Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Machinery does not activate with perfect speed and synchronicity on a planet-wide scale, but the massive flow of power across millions and trillions of circuits across the continents and hemispheres of Corthid had initiated its chain of consequences … not even X could stop it now….

  Some of the repeater screens filling the huge walls of the chamber were tuned to views of distorter towers projecting above the surface of Corthid. The sun vanished from the dayside sky, and the stars winked out from the nightside sky. Above the atmosphere of Corthid was … nothingness … a smoky, insubstantial void of non-being.

  The distorter towers, at that same moment, shined with a strange greenish light, quivered like images in a rippling pond, and vanished, their basic structures and elemental components similarized away from Corthid. Whatever it was X had done to alter the machines and make them so lethal, the evidence vanished with the speed of twenty-decimal-point similarity.

  At that same moment, the thought-flow from the enemy stopped. Gosseyn could detect that the similarity effect, the same one that precipitated the whole planet Corthid out of the ordinary realm of energy and matter, had already triggered the removal of the thought-patterns of X from the body of Illverton.

  There was no way to stop the faster-than-instant retreat, not of a man who had never really been here to begin with.

  Illverton swayed on his feet for a moment and then sagged, clutching the huge desk for support.

  Gosseyn jumped to the man’s side. “You were in contact with his mind! Wake up! In his knowledge was there a way to reverse the process? Is there a way to bring Corthid out of the shadow-condition?”

  Yvana and her men surged into the room. They had not yet grasped the implications of what had happened: The men were still pointing their hand weapons at Illverton, calling on him to surrender.

  If one or two of the excited young men had noticed the repeater screens, the implications of the sunless and moonless landscape had not yet sunk in: Their untrained nervous systems would automatically attempt to fit the pattern of what was seen into a “set,” that is, the nearest approximation of something familiar; it would happen without awareness. They saw merely unexceptional pictures of moonless nighttime scenes. They would for several moments be unable to see or understand the much stranger horror actually here: a world de-similarized from the laws of nature of normal time-space.

  Illverton was saying, “No, no, there is nothing … the theoretical basis used to erect the towers was flawed.”

  Yvana shouted for quiet. Her men looked startled and slowly lowered their weapons. Several of them examined the repeater screens, looks of awe and fear beginning to dawn on their faces.

  “Only if they had been perfectly synchronized,” the gray-haired man wheezed, “would they have been able to impress on all the matter-energy in range the mechanical self-identity needed to resist the Shadow Effect. Even the tiny distance from one hemisphere of the planet to another was enough to put the towers out of synchronization. An unsynchronized self-identification produces only nonidentity. Corthid, and a pocket of space around it for one hundred fifty thousand miles, has been forced into similarity with a null matrix, a mathematical state of non-being. And that pocket is shrinking.” He pointed with a shaking finger to the readings flashing like ticker tape across the bottom of the astronomical information plate.

  The whole world had become a shadow-being like the Follower … but without the special training the Follower had known to enable it to survive this condition.

  “How long?” Gosseyn said, “How long will matter and energy within this pocket of non-shadow maintain its coherence? How long before the world of Corthid dissolves?”

  Illverton shook his head. “I do not know the detailed calculations he made—I shared some thoughts with him, but I could not follow the mathematics. My impression was that there is tremendous mass-energy inertia involved in a body the size of the planet and the particles will continue to ‘try’ to behave as they always have done until the Shadow Effect erodes their consistency. So—weeks, maybe months.”

  Yvana and her men listened, dumbfounded, as the death sentence of their world was pronounced.

  Illverton said heavily, “He—the creature possessing my brain—did not care about how long we would survive the shadow-condition. Long or short, it was the same to him, since there is no way to return to normal. There is no connection between any atom on this planet and any atom in the outside universe. Time, gravity, energy, matter … all will now act as if we are no longer part of the universal system. As if we have no identity.”

  Gosseyn said, “The Games Machine of Corthid has circuits designed for examining deep neural structures. If there is a buried level of memory in your nervous system, a residuum from the imprint from X, then the Machine might be able to reconstruct it.”

  Illverton said, “Who do you mean by ‘X’? The man possessing me did not think of himself by that name.”

  Gosseyn was curious. “What does he call himself?”

  “Ptath.”

  AT Yvana’s request, Gosseyn took her along when he went to the roof of the Safety Authority building, looked far down the avenue to where the mighty structure of the Games Machine reared, selected a spot on the sidewalk nearby, and similarized himself and Illverton there.

  Gosseyn threw open one of the doors at random on the first tier skirting the base of the Machine. Within was a chair and a desk facing a screen. Electron tubes behind the screen, sensitive to neural flows, glowed a warm cherry-red when Illverton grasped the handles.

  Gosseyn explained his request.

  The calm voice of the Games Machine replied, “I can recover some, but not all, of the thoughts of the memory-identity—the man you call X—once impressed on this subject. However, your overall purpose will be frustrated.”

  Gosseyn said, “Why is that?”

  “The man you call X has a more fundamental understanding of the structure of reality than current science. In his understanding, each atom of the planet Corthid was in a specific time-space-energy relationship with each other atom in the sidereal universe: That specific relationship can be approximated as a twenty-decimal number. To travel by distorter from one point to another, both points must be identified up to twenty decimals. However, this shadow-condition into which the planet Corthid has been thrust is a non-identity: It is not expressible in twenty decimals, or any number of decimals. Even had the distorter towers been left intact, the distorter matrices would have no information to enable them to locate the universe.”

  Gosseyn said, “The theory is that the universe is a vast collection of energy balances, held in a cooperative scheme?”

  “In effect, each particle identifies itself to all others in return for being so identified: Two particles in such a relation can coordinate interaction at a distance. The desynchronized actions of the distorter towers merely randomized the identities, as far as the outside universe is concerned, of each separate particle of Corthid.”

  Gosseyn said, “There are mechanical distorters here on Corthid in great numbers, in elevators, in transportation booths, in shipyards, aboard any ships currently docked.”

  “They cannot help. Although, to each other, and from the frame of reference of the matter surrounding you, all of you appear to be solid bodies, as does the planet Corthid around us, a more accurate model would be to say that your atoms are disconnected partly from each other and utterly from the universe as a whole: You are shadow-beings, even if you don’t look it to yourselves, and the distorter matrix cannot identify you so as to force a twenty-decimal-point similarity. The mechanical distorter matrices, as far as the surrounding universe is concerned, are blank.”

  Illverton spoke up, looking haggard. “There must be something in my memory, something that Ptath knew, which would save us from this trap!”

  The Games Machine said, “I find no record of any such thought of his lodged in your memory. Instead, he had the conviction that this would entrap someone even with his own rema
rkable level of ability.”

  Yvana said suddenly, “Yet we have someone else who was in mental contact with him during that last moment.”

  Gosseyn took Illverton’s chair and grasped the knobs of the nerve-reading machine. The electron tubes slowly brightened and dimmed as the Games Machine probed and analyzed.

  “No. The same thoughts of the man you call X are reflected in both memory records: X had no ideas for any possible escape. But here is something interesting,” said the Games Machine. “While the mechanical distorters on the planet have no detectable connection with the outside universe, I am detecting a trace—a very dim trace, roughly thirteen decimal points of similarity—of a still-active similarity in the subject’s double brain. Mr. Gosseyn, some part of your nervous system is still connected with the outside universe—although the space intervals involved are on the order of three million light-years, farther than the Andromeda Galaxy is from the Milky Way: The time interval is even greater.”

  Gosseyn said, “Perhaps the Shadow Effect has an upper range.”

  Illverton said, “Archeological remains of the starships of the Primordial Men from the Shadow Galaxy indicate that they could, indeed, eventually outdistance the effect. There is no record that the shadow can reach across intergalactic distances.”

  Gosseyn said, “But I do not recall memorizing such a point. It may be a trace picked up from the dying memory of Gosseyn Three, who perished in the Shadow Galaxy.”

  The Games Machine said, “No. It is far older. You inherited it from Lavoisseur, or from his predecessors. There are techniques which can be used to artificially stimulate the brain cells to a greater degree of similarity, and amplify the neural energy involved in triggering your particular method of organic distorter transportation.”

  Yvana said, “Wonderful. That means Gosseyn can escape.”

  Gosseyn said, “Landing in an arbitrary point in a distant galaxy, or the empty spaces between galaxies.”

  Yvana said, “You’ll die with us if you stay here with us.”

  Gosseyn said to the Machine, “If I memorize and transmit each member of the Corthid population, one at a time, to this distant point, how long will it take? Assuming no new births in the interim.”

  The Games Machine said, “With or without the Primordial technology Gosseyn Three used to amplify his abilities to transport whole planets across an intergalactic range?”

  Gosseyn was shocked for a moment. He made his Null-A pause, and continued calmly, “Explain that statement. Gosseyn Three did not know how to make the Spheres of the Primordials. Those machines were larger than gas giants.”

  The Games Machine said, “However, his memory from his double brain, which exists as a trace in the memory of your double brain, retains the similarity patterns of the seventy-five-thousand-light-year-wide segment of the Shadow Galaxy he ‘memorized.’ Within that segment were many thousands of the Spheres, and he memorized their structure down to the atomic level. I can produce a complete blueprint of all the machinery involved over a period of weeks, if I am given use of all the stat-plates in the city.”

  Illverton said, “There is not enough raw material left in our pocket universe here to build something so large!”

  Yvana said, “So we will have to build a smaller model. We only need an amplifier large enough to allow Mr. Gosseyn to memorize this one small planet, of course, and similarize it, and all of us, to that one remote point in time-space to which he is still connected.”

  Gosseyn turned to Yvana. “Do you think you can mobilize the population of Corthid sufficiently to study and understand an alien technology and build a working model large enough to affect the whole planet?”

  She smiled, and her eyes twinkled. “Who wants to wager me that we can do it in two months?”

  Illverton, the chief of the Safety Authority, silently reached up to his collar and tuned his garment to match the uniform of the Vathir Organization.

  17

  Time and space appear to our nervous systems to be separate, although science shows these are two aspects of one underlying reality.

  Over the next two months, as the shadow-substance forming the boundaries of their universe shrank to half its diameter, the people of Corthid worked double and triple shifts. Robotools whirred and built, pausing only for replacement parts; people worked, pausing only for hastily swallowed meals, snatched hours of sleep.

  Of all the planets in the galaxy, Corthid was surely the one requiring the least work to convert to self-sufficiency. Even so, the work was tremendous: All cavern entrances had to be blocked airtight while the surface atmosphere condensed and froze. Without distorters bringing in warehouses full of grain through interstellar commerce, the worldwide stored supplies of food and fuel had to be rationed and distributed.

  The Games Machine produced diagrams of the incomprehensible machinery of the Spheres; Corthidian scientists analyzed, tested, came to tentative conclusions; the worldwide industrial complex of one of the most highly industrialized planets in the galaxy roared into effort.

  First, the Corthidians had no lack of mineral raw materials: Long ago the superpressurized ball of molten nickel-iron at the core of their world had been tapped by distorter, so that an endless ocean of metal was available to be transported instantly in any amount to any or all the factories of the world. Whenever they needed additional workspace or factory floor, a disintegration warhead hollowed out another few cubic miles of cavern in the planetary crust. Second, they were already highly regimented, since all life on their planet was sustained in the artificial environments of their cavern systems, so that plans could be quickly put into motion. Third, their psychology was geared toward cooperation, self-sacrifice, and hard work.

  Gosseyn was impressed. As childlike as they might be in other ways, when it came to worldwide cooperative effort, the Corthidians were as well organized as a similar group of Null-A’s would have been. Small wonder they had been the capital planet of a hegemony of over one hundred thousand star systems, second largest of the nineteen galactic member-states comprising the Interstellar League.

  The days turned into weeks as the surface of the planet was covered from pole to pole with the Primordial machinery, components whose functions were only dimly understood. Gosseyn wondered how events progressed in the outside universe: Perhaps Enro had already triumphed and the galaxy was his.

  The time came when Gosseyn was escorted to a heavily insulated medical cocoon, partly submerged in the electron-dampening fluid, and sent into a deep narcohypnotic sleep. The cocoon was raised into place in the center of the several miles of electronic brains and distorter-type machinery that formed the basic circuit of the worldwide Sphere technology. As he slept, the Games Machine carefully probed for the deeply buried channel in the memory of his extra brain and carefully stimulated the partial similarity found there.

  He woke to find Illverton and Yvana standing over him, smiling uncertainly.

  “What happened?” Gosseyn said.

  She said, “It worked … and we’re lost.”

  THE astronomical observatory of Corthid was a degravitized building-complex, pressurized against the near-vacuum and hovering in the troposphere of the planet. In the short amount of time it took Gosseyn to wake, dress, and travel there, the ever-busy factories of Corthid had created and orbited a series of mirrors, several miles in radius, in geosynchronous orbit around their world, and used these to gather astronomical images.

  At the moment, Gosseyn stood under the vast glass dome of the observatory, in a gardenlike spot that provided the airtight building with oxygen, and he was looking up with his unaided eye at the black sky. Only in one-quarter of the sky was there anything to be seen: an oval of blurred lights, a scattering of stars. They were looking at a galaxy from the outside.

  Underfoot, he saw the atmosphere and world of Corthid: No longer was it a rust-red sphere of endless deserts; now it was a silvery-gray sphere of towers and collectors and antennas and power units, all dusted with a “snow�
� of frozen oxygen-nitrogen. All the equipment of the Sphere technology filled the surface area from horizon to horizon.

  He met with the chief astronomer, a man introduced as Abrin of the Brinna unit of the Brinnahadil Organization. From the man’s poise and speech it was clear that he had received at least some Null-A training.

  Gosseyn said, “It is not the Milky Way. This is an elliptical galaxy, not a spiral.”

  Abrin said, “That conclusion is based on an assumption open to question. The mass and certain other characteristics match those of the Milky Way. We have only just begun to analyze long-range images we have gathered of the civilization there.”

  Gosseyn said blankly, “Civilization?”

  They stepped into the library. Gosseyn saw photographs, both visible light and X-ray, of the structures, larger than worlds, seen orbiting the millions of stars of the unknown galaxy.

  Abrid said, “Keep in mind these photographs are archeological in nature. We do not know what happened to this civilization during the one hundred sixty thousand years it took for the light waves to pass from the galaxy to our current location. What do you make of this?”

  Gosseyn examined the photographs rapidly. “Obviously the images from farther away represent an older stratum of civilization. In this early period, this looks like they are using superatomic explosions to move planets into habitable orbits, or pulverizing gas giants to render them into raw materials. I notice that double and triple star systems only seem to exist on the far side of this galaxy.”

  “The far-side images are older by one hundred and forty-five thousand years. Double and triple star systems are less gravitationally stable than single stars; they may have been engineered out of existence. We also suspect, from some of the stellar motions, that this had at one time been a spiral galaxy, but that it was artificially reconstructed into an elliptical—perhaps to eliminate the possibility of a dangerous supermassive black hole growing up in the center.”