The Original and Complete Null-A Trilogy, page 34
He studied Yanar again, and made up his mind. Definitely, irrevocably, no friendliness.
He walked slowly toward the man, making no effort to be stealthy. The Predictor glanced up, and saw him coming. He stirred uneasily in his chair, but remained where he was. He looked unhappy.
Gosseyn considered that a good sign. Except for those who had been in contact with the Follower, none of these Predictors had ever been subjected to the pressure of not knowing from instant to instant what the future might hold. It should be interesting to observe the effect on Yanar. And besides he himself needed information badly.
Gosseyn began by asking the simple questions. And before each one—not only in the beginning, but during the entire interview—he shifted the wire in the control room back and forth between the floor areas “1” and “2.”
With occasional exceptions, Yanar answered freely. His full name was Yanar Wilvry Blove, he was forty-four years old, and had no occupation—that was where the first hesitation came.
Gosseyn noted the point mentally, i but made no comment. Blockage in connection with occupation, distinct interruption in neural flow.
“Is there any significance to your names?” he asked.
Yanar seemed relieved. He shrugged. “I’m Yanar of the Wilvry birth center on the island of Blove.”
So that was how it worked. He shifted the wire again, and said affably: “You people have quite a gift of foreseeing. I’ve never run into anything like it before.”
“No good against you,” said Yanar darkly.
That was worth knowing for sure, though, of course, the statement that it was not usable did not make the words true. Fortunately, he had other verification.
Not that he had any alternative but to proceed as if Yanar didn’t foresee his questions.
The interview continued. Gosseyn wasn’t sure what he was searching for. A clue perhaps. His belief that he was still in the Follower’s trap was becoming greater and not less. If that was so, then he was fighting against time, in a very real sense.
But what was the nature of the trap?
He learned the Predictors were born in a normal fashion, usually aboard skytrailers. A few days after being born they were taken to the nearest birth center that had space available.
“What does the birth center do to the child?” Gosseyn asked.
Yanar shook his head. And there was blockage again in the neural flow from him. “We don’t give information like that to strangers,” he said stubbornly, “not even to—” He stopped, shrugged, then finished curtly, “To no one.”
Gosseyn did not press the matter. He was beginning to feel distracted. The facts he was unearthing were valuable but not vital. They did not fit his needs of the moment.
Yet there was nothing to do but go on.
“How long Have there been Predictors?” he asked.
“Several hundred years.”
“Then it’s the result of an invention?”
“There’s a legend—” Yanar began. He stopped, and stiffened.
Blockage. “I refuse to answer that,” he said.
Gosseyn said: “At what stage does the prophetic ability appear?”
“About twelve. Sometimes a little sooner.”
Gosseyn nodded half to himself. There was a theory forming in the back of his mind, and this fitted. The faculty developed slowly like the human cortex and like his own extra brain. He hesitated over his next question, because there was an assumption in it that he didn’t want Yanar to notice until it was too late. As before he shifted the wire first, then:
“What happens to children of Predictors for whom there’s no room in the birth centers?”
Yanar shrugged. “They grow up, and run the islands.”
He sat smug. He seemed unaware that he had revealed by implication that only those children became Predictors who went to the birth centers.
His impassivity started another train of thought in Gosseyn’s mind. He had been intent, but now it struck him sharply that Yanar was not reacting like a man being subjected for the first time to such an interview as this. He knew what it felt like not to have advance awareness of questions. Knew it so well that it didn’t upset him.
Like lightning Gosseyn saw the possibilities.’ He stepped back in his chagrin. It seemed incredible that it had taken him so long to realize the truth. He stared down at the Predictor, and said finally in a level but steely voice:
“And now, you will please describe exactly how you have been communicating with the Follower.”
If ever a man was caught by surprise, then Yanar was that man. He seemed unprepared in the extreme thalamic fashion. His face turned livid. The neural flow from his nervous system blocked and then burst, and then blocked and burst again.
“What do you mean?” He whispered the words finally.
Since the question was rhetorical, Gosseyn did not repeat his statement. He glowered down at the Predictor. “Quick!” he said. “Before I kill you.”
Yanar sagged limply back into his chair, and once more he changed color. He flushed. “I didn’t,” he stammered. “Why should I endanger myself by calling the Follower and telling him where you were? I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
He shook himself. “You can’t prove it,” he said.
Gosseyn didn’t need proof. He had been dangerously remiss in not keeping a watch on Yanar. And so the message had been sent and the damage done. Gosseyn had no doubt of that. The Predictor’s reactions were too violent and too realistic. Yanar had never had to control his emotions, and so now he didn’t knowhow. Guilt poured from every reflex in his body.
Gosseyn felt chilled. But he had done what he could to protect himself, and so there was nothing to do but obtain more information. He said curtly:
“You’d better talk fast, my friend, and truthfully. Did you contact the Follower himself?”
Yanar was sullen. He shrugged, and once more that was a signal for a block to break. “Of course,” he said.
“You mean, he expected a call from you?” Gosseyn wanted that clear. “You’re his agent?”
The man shook his head. “I’m a Predictor,” he said.
There was pride in his tone, but it was a bedraggled variety. A lock of his iron-gray hair had sagged over one temple. He looked like anything but a nobleman of Yalerta.
Gosseyn did not comment on the boast. He had his man on the run, and that w-as what counted.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said you were aboard.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he knew that.”
“Oh!” said Gosseyn. He paused, but only for a moment.
His mind jumped ahead to other aspects of the situation. In quick succession he rapped out a dozen vital questions. The moment he had his facts he “similarized” the both of them into the control room, and stood over the trembling Yanar while he produced maps, and showed the wide circular course the ship had been following round and round the Follower’s island, at a radius of a hundred miles.
Gosseyn reset the course for the island of Crest, only a few hundred miles north by northwest. Then he turned to confront the Predictors.
“And now,” he said in a threatening tone, “we come to the problem of what to do with a traitor.”
The older man was pale, but some of his fear had departed. He said boldly, “I owe you nothing. You can kill me, but you can’t expect loyalty from me, and you won’t get it.”
It wasn’t loyalty that Gosseyn wanted. It was fear. He must make certain that these Predictors learned to think twice before they acted against him. But what to do?
It seemed impractical to make a definite decision. He turned on his heel and headed back into the drawing room. As he entered, Leej appeared from the direction of the bedrooms. He walked toward her, a faint frown on his face. A few questions, madam, he thought bleakly. How was it that Yanar could warn the Follower without his action being predictable? Please explain that.
The woman stopped, and waited for him, smiling. Her smile changed abruptly. Her gaze plunged past him and slightly to one side. Gosseyn spun around, and stared.
He felt nothing, heard nothing, and there was no sense of a presence even now that he could see. But a shape was taking form a dozen feet to his right. It grew black, and yet he could see the wall beyond it. It thickened, but it was not substance.
He felt himself become tense. The moment of his meeting with the Follower had come.
IX.
Ābstracts
Semantics has to do with the meaning of meaning, or the meaning of words. General semantics has to do with the relationship of the human nervous system to the world around it, and therefore it includes semantics. It provides an integrating system for all human thought and experience.
There was silence. The Follower seemed to be regarding him, for the shadowy mass was holding steady now. Gosseyn’s brief, intense anxiety began to fade. He stared at his enemy alertly, and, swiftly, his attitude changed.
Actually, what could the Follower do against him?
Cautiously, Gosseyn shifted his gaze for a flickering moment to take in the rest of the scene before him. If there was going to be a battle, he wanted to be in the best possible position for it.
Leej was standing where she had paused. Her body was rigid, her eyes still unnormally wide open. During the fleeting instant that his attention lingered upon her, he noted that the neural sensations that flowed from her showed an unvarying anxiety. It could be an alarm for her own safety exclusively, but Gosseyn thought not. Her fate was too closely bound up with his. He dismissed all thought of danger from her.
His eyes shifted toward the door of the corridor that led to the control room. For the barest moment, then, he lost sight of the Follower. He twisted back immediately, but he had his fact. The door was too far to the right. He had to turn his head too sharply in order to see it.
Gosseyn began to back toward the wall behind him. He moved slowly. There were several thoughts in his mind, several possibilities of danger. Yanar. The Predictor, he discovered with a swift probe of his extra-brain, was still in the control room. Unfriendly vibrations flowed from him.
Gosseyn smiled grimly. He could just imagine how the older man might do him great damage in a critical moment. From memory, he visualized the wall behind him, and it had the air-conditioning slits that he wanted for his purpose. He twisted slightly to one side, until the soft breeze was blowing directly against his back, and there, one heel pressed against the wall, he took up his position.
Having done what he could, he studied his enemy with appraising eyes.
A man? It was hard to believe that a human form could become so shadowy, so insubstantial. The structure of darkness had no form. Gosseyn saw, now that he was looking at it sharply, that it wavered ever so slightly. As he watched, fascinated, it changed and grew fuzzy at the edges, only to fill in again as if a pressure was behind it pushing the foggy stuff forward.
Cautiously, Gosseyn probed into that gaslike thickness. He held himself ready to nullify potent energies.
But there was nothing.
He took his usual prolonged moment to “photograph” an object. And still there was nothing. No image formed.
No normal image, that is. His extra brain registered the presence of air. But the darkness itself came out blank.
He remembered what Leej had said, that the Follower was a being out of phase. He had assumed from other comments that the man had found a way of being out of phase in time. Somehow, not in this time. Here, but not now.
Suddenly, now, he realized that he had a more far-reaching assumption than that. He had assumed that Leej knew what she was talking about.
Where would she have gained the idea that the Follower was out of phase? Why, from the propaganda of the Follower! Neither she nor the Predictors had any critical ability, at least not in a scientific sense. These Predictors stole their science from the islands. And so, in their innocence they bad accepted the Follower’s own picture.
“Leej!” Gosseyn spoke without looking at her.
“Yes?” shakily.
“Have you ever seen the Follower as a man, without”—he paused, finished sardonically—“his make-up on?”
“No.”
“Do you know anybody who has?”
“Oh, yes. Yanar. And oh, many others. He grew up from childhood, you know.”
For a tense moment Gosseyn toyed with the idea that Yanar was the Shadow. Yanar standing in the control room manipulating the shadow puppet. He rejected the notion. The man’s reactions under questioning, both inward and outward, had been on a provincial level. The Follower was a great man.
The question of how the Follower did what he did was not something about which he could make up his mind on the available evidence, but it was just as well to clear away the assumptions of people who didn’t really know the truth.
Gosseyn waited.
A mental finger in his brain quivered on a nerve trigger that would bring the power from the forty thousand kilowatt dynamo in the Followers Retreat across the gap of space, and straight into the shadow stuff.
He didn’t pull the trigger. This was one time he had no intention of forcing the issue.
He had not long to wait. A deep, resonant voice came out of the shadow emptiness:
“Gilbert Gosseyn, I offer you—partnership.”
For a man who had been nerving himself for deadly conflict, the words came with almost the force of a bombshell.
His mind adjusted swiftly. He remained puzzled but his skepticism faded. Actually, Leej had indicated something like this might happen. In describing the Follower’s visit to his cell while he still lay unconscious, she had reported the Follower as saying that he preferred to use people rather than kill them.
It was interesting, but not convincing, that he had now decided on equal status.
Gosseyn waited to be convinced. “Between us,” said the shadow-thing in his strong voice, “you and I can dominate the galaxy.”
Gosseyn had to smile at that, but it was an unpleasant smile. The word “dominate” was not calculated to win the good will of a person trained as he had been.
Still he made no reply. He wanted to hear every word of the offer without any more comment than was necessary.
“I warn you, of course,” said the Shadow, “that if you should prove to be less strong than I suspect, you will eventually have to take a subordinate role. But for the moment I offer full partnership, without conditions.”
Gosseyn grew sardonic. This was thalamic talk. Without conditions indeed! He did not doubt but that he was expected to co-operate with the purposes of the Follower. People tended to project their own hopes and desires, and so a plan for personal aggrandizement became the plan.
Next move: bloodthirsty threats.
“If you refuse,” said the resonant voice, “then you and I are enemies, and you will be destroyed without mercy.”
And that, Gosseyn presumed cynically, was that. The pattern of the neurosis was complete.
His analysis must have been correct. Silence settled over the room, and once more for a little time there was only the movement of the ship as it raced through the night sky on wings of magnetic power.
It was clear that he was now expected to make an answer.
Well, what ought he to say?
From the corner of his eyes, Gosseyn saw that Leej was edging cautiously toward a chair. She made it, and sighed audibly as she sank into it. That brought a bleak amusement to Gosseyn, which passed as the Follower said in his steeliest tone:
“Well?”
There was the beginning of purpose in Gosseyn now, a half determination to test the strength of the other. Test it now. But first, as much information as he could get.
“What’s the war situation?” he temporized.
“I predict unqualified victory for Enro in three months,” was the reply.
Gosseyn hid his shock. “You actually see the moment of victory?”
The pause, then, was so slight that Gosseyn wondered afterwards if it had occurred, or if he had imagined it.
“I do,” was the firm reply.
He couldn’t accept that, since it failed to take his extra brain into account. The strong possibility that he was being lied to made him sardonic again.
“No blurs?” he said.
“None.”
There was an interruption, a movement from Leej. She sat up. Then:
“That,” she said in a clear voice, “is a lie. I’ can foresee everything that anyone else can. And it is difficult to prophesy in detail for more than three weeks. Even that is always within certain limits.”
“Woman, hold your tongue!”
Leej’s color was high. “Follower,” she said, “if you can’t win with the power you really have, then you are as good as lost. And don’t think for an instant that I feel myself bound to obey your orders. I do not desire, and never have desired, your victory.”
“Good girl,” said Gosseyn.
But he frowned, and noted a point for future reference. There was in her words a veiled implication of previous collaboration with the Follower.
“Leej,” he said without looking at her, “are there any blurs in the next few weeks?”
“There is no picture at all,” was the answer. “It’s as if everything is cut off. The future is a blank.”
“Perhaps,” said the Follower softly but resonantly, “that is because Gosseyn is about to die.”
He added quickly: “My friend, you have five seconds to make up your mind.”
The five seconds passed in silence.
Gosseyn had expected, if an attack came, it would be one of three types. First, the Follower might try to utilize the magnetic power of Leej’s ship against him. He’d quickly discover that that wouldn’t work.
Second, and most likely, he’d use a source of power in the Retreat, since that was his base of operations. He’d quickly discover that that wouldn’t work either. Third, he would use an outside source of power. If it was the latter, Gosseyn’s hope was that it operated across space and not by mechanical similarity.
