The Map is not the Territory; the Word is not the thing it represents. Our sensations are not reality, but an abstraction from reality.

Pain.

A torment of fire raced along Gilbert Gosseyn's nerves as he stood on the promenade deck of the great space liner Spirit of Liberty.

The next moment: darkness.

A moment before, the calm voice of the captain echoed from the annunciators, warning passengers that the distorter-shift from orbit to the ship's berth on the planet below was about to take place. Through the cool armored plastic of the transparent hull, the planet Nirene hung like a black pearl in space, her icecaps a dazzling azure crown in the light of her blue-giant sun.

Then next moment…

Gosseyn's body jerked in agony, but before he could draw breath, the darkness and the scalding pain were gone. He landed on his feet in a crouch. There was carpet, not metal deck, underfoot.

He blinked. His eyes adjusted to indoor gloom. He was in a small, well-kept apartment. Behind him was a kitchenette, outfitted with the latest in electronic appliances; before him to the left, a retractable door was slid half-open to reveal a green-house filled with orchids. Steamy, hot air came from that door. What little light there was came from that doorway. Before him to the right was a closed door. Directly before him was a desk and chair made of lightweight plastic-steel. The chair had toppled. Here was a corpse.

The corpse was distorted, blackened, as if the once-human body had been twisted by unthinkably powerful forces. Here and there a white bone fragment peered through the dark, dry mass. The bones were subtly curved, but not fractured, warped out of alignment.

The mental picture formed was one of subatomic wrongness.

The man had been of a wiry build, lean but not tall. Few other details survived. The face of the corpse was an indistinguishable blackened mass. The head was burned free of hair. The right hand was a fleshless black claw; the left hand had been burnt down to a stump. Concentric stains of decayed matter surrounded the left stump, as if the murder-energy, whatever it had been, had lingered at that spot after the man's death. Tiny glimmers of gold formed teardrops at the center of the halo of stains: Gosseyn assumed it was the remnant of a wedding ring.

Gilbert Gosseyn gently probed the corpse with a pulse of energy from his double-brain. There was no return signal: he could not "memorize" or mentally "photograph" the cellular and atomic structure of the corpse.

The man's clothing, strangely, was not burnt or marred. He was dressed in the somber, loose-fitting garments favored by favored by citizens of the central worlds of the Galactic League.

This raised the question of what planet Gosseyn was now on. How many light-years had he been carried by distorter?
 

The gravity seemed the same as it had been aboard ship, which had been adjusted to match that of the planet Nirene.

The sensation of momentary darkness was familiar to him. Distorter matrices were able to form an electro-nuclear similarity between the atomic composition of one area of space-time and another, in such a fashion that the interval between the two points became mathematically insignificant. During that moment of distortion, objects, energy, people, even giant space vessels could be moved across the gap between the two points as if there was no gap. The lesser always moved toward the greater.

Gosseyn knew the phenomenon better than anyone else. Except for Gosseyn Three, his "twin-brother" (that cell-duplicated version of himself created in the same fashion he had been) no other living person was known to have the extra neural matter, a secondary brain, tuned to the energy flows of the continuum in such as fashion as to allow him to act as a living, biological distorter machine.

Someone had acted during the moment of distorter uncertainty. While the ship moved to her home-station receivers to which she was attuned, something had attuned Gosseyn…here.

Alert, he stepped into the orchid greenhouse. The room was hot and wet, but unlit. A shawl hung on a peg near the door, emitting cool air. Gosseyn assumed the thermostat on the shawl was tuned down to compensate for the close warmth of the room. Something tickled his memory. Where had he seen this before?

The light came from a second door beyond, half-open. Gosseyn was through it in a moment. It was a bedroom.

First, he stepped to the window, turned it on. The window was bolted to what seemed a wooden wall, but Gosseyn's secondary brain could detect the residual magnetism of the armor beneath the wood veneer, nine inches thick or more. The window was a fixed-direction model, able to bring in images from beyond the armored wall, but not to peer into neighboring apartments.

The view showed a giant blue-white sun glaring down on a metropolis of super-skyscrapers. Despite their height, the buildings were squat, cylinders as wide as they were tall; many were crowned with rooftop gardens of vivid blue plantlife. One building, a stepped pyramid half a mile high, had acres of garden and park at every balcony.

But the scene had a grim aspect to it. Each building was surrounded by a slight haze like a heat shimmer: electromagnetic force shields heavy enough to dissipate the heat and radiation of orbital bombardments, nor did modern windows need to pierce the massive armor of their surfaces to bring in light. Air traffic was conspicuously absent, as were energy-bridges leading from roof to roof. Flying cars, or pedestrians strolling atop a solid streamer of force, made vulnerable targets.

Gosseyn amplified the window image. As a precaution, he selected a spot on a nearby rooftop, and memorized it. Specialized ganglia in his extra brain felt the "tug" of awareness of that little portion of space less than a mile away. He set the trigger in his mind to jump him to that spot if doubt or pain struck him.

Then he focused the window on the posters and signs of the few street-level shops he saw. Some writing was in the script of Gorgzidi, which Gosseyn could not read, but which he recognized. The automatic methods of learning spoken languages at a subverbal level did not have a means of teaching writing systems. Hieroglyphs on the older buildings were Nireni, which he had learned in preparation for his voyage. He had also studied maps; he recognized place names.

This was the city New Nirene of the planet Nirene, the second city of that name. Before the throne had been removed to planet Gorgzid, this world had been the capital of the Greatest Empire. The first city called Nirene, once a metropolis of some thirty million souls, was now a burnt, radioactive wasteland.

The military aspect of the architecture of New Nirene was merely one more legacy of the decades of iron rule by Enro the Red. The great dictator was gone, but the events the tyrant set in motion continued in their remorseless way under the vast inertia of social habit and thought. The years of conditioning by police and military propagandists left a visible stamp on the scene below; and, Gosseyn reminded himself, an invisible stamp in the minds of Enro's subjects. To call the world a League protectorate was an abstraction, an incomplete statement. On a fundamental level, by habit and custom and all the neurotic behaviors of the untrained minds of Enro's subjects, this was still a world of the Imperium.

There was a high dome in the distance, possibly the very starport where the ship he'd traveled on was now berthed. The dome seemed solid: distorter technology did not require the ship launching or landing stations to be open to the sky. But there were antennae atop the peak that suggested x-ray radar-photography arrays able to examine ships in orbit for weapons before bringing them to the surface, in the heart of the city.

So Gosseyn had been carried a few miles, at most.

Why? And by whom?

Former journalist and retired attorney John C. Wright is currently a technical writer living in Centreville, Va., with his wife and children. He was a Nebula award finalist for his novel The Orphans of Chaos.