Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Gosseyn saw the island-fortress Inxelendra founded, she and her followers from the planet Gorgzid, the frowning walls and domes protected by an aura of atomic force … during the early years, it had been merely a crude wooden palisade around the towering space ark.

  And Yalerta was not the first world on which she had established infant-teaching incubators. Gosseyn saw flashing pictures of worlds with giant crimson suns, or brilliant white dwarfs, or a strange rainbow-colored planet of crystal oceans and glass towers beneath multiple suns of azure and gold and rose-red….

  Everyone she’d ever taught, everyone she’d ever met, all their conversations, all the details of their dress and appearance, the customs and sciences of thousands and tens of thousands of worlds, everything was recorded in precise detail, referenced and cross-referenced, formed into associational patterns of astonishing complexity.

  The degree of organization in the memories astonished him, for some of the memories were not stored in her brain—there would not have been enough room for that—but were lodged in other versions of herself distributed up and down the timeline, countless hundreds of billions and trillions of years of her, with all the countless trillions of versions organized according to a complex Nexialist system of logical references.

  “I was the ship’s Nexialist,” she said aloud, as she passed with stately stride through the valves of the magnetically locked door of the sanctum. “Gorgzor was the predictive historian. That is what callidetic science is supposed to be for, you know: not winning card games or even outsmarting the stock exchanges of different worlds, as the Corthidians do, but for guiding the subtle chaos of history, doing for sociology what Null-A did for psychiatry. The other woman was the Nonlinear Ratiocination expert. You were the semantic psychiatrist, our Null-A.”

  Within was a domed space, smooth as the inner shell of an egg, made of dark substance. In the center of the room was a sensory-deprivation pool, surrounded, like a fantastic underground grotto with crystal growths, with the shining spears and cylinders of the electron-control technology of the previous galaxy. The lights were kept dim so that ambient photons would not disturb the delicate workings of the neuropathic instruments.

  In her mind, Gosseyn said, “How did you survive the ultimate end point of the universe? How did you reenter this universe at the origin point?”

  She said nonchalantly, “The Ydd knew they would be destroyed in the moment of cosmic re-creation, but they needed an observer to see the Big Bang, so that the next universe would arise with the same physical constants as this one, the same path of history be initiated, and lead inevitably to the Ydd.”

  Gosseyn said, “Lead to the Ydd?”

  She said curtly, “You spoke with the Ydd. The deceptive approach it used, the savage idiocy of its goals … what is that a sign of?”

  Gosseyn was embarrassed that he had not seen the obvious before. “Degeneration. The psychology of the ‘true believer’ forces the mind to seek simplistic and violent solutions. In this case, the Ydd’s true belief centers on self-preservation. The psychology involved suggests a rejection of a more civilized mode of behavior.”

  She said thoughtfully, “The Ydd still retained some remnant of the code of their previous civilization. I was mad at the time, you know, out of my mind. Everything had been dead for countless quadrillions of millennia. The universe was empty. The Ydd were noble about preserving me, through the turbulence of the supercollapse, even to the end point, the eschaton, and past it. Quite noble. In the final eon of the universe, the submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in the foam of space-time are the only events registering on the cosmic all: The creation of a pair of opposite reversed particles and the creation of a pair of matter and antimatter universes approach indistinguishability. The Ydd forced the similarity between the end point and the original point of the universe, placing me in the out-of-phase condition so that even the near-infinite energy expansion of the first three seconds of the universe could not harm me. In that condition, I could observe the event and, by observing it, collapse the uncertainty surrounding the origin-singularity into positive reality.”

  Gosseyn was awed. She had lived through all time, all the future, and all the past. This was the final Chessplayer indeed, the one who must know all the answers any one being could know. And yet she was making adjustments to the complex crystalline circuitry of the Yalertan machine, rapidly preparing the energies needed to form a prediction-similarity through time.

  His curiosity was too great to follow her chain of thought on that point. There was too much else he wanted to know. “How could the accident that created X have happened? You not only foresaw it; you remember from the previous universe.”

  She said, “It was no accident.”

  “The passage through the shadow-substance surrounding the Shadow Galaxy, it altered his brain….”

  “Deliberately. Ptath used special equipment aboard the ship, so that when we passed through the cloud, it affected his personal future in a special way, to make himself unpredictable. The physics involves breaking the past-to-future similarity with a shadow-effect operating during moments of space-time uncertainty. This was not done to trick or defraud the other Primordials, but to allow Ptath, and everyone his actions touched, to escape the observation of the Ydd, whose existence I had revealed to him. The Ydd perception from the outside of time works on the same principles as Predictor perception of future events. We had no opportunity before that, since creating an artificial shadow, or blind spot, would have registered on all the prediction alarms of Centermost. Only under the cover of the Cloud, where the prediction circuits were blind anyway, could we perform the test. It was the first experiment in half a million years whose outcome was not known beforehand. What fools we were! It was that experiment that damaged Gorgzor.”

  She shivered with a sharp and bitter sorrow. “I have hated Ptath since that day. How ruthlessly he used us! Human lives are just tools to him. The irony was that the Observer Machine was designed with prediction circuits to monitor the behavior of its charges. It had not been programmed with the physics needed to understand the uncertainty cloaking Ptath, and so it interpreted the phenomenon in psychological terms. It could not predict the behavior of Ptath, and so it concluded Ptath was erratic due to psychological damage, and set about trying to cure him.”

  She made an arch eyebrow at him. “Naturally you would not have agreed to be cured had you known that the cure was based on a diagnostic malfunction.”

  “No. I would have agreed anyway. The Machine had to be ordered by some variant of X to cure him, and I was the only one available to give the order. I still do not know what the end product of the curative process set in motion will be. But it had to be done.”

  She said coldly, “At least you are consistent across all your variations. X uses men with the same ruthlessness as you use yourself.”

  Gosseyn supposed with his new triple brain he could actually shut off the blind-spot effect created by his double brain; it would expose his future to the enemy, to the Ydd, and so he was not likely to make the attempt. But it gave him a feeling of detached satisfaction to think that the persistent and lonely Observer might one day fulfill its one remaining set of orders.

  “Speaking of X, if he was not driven mad during the Great Migration by passing through the shadow-cloud, what caused his insanity?”

  “I did. X was created by me to infiltrate Thorson’s gang on Earth, and, after he killed the man he thought was Lavoisseur, to infiltrate Enro’s inner circle, and find the agent of the Ydd operating in this era.

  “Because Enro had fooled his cousin Secoh into assuming the shadow-body of the Follower, it took my detective a long time to discover that Enro was the real Ydd agent. It was Enro who had opportunity to examine the shadow-distortion device he found in the Crypt of the Sleeping God. Surfaces are transparent to him: He could see the inner workings at a glance. Using the device, he had attuned his clairvoyant senses to the non-being spectrum, and saw through the wall
s of the universe, sent his perceptions ranging outside of time, and so he came across the Ydd entity. They made a bargain. It was an arrangement of mutual exploitation.”

  “Your detective?”

  “Eldred Crang. I hired him. You unexpectedly survived your mission to kill Thorson, and had been trained by Dr. Kair to new levels of competence, so I decided to have the Observer imprint you into Ashargin on Gorgzid, in order to distract Enro from Eldred Crang. Eldred conspired with Secoh to overthrow Enro, and then conspired with you to take Secoh out of the picture. Once Enro was dethroned, with all his top men either in jail or swearing allegiance to Ashargin, X was in a position to become a trusted ally. The imposture was complete because X thought of himself as the original Ptath-Lavoisseur. Even the Ydd were fooled. After X handed Enro bloodless victory over the planet Petrino, and promised him a galaxy rendered helpless by warped Null-A, Enro was conditioned to trust him. Yes, trust him even to the point where the two are willing, in emergency, to share one nervous system. Your finding the Observer was that emergency. X imprinted Enro on himself; Enro was the only other double-brained Primordial at hand. That imprint was the final error. The Emperor is in check, and cannot escape the checkmate. Are you ready?”

  “Wait. I have questions about my identity, about what was done to me, and for what purpose …?”

  “We have little time for your trifling personal problems, Gosseyn,” said the woman, not without a hint of an arch smile at his frustration. “Obviously you had to be kept in the dark, a man without a memory, since your foe is able, when it suits him, to place himself in a passive state with a simple reduction circuit, and intercept your thoughts.”

  Gosseyn’s thoughts were colored with anger. “Am I again to be sent to die for causes I don’t understand, against foes I don’t know?”

  “This is no different from any soldier,” the woman said coldly.

  “But when I meet X again …”

  “You’re wasting time. That is a foregone conclusion. In fact, the mere act of being in contact with the mind of X even for a few minutes has probably already set in motion the psychological imbalances needed to destroy him. He is of no importance.”

  “Enro …”

  “Even less importance. No matter how the next forty-seven thousand years turn out, whether they are ages of liberty or tyranny, happiness or misery, by the time two hundred thousand million years are passed, the civilization that rules the sevagram will occupy basically the same area of the local galactic supercluster, and achieve roughly the same height of enlightenment and technical advancement. You are wasting my time with trifles.”

  Gosseyn pressed the point: “Nonetheless, the Observer said I was on the brink of success against X, but it seemed to me, at the time, that I was about to lose my mind and individuality. What was the deception involved?”

  “Oh, that!” Her tone was dismissive. “I should have thought it obvious by now.”

  Gosseyn sheepishly realized that it had been obvious.

  Both X and Lavoisseur believed the other one was a created copy of himself. But only one belief was false.

  Which was more likely: That the foremost Null-A psychiatrist in history could create an insane version of himself, with just the precisely designed mental derangement that would make the madman suited to the task of uncovering the plot against Null-A? Or that the insane murderer could create the psychiatrist?

  The belief in the brain of X that he was the older, the original, was false, one of many false beliefs imprinted by Lavoisseur in order to make X have the insanities necessary to commit him to Enro’s mad program of galactic dominion.

  Gosseyn said slowly, “But the Observer Machine said that you arranged to have the Lavoisseur memory chain split off from the X variation—” Then he stopped. Because the Machine had not used those words. The Machine, which had induced in itself confusion about Lavoisseur’s identity, had not been able to identify the break-off by name, nor the original.

  X once had claimed that the Observer Machine had altered a copy of X to create Lavoisseur, the Lavoisseur who had brought Null-A to Earth. Another false belief.

  Inxelendra was answering the half-unspoken question: “X is nothing more than a false memory chain, deliberately established out of the Ptath memory template by me. I made him at the same time I made the artificially aged version, the graybeard, who I placed in charge of the Semantics Institute. The old-looking Lavoisseur was meant to be seen to die when Thorson died. This was not done merely to fool you, but also to stop any successor to Thorson, who might also seek out the secret of immortality. This death also allowed me to maneuver X into Enro’s service. Lavoisseur and I combined our skills to create X. A masterpiece of work, if I say so myself. The personality was stable to a point, but constructed with a crucial weak spot, so that the false memories in X would come unraveled once they had served their purpose.”

  “What is the key? What is the difference in psychology?”

  “You are asking me what it would take to turn you into a totalitarian mass murderer like him?”

  “I suppose that is the question.”

  “He can’t fall in love.”

  “That’s all?”

  Inxelendra smiled and said coolly, “That’s all. The Isolation Syndrome, leading to morbid egotism, leading in turn to an intellectual inversion of basic drives. Loveless men are unsympathetic. The suffering of others does not enter their calculations. Everything else, the difference between murdering one man and galaxy-wide genocide, is just a matter of scale.”

  “Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t the false memories unravel? The X personality seemed convinced it was about to absorb me and erase my separate identity. I was about to die.”

  “That conviction was false-to-facts, Gosseyn. You were in no danger. The fundamental truth he is trying to hide from you is the same he tries to hide from himself. Obviously X is not the ancient Ptath being. The civilization of the Null-A galaxy would not have permitted a murderer to exist in their midst, uncured, or placed him in a position to engineer the ship minds of the Great Migration. The thoughts you encountered while in the nervous system of X, the panic that you were about to be absorbed, the belief that the younger memory chain was about to be integrated into the older: Those were his thoughts, not yours. He merely inflicted those thoughts on you during your moment of similarity, a desperation ploy. You fell for it, and you used a hypnotic technique to prevent the levels of logic from completing the cycle: This granted him a delay. Not a reprieve. He may continue to exist for a few more hours or days.” She shrugged.

  “Why didn’t the Observer warn me what was about to happen?”

  “Because the Machine cannot reach that conclusion. In order to be able to take orders from you, the Machine had to program itself with a confusion over your identity. It does not know who is older and younger among your versions, because it was forced to program itself to think all of your versions were one identity.”

  “So the original Lavoisseur, the man who made me, is not dead?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “You can ask him yourself when you see him.”

  Leej, or rather Inxelendra, with no hint of modesty, had by this time disrobed and cast the rich gown aside. Clad only in her jewels, which must have been electronically neutral, she lowered herself into the thick, oily life-support fluid of the sense-deprivation tank. She affixed a soft breathing-mask to her face. She lowered herself beneath the surface. The fluid rolled over her head.

  It was dark. And Gosseyn was elsewhere.

  38

  When information enters the nervous system, it creates entropy outside the system, and therefore memory operates in the direction of increasing entropy, the direction we call future. On the fine level, these distinctions are proven to be artificial.

  Gosseyn became aware of the time-energy. It was rushing from the past to the future in its mindless, mechanical fashion, each second containing the mass of the entire uni
verse, a three-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional river. In places where those slices had been massively disturbed, a universe-second displaced from the time-energy stream began reproducing itself out of the cosmic ylem, erecting a parallel structure.

  The number of streams was in the hundreds of thousands. Some were shining with vitality and strength; some were thin and weak, containing only the mass of a galaxy or even a single planetary system. All were separated from their parallel neighbors by an insulation of the non-identity: the Shadow Effect.

  In places the shadow was thin, and here and there were counter-streams, energy flows rushing backward against the time-stream, forming odd swirls and knots and infinitely regressive loops.

  The whole structure pulsed with a terrifying aliveness: It shined and throbbed and flashed like lightning, and flares of power flickered back and forth across the whole titanic length.

  In one direction, all the streams were issuing from a single point, smaller than the nucleus of an atom. In the other direction, the streams of fire dimmed, becoming vague and tenuous, and they seemed to curve in a vast fourth-dimensional horizon back together again, approaching an end point as infinitely dark even as the origin point was infinitely bright.

  The earliest epochs of the universe, less than one ten-millionth of the whole structure, the mere roots of this fantastic many-branching tree, were bright and hot. These were regions of time-space flooded with a dense, opaque, nucleonic plasma like the core of a heavy star. Next was an era of precipitation, where early galaxies were forming out of the primordial nebulae into a transparent universe. Then a short period where stars in their cycles arose and died and rose again from the ashes of earlier generations, slowly building atoms of greater complexity and weight as century upon century fled past. Then came an era of twilight, when galaxies of red giants burned briefly in the cosmic gloom, galaxies eaten by the ever-growing black holes at their cores.