Null-A Continuum (46 page)

Gosseyn's mind was too strongly affected by the mood and emotion of the man in whose body he was lodged to see the scene clearly. Gosseyn performed a cortical-thalamic pause, and, looking again, he saw that this was not a victory parade: merely that the watcher felt such a sense of triumph and so little concern for the suffering and bloodshed he saw that it distorted his perception. He was watching an ongoing battle: Ships and armored cars were being brought up to reenforce a contested area, a city protected by a wide force-barrier. The barrier was being drawn back, foot by foot, under the directed-energy fire of the ships and land units. Buildings and troops no longer under that shimmering curtain of protection were swept with flame.

Looking at it through other eyes, Gosseyn also saw a million nuances he would not have seen had he been present himself. He could tell where the defensive line was vulnerable. He could see where the enemy would fall back, and possible approach paths for his men. He saw at a glance how supply lines, fields of fire, ranges for broadcast energy to power siege-weapons, and overlapping areas where the municipal force-fields stood were all arranged. He could tell by the lines of energy-fire which gun squads were fatigued and which were fresh.

He could sense weakness in the enemy. He could see victory as clearly as a Predictor, and the steps needed to achieve it.

Gosseyn next realized that he had not been standing on a balcony or even standing at all. He was lying down. It was warm and relaxing. He was in a bathtub. The appearance of being on a balcony had merely been a confusion
caused by the way the images from the siege—a major city on a planet tens of thousands of light-years away—had been reflected in the mirrors around him.

He was in an enormous bathtub made entirely of mirrors.

When Gosseyn performed his cortical-thalamic pause, the figure in the tub blinked, and the images vanished, leaving behind only the mirrors: All four walls of the bathroom, as well as the ceiling and floor and bathroom fixtures, reflected the naked figure in the bathtub repeated to infinity.

It was the young version of Gosseyn, the seventeen-year-old called X, the ancient being also known as Ptath.

Also reflected were the fixtures of the bathroom and the squad of young women standing or kneeling alertly at the side of the bath. One of the women knelt behind him, her hands on his temples and neck, giving a soothing massage.

The water was hot, almost scalding, but so relaxing to his muscles and nerves that the space-bypassing ganglia of his extra brain could pass images into his visual centers without disturbance.

The mirrors of course—this thought floated up in his awareness automatically—had always helped him focus his clairvoyance. Apparently the point where photons changed direction during reflection, moving from the speed of light in one direction instantly to the opposite, had an affinity to the location-distorted photons his God-given power brought in from infinity.

Ptath was thinking,
That Null-A pause was not me. There is a third person in here with us.

“Ah, Gosseyn,” said the boyish figure aloud, smiling at his own seventeen-year-old face in the mirror, “I like women to bathe me. There is a gentleness about them that soothes my spirit.”

Gosseyn quickly adapted to the shock. Of course Patricia, his sister, had seen it from the boy's speech and actions back on Mars. The first time Gosseyn had seen
him, the seventeen-year-old had been wearing a uniform. It was one he had a right to wear.

Enro! All this time, Gosseyn had been fighting Enro.

Enro the Red was possessing X using the same sophisticated nerve-energy distortion the Observer once had used to imprint Gosseyn on Ashargin.

“Not quite the same, Mr. Gosseyn.” The mocking lilt and rhythm of the dictator's accent was present in the boyish voice. “The techniques taught to me by the Ydd, the Primal Creatures of the universe, allow me to imprint a copy of my personality while retaining my own consciousness awake and alive, back in my own body. Convenient for a man with so many wars to fight!”

With this came Enro's icy and unspoken thought that the opening moves of the mind war with Gosseyn had been set in motion at his first words … the memory process would run its course….

There is a gentleness about them that soothes my spirit.
That was the first thing Enro had ever said to him, back when Gosseyn was possessing Ashargin. Gosseyn remembered his reaction: The great dictator had meant the comment to be humorous, not realizing what it revealed. Babies also like the soft feel of female hands; but most babies did not grow up to gain control of the largest empire in time and space. Gosseyn also remembered scrubbing Patricia's back on their wedding night, after helping her out of her lacy white gown; she giggled and blew sudsy soap at him … but wait, that was a false memory…. All his memories, in fact, were false. Gilbert Gosseyn, he suddenly recalled with a start, was merely a construct, meant to be temporary, which, having fulfilled its espionage function, could now be reabsorbed into the Ptath overconsciousness….

Gosseyn did not adapt quickly enough. Before he could raise any of his Null-A self-calming techniques, he was struggling to retain his sanity, his consciousness, his identity, his life.

HE could feel his thoughts losing their focus, memories slipping out of reach like those of a man suddenly waking from a dream. He had to stay alive; he had to retain his own sense of self-identity … he had to …

He had to kill himself. Another memory, this one from an earlier period, bubbling into his disintegrating consciousness. He had been lying on a bed in a hotel room, listening to a relentless voice, his own voice, droning a recording. He had taken a large dose of a hypnotic drug, in an effort to force himself into a suicidal state of mind. “… my life is worthless … everybody hates me … there is no point to going on … my wife is dead … my memories are false … I am nobody … hopeless…. Patricia will never love me….”

Meanwhile, the image in the mirror, his young face, had vanished and was replaced by a smoldering shadow-form. The women were retreating toward the doors of the mirrored bathroom. Retreating, not panicking. They had been told to anticipate this.

The mirrors must have been prepared with special fields that reflected more than light, because the moment the last woman heaved the heavy door shut behind her, the shadow-form in the tub emitted a beam of destructive energy in the cosmic-ray wavelengths, and this beam bounced back and forth between the multiple surfaces, crisscrossing through and around the shadow-form.

He was bombarding himself with fire, and the air in the room grew superheated: The bathwater erupted upward in plumes of steam. Even if the beam cut out the moment he returned to his form of flesh, it would mean his instant death.

Why? Why was he doing this to himself? Gosseyn was sure it must mean something.

If only he could concentrate!

Gosseyn could not remember how to perform a cortical-thalamic pause because … when, after all, had he learned the technique? He could not have learned it
while he was studying Null-A with Patricia back on their farm in Cress Village, because those years had never happened. He must have learned the technique earlier, back when he was Lavoisseur and came across the science of the mind the Earthmen had developed. But no, that was a lie. Lavoisseur, earlier, had been a man named de Lany, one of the inventors of the Games Machine. And before that, he was called Ptath. He had fled from the Shadow Galaxy during the Great Migration. Of course! He had learned the technique, as all schoolboys did, in the Scholar-Temple complex of the Logicians of the planet Centermost … which meant that he was not Gosseyn … Gosseyn never existed … Gosseyn was dead and deserved to die … so he must kill himself.

A twisted logic kept derailing his thoughts back into strange bypaths and memories, memories that kept leading back to the same thought of self-doubt and self-destruction.

That he had once attempted suicide was a damning fact. For cells retain their molecular memories. Nothing in the human nervous system is ever truly forgotten. The correct stimulus, the correct chain of nerve paths triggered, would produce the state of mind where he welcomed, he yearned for, death.

But that was not the source of the hammer blows of passion that kept disorganizing his mind.

The source was Enro. For the dictator was a man of rage. Whatever opposed him had to be destroyed, and utterly. It was not merely treason to oppose the Divine God-Emperor of Gorgzid; it was blasphemy. Gosseyn was the paramount source of Enro's rage and hate…. Gosseyn was the one who stood between him and … and …

And what?

But no, the emotion was too great, the hatred too blinding. Enro could not have a coherent thought about it, not on any level.

At the same time, something was using a rapid variety of Null-A associational and verbal techniques on his mind, mostly at a semiconscious level, affecting his perceptions even before he was aware of them, including his self-perception. The meaning of his thought-emotions was changing like wax, even while he thought them, the definitions of the words changing, the emotional connotations turning backward. Liberty now meant anarchy; tyranny now meant law and order; enemies of the state were now merely vermin, to be wiped out as quickly as possible, cancers to be cut out of the body politic before they spread. And the chief of these anarchist vermin was … Gosseyn, the bundle of meaningless pseudomemory that had somehow convinced itself of its own delusive self-existence….

Something was trying to force him into similarity with the older version of himself. He could dimly sense that it was a nearly automatic verbal-mental process, like a hypnotic command that, once triggered, had no choice but to run its course.

If Enro's rage had not been present, Gosseyn might have been able to identify the nature of the rapid automatic logic-sequence, might have been able to defend against it.

Defend? Or was he supposed to be assisting the process? Surely if he helped the younger, insane, version of his thoughts back into their normal form, the curative Null-A technique would show …

…. would show him his true identity….

Gosseyn pulled his thoughts away from that line of reasoning. To survive, he could not let his self-identity become merged with Ptath, that elder being from which he sprang. Gosseyn used a Null-A hypnotic concentration technique to prevent his memory chains from merging with, and being obliterated by, the older and stronger mind-force of X.

How had the Observer meant him to survive in this
mental environment? How in the world was he expected to analyze and cure the warped thinking of X when the glandular-neural framework of his thoughts and memories was caught in a tempest of jealousy and rage?

The hypnotic technique affirmed his sense of self, the series of subconscious assumptions and thought-perception-emotion memory-relations on which self-hood was based … and the mental storm subsided a bit.

Gosseyn caught a glimpse of his enemy's thoughts behind the maelstrom of his emotions. The strategic genius of Enro was at work with the psychological genius of X intertwined in one brain. Enro saw the fields of attack and defense and unerringly selected the weak spot: Gosseyn suffered from identity confusion.

Gosseyn's own strengths could be turned against him. His multiple bodies had weakened his self-preservation instinct: He simply was not as afraid of death as mortal men, not that panicky absolute, blind terror of death that makes even cornered rats fight. And the memory of the time when he hypnotized himself into attempting suicide, if brought to the fore …

The thoughts of X were crisp and clear and precise, by contrast.

The Observer has attempted many times to influence my thinking. It was damaged by the passage through the primal shadow, not me: It wrongly concludes that I am insane merely because I seek a reasonable accommodation with the Ydd entity.

Of course, I knew it would attempt to imprint your thought-patterns on mine: I have, as Patricia warned I would, embraced a form of controlled insanity, namely, Enro, to act as my defense and counterattack. Enro is the opposite of Ashargin: a mind so dominant that nothing can suppress it. Certainly not you.

You are conditioned to exist in a nervous system where the thoughts guide the emotions, the cortex shapes the thalamus; therefore, you are utterly helpless in the nervous
system of a man whose thalamic reactions force all his cortical reactions: the Violent Male, the Passionate Man. If only you knew who and what you were, Mr. Gosseyn, you could resist the maelstrom of emotion, but the moment you acknowledge who you are, we shall become as one, and the older shall dominate and cure the younger break-off, and all the scattered memory chains be gathered back to one.

Fool! The Observer in the Crypt is a machine. It thinks mechanically. It has tried this before. It deliberately confused itself about your identity so that you could order it to cure me. It never stops seeking to cure me. It sent you here because it does not tire of futile repetition. It must go through its options in their mechanical order of priority.

Your wish is to die. To die, you need only think of the place where your body has been set for safekeeping. Or, if you wish to live, you must also think of how to safeguard that body.

Gosseyn could not hide his thoughts from himself.

Aloud, Enro said, “I see him.”

The mirror before the shadow-figure seemed to recede and fade. Enro's power summoned an image of the Crypt of the Sleeping God, a view of another galaxy. There lay Gosseyn's body, its head and shoulders visible through the transparent upper panels of the Crypt.

Gosseyn could feel the action of “his” double brain when X memorized a section of the hull floor near the foot of the two curving staircases that led up to the location of the Crypt.

X triggered the distortion.

DURING the moment of darkness, the madness ended. The distorter passage broke the forced similarity holding his mental patterns in the other man's nervous system.