Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  “Go on,” she said. “Make the call.”

  He studied the phone for a moment with his extra brain, sensing the flow of electrons in its circuits. He identified the proper contacts, and instead of raising a hand to touch the phone, he merely similarized the two contact points within the machine itself, so that the electricity flowed across the gap as if there were no gap, completing the circuit.

  Patricia looked startled and alarmed when the phone screen lit up.

  “Yes?” said the robotic operator.

  “I’d like to make an appointment with the nearest qualified psychiatrist that I can afford to see. I am not willing to spend more than fifty credits.”

  “That would be Dr. Augustus Halt of 5200 Babcock Street Northeast, in Palm Bay. He can see you this evening at 7:00 City Time.”

  Gosseyn hung up by breaking the circuit he had caused and replaced the telephone in its niche by memorizing the phone base, memorizing the niche, and forcing a similarity. Patricia watched the phone disappear from the table and reappear in its little cupboard.

  She touched the telephone gingerly with her hand, as if expecting it to disappear again.

  “Why don’t you tell me the whole story?” she said at last.

  After he was done, she leaned back against the kitchen counter. Her pose was semirelaxed, her long legs crossed at the ankles, her shoulders slightly hunched as her weight rested on her spine. Her eyes were bright and her expression thoughtful.

  She said, “The safest assumption is that this is time-travel. The Shadow Men put you back into your own past. If this were an illusion set by an enemy, I would not be here, nor would you have your extra brain and all its capacities still intact.”

  Gosseyn said, “It cannot be the real past. You, or rather, Reesha of Gorgzid, had not yet arrived on the planet in 2558 A.D.”

  She said, “How did I die?”

  “What?”

  “In your memories—which are apparently being given real form around us here—when I was your wife, how did I die?”

  “An airplane accident. There was a sudden storm, a crash landing at sea. Your father, Michael Hardie …” Gosseyn stopped. How accurate was this illusion? How many details were present? “… is he here? In Brevard County? Living in Cress Village?”

  “Of course,” she said with a little shrug. “After his business failed, he wanted to move away from Tampa. So he put up that strange-looking house, using Mom’s money. I thought you remembered all this? You think the memories are false, but they have not vanished from your head, have they? We met because you were doing part-time construction work as a carpenter’s ‘prentice. You used to bang outside my window and walk back and forth with your shirt off. But Daddy is not a member of a conspiracy to overthrow the world government, if that is what you are asking.” She pushed herself lightly to her feet, came over, draped her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “So what is your plan in the meanwhile?”

  “Meanwhile?”

  “The invasion from the space empire does not happen, according to you, until 2560. That is two years away. How are we going to eat and pay our mortgage in the meanwhile?”

  So he ended up spending the day doing farmwork.

  THE bouts of dizziness came twice more as he moved from task to task on the fruit farm. Each time, his vision blurred and a darkness seemed to enter his brain. On the second occasion, he attempted to use his extra brain to “photograph” the atomic structure of his own body, including his nervous system. That seemed to have a stabilizing effect, for the dizzy spell ended abruptly.

  The sun had set. He could see a gibbous moon rising in the distance as he walked back across the fields from the orchids. His muscles ached in a fashion he found refreshing.

  How long had it been since he’d put in a good day’s work?

  Actually, never. None of his memories of farm life were real. Gosseyn One had lived a few days on the money he’d found in the wallet in his jacket, presumably Lavoisseur’s. Gosseyn Two had lived on Venus, where money was not used to track labor value. He had also drawn a pension from the Semantics Institute, since he was legally the same person as Lavoisseur, the head of the Institute until such time as the Board of Governors selected a new one. Gosseyn Three had joined the expedition to the Shadow Galaxy, funded by the Nexialist Committee of Planet Petrino, and had lived off what the ship’s quartermaster provided. Only Gosseyn Four had ever done manual labor, serving for a day or two as a roughneck aboard the tramp freighter that carried him to Venus. The Corthidian organizations had made him their guest during the emergency and asked of him nothing more onerous than giving interviews to their press and meeting with their scientific leaders: His “wage” on Corthid was their highly abstract system of estimating fame and influence.

  Lavoisseur, the foremost Null-A psychiatrist of the age, had selected well when selecting these false memories to implant, Gosseyn decided. Hard as the farmwork was, it formed an almost mystical connection to Mother Earth. There was a wide variety of false-to-facts, even neurotic, beliefs the comforts of technological civilization encouraged, to which farmers tended to be immune. They knew in their bones that there was no reward without labor, no certainty of harvest despite the labor; and they knew the value of self-reliance.

  Gosseyn, standing outside his little cottage, put his hands on his back and gave a great rolling shrug of his shoulders, grunting. Yes, if ever the danger posed by Enro were to pass away, if ever he were to retire to private life, this would not be a bad choice: his own land, his own work, his wife …

  He looked up at the night sky, smiling.

  The smile slipped and vanished.

  The sky was cloudless, and yet it was blank. There were no stars.

  GOSSEYN’S sharp eyes caught the red dot of Mars, one or two flecks of light that might have been Telstars … and nothing.

  He ran back into the house. “Where are the stars?”

  Patricia blinked blankly at him. “The what?”

  He jumped over to the phone and thumbed the switch for the operator. “Operator! What is the most distant location I can call?”

  “There is a scientific station beyond the orbit of Pluto, studying the formations of ice asteroids at the edge of the universe.”

  “The edge … define that term.”

  “At a distance of roughly one-point-three light-years from Sol, particles enter a condition of non-identity. Atomic structures lose all coherence; photons suffer redshift and become unlocalized. The boundary is a slightly flattened hollow sphere, centered on the sun.”

  “What about the stars?”

  “This unit has no references for that term.”

  “Other suns like our own?”

  “Would you like to speak to the fiction desk of your local library?”

  Another spell of dizziness struck him at that moment. His vision went dark; his eyes blind, he clutched the edge of the cabinet where the phone rested, and performed a cortical-thalamic pause to quell his rising panic. Every sensation is not itself only but a complex of thought-and-feeling, an interpretation rising from the layers of my nervous system: Sensations enter the brain, pass through the thalamus, where they are given emotional meaning, and only then are they passed along to the cortex. But the meaning is no more than an interpretation….

  When he opened his eyes, Patricia was looking at him with grave concern.

  “I’m going with you,” was all she said.

  They walked the two miles to the bus, paid their dimes, and were carried into the city. Dr. Halt had his offices on the top floor of a four-story building, set back away from the busy street. The building was surrounded by palm trees that rustled in the night gloom.

  The psychiatrist was a Venusian Null-A. Gosseyn had only begun to tell his story when the man interrupted him. He said, “Full-grown psychosis does not occur without cause. And I assume”—he cast a glance at Patricia—”there is no history of any neurotic behavior before this? No exposure to psychoactive chemicals or radiations which migh
t produce a sudden change of basic neurochemical structure?”

  Patricia said, “Not to my knowledge.”

  Dr. Halt said to the lie detector built into his desk, “Well?”

  The machine answered thoughtfully, “The neural activity I am picking up is consistent with the presence of additional material grown from the brain stem. If this is a natural mutation, it is complex and complete beyond any on record.”

  Patricia said, “He turned on the phone without touching it. He moved an object—excuse me, I remember seeing the phone move from one side of the room to the other by what I took to be a process of dematerialization and rematerialization. The phone did not appear different after the process to casual inspection: For all practical purposes, it was the same phone.”

  The lie detector said, “She’s telling the truth.”

  Gosseyn said, “I can explain the physics involved.”

  Dr. Halt said, “That will not be necessary for my purposes. Each possibility is impossible. You see, Mr. Gosseyn, the existence of a hitherto-unknown mutation of man, a hitherto-unknown technology based on a hitherto-unknown law of nature, or the ability of a man to go insane without cause and without any sign of insanity, and to likewise share his delusions with his wife, so thoroughly that a lie detector cannot sense any deceptive intent, are all equally impossible according to how modern science thinks the universe works. I need to discover how you and I can both be sane, that is, can both operate with our nervous systems adjusted to an accurate model of the universe, and yet have conclusions about the universe that are mutually exclusive. Either you are mad or the universe is. Let us eliminate the first possibility. Mrs. Gosseyn, if you will wait here?”

  The doctor led him into an inner examination room with insulated walls. The lights here were lowered, and the room was uncomfortably cool, since some of the electron tubes of the equipment were delicate enough to react to light and heat.

  He had Gosseyn sit down in a chair made of electronically neutral amalgam, and he lowered a domelike instrument to delicate contact with Gosseyn’s skull. The edge of the dome was at his collarbone. Gosseyn’s vision was cut off.

  “I am sending signals into various segments of your brain, the cortex, the medulla oblongata, the brain stem, to study the reactions in your neural flow. You are Null-A trained? Enter an alpha-wave biofeedback state for me, please. If you can do it without artificial aid …”

  Gosseyn relaxed into a semitrance. He was aware only of occasional pressures and tingles in his limbs, as energy from the apparatus accidentally stimulated sensory nerves in the periphery of his nervous system. As the machine tuned itself more completely to his individual life-rhythms, this sensation dropped away.

  Dr. Halt said, “There are energy connections leading to your wife—or should I say, to the woman in the other room, since you do not seem to regard her as being your real wife, or even real at all—that are abnormally strong. The energy density involved is greater than the total mass-energy value of the universe. There is only one conclusion to be faced.”

  Gosseyn, alarmed, raised his hand toward the domelike helmet over his head and tensed his muscles, as if to begin to stand.

  The doctor’s voice rang through the darkened chamber without emotion, cool and precise: “This universe is false, and all existence within it is illusionary: You are an entity from a superior manifestation of reality. Someone or something—a Deceiver—is projecting a four-dimensional energy-form through your nervous system to force you to create this false reality around yourself, based on your memories. I assume it is based on your memories, since otherwise I would not be present in the dream to be helping you wake from it. I am clearly a dream-element arising from your unconsciousness, not something the Deceiver would have chosen to put in this dream. By tracing the nerve paths the outside force is using to create this illusion, I can neutralize it.”

  As Gosseyn struggled to rise, a strange fatigue, a heaviness, entered his limbs at that moment: a bout of the dizziness he had been suffering all day.

  “Stop!” croaked Gosseyn, a feeling of nightmarish heaviness and slowness hindering his motions. Putting his numb hands to his head was like pushing them through glue. His fingers fumbled uselessly: He could not get the helmet of equipment away from him. “Stop! If you shatter this reality, everyone will die! Patricia, the Earth! Venus and the Mars colonies! Don’t …”

  He pushed the helmet away. There in the semidarkness was the psychiatrist, merely a silhouette standing next to his control panel.

  A dry chuckle. “Come now, Mr. Gosseyn. A false existence is not worth sustaining. You know that.”

  From the tiny red light winking on the desk Gosseyn could see the slim fingers of the psychiatrist push a plunger. There was a low hum from the walls, and Gosseyn felt activity in his extra brain. The distorter cycle in his brain had activated without a conscious cue from him: He felt the energy surging in his brain. The process of twenty-decimal similarity was about to move him to … somewhere….

  There was a moment of darkness.

  19

  “Category” confusion in an organism is caused by the attempt of the nervous system to identify one object, process, or event as another; neurosis is the rejection of all evidence to the contrary. The purpose of non-Aristotelian logic is to avoid such errors of categorization.

  In the Shadow Galaxy, some three million light-years from the Milky Way, the superscientific ship Ultimate Prime was dropping to the surface of a planet of the Primordials.

  Overhead the sun was not white but black, surrounded with a white halo of flame: This was a collapsed star. It was slowly eating its brown dwarf companion, as long streamers of star matter were pulled out of the dim photosphere of the dying dwarf star and pulled into the relentless gravity well of the collapsed star: Each particle of matter and energy was bent and pulled apart by the tidal forces involved as it passed through the accretion disk surrounding the black hole. The X-rays given off heated the other incoming matter to incandescence, and the deadly black sun was brighter than the full moon of Earth.

  Gosseyn stood on the observation deck, watching the approaching landscape through an armored section of transparent hull. Dense clouds parted, revealing a world of rippling browns and golds, dull grays and tawny yellows. The mountains were no more than low mounds, barren; the rivers were no more than tracks of salt across a flat plain, long ago silted up and choked. The oceans were shallow, ink-black with millennia of erosion. This was a world that had long, long ago lost all tectonic activity.

  Here and there stood the mile-high towers of the Primordials, rising sheer from the gray-white soil, or tilted at alarming angles. Only a few had toppled entirely and stretched out flat, fallen giants. Elsewhere were black, white, and silver domes, looking like power stations and atomic piles.

  Dr. Curoi of Petrino, the ship’s nexialism officer, was standing at Gosseyn’s shoulder. He pointed. “This solar system you similarized across space next to the ship was a good choice: The atmosphere is almost entirely argon and other inert gasses, and the remnants of the ancient civilization have been almost perfectly preserved. Their engineering skills were simply miraculous: The ship’s radiation officer tells me that our plates are picking up controlled radioactivity from those domes. I suggested to Grand Captain Treyvenant that we start our experiment near that crater impact the astronomy team detected on the equatorial continent.”

  They passed quickly over a stretch of gray-black, lifeless ocean. Here was a peninsula of land, as flat and dull colored as the rest of the planet. In one place was a crater-lake some eighty miles wide. Surrounding the crater, and evidently toppled by the impact, were numbers of the mile-high towers. Several of the towers had long sections of their armor torn away or had split along their corners, revealing, like the hexes of a honeycomb, level upon level and deck upon deck of the vertical cities within.

  Dr. Petry of the ship’s archeology department was talking over the ship’s intercom. Gosseyn’s belt-phone picked up the co
mment and forwarded it to him. “Our suspicions were correct. The material of these towers is an artificial form of matter, composed of locked positron-electron pairs. The Brownian motion of the atoms itself produced their energy, light and heat, a nearly inexhaustible supply. The outer layer of tower-crystal was designed to shed the excess as harmless radiation. When they moved this world between stars, the structures would provide enough light and heat to keep the atmosphere warm, and the landscape flooded with brilliant light.”

  Another voice on the same channel said, “The high-energy paleoanthropology team developed the plates we took passing over the South Pole. We think the megalithic structures are the remains of part of the artificial gravity mechanism used to stabilize the planet during interstellar flight. The main energy centers were probably off-planet, as were the distorter engines.”

  In a short time, the ship came to rest on the dark soil of the dead world. Gosseyn and Curoi disembarked, along with Dr. Kair, the Null-A psychiatrist, and Leej the Predictress. Some scientists from the high-energy physics department, xeno-archeology, and neuropsychology were also present. In charge of this landing party was one of the lesser captains, Mandricard of Accolon. All were equipped with heavy armor, electromagnetically shielded to block the deadly X-rays issuing from the black sun. The robotools of the archeologists floated to the left and right, photographing, testing, sampling.

  There were corpses everywhere. Some peculiarity of the atmosphere had almost perfectly preserved the mummified forms: blackened skin, paper-thin, covering skulls. In his lightning fashion, Gosseyn counted the bodies spilled just from one tower: over a million people. He multiplied that by the number of towers he saw, either toppled in the near distance or, on the horizon, rising in rank on rank.