NULL-A
CONTINUUM
JOHN C. WRIGHT
Continuing A. E. van Vogt’s
THE WORLD OF NULL-A
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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To the grandmaster of imagination
I never wrote you a letter
For those hours
And there were many
When the world did not welcome me
And your worlds
And there were many
Did.
Let this writing stand in the stead
Of that unsent letter.
•
For Lydia, with love. Without your courage and cheer, this work would have been stillborn.
•
To the memory of Dan Hooker, with respect, who made this novel possible.
•
To Isaac Wilcott, whose work and research were invaluable.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
The occupants of each floor of the hotel must as usual during the games form their own protective groups….
With these words, The World of Null-A opens, and we are introduced to one Gilbert Gosseyn, who believes himself to be a widowed farmer from Cress Village, Florida, presenting himself during the games to the City of the Machine. And yet Gosseyn’s beliefs are false, implanted in his mind by an unknown agency for a hidden purpose.
Reader, the volume you hold in your hands is meant to serve as an homage and continuation of the celebrated Null-A books of A. E. van Vogt. The World of Null-A was first published in 1945 in Astounding magazine, and arrested the attention of the science fiction readership as few books before or since. For sheer invention, breathless pace, and glimpses of the amazing potential of the human individual, the tale is unequaled. That A. E. van Vogt also introduces a concept as esoteric as non-Aristotelian multivalued logic (abbreviated Null-A) while telling a tale of adventure, intrigue, and war is a testament to his powers.
The theory of general semantics postulates that through a proper understanding of the relationship between words and the reality words allegedly represent a mind can be trained to avoid disorientation. On an emotional level, a lack of disorientation means the absence of neurotic and self-destructive behavior. It entails an integration of the cortex, the seat of reason, with the thalamus, the seat of emotion.
By A.D. 2560, Earth is a world of Null-A. The games select candidates on the basis of their cortical-thalamic integration, their sanity, for various high positions in business or government, including the presidency of Earth. Candidates of the very highest qualification are selected by the Games Machine for emigration to Venus, where men live without laws or the need of laws.
On Earth, police protection is suspended only for one month, and only in the City of the Machine. A man named Nordegg, a neighbor from his home village, claims Gosseyn is an impostor. When Gosseyn protests that he is the widower of Patricia, the daughter of Michael Hardie, his statement is greeted with derision, and the protective group of the hotel where he is staying casts him out into the streets to fend for himself.
He then encounters a young woman calling herself Teresa Clark, apparently unprotected during the policeless month, who leads him into a trap. Gosseyn discovers Michael Hardie is the President of Earth. “Teresa” is his daughter Patricia, a member of a gang led by a sardonic giant of a man named Thorson. Thorson and his gang have been using a device called a distorter to paralyze certain circuits in the Games Machine, falsifying the outcome of the games, and allowing Hardie, an ambitious gangster in no way qualified for the presidency, to assume power.
One member of the gang is a bald and earless cripple with prosthetic limbs, whose horrible disfigurations are covered by a medicinal plastic, but he has a strangely magnetic personality. He introduces himself with these words: “Consider me the ‘X’ quantity. And let ‘X’ equal any infinite value.” He arranges to have Gosseyn’s cortex photographed: Gosseyn possesses, in embryonic form, a secondary brain.
Patricia reveals that Thorson is an agent of an interstellar power called the Greatest Empire, ruled by a tyrant named Enro the Red. Enro intends to massacre Earth and Venus as the quickest way of provoking a galactic war with his neighbors, the Interstellar League. X is none other than Lavoisseur, the head of the General Semantics Institute of Earth.
Gosseyn makes a foolish escape attempt and is shot to death in the street. He wakes up on Venus, apparently the same individual, but actually Gosseyn Two, the same memories lodged in a duplicate body. A robotic plane under orders from the Games Machine forces Gosseyn to surrender himself to Eldred Crang, apparently another member of the gang and Patricia’s sweetheart. During what appears to be an escape attempt, a member of the gang named Prescott shoots and kills X and Hardie.
While free, Gosseyn is convinced by the Games Machine to attempt suicide in order that he will wake up in the final Gosseyn body, one with a fully trained superhuman double brain. Dosing himself with a hypnotic drug, he programs his subconscious with the defeat and despair needed to carry through with the desperate act of self-destruction: He is saved by the intervention of a hotel clerk, but later recaptured by the galactic agents.
Venus and Earth are invaded, but the invaders are thrown back by the resilience and tenacity of the Null-A resistance. Thorson hides the failure from his superiors, and instead concentrates on training Gosseyn’s embryonic double brain, with the help of Dr. Lauren Kair, a Null-A psychiatrist. Thorson’s hope is that Gosseyn, if fully trained, will be able to lead him to “the Chessplayer” manipulating Gosseyn and the events around him. Thorson wants to find the man who made Gilbert Gosseyn, for Gosseyn is obviously an artificial being, and wrest the secret of eternal life from him.
During this period, Patricia is placed in the same comfortable cell with Gosseyn. Apparently their captors hope that Gosseyn will be reluctant to escape if it means harm to the girl. He asks her what her status is. “I’m your wife,” she says, and Gosseyn is irritated that she should joke at such a time.
She reveals that Eldred Crang is a Venusian Null-A detective, who, discovering the secret base of galactic invaders many years ago, infiltrated them, rose to prominence in the Greatest Empire military command, and returned with the Venusian invasion force as a fifth columnist. It was Crang who persuaded Thorson to study rather than kill Gosseyn, Crang who will convince Thorson to leave the safety of his well-protected galactic base.
Gosseyn’s secondary brain is developed through training to act as an organic distorter. On a practical level, it gives Gosseyn awareness of and control over the energy patterns and forces in his environment.
Thorson, unwilling that any other man
find the secret of eternal life, returns with Gosseyn and a battalion of soldiers to Earth. Due to the fighting, the city is a burnt-out ruin and the Games Machine is destroyed. Thorson follows Gosseyn to the now-deserted Institute of General Semantics, where a telepathic signal leads Gosseyn to someone who seems to be an older and uncrippled version of X, Lavoisseur, head of the Institute. Lavoisseur, who has similar control over space and energy as Gosseyn, electrocutes Thorson; Gosseyn remorselessly slaughters the soldiers of the Greatest Empire who had been guarding him.
Lavoisseur is severely wounded in the firefight but lives long enough to briefly answer Gosseyn’s questions. He explains the process by which duplicate bodies can be created and nourished in a sensory-deprivation environment, with a twin brain linked by a distorter circuit, so the thoughts of one are reflected in the other, who can wake when the first duplicate dies. Lavoisseur says he created X by means of his cellular duplication process and damaged him to speed up the life process, making X the greater, so that his thoughts would be telepathically “similarized” back to an identical brain in Lavoisseur. By this means Lavoisseur spied out the plans of the gang and, working through Crang and the Games Machine, thwarted them.
Lavoisseur dies. Gosseyn is able to pick up from the fading energy of his nervous system certain fragments of thought and memories. These thoughts reveal to Gosseyn that for centuries, under many names, Lavoisseur has been the secret patron of Null-A, having built the first Games Machine on Earth. When all men are trained to the levels of sanity and moral maturity promised by the Null-A sciences, they will be ready for the secret of immortality.
Lavoisseur has often wondered if there is a Chessplayer behind him, manipulating his life for some unknown purpose, but concludes that there is not one. Life itself is the mystery and the source of mystery: “Once more, the cycle is completed, and we are no further ahead.” After he dies, Gosseyn realizes the implication of Lavoisseur’s last thought.
He removes the beard from the face of the old man and looks into his own features.
The Players of Null-A (published in the United States under the title The Pawns of Null-A) elevates the action to a galactic scale. Enro the Red, cheated of the atrocity he wished to commit so as to provoke a war, instigates without provocation the greatest war in galactic history.
With Thorson dead, Eldred Crang, as second-in-command, takes control of the galactic base on Venus and the soldiers stationed there. He disperses the army by the simple means of offering the men to regional commanders of other bases elsewhere in the galaxy. The commanders, always understaffed, gladly receive the additional troopers with no questions asked.
Meanwhile, a mysterious shadow-being known as the Follower appears on Venus and uses his uncanny ability to predict the future to arrange an assassination attempt against Gosseyn. When that fails, Gosseyn tracks the clues into the apartments of one of the agents of the Follower. The agent puts up no resistance but hands Gosseyn a shining card. On it is printed a simple message from the Follower: “You are caught in the most intricate trap ever devised to capture one man.”
Gosseyn wakes up somehow occupying the cortex of another man on the planet Gorgzid, capital planet of the Greatest Empire. He is trapped inside the untrained nervous system of Ashargin, last survivor of the previous dynasty, now merely a pawn in Enro’s political machine. Ashargin had been raised as a novice by the servants of Secoh, Chief Guardian of the state-established Cult of the Sleeping God. Ashargin is weak, childish, and neurotic, the outcome of years of ill treatment during his youth; Gosseyn resolves to train the body and brain he is inhabiting with Null-A techniques, to enable Ashargin to act effectively against Enro. These plans are thwarted by Enro’s eerie power to see through walls and discover all conspiracies against him.
Patricia, now revealed as Empress Reesha, Enro’s sister, arrives on Gorgzid, on the arm of Eldred Crang, apparently her husband. Gorgzid has a custom of brother-sister marriage for the Emperor and Empress, and Enro is outraged that Reesha refuses to honor it.
Gosseyn is returned to his own body and finds himself imprisoned in the Retreat of the Follower on the planet Yalerta, held in the same cage with Leej the Predictress. Gosseyn protects Leej and uses the powers of his extra brain to escape.
The pitiless ruling caste of the planet Yalerta can predict the future, apparently able to bypass the limitations of time in much the same fashion that Gosseyn can bypass the limitations of space. The Follower meant Gosseyn to be kept under the watch of the Predictors. However, Gosseyn’s double brain blurs the Predictors’ impressions of his future whenever he uses it to distort time-space, blinding them.
Leej conceives the desire to be Gosseyn’s lover (there being no marriage or other permanent emotional relationships among the Predictors), but Gosseyn is unable to find himself interested in any woman who lacks the Null-A training.
A warship of the Greatest Empire, apparently in alliance with the Follower, is on Yalerta, gathering Predictors into Imperial service, so that they might advise Enro of enemy military movements before they are detected and the outcomes of engagements before they occur.
Gosseyn single-handedly seizes control of the ship and, later, discovers that the Follower meant to sabotage Enro’s efforts to recruit Predictors.
Meanwhile the Null-A technicians of Venus have invented a technique for mechanically dominating and paralyzing the brain of any person lacking in Null-A cortical-thalamic integration. When it is revealed that this system of mind control cannot stop the Predictor-guided warships of the Greatest Empire, the decision is made to abandon Venus. The population of Null-A’s is scattered throughout the various worlds of the Interstellar League.
Gosseyn discovers a distorter circuit linking the Retreat of the Follower on Yalerta to the Crypt of the Sleeping God on Gorgzid. The Crypt is revealed to be a long-buried intergalactic vessel, the last remnant of an eons-old fleet that fled a dying galaxy and populated the Milky Way. Lavoisseur was one of the original migrants from the Shadow Galaxy; with him gone, Gosseyn was the only person the damaged Observer Machine, the electronic brain guarding the vessel, could contact.
The one remaining passenger in his medical suspension coffin is brain-dead, kept alive by the Observer Machine, which cannot act to damage a body in its keeping. The superstitious men of Gorgzid, having long ago forgotten their origins, since primitive times have worshipped the ageless yet living body as their Sleeping God.
Aboard the archaic ship is an instrument for reproducing, on a small scale, the Shadow Effect that consumed the previous galaxy inhabited by man; the Observer Machine tells Gosseyn that, years ago, while Lavoisseur was attempting repairs on the ship, a junior priest was accidentally attuned to this shadow-energy circuit and gained the ability to render himself insubstantial. That junior priest, convinced that he was granted this power by the Sleeping God, used it to gain highest rank and vowed to see the galaxy conquered and the Cult spread to all worlds.
The Observer Machine tells Gosseyn that it was the Chessplayer transferring Gosseyn’s mind into Ashargin to put Gosseyn into a position where he could be told the truth and sent to stop the Follower. But the machine says the real gods, and the real Chessplayer, have been dead for two hundred million years.
The Follower is Secoh. Secoh has organized a palace coup and wrestled control of the Empire away from Enro, who has fled. As Ashargin, Gosseyn negotiates with Secoh to lend his prestige as the remaining legitimate heir to the throne to the Cult, in return for a chance to view the Sleeping God in his crypt.
Secoh agrees, and Ashargin and the hierarchy of the Cult meet for the ceremony of viewing at the Crypt. Gosseyn has arranged with the Observer Machine to transfer his consciousness into the body of the last passenger.
To all appearances, it seems as if the Sleeping God wakes; he accuses Secoh of treason and advances toward him menacingly; Secoh, maddened with terror, assumes his shadow-form and destroys the figure shambling toward him. The mind of Secoh is unable to withstand the stress of
remembering that he killed his own god, and he collapses into profound amnesia, his entire personality erased by the shock.
Null-A Three takes up the narrative of Gilbert Gosseyn, now on an intergalactic scale. A fleet of warships from the dead galaxy from which mankind originally came is brought into the Milky Way, apparently by the malfunction of the space-control lobe of the extra brain of one of the undiscovered sleeping bodies of Gosseyn. The fleet is titanic, well over one hundred thousand warships, and manned by a troglodyte race degenerated due to eons of exposure to the Shadow Effect. The flagship finds and prematurely wakes the body of Gosseyn Three, who is in mental contact with Gosseyn Two, both bodies alive and awake at the same time.
Enro the Red cooperates with Leej the Predictress and Gosseyn Two and Gosseyn Three to end the menace posed by this superfleet, but at the height of the crisis Enro intrigues to have the troglodytes brought under his control. Gosseyn Two summarily sends Enro to an asteroid prison remote from any contact with galactic civilization.
The tale ends with Gosseyn Three departing the Milky Way galaxy.
NULL-A THREE was composed many years after the first two, when van Vogt’s health was suffering. With apologies to any purists among my readers, some of the events in the third book do not fit well with the established continuity of the first two.
I will mention four examples:
1. Much of the third book is concerned with a fatuous courtship between Gosseyn and a widowed queen, a neurotic woman who should not hold any attraction for a man like Gosseyn.
2. On Earth, gangsters and businessmen conspire to prevent the creation of a second Games Machine, but the notion that business enterprises would cooperate with crime is contradicted by the first book, where it is stated management and ownership positions in the business world are not available to any but those who pass the initial round of the games, i.e., highly sane and well-integrated individuals.