's in face and features, but carrying my triple brain, had not been a simple matter. Tissue rejection, and an incompatibility of biological systems, had been overcome only with a series of energy adjustments, so that the rhythms and brain waves of the empty body had matched my own. The result was two Crang look-alike bodies, partially similarized because of their monozygotic nature. This body contained my triple brain, and was kept in suspension; the other contained an empty brain with no special adaptations to its nervous system. An extra brain would have been too easily detected by the medical corps of Enro's secret police, or even by Enro himself, who can see through flesh and bone as easily as through walls. The Observer Machine projected my consciousness from this Crang body to the empty one. It was then similarized to one of the open points earlier in the time-stream, lived forward through a number of events, and eventually accompanied Patricia to Nirene.

“Patricia insisted that certain hours during Gosseyn One's early life be occupied by me, the duplicate of Eldred Crang. It was this body, for example, not the real Crang, who was kissing Patricia the night of your death under a hail of gunfire. Again, it was I, and not the real Crang, who was on the arm of Empress Reesha when she presented me to Enro, pretending a marriage to Crang to hinder Enro's desire for the traditional brother-sister marriage of Gorgzid royalty.”

Gosseyn said, “If you are from my future, tell me what next I must do.”

The seated Gosseyn shook Crang's head. “No. Every
paradox we create, every bit of information passed against the direction of entropy, increases the likelihood that we fail the test of the Aleph Council and die, letting some other time-variant cure the continuum. I have restricted the memories of your immediate future to a minimum. Now you must leave, and before the other versions of you from down the time-stream arrive at this point, and create further paradox. I have a complete set of memories, and so I will take over organiztng the First Aleph Council.”

Leave to where? But Gosseyn did not bother asking the question. The implications of Rhade Ashargin's gruesome execution were clear. Enro's pointless attempt to murder Crang provided the means.

Common sense, do what it will, cannot avoid being surprised occasionally. The object of science is to spare it this emotion and create mental habits that shall be in such close accord with the habits of the world as to secure that nothing shall be unexpected.             —B
ERTRAND
R
USSELL

The few square feet memorized by Gosseyn's extra brain when he turned to look at the crimson planet Ur: This memory had been transferred into his nervous system along with the rest of the scene of the Enro murder attempt.

Attunement to the Sphere of Accolon gave Gosseyn the necessary range to bridge the gap between the two points.

Gosseyn found himself standing on the red sands of an alien beach.

Overhead was a red giant sun, dotted and streaked with sunspots, its corona tortured and pulled out of shape by
the white-hot spark of a dwarf star passing across its face. Only the sky near the noonday sun was dark pink: Near the horizons, bright stars peered out from a colored sky, purple a shade brighter than black.

Despite the look of the sky, the air pressure here was normal. With his secondary brain, he could detect a distorter field arching the heavens: a technology, no doubt left from the Primordials, designed to retain an atmosphere that would otherwise have boiled into space.

No ship passing within ten light-years would have any instrument to detect the distorter anomaly, and a Mercury-type planet was automatically filtered out of navigation reports as airless and unfit for human life. Because of the structure of assumptions of the men designing planetary survey instruments, the planet Ur was so well hidden as to be invisible.

He recalled Patricia saying that the special conditions on Ur would help Enro avoid dangerous side effects from his powers. Gosseyn now saw why. A small-scale version of the Stability Sphere was at work here: a system to return any atoms of the “memorized” atmosphere back from space. For the system to work, every atom of the atmosphere, and a larger mass of the planetary crust, would have to be maintained. Each particle of this world would be abnormally resistant to any non-identity process.

Underfoot, darker streaks of mineral grit ran through the scarlet sands, as well as bright tawny patches. The beach was striped like a coral snake. The lighter gravity was like being underwater: Gosseyn's first footstep carried him yards across the gritty sand, and the plume of black specks that rose at his footfall climbed into the air higher than his head. A single jump took him to the top of the cliff.

From there, he beheld a landscape of broken peaks and jagged outcroppings, leaning rocks and strangely elongated miters of stone. To his left was a deep river valley.
The waters were white, but falling with ghostlike slowness.

Atop eight gigantic pillars was a pagoda, with tier on tier of ornamental stories rising, each higher above the next. Gosseyn recognized the building material and structural style: This had been made by the Primordials, perhaps by one of the first landings in this decant of the galaxy during the Great Migration.

Gosseyn kept adjusting his estimate of the building's size upward. Clouds hung about the middle of the structure. Four of the huge legs on which the building rested had touched the ground at a point beyond the nearby horizon of this tiny world. The vast building straddled the world. When he saw a landing platform near the top of the pagoda held not one but several of the mile-long superspaceships of the Greatest Empire, as small as a lady's dangling earring at this distance, Gosseyn gave up trying to form an estimate of the height.

Instead, he closed his eyes and studied the structure with his extra brain. Atomic and superatomic piles, coolant systems, amplifiers, and generators were in the core, along with thousands of robotic brains and distorter systems linking this hub of the Greatest Empire to its sixty thousand star systems and eighteen hundred thousand ships. Gosseyn's extra brain could feel, like sharp metallic pings of radar, the fluctuation in time-space when a distorter carried men, war machines, or cargo to or from the many cubic miles of warehouse and barracks inside the titanic pagoda-building. The distorters were in constant use. The nervous energy traces of men and women—the personnel were in the tens of thousands—were not evenly distributed. In one place was an immense gathering, and, as if he could hear the dim roaring of a distant mob, Gosseyn could detect a state of nervous excitement, of alarm, gripping the immense gathering.

Without bothering to open his eyes, Gosseyn used his Enro-like method to view the area remotely. It was a
huge military amphitheater occupying most of one deck of the colossal pagoda. Memorizing a spot with his extra brain, he stepped there.

Gosseyn appeared in a crouch behind a massive floral arrangement to one side of the altar. The silver vase lush with white blooms hid him from the gathered battalions of Greatest Empire soldiers standing at attention across the acres of metallic floor. A priest Gosseyn did not recognize (but who, from his robes, Gosseyn assumed to be the Lord Guardian of the Sleeping God who had replaced Secoh) was standing a yard or two from Gosseyn. There was also a marine guard with a high-energy rifle a little ways to one side of him. But neither this guard nor the priest saw him. Their eyes were locked on the scene before the altar.