Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  He was curious when he became aware of a second group of circuits and machinery, an entire parallel system, woven throughout the distorter towers. At first he thought it was a backup or fail-over system, but no: As his mind delicately probed the energies rippling smoothly through these circuits, Gosseyn felt twinges of activity in his own extra brain. Little images of the past and future appeared around him: a picture of himself entering the orbital station and taking control of the factory floor, another picture of Enro appearing as a ghostly image on a throne, and killing him before he could react….

  Not just pictures appeared. He heard Enro’s melodic baritone: How convenient of you to have selected your own coffin, Mr. Gosseyn….

  These were mechanical predictor circuits. Gosseyn was not surprised such a technology could exist: If the organic distorter in his extra brain performed the same function as the distorters found in faster-than-light radios and starships, then he did not see why what the brain of a Predictor of Yalerta did could not also be copied.

  He studied the pulsating energies flowing through the circuits cautiously. He estimated the time-depth interval to be roughly fifteen billion years. The age of the universe? And the orientation was set toward the past, not the future.

  These circuits were communicating information backward into the past. But what information? He traced leads and trickles of information until he found a large central map-room. At the core of this orbital station was a large and intricate three-dimensional map of the galaxy. The map was roughly a mile in diameter. Circuits in the walls of the map-room tracked the motions of certain planets, only a handful, and shell upon shell of electronic brains surrounding the map-chamber made calculations to correct for Einsteinian non-simultaneousness.

  The robot brains were chuckling and clicking to each other: Message 6001012AB32 to Ydd Entity identifies target world … planet Uluviron … coordinates in time and space … orbital elements … has not entered into cooperative agreement with Interstellar League Safety Authority … Commissioner Thule orders the planet nonidentified … order 6001012 verified … Message 6001012AB33 from Ydd Entity … Confirmation … Shadow Effect to impinge on Uluviron in nineteen hours’ local time … countdown begins—

  Message 6001013AB34 to Ydd Entity identifies target world … planet Eaeas … coordinates in time and space … Commissioner Thule orders … verified … countdown begins … order 6001014 … planet Osnome … countdown begins—

  Gosseyn dared not stand by while world after world was destroyed. He selected a group of magnetic waves passing through the room and used his extra brain to impose a message stream on the band: Order 6001013 not verified … order rejected … confirmation code from Commissioner Thule not recognized.

  In their automatic way, the robotic brains repeated the false signal from Gosseyn. Commissioner Thule not recognized … order 6001013 not carried out … not recognized … order 6001014 not carried out—

  This solution, of course, was only temporary. The robots would mindlessly reject all further orders in the queue until some higher process or human operator noticed the interference.

  The important thing now, within the limited time before he was discovered, Gosseyn decided, was the experiment to see if planets could be recovered from the Shadow Effect. If they could, then all of Enro’s horrific war machine, and the terrible threat of galaxy-wide disintegration, was undone at one stroke.

  And Gosseyn saw no reason, theoretically, why it should not work. If the planet within these pocket universes of shadow-stuff were truly disconnected from the continuum, that meant they were unrelated in space and in time. From the frame of reference of the universe, the first split second after the Shadow Effect seized the planet was no more “real” than the lingering weeks or months it took for the world’s entire atomic structure to disassociate from itself. Time was a human category of thought.

  From the point of view of a quantum universe nothing, really, was disconnected from anything else. Any one event in time-space, on the basic-energy level of the universe, was actually simultaneous with any other event.

  Steeling himself, Gosseyn directed the circuits interacting with his brain to attune him to the completed Stabilization Sphere occupying an outer orbit of Accolon’s parent sun….

  There was the sensation of dreamlike falling, of expansion … of connection with …

  The fabric of time-space was spread around him in four dimensions. Like bright, hard grains of sand, he felt the little intolerably hot pinpoints of gravity-electromagnetic-nuclear force where suns were distorting the fabric of space. His perception ranged across apparently microscopic suns and submicroscopic worlds for hundreds of light-years in each direction: a far smaller segment of the galaxy than the millions of still-operating Spheres in the Shadow Galaxy had been able to reveal to him.

  He could not shake the odd conviction that he himself was part of the complex matter-energy and gravitic dance of the suns swinging in their eon-long orbits about the roaring central core of the galaxy. The core! That infinite well of gravitational pressure, hidden behind its own blazing nebular clouds, but visible to Gosseyn’s kiloparsec-spanning consciousness.

  He reached out and felt the warp and weave of time and space in the local area. Gosseyn was careful to keep his thoughts calm and unhurried, so that he did not accidentally destroy any solar systems.

  There were fewer than a hundred currently maintained by the energies throbbing in the equatorial circuits of the mighty Sphere: a rapid exchange of balancing forces that reaffirmed the location and properties of atoms and molecules in their positions, so that their identities could not be lost to the Shadow Effect. Each stabilized planet or star system was the end point of one of the shining threads of balanced distorter-energy issuing from the Sphere, and guided by the complex calculations and focusing elements in the orbital stations.

  Carefully, he used the circuit he had built to attune certain bands of the Sphere distorter power through his own nervous system, using his control over the antennas in this orbital station to trigger the deeply buried distorter connection he had with the lost planet Corthid.

  Suddenly he grew aware of the shadow-areas in his small segment of the galaxy: a non-condition of nothingness-energy that was not part of the overall system of positive and negative balances forming the local interstellar environment. It was like staring into a vast, dark cloud.

  And a point of light emerged from the darkness. It was shining with the electromagnetic noise of cities and power plants, alive with the pulse of neural energies of millions of inhabitants….

  Gosseyn sensed, on a deeper level of the time-space plenum, a stress, like the pull of a magnetic force. There was a spot in time-space where the planet Corthid wanted to be, and its uncounted trillions of atoms and particles were somehow associated with that point.

  He realized nervously that this home spot for Corthid was still behind the boundary of the shadow. But where else could he put the planet? It would freeze if left adrift in interstellar space. The only area of space-time where Gosseyn had numerous energy connections was Sol. He used his memorized locations to identify a target: the roof of the spaceport on Venus, the laboratory of Dr. Hayakawa, various points in and near the Semantics Institute on Earth … the small lab in the deserted galactic base on Venus where he first made two identical blocks of wood touch … he used all these points as orientation vectors to select an area between the orbits of Earth and Venus … he stimulated his extra brain to force the similarity … the Stability Sphere amplified the signal a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a millionfold….

  Corthid took up a position around Sol between the orbits of Earth and Venus.

  Gosseyn saw he had too good an opportunity to miss. Pulling his perception back to the Accolon system, he probed the space between Accolon and its major moon: There, like a steel pebble in his mind, he could feel the contours of what was undoubtedly the penal colony where the No-men were imprisoned. He similarized the whole space colony into a stable orbit a
round Corthid in the Solar System but transmitted the guards and security systems into an area of polar swamp beneath the towers of Accardistran Major.

  Gosseyn was convinced he had only minutes or even seconds before his manipulations of the Sphere of Accolon were discovered. So next, he found the Temple of the Sleeping God on the planet Petrine and similarized it, foundations and all, to a compatible site on the planet Corthid, in a cavern not far from the buried city of Corthindel. It was but the work of a moment to place all the men and women in the dungeons in the lower half of the temple-prison into the stately chambers above and sweep all the priests and guards and agents of Enro into the prison cells.

  Gosseyn hurriedly began sending the shadow-ships of the Greatest Empire, one by one, as quickly as he could search through the stars to find them, to a remote spot somewhat above the galactic plane, and placing them gently in orbit around a fruitful and green but uninhabited planet before sending essential components of their engine cores elsewhere.

  He had transmitted about three hundred ships of Enro’s fleet when his attention was snatched by a strange vision, for he seemed to see millions and tens of millions of energy-threads, an uncountable majority, not reaching toward the protected planets but rotated at right angles to the normal plane of space-time.

  The reaction was instantaneous: The moment he grew aware of the million line clusters they somehow oriented toward him and his brain was caught up in an immense flow of power.

  Now the galaxy was visible to him not as a spiral of visible light only but a complex Celtic knot of cosmic rays and X-rays, stripped helium nuclei, heavier particles built up in the nuclear furnaces of novae and supernovae, a streaming labyrinth of magnetic fields and nebular clouds, surging bands of ultraviolet, infrared, and radio waves echoing from gulf to gulf like the songs of whales. There were a surprising number of icy giant worlds falling endlessly through space, snowballs of methane the size of Neptune, unaccompanied by any suns. Asteroid belts and clouds forming oddly regular patterns stretching between the constellations. Vents of superhot gases were rushing across the thousands of light-years from the upper and lower poles of the galaxy’s hot core, creating endless oceans of radiation where no human ship, and no human world, could survive. Nor was this all: Like luminous flowers, the scattered globular clusters orbited high above and below the main disk of the galaxy, ornaments of intricate brightness, and, farther, he could sense the satellite galaxies of the Lesser and Greater Magellanic Clouds.

  His mind recoiled in shock from the glory of it all: It was too much.

  Immediately he performed the cortical-thalamic pause, making himself consciously aware of the nerve-flows running from his perceptual centers, through his thalamus, and only then to his cortex and back to form reaction-emotions in lower sections of his nervous system.

  But the promised sanity did not come. The overwhelming flood of images continued.

  The tiny fragments of matter grouped into the habitable iron-nickel worlds of man were lost in the complex vastness. For a moment, he could not find the three million worlds of human civilization. He was lost.

  As more and more of the millions of energy-lines oriented toward him, he grew aware of greater and greater dimensions of infinity. Now he could see hundreds, no, millions of galaxies connected to each other, extending outward from this central position … but these were all the Milky Way galaxy, merely images from different eons of cosmic evolution.

  Here were early images of the galaxy, when it was a cylindrical cloud of simple hydrogen-burning stars; there were dim red smoke rings, like a wheel of ash without a hub, images from the remote future.

  Certain of the future images of the galaxy were strangely regular in the web of radio and radioactive energies surrounding them, as if they had been engineered on an interstellar scale, and the dangerous central core was tamed, surrounded by concentric shells of artificial matter. Some of the future galaxies were white-hot with energies related to the distortion of time-space; others were dull and quiet, as if the far descendants of intelligent life in those eons were resting between unimaginable efforts. Some far-future millennia were rich with the neural pulsations of living minds; others were humming with the steadier energies of entirely man-made life-forms….

  And there were more images, and still more … a galaxy that was still a nebular cloud, from a very early period … a dark fleet of machines as massive as a galaxy but composed entirely of artificial atoms and elements unknown to earlier periods, to form some artificial mental system adapted to the conditions of the dark and sunless universe of the Age of Decay….

  Gosseyn heard a voice, but, in his confusion, he could not tell where it came from. Time seemed to be strangely spread out and melted together: He both saw his body lying in its crate and saw the moment when he appeared on the orbital station and the moment when Enro casually leaned over the edge of the crate and spoke to him.

  The voice said, “Excellency, this is Predictor Thule. I can confirm: You will kill Gilbert Gosseyn in fourteen minutes. He is suffering from time-sickness….” (A chuckle.) “Any child of rank from a birth-center on my world knows how to shrug off this side effect … he will be helpless … no, there is no blurring … the future is certain.”

  Predictor Thule! The chief of the Safety Authority on Accolon was not merely one of Enro’s agents; he was one of the Yalertans.

  The blazing images of past and future filled Gosseyn’s mind. He could not look away, as the visions were inside him, part of him, and he was part of the universe.

  He tried to find his home galaxy, the eon of time native to him, but the spiral galaxy was now turning like a vast pinwheel, its arms of fire rotating, each star traveling at a different rate. Where was the star Accolon? Or, no, wasn’t he on Earth? Wasn’t he an old man dying from a soldier’s bullet on the floor of the Semantics Institute? No, he was a farmer from Cress Village … no, he was a baby in an artificial crèche, kept in a state of profound unconsciousness, fed by liquids, his brain sensitive to the thought pressures of Lavoisseur …

  … was that an earlier picture, or a later one?

  Here he was, emerging from his suspension capsule onto the soil of an unknown world in the new galaxy. The two women passengers had survived, and he must select a wife from one of them, but the other man, named Gorgzor, had been fatally wounded. The Observer could keep him alive, barely … the dark-haired woman, who had been betrothed to the wounded man, was already beginning to weep … many children in the next generation were named after him, and one founded a tribe, the Gorgzides, that grew into the nation and empire imposing its name on the world….

  Gosseyn saw Enro’s face, eyes aglow with gloating satisfaction, as the great dictator leaned over, looking down into the crate. He was dressed in a military uniform of scarlet and purple. Somehow, he seemed to be seated on an elevated throne of dark iron, and the emblem of the Three Watching Eyes of the Empire hung above and to either side of him.

  “How convenient of you to have selected your own coffin, Mr. Gosseyn. X tells me he can prevent the transfer of your consciousness to your next hidden body merely by establishing a system of vibrations throughout this area with his robotic mind-paralysis units….”

  Enro raised his hand. From the ghostly translucence of his flesh, Gosseyn realized he was looking at a projection, created by Enro’s control over images sent through space.

  No, that was not happening yet. This was a vision of a few moments in his future. Where was he? But the galaxy was too large; time was too immense. Gosseyn abandoned that search and looked instead to see if he could pierce and find the source of the billions of energy-lines that had pulled his perceptions so far away from himself.

  Then he saw that there were systems of Stabilization Spheres not merely in the future galaxies but also in the past, including early periods of galactic evolution before the formation of planets. A paradox: The Spheres were made of elements, carbon, silicon, iron, uranium, which simply did not exist at that time.


  Further, there were Spheres of the same design scattered throughout the Andromeda Galaxy, three million light-years away, and Fornax, and Sculptor, the supergiant galaxy in Triangulum … and farther….

  His perception, his mind, encompassed the knowledge and texture of time and space, matter and energy, in all its complexity, of the entire Virgo Supercluster, of which the local cluster of galaxies was merely a small part: His thoughts reached across two hundred million light-years, to the Hydra Supercluster … it was more than any mind, even one as well trained as his, could bear….

  Any child of rank from a birth-center on my world knows how to shrug off this side effect …

  Gosseyn attempted again to perform a cortical-thalamic pause, but this time he used the hypnotic cues that lay beneath the pause to become aware of the flows to and from his extra brain … he made an effort to relax the nerves and muscles and calm the bloodflows surrounding the sensitive tissues at the base of his brain … because it was this area of the brain, not his thalamus, that was being overwhelmed. It was his perceptions that were insane, not his emotions. If a child could do it, it must not require advanced training…. Gosseyn saw one out of several possible futures … in the ones where he was dead, no information came back. From the future where he lived, the correct combination of cues to force the pause-of-perception came to him. He did not have time to train the unknown brain sections to a proper response conditioning. But he could simply dominate his own buried nerve-paths that same way he dominated the circuitry flows within the machines around him.