Null-A Continuum (16 page)

“You monster!” Gosseyn stared in horror. “Who are you, really?”

The young man said lightly, “I am Gilbert Gosseyn. The
real
Gilbert Gosseyn.”

The general rule is that any notions of identity are simplifications of a more complex underlying reality; this rule applies to self-identification as well.

The young man continued, “The real Gosseyn! I am the person you would be if an earlier version of you had not erased your own memory in a rash attempt to stop me.”

The lie detector spoke up out of turn: “There is confusion. I was asked to verify the testimony of the man named Gosseyn: The young man now speaking does have continuity of identity with the name ‘Gosseyn,' but there are other identities present in his mind.”

Gosseyn said, “Who is he?”

“He thinks of himself as Lavoisseur, but there is additional confusion, as he knows you knew him not by that name, but another. There is deceptive intent involved.”

Gosseyn said to the boy, “When first we met, you called yourself X the Unknown Factor. You are the crippled version of Lavoisseur he created to infiltrate the Hardie gang.”

The young man's eyes narrowed in grim amusement. “Is
that
what he said? He told you the truth as best he knew it. When I created him, that was what I wanted him to believe.”

“
You
created
him
?”

“Of course. I had to create a version of myself who thought he was the original, to make mind-to-mind contact with the Observer of the Crypt, so that I, from a safe distance, attuned to his thoughts, could watch to see what the Observer would do with him. It used him to spread Null-A to several planets before I could prevent it. He was using the name ‘de Lany' at that time. Later, I recovered partial control of my stray self. I arranged to have him, under the name Lavoisseur, go to Earth just before the Galactic Invasion, to keep me aware of any resistance gathered around the Semantics Institute, or from the Venusian detectives. A Venusian detective named Crang befriended him—or should I say you?—and figured out that he was a copy. At first the thought-flow was from him to me, for I had designed the Lavoisseur body on a genetic level to have increased adrenal flows to make him ever in a state of nervous excitement. But I underestimated myself.”

“Are you claiming that, once he discovered your existence,
Lavoisseur arranged your accident, to wound you, and speed up your life process?”

“Ruthless, wasn't it?” The young man called X smiled. “But the psychological strain on him was terrific. I had also kept to myself my method of immortality through body-duplication, but he examined his own construction and reproduced the technique, creating an amnesiac version of himself: the first copy of your current memoryline.”

“Gosseyn One.”

Now the young man smiled grimly. “I admit I was startled the first time I met your first body—imagine seeing a young and uncrippled version of yourself dragged into a room with your fellow conspirators. Imagine my relief when I discovered you were a brain-damaged version, unable to use your powers. But I could not have you killed, because you were the only clue leading back to Lavoisseur. When Gosseyn One was born, Lavoisseur disappeared from my view. After that, when I tried to enter the low-energy nerve-meditation to find his thoughts, all I could find were yours. And you knew nothing. I had at that time assumed the identity of Lavoisseur to control the Semantics Institute, to prevent the Institute from hindering Thorson's plan to invade Earth.”

“Prescott shot you.”

X shrugged nonchalantly. “Your appearance on the scene meant I had to exit before any awkward questions were asked. What if they had checked your fingerprints? I was tired of being in a wheelchair, and I needed to be offstage for a while, to maneuver you into a position to kill Thorson, who had grown ambitious. The older and more insane version of you, the man who thought he was Lavoisseur, got himself killed off nicely: I blocked his extra-brain distorter signal using the non-identity method, so nothing was transmitted to his next body. A fitting penalty for trying to reveal the secret of immortality!” The boy frowned soberly. “But he was not the first version of
me to make that foolish error. In ancient times, I also tried to immortalize the Shadow Galaxy, with results too hideous to describe. It is to prevent that catastrophe from repeating itself that I am here.”

Gosseyn said, “I assume you are prepared to prove your more unlikely statements? I admit I have doubts on a basic level that a murdering madman like you could be any sort of version of me.”

X said harshly to the lie detector, “Verify this!” and to Gosseyn: “I have come here with every expectation of killing you, should you prove stubborn. I needed to trick you into a situation where your death-trigger would not release your memories back into me, as I have no wish to have my thoughts confused with your sentimental emotionalism.”

The lie detector said, “The statement is a true one, according to the information and belief of the speaker, but there is a deception based on omission.”

The young man said, “The omission is this: I am waiting for compatriots of mine to establish a no-signal condition in this area. You examined the body of Gosseyn Three? There is a mechanical means of neutralizing the immortality circuit.”

“Then you are the one who killed him.”

The young version of his own head nodded. “The Interstellar League was almost correct. Gilbert Gosseyn, the real Gosseyn, is indeed an agent of Enro the Red.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I thought that would be clear by now. Superior and sane minds should not bow to inferior and unsane governments. My attempt was to create a universal government, working through Enro and Secoh. A government ruled by sane men, the only men who can be trusted with power over others. The Observer in the Crypt of the Sleeping God was programmed to release its passengers when safe, and to educate them according to the scientific knowledge left aboard. That knowledge included the Null-A training techniques, of course. I wanted that
knowledge released only into the ruling class of the new empire: You see the difficulty.”

“Null-A's would not help you establish a galactic empire.”

“Correct. That meant that Null-A training had to be forbidden to men until
after
the galaxy was conquered. However, the Observer of the Sleeping God was programmed to do otherwise: Working through you, it propagated Null-A through several planets that were unknown or unmapped, including Earth, as well as the electronic tube technology and the lie detector.”

Gosseyn noticed the oddity:
Working through you.
The seventeen-year-old several times had slipped into the habit of referring to Gosseyn as if he were Lavoisseur, the immortal man who brought the Null-A science to Earth.

Wryly, he realized that this verbalization was just as accurate as to call him by his current name. He had lost Lavoisseur's conscious memories at his creation, it was true, but the drive, the ideals, the loyalty to Null-A, that remained. Something of Lavoisseur survived.

The boy said, “Only on Earth did the seed take root. The original attack on Null-A Earth, and the reason for the Greatest Empire base there, was to destroy the philosophy, and to start the galactic war that would lead to union.”

“That plan failed.” Grimly.

“Did it? The League Powers, in order to cooperate during this war, had to give some of their sovereignty over to an interstellar body, an emergency commission known as the Security Council. Control of that council is the next step. The members who were more recalcitrant were gathered here to be eliminated. You were allowed to escape from Gorgzid to bring your warning to the League Powers, bringing all together to this one place, this buried war room I could not find except through my link to you. Enro has been maneuvered into a position where he must use psychological methods, rather than open war, to
establish universal dominion. The loss of life will be much less.”

Gosseyn said, “You speak as if you expect to persuade me to join you.”

“Why not? We are one and the same individual, after all. But I remember our former lives all the way back to when I and two women awoke in the suspended-animation coffins of the crashed spaceship that later was worshipped as the Crypt of the Sleeping God. Do you understand the utter pointlessness of opposing me? There is no Cosmic Chessplayer aside from me. On Earth, my duplicate was called de Lany; on a prehistoric Mars that died when the dinosaurs were young, I was called Xenius; on Yalerta, I was Ysvid of Forever Isle; on Ur, the most primal of all worlds, I was called Ur-ath-Vir the First-of-Living. I have a thousand names. I am eldest of all men: the galaxy's one immortal. I am Lavoisseur from a time period before the man you thought was Lavoisseur, the modified version of me, began to work against me. I am the original Lavoisseur, the eldest of all the Gosseyn line.”

The lie detector said, “False statement. This is not the man you knew as Lavoisseur. He is—”

But a shot from the blaster ended the comment.

As Gosseyn leaped on the boy, he released the suppressor, and an invisible tangle of energies flooded the chamber. The boy's not fully developed muscles were no match for Gosseyn's Null-A-trained body; but, as they wrestled, the young body had a suppleness and strength that showed that he was not lying, at least, about being a Null-A. The young muscles reacted with the strength that only tissues momentarily disconnected from the fatigue centers of the brain could match.

But Gosseyn knew the same techniques, and he was more massive, had longer reach.

The two struggled over the still-firing gun. The blinding ray scrawled curlicues of burning debris across the wall and ceiling of the chamber, blowing out vision screens
and chandeliers. Then the boy's muscles sagged and suddenly gave way. Gosseyn, off-balanced, nonetheless retained his grip on the widely struggling figure, one hand clamped like a vise on the boy's gun hand. During that moment, the boy strained and pointed the weapon at the suppression emitter. The machine exploded in the shower of electron tubes.

The boy dematerialized right out of Gosseyn's hands.

The advantage of non-Aristotelian integration over the stereotyped reflexes of categorical thought is greater flexibility of mental adjustment of abstractions to the facts they represent.

Two things happened rapidly.

First, Alert lights flashed red throughout the Council Chambers of the Interstellar League. In several places, the wall decorations swung back to reveal television screens and electronic tactical display maps. Phones rang in front of the chairs where the corpses of the Interstellar alliance government slumped. Tinny voices called out, shouting out alarms and warnings, begging for instructions.

The television screens displayed the view above the city of Accardistran Major. Hanging above the North Pole of the planet, with the supermetropolis looming from the polar jungles below her, was a dreadnought-class battlewagon some two miles long, shimmering with eerie green shadows as she materialized into view. On her prow was the triangle of Three Watching Eyes, the emblem of the Greatest Empire.

These were the compatriots X had been expecting.

A zone of force, transparent at first, but smoggy-black
and growing blacker, was radiating from powerful projection arrays amidships. This sphere, centered on the ship, encompassed within its border a large dome of atmosphere, several miles of the city, and a bowl-shaped bite out of the planet crust.

Second, as the force-zone solidified, Gosseyn felt a space-distortion ripple through the area: He recognized it as the same shadow-substance effect used to break Gosseyn's relationship with his next bodies.

Gosseyn was aware of the fact that his “memorized” locations in his brain were no longer connected to anything … all but two. He could still feel the locations at the post office and the Earth embassy: within the sphere projected by the ship. At a rough guess, the volume of action of the isolation-energy was about eighty-one cubic miles.

Several of the telephone voices cut off, and certain television screens went dark. The views from orbital satellites were missing: The sphere of force was negating all signals from outside.

The city lights shined up into a sky as lightless as a tomb.

The sphere … coruscated … with black energies. Little ripples and sparks of coal-black substance fluttered in and out of a deeper ebony; a dull red-gray smoke, the hue of blood, hovered over it. Gosseyn had a distinct impression that the photons near the force-zone were
blurring
, losing their exact locations, losing energy, the closer they got to the mathematically perfect barrier of the spherical zone of force.

Gosseyn similarized himself to the only location available. The secretary and the marine guards and the persons waiting to see Ambassador Norcross were startled when Gosseyn appeared in the antechamber of Norcross' offices.

One of the marines had an electro-telescopic range-finding mechanism on his power rifle.

Ignoring the questions from startled bystanders,
Gosseyn said to the marine, “There is a warship of the Greatest Empire about to destroy …”

The man obviously had Null-A training, at least to a degree. “I recognize you, sir,” he said, unclipping the range finder and handing it to Gosseyn.

Gosseyn rested the metal tube on the windowsill and focused it on the warship hovering in the gloom overhead. Already searchlights from police and military installations beneath were sending narrow and brilliant beams through the dark air. Space-raid sirens were bellowing across the midnight-black streets; glittering force-shells were thickening around the buildings. The outer defensive screens of the mighty warship were already glinting with pinpoint sparks, perhaps from small-arms fire or vehicle-mounted weapons from police ships: small but defiant gestures.