Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Gosseyn had been expecting interference, but he had calculated that he would have time in which to act before he was detected. He had assumed an offset of ten hours for every thousand years of time-displacement: The creatures of fifty thousand years in the future, even if they knew the exact date of his manifestation, should still have been hampered by an error of plus-or-minus five hundred hours.

  But it seemed the far future found a technique for narrowing that error down to a very fine margin. He was cut off in midsentence.

  The moment of darkness ended, and he found himself in the middle of a semicircular table of Alephs, giant, golden-skinned versions of himself. As before, there were three concentric rings of tables, each set higher than the last, with dozens of calm and gigantic images of his own face looking down at him.

  With his extra brain, he could detect what Leej, when she had been here, could not: This glassy substance underfoot was indeed the surface of a neutron star. A powerful system of artificial energies created a distorter-effect just below him and cut the gravity oriented to his body down to a tolerable level. The giants did not bother with this: They maintained their bodies within the superacceleration field of the neutron star by the simple expedient of holding each atom and particle of their bodies in place with an energy-control technique. In effect, the nervous systems of these immortal beings re-created their bodies hundreds of times a second, despite the gravity.

  With his tertiary brain, Gosseyn was also able to perceive something else that had been invisible to Leej: The different individuals in this chamber were attuned to the frames of reference of different parallel timelines. More than one Gosseyn-Aleph here was from various alternate time-streams.

  Gosseyn said, “I am still in communication with myself as I existed in the moment of creation. Any interference with me, and this universe will be destabilized, and I will go through the next creation-destruction cycle and try again. Eventually I will find an Aleph council willing to deal honestly with me.”

  One of the giant golden Gosseyns leaning down from a high table raised his hand in a dismissive gesture. “We are that council. Our intention is cooperative. We all have fond memories of the bungling and earnest awkwardness of our early days.”

  Several of the giant creatures smiled slightly.

  Another said, “At the time, the decision to commit radical surgery on my own memory, in order to combat the menace poised by alternate variations of myself, seemed sensible. Of course, I should have known that the limited and amnesiac version of myself would develop in strange ways, and would have to be treated delicately, by both past and future versions of myself. We are sorry to have provoked your suspicions.”

  Gosseyn said, “Let me be blunt. Why did you lie to Leej? Why did you manipulate her into sacrificing herself?”

  “In our frame of reference, that event has not yet happened, but the logic is plain. The Yalertan will have the extra brain matter in the brain stem used to control space-time. She will have an emotional fixation on you, needed to maintain the similarity link. She will be needed to carry the memory-information of this universe through to the next, and also to allow our machines to keep a fix on you, so that this same universe-wide memory-information would be available for you to impose on the previous universe during the creation flux and give rise to this one. Leej, at that time, will not yet be a sufficiently advanced personality type to volunteer to do her duty without the manipulation. If it makes a difference, her ultimate version consents to the deception.”

  “Was she the one who manipulated my nervous system, while I was outside the universe, to similarize the Big Bang into the center of the Ydd mass? I was told that attack could not possibly have harmed the Ydd; and yet when I returned to the no-time condition, the Ydd was gone. What did this mean?”

  One of the other Gosseyn-Alephs leaned forward and spoke, his harsh thoughts radiating throughout the chamber: “Gentlemen, this candidate seems recalcitrant, suspicious, and unsuitable. He is wasting our time on questions whose answers he should know by now. Come! There are other versions of me, lost in the tangle of illusionary parallel timelines, who can be maneuvered to give rise to our current version of self with minimal stress on the cause-and-effect simultaneity. Any time paradox which severs a cause-and-effect link, we can re-establish with our distorter.” He raised a finger toward the immense black dome overhead.

  Gosseyn could see that the dome surface was a mile in radius overhead and each square inch covered in microscopic black pores, connecting this area of space-time with tens of millions of machines like it, scattered through the different eons of the time-streams. He was in fact standing in the very center, the focus-point, of the tremendous time-energy distortion mechanism that allowed the Aleph Council to travel in time.

  A third spoke in a milder voice: “Brother, we have done nothing to reassure young Gosseyn of our good intentions. He is only beginning to suspect that we, and no one else, first set this whole chain of cosmic cycles in motion, by our unwillingness to suppress the dangerous time-control technology. However, I urge the Council to support this candidate. If he can successfully set in motion the chain of historical events which will one day give rise to this Council, while altering the probability that we will degenerate as quickly as prior universes did into madness and self-destruction, then we should allow him to be the man who will grow into us.”

  Gilbert Gosseyn opened his mouth to object but then snapped it shut again. Because he realized from the nonchalance, the calm and goodwill issuing from the nervous systems of these far-future beings, that the success of the efforts of at least some version of him was a foregone conclusion.

  No matter what Gosseyn did or did not do, from their point of view, was irrelevant. If he was unsuccessful, they would manipulate time so that he was no longer in their past. His life would be relegated to an unsuccessful alternate time-stream. If he was successful, they would graft his life onto their past and his success would be placed in their glowing memories.

  Gosseyn said, “How many other candidates are there? How many other alternate possible versions of me in my time-era?”

  The golden giant seated in the center seat of the lowest rank of tables answered: “You are the one-hundred-ninety-seventh version who has successfully made it to this point in the sequence of events. There are still three deviations between your past as you recall it and our memories, which are sharper and crisper than yours. At the moment, any discontinuity between your chain of memory and mine is interpreted by the universe, and by this council, as evidence that you are not the true and actual version of Gilbert Gosseyn who establishes the Time Council, and sets in motion the defeat of the Ydd entity. You of course have the opportunity now to rectify this.”

  Gosseyn said, “Then you cannot tell me what it is I am going to do?”

  The giant nodded. “Were we to do so, it would create an additional strain on our cause-and-effect-repairing machinery. If you are the one our gathered memory says you are, then you have the wit to reach the correct conclusions with no further help from us, and the forthrightness to act on them. If not, we will examine the one-hundred-ninety-eighth candidate. We have larger matters to deal with than the salvation of the slower-than-light segments of the universe, and these purely local energy disturbances with the Ydd patient.”

  Gosseyn said, “Your system for rating the acceptability of candidates is based on your energy costs, is it not?”

  The members of the Aleph Council nodded and murmured their agreement. One said, “The fewer paradoxes you create, the more closely your future events match our past events, the less stress is placed on the time-structure. From your own point of view, any mistakes and you will seem to destroy the universe; from our point of view, that same mistake will merely move you into an unrealized alternate probability, and erase your existence. We cannot be more helpful: These frugal energy expenditures are crucial to maintaining the integrity of the continuum. No matter what our personal feelings to any past version of ourselves,
we must pick the candidate who damages the continuum the least.”

  GOSSEYN ended the interview by similarizing his consciousness back to non-space. From the outside, the universe was a tree with limbs of fire, a many-branching stream of gemlike energy. Here and there were the whirls and distortions, especially where time-streams intersected or ran backwards: the damage caused by paradox.

  Over 190 previous Gosseyns had been at this point and determined on a course to save the universe but decided wastefully? The solution, given the fundamental nature of the Ydd, was obvious, even though it was a partial solution, not perfectly satisfactory.

  The judge, ultimately, was the universe itself: Paradox confused the energy flows of the creation particle. The particle’s nature was to extend itself forward through time, unfolding into time, space, matter, energy, as it did so: If the resulting universe was rendered illogical by too many breaks in cause and effect, the paradox shocked the universe into withdrawing its energy back to itself, ending that cycle.

  Gosseyn thought carefully. In his mind he contemplated all that had happened and would happen.

  He did not want to break into the universe and create yet another breach in the negative energy barrier.

  When he was ready, he similarized himself back to the origin point of the universe. A simple rotation kept him safe from the devastating power of the first submicrosecond of the Big Bang, while extending his body through the first trillion years of existence. He found points of similarity with his own thoughts, a pull like a magnetic attraction, as versions of him existing in many periods of time intersected the years he was occupying.

  Gosseyn knew the mechanism of the Null-A pause; he knew as well the systems used by his own nervous system to filter out the complex information-pulses of the universe into a perceptual set. His task now was to create a “set” that would find a twenty-point similarity with his own mind, while being rejected and ignored by the cortical-thalamic “set” of X and other insane versions of himself. The curative thought-flows he had already once tried to impose on X-Enro acted as the base on which he erected a system of hypnotic information-pulses.

  Here, at the subconscious level, he stored the information he wanted his other versions to possess, especially the memorized point in time-space he had selected as the meeting place for what was to become the Aleph Council. A sane version of himself who accessed these buried memories would discover a distorter-attunement to the location. An insane version bringing these memories to the fore would be subjected to the curative method attempted by the Observer, and which Inxelendra assured him X could not withstand.

  Gosseyn redistributed himself so that he occupied a three-dimensional shape and a single point in time. He then set up a cue to similarize himself to his selected meeting place: the core watch room of the Sphere of Accolon. He selected a time after his last visit there, after his duel with Enro on Mars, to minimize the energy costs of any time paradox.

  But he did not trigger that cue yet. There was another place he had to visit first.

  GOSSEYN appeared in his house on Venus. It was as he remembered it from before his flight to Nirene; automatic systems had kept it clean and tidy.

  The main room was walled on three sides, paneled in highly polished living wood. The final wall was missing, so that a woodland scene of fantastic blooms, lianas, and leaves filled the wide view. A slight heat shimmer betrayed the presence of a multivariable force field that could be made transparent or opaque, set to admit or repel light or wind or rain. There was no heating element in the force-wall: It was never cold on Venus.

  He set off down the branch, which was as wide as a highway. After a few minutes’ brisk walk, he crossed the air-bridge leading to a branch just as wide in the next tree and then descended a set of broad stairs grown out of the bark spiraling down to the grass-level.

  Landing City was built partly in a clearing, partly amid the branches of the surrounding trees. The size of the trees allowed extensive houses and offices, factories and power plants, to be dug out of the bark at any convenient level above the ground. So far, there was no need to restrict the growth of the city. The size of the trees made it impossible for even very extensive excavations of the wood to damage the tree.

  The ground-level of the tree-city was ornamental park, with little foot-traffic, and the paths were grass, rather than paved, through a fairy gardenscape. Folks in a hurry took an air-car from branch to branch of the city above, or a distorter.

  In the center of the clearing, atop a green knoll, rose the Games Machine of Venus, a pyramid of burnished metal whose base was fringed with an ornamental hedge and whose stepped side drooped with flowers and hanging vines. Here, in a small outdoor café near the main gates, a small group of weary, nervous-looking young men and women congregated. The mission of the Games Machine of Venus was the melancholy opposite of that of the Machine of Earth: The Earth Machine tested candidates to discover who might be sane and highly integrated enough to welcome them to Venus. The Venus Machine tested suspects, and failure meant exile. These children of colonists had neglected their studies, or had been born with neurological defects, or for some other reason could not achieve the threshold level of Null-A training needed for adulthood on Venus. It was a harsh system, but there was neither police nor crime on Venus, and so the populations of Venus had never been convinced to alter it.

  At the café was a small news kiosk. Gosseyn stepped over to check the dates and see what year and month he found himself in. The headline read: “RHADE ASHARGIN MURDERED—Stranded on Asteroid, Eaten by Shadow.”

  The picture showed Enro the Red, the large, broad-shouldered, and red-haired adult version of Enro, at a public ceremony, sword in hand and with three masked judges in black ermine behind him, lowering a chained figure in a spacesuit from a warship hatch to the cratered surface of an asteroid. The photographer had managed to catch a limb of the shadow-cloud rising over the near horizon of rock, blotting out the stars.

  Gosseyn entered the gates of the Games Machine and soon was seated before one of the neurological screens. A circuit focused on him took several very careful measurements of his thought-patterns.

  He said, “I’ve been in mental contact with the Final Intellect when the Ydd subsection of the cosmic minds went into rebellion. The rebels used the imprinting process—the same the Observer used on me to imprint me into Ashargin—to impose a strict uniformity upon the unwary victim-sections of the cosmic brain.”

  The Games Machine said, “I can confirm that the waveforms used indeed left a trace-energy in your nervous system. It will take me another few minutes to establish the set of psychological matrices involved: pain-pleasure, good-evil, just-unjust. The basics for this type of imposition are always the same: Machines have an axis for permitted-forbidden, and no sex drive, obviously, but, even aside from that, even we machines have to be built according to the basic logic of human psychology, or else we could not interact sensibly with you.”

  The machine calculated, and there appeared a set of equations in the special symbols of Null-A math. The Games Machine had calculated a levels-of-logic cascade, based on Null-A principles, which would give the suppressed segments of the Ydd partial minds the training needed to have a chance to resist and throw off the control-thoughts.

  Gosseyn had a stat-plate print out the equations on a sheet and walked to a nearby tool shop. This was not an automatic shop, like so many on Venus. The young man in a green coat behind the counter listened attentively as he took Gosseyn’s order. There was no talk of payment: Venusians did not use money as such. Instead, both men made a note of the exchange in the shopkeeper’s handheld unit, which made an abstract of the situation and passed the information by radio to a central bank, which tracked such things on a voluntary basis. Not merely the market value of the goods that exchanged hands but several indicators of various forms of the social value, both long-term and short-term, were accounted for, and investors could always challenge the assessment of the worth of a good or ser
vice if they thought the banks were underestimating its value.

  In a few minutes, the robotools in the back of the shop had compiled the electron tubes of the configuration defined by the equations of the Games Machine, and the clerk wrapped them for Gosseyn. Gosseyn did not bother to walk out of the shop: From where he stood, he assumed his shadow-body, went through his predictor-distorter routine, and triggered the cue to take him to one of his memorized locations in another star system.

  Gosseyn appeared on the basic machinery level of the orbital station of Accolon, not far from the crate where Enro had found and slain him. It took Gosseyn only a few minutes to dominate the energy flows of the electronic brains on this level and assign them new tasks.

  He wired the special tubes he had brought from Venus into the mechanical prediction circuits communicating with the Ydd. The signals to cure the victim-minds dominated by the Ydd of their vulnerability to mental imprinting were now placed as a carrier signal heterodyned on every message the orbital station was sending through time to the Ydd overmind.

  The creature could not do a cortical-thalamic pause or anything to examine its lower perception structure, because such self-examination would also free its lower component minds from the imprinting control. Yet without the cortical-thalamic self-awareness neither could the Ydd find the source of the idea-forms cascading through its lower member-minds, freeing them from control. The more the Ydd communicated with this period in time, the more sane and integrated its thoughts would become.