Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  When she turned her eyes toward Aleph, Gosseyn suffered an embarrassing shock. It was embarrassing for him to be sexually allured by a male figure—he could not help but notice the well-formed muscular thighs, the breadth of shoulders, the hawklike eyes, the godlike confidence that made the other men around her seem, to Leej, like merely helpless children.

  And of course, it was his face, Gosseyn’s face, she found so magnetic.

  The second surprise was that she was as yet unaware of him. Gosseyn’s emotions were pale compared to the whirlpools of passion rushing through the Predictor woman, and his surprised thoughts were simply blending in with her general feelings of surprise at the current scene.

  She did not even know herself well enough to notice when foreign thoughts were running through her mind.

  Her inner state of mental and emotional confusion was hidden beneath a suave exterior. Her crisp, cool voice rang out to Aleph: “Why have you not, in your own time period, arranged for such a time-expedition? Your contemporaries apparently have all the combined secrets of the Predictors, of Enro, of the Follower, and of Lavoisseur. You have the science to do this yourself, experts, where we are doing it for the first time!”

  Aleph spoke to Leej but was apparently addressing Gosseyn: “I saw in the memory grafted onto yours from Gosseyn Four that the astronomer Abrin showed you a neurological energy reading of the distorter-type output of the galaxy in my time. You saw that an entire galaxy-worth of beings was attempting to contact that future, and that an energy from the future had responded. I can tell you that the response from a hostile future was to erect a negative-energy barrier to time-travel, similar to the shadow-substance across which your space-bypassing power cannot operate. This was the likely reason Corthid was not flung even further into the future: The barrier prevented it.”

  As he spoke, Gosseyn saw a strange thing: The shadowy multiples of prediction-pictures surrounding everyone in the environment became fewer and sharper. Leej had deliberately, almost without thought, acted to put the future on a basis where there were fewer and more easily predicted possible futures.

  Leej spoke again, “Then why should we be able to cross it?”

  It was Curoi who answered. “Aleph hopes that the barrier will not exist in this—this alternate, artificially created, universe. Am I correct? We are all copies of beings who exist in a parallel time. If so, you have done us a terrible disservice.”

  Aleph nodded his great, golden head, his eyes grim. “Or perhaps I saved you. Your originals in the true time-stream were destroyed when Gosseyn Three died. But even here, your preservation is temporary. It is our belief that, in order to preserve itself, the Ydd intends to render this entire area of space-time, all the surrounding galaxies within the Virgo supercluster, into a low-energy condition where life is not possible.” He gestured around him at the dead planet and raised his hand to point at the blank, black sky where uncounted millions of neutron stars and brown dwarfs burned feebly in the Shadow Galaxy.

  Curoi said, “Are we to dissolve and be slain like the ghostly people in Gosseyn’s short-lived illusion universe?”

  “I do not believe this universe will collapse. One second of time was removed from the main flow of the eternity substance: It replicated the next second thereafter, and the next and the next, in its mindless, infinite fashion. My time here, however, is done. I can no longer maintain this projection.”

  The giant golden man blurred, turned into a shadow-form, and vanished.

  21

  No two objects in the universe, no two events, are identical.

  As Aleph vanished without saying any good-bye, Gosseyn could see the scorn in the thoughts of Leej. She simply did not believe Aleph had told the truth. This was a temporary universe, fated for destruction.

  She was now convinced that this being, the Aleph, was Gosseyn, a true version of his. Creating an artificial universe of duplicated people was essentially the same as what Lavoisseur had done when he created Gosseyn to stop the invasion of Earth.

  Leej’s thought-emotion was: Oh well. Some men are just like that.

  Just like Gosseyn. He had disrupted her life on Yalerta, forced a breakup with her old lover Yanar, trapped her for more than a month aboard a broken starship surrounded by strange and foolish peons (in the mind of Leej, anyone unable to see the future was a “peon”), and then never thanked her for her sacrifice and for her ministering to him—not even when she had, with her own aristocratic hands, acted as a nursemaid to Gosseyn’s unconscious body. Leej regarded this as a degradation, suffered for Gosseyn, who had never thanked her, never reciprocated her burning love for him. To Leej, Gosseyn was merely one more of the ruthless and heartless men she had met in her life: a slightly less dangerous version of the Follower.

  There was simply nothing to be done about such men. They popped up in a woman’s life, ruined it, and departed. Only little girls—weaklings—griped aloud about it. Oh well. Some men are just like that.

  Gosseyn, confounded and overwhelmed by a rush of feminine emotion, was stunned by this mental image of himself. But that was not the way it was! There was a galactic war to stop….

  The flood of shocked emotion was one his own highly trained nervous system never would have permitted. Leej was now aware that she had been violated: A man had been imposed into her innermost being without warning or consent.

  And not just any man: Gilbert Gosseyn, of all people! The man she had wanted to take as a lover! That man who spurned her.

  The physical sensation of rage, muscles tensing, pulse beating hotly in her face, stunned Gosseyn for a moment.

  Nor could Gosseyn make himself unaware of the emotion: It was his emotion, too, and he shared it. Unlike the weakling Ashargin had been when Gosseyn had been implanted in him, there was no way to dominate Leej. She was not driven into the trancelike blankness Ashargin suffered when another mind was imposed on him.

  She was aware of his thoughts, but in a fashion that was subtly distorted, so that his reaction, to her, sounded defensive. Like he was whining. Her reaction in turn was: For men like you, it is always something. Galactic war, or whatever excuse comes to hand. You just run roughshod over people’s lives.

  Leej then did something that astounded Gosseyn. She could—hear—a number of possible mental conversations or struggles that might come out of this moment in time. The one where Gosseyn and Leej most quickly and, with the least upset to her, came to a mutual understanding was the one future she … somehow … selected.

  In that future she thought to herself (and yet somehow at this moment in time she was also thinking it), We need to come to an accommodation. You’ve been thrust into my life one more time, once again with no concern for me. Let’s simply be as grown-up and professional about this as we can … and get it over and done with … as quickly as possible.

  “As quickly as possible” turned out to be something more than two hours, while the ground teams reembarked upon the ship, and the Ultimate Prime rose majestically out of the cloudy argon atmosphere of the Primordial planet. The ship’s engines could interact with the still-functioning Spheres from any point within the Shadow Galaxy; however, in order for Leej to float in the central axis of the navigation core—the only spot aboard ship insulated and large enough to accommodate the energy flows involved—required weightlessness.

  Leej walked with the nurses who stored Gosseyn’s motionless body in a medical crib. Leej saw how, even relaxed in deathlike sleep, handsome the noble head, how strong, even relaxed, the planes and veins in the neck were. The man who could not die.

  Gosseyn’s reaction: That assessment is false-to-facts. X has a method of killing me that would have worked had it not been for an emergency reflex built into my brain stem by Lavoisseur….

  Her vision blurred slightly as rage shook her. That reaction surprised him. Rage? Why was she angry now?

  But he knew, because their thoughts were intertwined. You just have an explanation for everything, don’t you? This, accompanied by a
mood of exasperation. Gosseyn would just never shut up. He overanalyzed everything. He was cold, dispassionate, unloving …

  Unloving toward her.

  The blush spread from her cheeks down her throat to her breasts. From within, he could feel the hot flush of warmth from her skin.

  Because beneath her shame and rage was hope. A girlish hope. She was a born aristocrat, trained to hide her emotions, so that underlings would not see. Underlings included the future-blind, the peons, including the crude foreign men of strange worlds. The men like Enro whom the Predictors had once been compelled to serve. And men like Gosseyn.

  (This thought was mingled with a confused memory of the handsome peasant boys she used to command to wait on her when she was bored. Their dirty fingernails and sunburnt, callused hands thrilled and disgusted her with their roughness.)

  Now that one of those coarse men from the outer worlds was within her, within her very soul, Leej was convinced he could not help but love her, now that he saw her as she truly was.

  Gosseyn’s reaction, of course, was detached.

  His analytical mind immediately saw how her tangle of fear-complexes related to her neurotic sexual behavior. She was crippled by her upbringing.

  The syndrome of aristocracy was simple: Any caste system is based on a shared and unquestioned illusion of moral supremacy and manifests itself in a fetish for outward and meaningless symbols of status and power. Upper castes fear uprising by the lower, whether the threat is real or not; hence they fear any dishonor to their symbols of prestige.

  And there was no more potent symbol in the human psyche than the surrender of a woman to a man. Hence aristocracies were phobic about liaisons between high-born women and low-born men: Prohibited under all conditions, it had for Leej the lure of the forbidden.

  On the archipelago world of Yalterta, the Predictors flew from island to island on magnetically powered airyachts and only the peons were tied to the land, farmed the soil. Their prognostication abilities gave the aristocrats an unsurpassable military superiority over their helpless peons, whom they could rob and abuse at will, able to foresee and circumvent any rebellion or resistance. This meant the normal correctives of reality could not break the falsehoods by force. Despite their advancements in technology or other areas, Yalertans were psychologically trapped at a primitive level of history, roughly equal to the fellahin priest-king structures of ancient Egypt on Earth. The neurosis of status, the pretense that they were morally superior, still operated.

  In Leej, the subconscious force that recognized her inhumanity to her fellow man drove her to a forbidden sexual attraction: The “lower orders” fascinated her.

  Combined with this was a second neurosis. Her culture and upbringing had trained her from birth to accept the notion that sex was for casual liaisons only. Children of Predictors were raised in the Pedagogic Centers, not by families. Marriage was for peons. The consequence of that: a series of meaningless relationships brutally damaging to her sense of self-worth. The primal drive of a female animal for a safe place to mate and bear children was continually frustrated.

  No wonder her sexual neuroses had combined to select Gosseyn. As an outworlder, he was like one of the forbidden peasant boys; but his superhuman abilities, able to block out the prediction power, made him the most powerful potential mate of her experience: the most alpha wolf of the pack. He was the mate who could make her safe, permanently safe.

  Gosseyn’s analysis: She would not be able to understand the drive forcing her toward Gosseyn because she could not question or criticize her aristocratic upbringing. For her to admit, even for a moment, that her attraction to Gosseyn was based on subconscious disloyalty to her class …

  Gosseyn could not finish the thought. The anger of Leej made metallic dots swim in her view, which was now his view as well. Her furious thought: The islands were at war before we took over! We foresee the needs of the needy and foresee the yield of the harvest! Those blind worms! Filthy low worms! They beg us to rule them!

  Then into her mind came a hysterical sense that Gosseyn didn’t really mean what he thought. He was just thinking these things to hurt her.

  Despite that she was in intimate contact with his inmost thoughts, she simply denied that he truly thought what he thought. Obviously he did not understand himself as well as she did!

  And then, just as abruptly, a third mood shift, a sensation of infinite weariness. A sense of overwhelming, soul-deadening defeat. Oh well. Some men are just like that. Half-hidden behind this thought, another emotionpattern: a sense of smugness, of superiority. Only the truly enlightened people (like Leej) knew the ugly truth about life. But once you found ugliness amusing, you could live with it.

  It was all so illogical that Gosseyn was at a loss. Was this the type of mental and emotional chaos most people, most of their lives, stumbled through?

  THROUGHOUT all this mental turmoil, the outward conduct of Leej, the high-born lady, was calm and controlled. She made sure Gosseyn’s body was well tended. She spoke with the nurses in a friendly, if somewhat regal, way, and she bade them farewell and returned to her quarters.

  Someone had laid out on her bed the insulated suit, webbed with lie detector–style neural amplification circuitry, that she was to wear while entering the navigation core during the experiment.

  Leej stared at the clothing on the bed with a mounting sense of frustration, shame, and a sarcastic amusement at her own situation.

  With a bitter laugh and an abrupt gesture, she tore off her clothes and stood staring into the full-length mirror on the wall, her hands on her hips. She was a good-looking, well-groomed woman, in her thirties, dark haired, her head perhaps a shade too large for her frame.

  “Well?” she said aloud. “Do you see what you’ve been missing?”

  Gosseyn noted that staring at a woman through a woman’s eyes, with the glandular and neural reactions of the woman, produced none of the normal animal reaction that a healthy young male might have felt. His feeling, again, was one of clinical detachment. Leej might be offended that she had a voyeur lodged in her brain, but she also knew from Gosseyn’s own unconcealed and inconcealable thoughts that he meant not to embarrass her, not even in this situation of forced intimacy.

  “Don’t you find me even a little attractive?”

  Gosseyn’s thought: Only once you are aware that your reactions to events are based on false-to-facts associations can you adjust your emotions to reality. Rage or frustration or cynicism is a negative feedback signal, warning you of maladjustment. The signal will cause pain but will not correct the behavior causing the pain, because your attempts at correction are based on a false picture. This false picture was evolved to flatter you rather than tell you how to negotiate with reality.

  Her reaction (of course) to this little lecture was one of rage and frustration and cynicism. And then suddenly, welling up inside of her like a dam breaking, came misery: the misery of a woman in love, never to be loved in return, because the immortal superhuman man she loved regarded her as mortal, worthless, and weak.

  To Gosseyn’s surprise, Leej sank down on the bed in tears, hiccoughing, swallowing her sobs so as to make no noise, her nose stinging, trying her best to weep silently, lest someone in the companionway overhear.

  And this was apparently the future she had selected where the two of them adjusted to the inconvenience of sharing a body as quickly and harmoniously as possible.

  Since Gosseyn himself also felt all the neurological and physical sensations of stabbing sorrow and womanly hurt, he performed the cortical-thalamic pause, trying to retain his sanity amid the turbulent flow of emotion.

  And her emotions, naturally, were calmed as well. After a brief while, the tears subsided. Leej, her eyes red, said to the mirror bitterly, “Am I really so much worse than Patricia?”

  It is not a question of better or worse.

  But Patricia’s rejection of her own royal birth was the very thing Leej lacked: an objective sense of her own self-worth, b
ased on real accomplishment. The sunny humor and cool self-control of Patricia contrasted sharply with the bitterness of this neurotic, self-deluded female. Gosseyn could not prevent himself from thinking the unflattering comparison.

  Leej’s reaction was arch.

  “I thought you could never be attracted to a woman who had no Null-A training. But you do love her, do you not?”

  I do not. Those feelings were implanted as false memories.

  “Then why do you miss her cooking? Why do you miss your little fruit farm?”

  And for that he had no clear answer, not even in his own thoughts.

  22

  The human nervous system is limited in its capacity to draw meaningful distinctions and therefore must treat similar objects as if they are identical: This is always done with reference to some purpose.

  Soon Leej was zippered into her skintight insulated suit and floating in the center of the vast cylindrical space of the navigation core. She had braided her hair tightly and held it in place with the clip, to make it less of a nuisance in zero-gee. A half a dozen umbilical cords and wires connected her with instruments and recorders. Over her belt-phone she spoke with Dr. Kair and Curoi and Grand Captain Treyvenant as preparations were made and the final countdown began. As before, the distant hull above, below, and to each side was black with vision-plate images of the surrounding galaxy.

  Leej said into her phone, “I don’t see how this can work, even theoretically. Gosseyn’s thoughts may be living in my head, but his extra brain is still back in his head, unconscious.”

  Dr. Kair said, “Aleph established a nineteen-point similarity between Gosseyn’s thought-patterns and his body. Our instruments are picking up readings of the energy signals passing back and forth from his unconscious body. We believe that when Gosseyn thinks the proper sequence in your brain, this will push the similarity to the final decimal point, and remotely trigger the nerve connections in his extra brain.”