Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

Daley said, “I can answer. Lie on the bed; I will take an energy-photograph of your brain.”

  Gosseyn lay. Daley asked him to induce a semihypnotic state. Gosseyn did not need relaxing drugs to accomplish this; merely a silent effort of will sufficed. A special camera arrangement lowered itself from the ceiling on a telescoping arm.

  A moment later, Daley pulled a treated sheet from the equipment in the ceiling, put it under a reader, and studied it.

  Gosseyn felt a moment of grim satisfaction when Daley confirmed his suspicions. Gosseyn was not insane. Daley said, “The memory records in your brain are a sympathetic resonance phenomenon. The record in your mind was created in another mind. Imagine a brain in a completely passive state, so that another brain of the exact same electro-molecular composition could transmit thoughts to you below the level of your conscious awareness.”

  Daley did not need to say it, for they both knew Gosseyn’s secondary brain was kept in an artificially passive state, for just the purpose of picking up energy signals from the surrounding universe.

  Daley said cautiously, “I see that you enjoy an exceptional level of Null-A training.”

  Gosseyn understood. Daley meant that his well-trained primary brain was able to cleanse itself of the external impulses at a preverbal level, automatically. Gosseyn’s second cortex, which was not used for abstract thought, was not a seat of awareness, could have no such training, no immunity.

  Gosseyn spoke without rising from the bed: “Is it possible to suffer pain without damage?”

  “If the pain signals were false, originating in another nervous system, and transmitted to yours.”

  Gosseyn understood. His system of immortality depended on the law of nature that created a subatomic confusion, an uncertainty of location, between two identical brains. But—how could the signal reach from the Shadow Galaxy to this one? Had Gosseyn Three returned in secret? And when did Gosseyn Three go insane? To the best of Gosseyn’s knowledge, there were no other cellular-duplicates of the Gosseyn/Lavoisseur body line still alive, anywhere.

  Awake bodies, that is. Was it possible that the accident that woke his “twin” Gosseyn Three prematurely had been repeated? The body would be young: The growth tanks had not had time to mature any clones beyond the biological equivalent of seventeen. Normally Gosseyn and his twin Gosseyn Three would have been immediately aware of the thoughts of another duplicate: unless the thought-signals were particularly weak.

  Gosseyn had to make his primary brain aware of the subconscious whisper his supersensitive secondary brain was picking up. There was a chance that it would drive him insane. Gosseyn smiled, though. Here he was in one of the most advanced psychiatric facilities outside Venus; where better for a man to go mad?

  Relaxation was the key. His primary brain had to be put into a passive mode.

  Gosseyn said, “I’ve read that, in the old days, on Earth, there were sensory-deprivation tanks that cut off all sensation from the outside world.”

  Daley said, “We can accomplish that merely by interrupting the neural flow along your sensory nerves. It is painless. A lie detector can continue to monitor your brain for disturbances, in case the lack of sensation begins to damage you.”

  “Please make periodic energy photographs of my brain structure while I do this: I am interested to see what forces interact with my nervous system during this condition. Perhaps five minutes at first, then a longer period if the first test produces no result?”

  Daley set the controls.

  Gosseyn was floating in a silent darkness. Immediately came a sense of burning pain. His flesh was being scalded, his nerves burned inch by inch.

  Gosseyn blinked. He was upright, on his feet, standing in the bright sunlight. He caught the railing he found underneath his fingers. There were planters to his left and right and blue metal wall behind, some chairs and tables, but no people. Underfoot was a dizzying drop to the street, half a mile below.

  By his previously established reflex, the moment pain touched his nerves, he had automatically shifted himself across the city and found himself on the balcony of the building across from Crang’s apartment.

  Gosseyn’s limbs were shaking. Rage. There was rage inside his body. Not his own. Some other man’s rage was making Gosseyn’s face red with wrath, eyes narrow, and teeth clenched so hard that they chattered. The untrained, raw impulses of another man were making his skin crawl with hate, making his trembling hands curl into fists, eager for bones to break beneath them.

  He sank into one of the chairs. Clutching his head.

  What had that been?

  There was something distinctly … corrosive … about the sensation. Like finding another man has been wearing your clothes, leaving his things in your pockets, his smell on your shirt.

  Gosseyn paused to clear his mind. Then he used his double brain to “memorize” his own body and take a crude mental picture of it. He could feel the energy imbalance in his nervous system, connecting him to distant locations in time-space. He could sense which neural paths led to the trigger-concepts in his brain associated with each location. The most recent ones were here, this balcony; Veeds’ pistol; the dynamo room at the Nirene General Semantics Institute. His modest brownstone in the City of the Machine back on Earth, his tree apartment on Venus, tens of thousands of light-years away, existed as trace patterns in his brain but were too far away, without use of another special technique, to reach.

  There was nothing else.

  Nothing else he could detect. Equipment at the Nirene Institute would be able to do more delicate analysis than any he could perform on himself.

  He similarized himself back into the dynamo room. It took him a moment, at a run, to cross the lawn to the main building. Daley was in the room where he’d been standing a moment before.

  At Daley’s feet was a blackened corpse, naked.

  “Mr. Gosseyn,” said Daley in surprise. The young man closed his eyes and drew a slow breath. The cortical-thalamic pause. He opened them again. His voice was calm: “You are dead.”

  From the throbbing sensations passing through him, Gosseyn did not have to kneel and turn the body over to confirm the identity. He could feel the partial attunement still active, though fading, from a life-rhythm perfectly matched with his own.

  He turned the body over nonetheless. This murder had been committed in a more professional fashion, a wound through the chest, not the slow torture of Crang’s death. The face was intact.

  His face.

  5

  A multivalued logic more accurately reflects the complexity of the universe. Such logic is called non-Aristotelian or Null-A.

  Gosseyn tried to memorize the body, and could not. Like Crang, most of the body showed the corrosive blackness where molecules had lost their identity and location. The nineteen-decimal-point similarity needed for Gosseyn’s system of immortality to work had been disrupted.

  The disruption was not complete, however. Certain cells still retained their connection to space-time, and to Gosseyn.

  Gosseyn said, “There is a trace of neural energy left in the brain; it is too dim to make it out. Do you have access to an electron tube tuned to the frequencies needed to amplify brain-energy?”

  As it turned out, he did. Less than two minutes later, the equipment cart was wheeled in. Gosseyn was again lying on the bed, and the lights in the room were dimmed, so that the ambient radiation would not disturb the delicate energies involved. Invisible vibrations issued from the machine cart, passed through the dead body, and set up a series of rhythms in Gosseyn’s brain.

  He closed his eyes. The sensations grew stronger.

  Immediately he saw the galaxy of darkness.

  A black hole, hundreds of light-years in diameter, occupied the vast center of the dark spiral. Brown dwarf stars, neutron stars, and black holes orbited slowly in the unlit spiral arms. Nebular gas and dust there were in abundance, but even when they gathered together under the enormous pressure of billions of tons in the center of a shrinkin
g nebula, no ignition occurred. Here and there were globular masses of dark gas, hundreds or thousands of times the size of Jupiter, but the atoms at the core did not fuse but broke into a cold, dense plasma: a state of matter unknown to any science of the Milky Way.

  In this empty zone between the dead stars and the supermassive black hole core hung the scientific superstar-ship Ultimate Prime, a five-mile-long torpedo-shaped machine.

  To one side of the ship, the collapsed galactic core was dark, a monster of outer space that consumed all it touched, but it was not silent: Radio picked up the continuous hissing crackle of the X-ray storm issuing from the event horizon, as nebulae larger than worlds were sucked over the lightless brink. A wide area of ten thousand light-years surrounded the dark core, and had been swept clear of matter over millions of years, till only one particle per square parsec could be detected. Beyond this empty zone, to the other side of the ship, the dark stars in their millions, choked with streamers of cold nebulae, clouds of dust and gas thousands of light-years across, slowly circled the galaxy, a ring of ash that would never again wake to fire.

  Gosseyn Three hung, weightless, in the giant cylindrical chamber of the navigation room. To each side of him, and above and below, vision-plates the size of football fields shined with the images of the desolation of the dead galaxy. He could see astronomers from the navigation crew slowly pacing across the panels of the vast vision-plates, held like flies on a wall by artificial gravity, now and again making measurements, or placing an amplifier between their feet, and bending with interest over the eyepiece.

  His belt telephone rang. He pressed a pushbutton on the earpiece. “Yes?”

  It was Dr. Lauren Kair, the Null-A psychologist. He was a tall, heavily built man in his late fifties, and his voice over the phone was strong and gravelly: “The ship’s electronic brain says we are ready to make the energy connections to the Spheres. It will require all the distorter-based engines of the ship to make the primary connection. Dr. Petry of the archeology department assures me that any of the Spheres that are still active will send the connection to the next, outer rank of Spheres. If only one in forty still have any active circuits after so many millions of years, the resulting field should still stretch across a major segment of this galaxy, a cone-shape centered in the core radiating out to the fringes, some twenty-five hundred thousand light-years along its axis.”

  Gosseyn said, “And what does the ship’s psychology department say, Doctor? If my extra brain cannot encompass the energies involved, the experiment is pointless.”

  In this vast empty area between the arms and core, the expedition had found evidence of the lost civilization of the Primordial Humans. Giant geodesic spheres, metallic constructs larger than Jupiter, were here, hundreds and thousands and millions, each one separated from its neighbor by a distance of one thousand light-years, roughly the distance from Sol to Rigel. Amphibians ruled the torrid swamps of Earth at the time when these artifacts were built, and the dinosaurs were not yet born. The archeology department estimated that a little over 5 percent of the mass of the dark galaxy had been converted into the materials used to construct these Spheres.

  Archeological teams had descended into more than one Sphere, cutting through layers of armor, miles of machinery, and standing in awe to gaze at circuits the size of continents, but a three-dimensional volume larger than Jupiter was simply too huge to examine. “We’re like ants exploring the headlamp of an automobile,” John Grey, the Earthman on the team, had said, after they had penetrated only a hundred miles or so under the surface. “We can only guess what the main engine does.”

  But the ship’s nexialism officer, the “Expert Generalist” named Curoi, from the planet Petrino, had combined the findings of the high-energy physics and archeological departments with the speculations of the experimental distorter engine research team. Curoi’s conclusion, which he presented at the last meeting of the Council of Captains (for the ship was too large to be governed by one captain), was that the primordial humans had been attempting to stop the spread of the Shadow Effect that was consuming their galaxy.

  Gosseyn remembered overhearing the conversation. Dr. Kair had left his belt-phone running, the circuit to Gosseyn’s phone engaged, so that Gosseyn heard Curoi’s calm, uninflected voice: “The effect—and we don’t know what it is—is related in some way to the distorter technology, to the fundamental realities underpinning time and space, energy and matter. The Shadow Effect must have spread, by the time the Spheres were built, to the degree that escape by faster-than-light distorter was impossible: This is why the Primordials colonized the Milky Way so slowly. A ship like Ultimate Prime, with her twenty-five-point similarity matrices, would not have been able to operate, to bridge the gap across space-time, in the conditions that obtained then.”

  The officer from the Engine Design Research department objected: “This ship’s design is, itself, a product of this long-dead supercivilization at her height: How do we know under what conditions the engines would not have been able to function?” There was no need for him to say that there were elements and circuits in the engines whose functions were still unknown. The machinery occupied over nine-tenths of the available volume beneath the hull, and on hops across the short distances available inside a galaxy many of the circuits and energy-mechanisms had not yet been observed in play. His team’s sole purpose during the expedition was to study these engines in operation.

  Curoi said slowly, “The archeological team estimates that the Primordials fled this galaxy much more slowly than we are now approaching it, and used many small, slow four-man ships at sublight speeds. A strange choice from an engineering standpoint. Not a strange choice from a military standpoint, if they were scattering deliberately, allowing most of themselves to die on the gamble that some would live. The Primordials fled as if they were under fire. Therefore, we cannot assume the Shadow Effect that consumed this galaxy was a natural phenomenon. These Spheres, gentlemen, were their last line of defense. The Spheres are components of a distorter engine large enough to influence the entire structure of space-time on a galactic scale.”

  The Grand Captain of the expedition, Treyvenant, a man from Accolon, chief world of the League, said, “There are countless millions of Spheres. How could they be controlled?”

  Curoi spoke to Dr. Kair: “The Venusian man who is helping us make the million-light-year distorter jumps, Gosseyn, what is the theoretical maximum limit on his ability? We know he can teleport a man-sized object, like himself, from one deck of this ship to another, when he is too impatient to wait for an express elevator….” (There was some murmured laughter at that.) “… But can he shift a building from a planet to its moon? A city? Can he shift a planet out of orbit? Can he memorize an entire solar system?”

  Kair explained that the number of possible neural interconnections in Gosseyn’s secondary brain exceeded the number of estimated particles in the universe. “As with most of the secrets of the human nervous system, the potential has not yet even begun to be explored.”

  There was a muttering of dismay from around the table. Grand Captain Treyvenant said heavily, “Without Mr. Gosseyn’s special abilities, if anything happened to him, the ship would require fifty years rather than five months to return to our home galaxy! The risk is unacceptable!”

  Leej the Predictress spoke next. Gosseyn heard her calm, patrician tones over his belt-phone. “Gentlemen, need I remind you why the Galactic Assembly launched this expedition? The Predictors of my planet, Yalerta, foretell that the Shadow Effect may soon appear in our galaxy as well. If this experiment yields clues as to how these Spheres arrested the Shadow Effect, the risk must be faced.”

  E-Vroi, an officer from Planet Corthid, spoke in the rapid staccato accents of his planet: “The Spheres did not save the Shadow Galaxy. What luck will we have, following a failed attempt?”

  Curoi said somberly, “The evidence from the astronomy and paleontology departments suggests they were constructed after the Shadow Eff
ect was much advanced, perhaps even after it was clear that it was too late for them. There is a mystery as to why they went to the effort.”

  E-Vroi uttered a high, sharp laugh. “Perhaps they left them for us. A generous effort!”

  Curoi said, “Be that as it may, the Spheres attune two areas of space-time to each other to force them to behave according to a normal metric. Any defense against the Shadow Effect our own scientists might examine naturally will follow similar lines. Instead of starting from scratch, we have here the end product of an entire galaxy of scientific genius working for centuries on the problem, embodied in a physical form, reduced from theory to practice. It would be criminal to ignore the mass of data these Spheres could give us—if only we could measure them in operation.”

  Curoi’s suggestion was to use the ship’s engines to engage the ancient Sphere distorter circuitry, with Gilbert Gosseyn as part of the circuit. He was convinced the physiology of the Primordials was something like Gosseyn’s and that the giant machines were meant to intermesh with a human nervous system.

  The vast navigation chamber was the only place on the ship large enough, and insulated enough, to allow the energies from the ship’s distorter engines to pass through.

  So Gosseyn found himself in the middle of the half-mile-wide chamber, floating with his local gravity turned off.

  Dr. Kair, over the belt-phone, was saying, “I cannot guarantee your safety. Leej the Predictress does not foresee a good outcome: Once we engage the engines, it is all a blur to her.”

  Gosseyn said, “I should be expected to endure more danger than a man with only one life: Otherwise, I’m shirking.”

  “Very well. The ship’s electronic brain is engaging the engines … now!”

  At first, Gosseyn detected nothing strange. Then, the sensation came upon him as if a million tiny particles, grains of sand and droplets of mist, were being “memorized” automatically by an action of his extra brain. A steady, powerful flow was rushing through his extra brain, so quickly that it was without turbulence, a blur of motion so swift that it seemed solid. Gosseyn realized that he could not move: The neural pressure in his body was too great for a signal to react from his cortex to his motion centers.