Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Leej said, “What if it doesn’t work?”

  But it did work.

  Leej’s first impression was of a sudden, dizzying increase in the clarity and range of prediction-pictures surrounding the vision-plates: She saw the tremendous and slow astronomical motions of dead stars orbiting the black center of the Shadow Galaxy, the great sweep of the spiral arms, moving and collapsing, like the froth of a whirlpool, spiraling inward.

  There were no duplicate or parallel pictures, as she might have seen surrounding predictions of human behavior, where there was some free will or uncertainty involved. With slow, titanic motions, the orbits of the black stars decayed, the spiral arms fell inward on themselves, the galaxy condensed into a small irregular cloud and sprays of black star clusters, and finally the vast singularity at the core of the galaxy consumed the remainder.

  Normal prediction could reach three or four weeks into the future. Larger and less-avoidable events, such as natural disasters, could be seen a year or two before the event. But this scene, the old age and death of millions of stars of the Shadow Galaxy—Gosseyn estimated the time interval involved to be between fifteen and twenty million years.

  Unexpectedly, the prediction-picture broadened, embracing the surrounding galaxies, as dust and other fine particles of matter (to which their vision was evidently attuned) spread across the universe as the Shadow Galaxy dissolved.

  A new vision arose: There were still a few dim red stars scattered throughout the universe, fewer and fewer per galaxy. Stellar formation had ceased long ago, but the smaller, cooler stars were tarrying before they burned out. Galaxies were nebular clouds composed of compact bodies: planets, burnt-out dwarf stars, neutron stars, black holes. Matter was undergoing inevitable degeneration as proton decay set in.

  Leej said, This future is from one hundred trillion years hence.

  Gosseyn asked, How can you tell?

  A Predictor can just … feel … from the length of the vision how far it has traveled.

  In other words (Gosseyn thought), Leej did not understand how she knew. She was not an analytical person and her culture not a scientific one. But for all that, he did not doubt her conclusion.

  The vision shifted again: Gravitational perturbations had flung the planets, slowly, over eons, out of their orbits, and they either fell toward cold stars or sailed away into lonely, everlasting night.

  Gosseyn: How long?

  Leej: The number of years is ten to the exponential power of fifteen. An immensity! If the life of the universe up to the point of the previous vision were lived over again ten times, that would approach this epoch. The eons it took for all the stars to be born and reborn, grow old, and finally die were only the first beginning. This is a universal night ten times the length of the universal day.

  Next came another vision, this one even darker, older, colder than before. A huge segment of space-time, large enough that Gosseyn, through Leej’s vision, could sense the curvature of the universe itself, was included within the view. Here there were no galaxies, for each galaxy had lost its stars. The stars had either fallen into supermassive black holes at the galactic core or been sent wandering, cast adrift in the endlessness. The dead and dying stars were now as far from each other, on average, as the supergalactic clusters had been in Gosseyn’s time.

  Leej: And this is ten times further again. This is ten to the exponential power of sixteen years. But we must reach farther … farther….

  Gosseyn: Surely all life died off long ago!

  Leej: No. I am still detecting the disturbances from free will. Something in the vast void is thinking, is acting, is changing its own future….

  Again the vision blurred and sharpened. Now the mass of the universe was mostly composed of a haze of gamma radiation Gosseyn could dimly detect with his extra brain. Gosseyn, able to sense and memorize the clouds of matter across thousands of light-years, did a random sampling and made an estimate: Roughly half the mass of the free-floating matter in the universe had been converted to gamma rays due to proton decay.

  Leej said, This is ten to the exponential power of forty years. And yet there is still life here.

  Gosseyn: Where?

  She showed him first one golden point of light, hovering in orbit around the supermassive black hole remnant of what had once been the core of a galaxy. And then, many numberless billions of light-years away, a second one, and then a third.

  There was a slight refraction to the mental picture, as if there were more than one possibility here. Something more than the mere mechanical actions of the laws of nature was at work. Whatever this golden atom was, it was man-made.

  Gosseyn attempted to “memorize” one of those golden points of light with his extra brain. He had a sense of immense smallness, as if the thing were many times smaller than the core of an atom … and yet it was massive, heavier than many solar masses. But it did not seem to possess the flattened smoothness of neutronium. His impression was one of cunning, gemlike intricacy, like the workings of a Swiss watch, but on a subatomic level, dealing with forces and energies immeasurably powerful, compressed into a measurelessly small space.

  What was it?

  Gosseyn suddenly felt a sensation, a distortion, as if Leej were being “photographed” by a distorter circuit.

  From the tiny golden atom came an irresistible pull. …

  Darkness!

  LEEJ found herself lying facedown, her cheek pressed against a hard, cold surface, harder than glass. She put her hands under her and rose.

  She was still wearing her insulated suit, but whatever force had plucked her out from the middle of the Ultimate Prime had very carefully unlatched her umbilical cords, removed medical sensors, and unscrewed fittings from sockets on her suit without tearing the suit.

  There were a dozen golden giants with Gosseyn’s face here, surrounding her. They sat in a circle on an elevated stage, leaning across a table of dark substance. The table was shaped like two horseshoes set end-to-end: Leej stood on a depressed circle of floor in the middle. Overhead was a black dome. Whether it was the sky of this lightless universe or merely a dome of black glass Leej could not tell.

  There was a second ring of Gosseyn-faced men seated behind and above the first, and a third ring above and behind them.

  Leej said, “You again! Doesn’t anyone live to make it all the way into far future but you, Gilbert Gosseyn?”

  One of the figures spoke in a voice like the bass string on a viol, his tones rich with humor: “It is not that the Gosseyn-Lavoisseur line is particularly long-lived; it is merely that we have the primary interest in meeting our remotest version, and so arranged to be at the time and place when and where he would manifest.”

  Leej became aware of the fact that Gosseyn was no longer in her thoughts. His calming presence had vanished. Had she been catapulted into the remote future by herself? She could feel the panic rising in her.

  A second one said, “We are maintaining the gravitational metric at the surface of a neutron star by de-similarizing the matter here from the effect of the gravity well. We do not normally appear in physical form. The atoms and molecules around you, including the substance of our bodies, were restored out of memorized distorter patterns matrixed in the core of the neutron star. Since the material universe has entered a period of low-energy disintegration, the minds that were once composed of all living beings in the galaxies have retreated into an out-of-phase condition, so that their thoughts do not occupy a particular point in time or space.”

  A third Gosseyn-Aleph spoke: “The engine that maintains this cosmic thought-record is housed in those superheavy atoms you sensed during your approach. When Gosseyn attuned you to one of them, it reacted automatically to memorize and preserve your brain information: The side effect brought you here.”

  Leej said, “What happened to Gosseyn? Why isn’t he here?”

  A fourth one answered her: “The nature of memory is fundamentally tied to the nature of time: The human nervous system interprets
the direction of greater entropy as the direction of consciousness, since memory is an organization of thought, and internal organization creates greater disorganization externally. Gosseyn’s thoughts are suspended: To the unprepared mind, a condition of no-time forces a condition of no-thought.”

  The first one spoke again: “The moment he wakes, his mind-patterns will be similarized to our own, and he will be mechanically educated with the processes he needs to be able to survive the Shadow Effect. At that time, we will assist you, so that you may continue your journey.”

  Leej said, “And what is the meaning of this? Why did you send one of your numbers back into the past to meet us?”

  The second Gosseyn-Aleph answered, “The Gosseyn you saw is from our future, possibly the ultimate or last of us. He has accomplished what we have not yet accomplished, and breached the time barrier.”

  Leej remembered Gosseyn’s story he had told Dr. Kair. “The Shadow Men of A.D. Three Million supposed it would only be a matter of a few hundred years before time-travel was perfected. Are you saying that here, long after the death of the star-making phase of the universe, you still have no clue as to how it is done?”

  Gosseyn-Aleph, or one of them, replied, “We know how it is done. Certain energy formations in epochs of intense gravity—such as exist at the core of dead neutron stars—have nineteen points of similarity between themselves here/now and themselves at a prior time. The prediction power shows that the interval can be bridged. During the current span of the universe, where all remaining matter is neutronium and therefore naturally partially similarized backward and forward through time, our ability to investigate the phenomenon is greatly enhanced.”

  A second one said, “But there is a negative energy barrier, a Shadow Effect, that normally prevents such time-distortions. The erection of this barrier was something imposed simultaneously upon all ages of the universe, a first step of an extra-universal attack, something meant to change the basic structure of reality itself.”

  Leej said, “The other Aleph spoke of an infinite enemy, a creature called the Ydd.”

  One of the Gosseyn-Alephs said, “It is to oppose the Ydd entity that this council has gathered, that we have taken the desperate steps we have. The youngest of us comes from as early as fifty thousand years after the Shadow Men. The eldest has not yet been born, but is present only in a copy of his brain we made through prediction power, transcribing his future thoughts into a blank matrix.”

  Leej asked, “And …? How can you fight something not of this universe?”

  “We have created not merely millions but billions of the Space-time Sphere amplifiers here in our own eon, scattered over a much larger radius than merely one galaxy, to create a correspondingly larger base-axis of operation. The Spheres will be oriented to Gosseyn the moment he wakes. This operation has used up most of our limited supply of uncorrupted atomically organized matter. Atoms are as rare, to us, as quasar pockets of the original Big Bang plasma are to you: the remnant of the universe as it once existed in a higher and more primal energy state.”

  Leej whispered, “Are the stakes truly so high?”

  “Observe!”

  LEEJ had a sensation of immense speed. Darkness was again around her. She was unaware of her body. Her consciousness was like a moving point, speeding onward, faster and ever faster.

  But not onward: backward. This was the second time her prediction power had been used to reach into the far past.

  She saw the Shadow Galaxy again, but this time, it was an image from before the nonidentity effect had darkened it. This was the Primordial Galaxy of man in its pristine glory.

  This image was one of a galaxy blazing with stars, the galaxy surrounded by a gemlike cloud of globular clusters, the spiral arms rich with multicolored clouds of nebulae, nurseries of fire where young stars where born: And here and there, pinpoints of intolerable brightness, were novae and supernovae, exploding outward to shower the surrounding universe with newer and heavier elements.

  The picture was encompassing millions of years at a glance, so the galaxy, glinting, shining, coruscating, seemed a moving thing, the spiral arms lengthening and turning like some ancient sea-creature made of fire, its hidden heart pulsing behind a curtain of red, orange, and purple nebular gas-clouds.

  Again, another picture: The galaxies were closer together now, and most of them were clouds in the shape of cylinders or toroids. The stars were the uniform white color, hydrogen-burning. The great nebulae reached from galaxy to galaxy, so that they seemed to be flowing rivers in which the galactic clouds were mere islands of foam. This was a very early picture of universal time. The element of helium had not yet been burned into existence by the slow process of cosmic evolution.

  Next, an even earlier picture: a small white-hot universe where vents of superheated plasma were issuing from a tiny pinpoint, smaller than the core of an atom. Time-space was enormously bent, so that light circling the miniature universe many times brought reflected images of the tiny point and its surrounding prominences to every side of the cosmos, spread and distorted as if in the surface of a curving mirror.

  Leej was staring in utter bewilderment. To her it was a meaningless glare of lights.

  Then, rising up from within her, that sensation of calmness and certainty she came to associate with Gilbert Gosseyn. He was awake!

  His thoughts were here, once again were with her. She could see that he noted and knew that they were viewing the early universe. The universe was so small that tiny quantum-level uncertainties distorted the otherwise uniform flow of the prominences: Some swelled up like bubbles, creating eddies and ripples.

  Within these eddies, so dense was the matter-energy involved that time and space were distorted, sometimes permitting time to flow backward, or for matter to spill out into the universe faster than the speed of light, “creating” an interval of space around it in which it could have its being. The whole universe was undergoing a rapid expansion and evolution. The primal ylem was breaking down into distinct variants of matter and energy, creating the dimensions of time and space as it did so.

  Gosseyn and Leej both noticed an area of darkness, of shadowy non-being, issuing between the prominences.

  Leej: What is that?

  Gosseyn did not know. He did the mental action of attempting to take a “photograph” of it with his extra brain. He sensed the underlying nothingness of the Shadow Effect: Even in this environment of immense pressures and temperatures so hot that no particles could exist for more than the merest infinitesimal fraction of a second, the shadow-stuff maintained its cold and vacuous nature, its fundamental non-being.

  The shadow reacted. Gosseyn’s extra brain felt the distortion of time-space around him as something within that shadow-cloud formed a twenty-decimal-point similarity with him.

  Overpowering alien thought-forms crashed into his brain: Ydd extrusion fourteen communicates with Ydd central consciousness and reports interference within the prime radiant-from-origin segment of the fourteenth arc of time.

  YDD OVERMIND CONSULTS WITH YDD ANALYTIC SUB-MIND AND SOLICITS A RESPONSE: SHOULD THE SURROUNDING UNIVERSE FROM WHICH THIS IRRITANT ISSUES BE ANNIHILATED?

  Ydd Analytic replies in the affirmative. This is a universe in which life shall one day arise. Life poses an unacceptable potential threat.

  YDD OVERMIND CONFIRMS. BEGIN PROCEDURE TO NULLIFY THE UNIVERSE.

  The mental “words” were shockingly loud: Gosseyn’s own thoughts were scattered and confused merely by the impact of the Ydd mental forms.

  Leej was the first to recover. She saw a possible future and urged it toward Gosseyn: “You have already been taught by the Council of Alephs how to survive the Shadow Effect. They’ve made you into a being like the Follower. Use that power now! Quickly!”

  Leej felt Gosseyn reach out and … break … the similarity allowing the Ydd to communicate with them. What was once identical he made non-identical.

  The similarity existing between Leej’s perception an
d the matter-energy conditions of the early universe also was broken. The vision vanished.

  Leej blinked, expecting to see the curving table and the high dome of the Aleph giants all around her. Instead was … strangeness.

  23

  Human abstraction therefore is conditioned by environment: We make those distinctions and see those similarities useful to our thought process. In novel environment, those unconscious, automatic habits of assumption will no longer be accurate.

  Around her was darkness, punctuated by terrifically small golden dots. Gosseyn was able to detect, very widely spaced, pinpoints of intense gravitational pressure, distorting the metric of space-time. These were massive black holes, scattered across billions of light-years, the rough cloud of them occupying an otherwise dark, blank, and empty universe. The golden pinpoints were the remnant of the civilization from which the Aleph Council had come. Leej noticed that she was perceiving these golden dots not with her eyes but with her prediction power: They were disturbing the fabric of time and probability. Gosseyn would not have been aware of them had he been in his own form.

  And the black holes were melting, disintegrating, and shrinking into Hawking radiation. Leej was not occupying one moment of time but was viewing countless billions of years compressed into each passing second. She was racing from 1040 years to 10100. A number so large only mathematicians had a name for it: the googol.

  Leej thought, I’m in space. Why can I breathe?

  She felt a sensation of anger burning in Gosseyn’s mind.

  In his sanity fashion he put the anger aside, and in flashing thoughts he answered her briefly: Her body had been turned into shadow-stuff, like the Follower. The normal atomic and chemical reactions that would otherwise afflict her, such as oxygenation in the lungs, running out of air, explosive decompression, had no effect here.