Null-A Continuum (31 page)

If Gosseyn had not spent the hours of the trip experimenting with his recently learned Predictor power and had not seen a vision of the same man occupying the lounge of whatever ship Gosseyn randomly selected to jump to, Gosseyn would not have been suspicious of him.

Gosseyn foresaw that, about a minute from now, after he confronted the man and was threatened in return, he could memorize the man's body with his extra brain. The action of the organic distorter in his extra brain cut off whatever future might be hidden beyond.

Gosseyn realized the psychological danger of relying too heavily on the prediction images. He had seen Leej deliberately following whatever the most likely future paths might be in order to make the futures coming after that easier to see far-off. It was a strategy that must eventually lead to a habit of overcaution, of lack of imagination: He wondered if the technologically backward culture of Yalerta's Predictor-aristocrats, the haughty inability of Leej to accept frustration of her erotic fixations, eventually leading to her extravagant act of self-sacrifice, been the result.

He could see another future-path, this one clear of blind spots, where he merely returned to his cabin for the remainder of the voyage. Gosseyn disregarded this safer path.

Gosseyn walked up to the table where the man was seated and pretending to read a book. He looked up. His face, at the moment, was old, lined, and gray. He closed the book on his finger, a casual gesture, but Gosseyn decided
there must be a weapon in it, because his extra brain registered the circuits in the book jumping to an energy level far above what would be needed by a text memory tube.

“May I help you?” the old man said. He was dressed in dark, simple clothing of conservative cut. Nothing that would attract attention in a crowd. The book was a travelogue, just the kind of thing a passenger on a space liner would carry.

Gosseyn took a seat and said in a conversational tone, “Your eyes impress me. I assume the pupils are painted on some sort of one-way film or cusp you wear like a contact lens, but you have a system for turning them in one direction or another while your real eyes beneath are watching something else.”

The man took a sip of his drink with his free hand. He was evidently pondering whether to continue the masquerade. The flesh mask on his face, as far as Gosseyn could tell, was perfect. The man could drink and eat with no seam showing around his lips. Perhaps the artificial flesh extended all the way inside his lips and cheeks?

But his nervous system flows were steady, not jumpy. He was someone who was cool under pressure, at least. He stood, leaving both his drink and his book on the table, and nodded his head slightly toward Gosseyn. “You embarrass me, sir. My face is quite unsightly while I undergo reconstructive surgery: I had my physician create this prosthetic for me, that I might pass without comment. Now, if you will excuse me? It is not my habit to discuss my personal matters with strangers.”

He started to step away from the table. Gosseyn reached out and grabbed his arm. “Hold on,” said Gosseyn. “I'd like to know why and, frankly, how you are following me.” For Gosseyn had switched ships not once but several times during his journey, usually by booking two cabins on two different vessels and similarizing himself and his luggage from one to the next after takeoff.

The man leaned in and hissed, “Careful, friend. There is a blaster tied to a mass-detection circuit pointed at your heart. Attempt to follow me, or make any sudden moves, and the energy of an atomic pile goes off right here.”

Gosseyn was not sure if the man was lying: Again, his neural flows were calm and undisturbed. The energy Gosseyn detected in the book lying on the table, an electron-tube arrangement hidden in its spine, was not powerful enough to be atomic, but distorters gave off no energy signature before activation, and so the weapon could operate by faster-than-light distorter principles. Could a distorter matrix be made so small?

Gosseyn realized that there was too much he did not know. There were too many worlds in the galaxy, too many advances in technology, for one man from a world newly introduced into galactic commerce to be familiar with.

Gosseyn merely tightened his grip, memorized the man's body, and set up a cue to trigger similarity to a spot of deck he had memorized in his cabin that morning.

A tense moment passed. He did not activate the cue. Gosseyn did not want to similarize himself and the man out of the room, for fear that the disappearance of his body mass would trigger the weapon. An atomic discharged in this confined space might well kill everyone on the observation deck, or even several decks of the ship, if the energy breached hull plates behind him. But if the man, or some compatriot of his, were controlling the weapon remotely, he evidently did not wish to fire at Gosseyn, not while Gosseyn held the man in his grip.

Gosseyn turned his head to study the book lying on the table. It took him the normal long moment to memorize its atomic structure. But the moment his head was turned, a shock burned his hand, and the pain jarred his arm and made him release the man. Gosseyn cried out, startled, and began to stand up but saw a flux in the energy signature of the book at his sudden motion.

He turned his head and looked out through the transparent hull, memorized the outer few layers of atoms, and triggered the book to go there. It disappeared from the tabletop and reappeared tumbling alongside the ship, touching the surface of the window. There was no air or relative motion, of course, so the book maintained its position, pages pressed up against the transparent hull.

There was no explosion, no discharge. Nonetheless, the passengers noticed the pale rectangle of the book appearing suddenly out of nothing, and it seemed huge against the backdrop of the planet behind it, because there were no visual cues as to the distance. Someone shouted hoarsely, and the people at the tables came to their feet, voices loud.

Gosseyn stood and turned, but the man had disappeared. The exit was suddenly crowded with nervous passengers eager to leave the lounge, and Gosseyn neither saw the man, nor could he pick out one nervous system signature amid the neural-electric “noise” of a roomful of startled and annoyed people.

Gosseyn stepped away from the observation deck himself and found a quiet spot, a maintenance closet, whose electric lock his extra brain could short-circuit. He brought the book back into his hand. It was steaming with the cold of space. Again his extra brain detected the energy levels fluctuating. He opened the spine with a tool he found on the shelf here.

The circuit inside was not a weapon. It was a simple distance-locator. The book could be set to audio, and it would read itself aloud while there was someone nearby listening, but if it detected no human-sized masses near, it would shut off. The mild electromagnetic fluctuations Gosseyn had been detecting had not been connected to anything other than the normal reading circuits.

And yet they seemed abnormally strong. He found a tracking screen pasted to the back cover. The book had been modified to track the configurations of several people over a number of yards, each individual within the
scan radius tagged according to his particular biometric contour. It was a rather clever method of tracking an individual in a crowded room, especially an individual whose unique nervous system structure rendered him distinct. Only a very close inspection—or an extra brain that could trace electronic vibrations—would have detected the reading circuit's modification from its original innocent purpose.

But the range was surely insufficient to track Gosseyn when he distorter-jumped from one ship to another.

He decided he had no time to waste with this. There were lifeboats on every deck of the great space liner, fifty-foot torpedo-shaped machines, each with her own small distorter-atomic power combination engine. He strolled casually from his maintenance closet to the nearest lifeboat, paused, and used his prognostication power to examine the future. He could see small, clear pictures in his imagination of what would happen, up to about fifteen minutes from now. He would launch the boat, which would decouple from the hull of the liner with explosive bolts. The ship's alarm would go off, and the radio board would light up with messages from the captain of the liner, which Gosseyn would not answer. He would similarize the man following him into the small cabin of the boat, with a cue in Gosseyn's extra brain tagged to retreat at similarity speeds back to his cabin aboard the ship if he suffered any pain, shock, fear, or surprise. The man would appear, apparently in the middle of a costume change, for he would be naked from the waist up, wearing no mask. His face and upper chest should show a hideous net of scars, as if from a powerful electrical burn. The head was hideous, a fleshless skull of muscle and nerve, coated with transparent medicinal plastic, the eyes lidless, the nose cropped. The faceless man would turn and raise his hand … a flare of intense, white light … and then, a blur occluded the vision.

Gosseyn no doubt would use his distorter power at
that point, or perhaps the faceless man had some ability to distort the metric of space-time that resulted in the same effect: a break of normal, linear causation and hence a blankness in the vision of the future.

Of course, the moment of Gosseyn's death, when his memories were transmitted to a waiting Gosseyn body, might also distort the fabric of time sufficiently to blur the prediction-vision. Were any of his bodies, hidden long ago by Lavoisseur, even in range?

On the other hand, if this faceless man was carrying a weapon of tremendous power, it might be better to have him away from a ship of innocent people. Gosseyn winced at the idea of the type of fantastic energies needed to overwhelm his complex of defenses being unleashed aboard the confined spaces of a starship.

Well, the future was not set in stone. He opened the hatch—the alarms automatically rang—and launched. During the moment when the little boat spun away from the giant space liner, Gosseyn memorized a patch of deck within the lifeboat, as well as the electronic patterns of the faster-than-light distorter-radio.

Then he similarized himself back to his own cabin and triggered the cue to similarize the faceless man into the space-boat. The space-boat was even now visible through the porthole in Gosseyn's cabin, dwindling in the distance.

He used his extra brain to send his voice over the radio to the space-boat. “I would still like to know how you managed to follow me.”

Gosseyn could feel the trickle of power in the area: The circuit was open, but the man was not responding. Through the porthole, Gosseyn could see two larger sideboats had been launched by the captain, to go recover the space-boat.

Over the radio he mentioned the approaching rescuers. “I suspect you have some weapon of sufficient power to destroy the sideboats approaching your position. If
you open fire on them, I can similarize you out into the vacuum.”

The man's voice was remarkably cultured and smooth toned. “Obviously I cannot reveal my methods over an open radio. Can you remove me from this embarrassing situation? My poor rescuers would be shocked to see my face in its current state. Perhaps we could meet in person? We have much to discuss.”

Gosseyn attempted to see the future, but, of course, no picture could form. A moment from now he was going to distort the faceless man into this cabin, and this blocked further visions of the future.

What happened was this. The man appeared in the cabin, between Gosseyn's bed and the half-open door leading into the water closet, where there was a mirror over the sink, and sockets for self-moving razors and the like. The man was unarmed. Instead of turning to face Gosseyn, who was behind him, the man cocked his hideously scarred, bald head to one side, staring toward the half-open door. Because it looked so much like the skull-face was staring at itself in the mirror, Gosseyn did not immediately recognize the gesture, though it was one he himself did every day.

The faceless man was memorizing the power output from the electric socket. Gosseyn realized this only when the lightning bolt struck him, knocking him into painful unconsciousness.

Every model of the universe, being an abstraction, is inaccurate: The process itself of modeling creates structural barriers to the comprehension.

Don't worry, Cousin. I used a nonlethal voltage,” came the cultured, melodic tones from the horrid, skull-like face. “I had to guess about your body weight, though: There should only be a small scar.”

Gosseyn came groggily to consciousness. He was in some storeroom or hold belowdecks, lying on his back on his numb arms. From the strange silence in the air, the lack of the whisper of ventilation or the throb of engines, he guessed that the ship had landed, making the final distorter jump from orbit to a surface berth.

The faceless man was seated cross-legged on the metal deck. Crates, chained down, loomed to either side, forming a little nook where the two were hidden. Gosseyn noted that he sensed no neural flows from the man: The electric system of the ship, the atomic pile in the stern, were likewise blank to him. When he attempted to memorize the area just behind where his captor was sitting, nothing happened.

Gosseyn said thickly, for his tongue and his jaw were still numb, “What did you do to me?”

“I injected your brain stem with a mild neurotoxin, which is temporarily relaxing your space-distortion-control lobe. Amazing, isn't it, that even one of the Higher Orders can be neutralized, if one knows the precise situation.”

Gosseyn shook his head. “But you don't know. That part of my brain was balancing the energy flows in the primal moment of the universe, fifteen billion years ago. If you relaxed it, there will be a reaction. Similarization
effects are not instantaneous, but something has been set in motion.” Gosseyn was not sure about the details of such immense energy structures, but assuming the similarity properties were roughly the same as sending an equal mass of electron volts across fifteen billion light-years, the effect, whatever it was, should manifest within his local frame of reference in roughly …