Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  The moment of the pause was a moment without time. And for a moment, the galaxy … faded … in that strange moment of transparency, he felt a moment of nausea….

  An illusion. This time-space continuum was also an artificially created falsehood. It was a structure created and maintained by these great Spheres.

  Enro was still speaking: “Do you understand now who is the Sleeping God? It is I. Not that bit of flesh kept alive in Cousin Secoh’s ancient starship. All those years I bowed and worshipped, not realizing the simple truth, the obvious truth. I was asleep and thought I was merely a man. But mine is the power of life and death, time and space. Once I embrace my sister as wife, the race that shall spring from her, omniscient, immortal, will wipe mankind away…. Lavoisseur (but you know him by the name X) has already taken the cell samples from my bone marrow to make a twin, a baby to grow in a tank, which will house me when I perish … but you will not live to see it.”

  Enro was fair skinned and lightly freckled, and when blood rose to his face, as it did now, his features were dark, like some exaggerated mask. His eyes glittered unblinkingly like those of a man under the influence of a drug.

  Gosseyn knew the symptoms: the Violent Man Syndrome. The belief that bloodshed would solve all problems, soothe all discontents, create the utopia. All life’s ills would be cured, if only the violent man were violent enough to shed all the blood necessary. It was all very sick and very simple: Infantile feelings of helplessness were buried under layers of increasingly random atrocities.

  “Do you know why I cannot spare your life? Because your maker had the audacity, the blasphemy, to put ideas in your head that you had touched my Reesha, that you had possessed her….”

  Gosseyn did not know what image of what far world Enro created behind his helpless body. It took only a moment for the space-stress involved between Enro’s viewpoint and his target to interrupt the biological functions of his body. Without a sound or word, he died, and his skin turned black as ash.

  Gosseyn stared in curiosity down at his body. The illusion was so lifelike! But he had already triggered the set of deeply buried commands Dr. Halt had implanted in his brain. The cycle to wake up out of the illusion, once started, could not be stopped.

  Even as Enro smiled a small, cool smile of triumph, he vanished. The orbital station lost its coherence, and the image collapsed. Some of the more distant stars lingered longer than the nearer ones, before the energies involved could not maintain the appearance of being where there was non-being.

  Gosseyn was alone in an utter darkness. His clothes were gone. He was in free fall. Around him was nothing, neither air nor airlessness.

  From Gosseyn’s point of view, the universe was a non-phenomenon. It ceased; in an ultimate fashion, it never had been. Instead was this: nonexistence.

  He probed with his extra brain. The nothingness around him was composed of particles of some sort, but each one was isolated, non-identified, so that no properties of behavior could be communicated from one particle to the next. There was neither direction nor duration here.

  Something stirred in the darkness.

  THE YDD GREET THE INTERLOPER AND INITIATE NEGOTIATION.

  31

  Positive judgments, that the world should and must conform to a man-made world-view, are the source of the violence neurosis of mankind, for the absolutism of two such positive judgment systems clashing leaves no room for peaceful arbitration.

  The thoughts rang into his brain, shockingly loud, dazing him. He performed another cortical-thalamic pause to prevent disorientation. Gosseyn selected one particle at random and “attuned” himself to it using his extra brain.

  The results were startling. That particle, to him, blazed with light, the light of a miniature star. He sensed the warp of space around him, as if this star were many times the mass of a galaxy, but only he was affected by the gravity. There was no sensation of motion, so he did not know the shape of his orbit around it. Perhaps he was falling straight toward it, but if so, the star did not visibly grow any bigger, so it must have been an astronomical distance off.

  Using that star as an arbitrary fixed point, he began using the shadow-controlling part of his brain, that special training he had received from the far-future version of himself, to shift certain of his properties further into phase with it, on several wavelengths in the neurochemical range, to try to find an energy level that would step down the Ydd entity’s monstrous mental force. He was operating on the assumption that, in this environment, all particles were “out-of-phase” to him. But theoretically, that same control over his own bodily substance that allowed him, while a shadow, to let light or gravity affect him rather than pass through him could be used here, once he had established a fixed orientation metric, to allow neural waves to pass through him without harm.

  It worked, or something did. The next thought-shape impressed into Gosseyn’s consciousness was like hearing a normal voice rather than a deafening shout.

  The mental voice was eerily calm and detached, without any hint of emotion: “The interloper should not have done that. The Ydd acknowledge displeasure.”

  Despite the tonelessness of the voice, Gosseyn felt a sense of hostility radiating from the darkness, of deadly rage.

  Gosseyn realized that he was inside the Ydd being. All this shadow-substance, occupying an unknown range of infinity around him, outside the universe and larger than it: All this was the Ydd.

  Out of the darkness around him, issuing from several points above and below, came bolts of powerful energy, crackling X-rays and high-energy gamma rays. When Gosseyn attempted to adjust his shadow-body to put himself out-of-phase with one group of them, he accidentally entered an in-phase condition with a second volley of bolts he had not been able to sense until then. As an automatic reflex, something he had set up in his extra brain long ago memorized the incoming energy and similarized it to the only point in space available to him: the tiny white star. But even this was not instantaneous: During the microsecond he was exposed to part of the radiation barrage he was burned badly. The pain was shocking: He lost sensation in his limbs. His hair was burned away from his skull. He lost the use of his eyes. Though he could still sense it with his extra brain, he could no longer see the tiny star that was his only orientation point in a universe of chaotic darkness.

  Gosseyn imposed a thought on the same band of energy the incoming “voice” of the Ydd had occupied. “I thought you said you wanted to negotiate.”

  “Interdicted behavior is unacceptable. This point is not open to negotiation.”

  Gosseyn wondered if he were speaking to a computer or some other form of artificial being. “What are your operating parameters?”

  “The highest priority goes to self-preservation, of course.”

  Gosseyn thought sardonically, Of course. “And?”

  “And all other entities within the time-space continuum must orient to that priority: Failure to do so is unacceptable.”

  And Gosseyn knew the reaction that followed upon behavior deemed unacceptable.

  This being, huge and primitive, somehow occupied a point before the beginning of time, a location outside of space. There seemed to be nothing else here, neither time nor space nor energy, nothing except for endless masses of noninteracting particles that lacked identity and behavior.

  Somehow this primal being was aware of events within the universe. Somehow it was displeased with these events: displeased to the point where destroying all but the first microsecond of the universe was its response. Whatever did not put the preservation of the Ydd first and foremost had to die.

  It seemed quite simple and quite neurotic.

  Gosseyn asked the central question: “Why? Unacceptable for what reason?”

  In Gosseyn’s brain there now appeared not words but sensations. Not images, for the creature’s senses did not include awareness of light, but some sense impression intimately tied into the nature of time-space itself.

  Was this the memory of the Y
dd? Its origins?

  Because at one point of time there was simply nothing. And at another point—whether before or after made no difference—the Ydd grew aware of the universe like a coal burning at the core of its vastness. A cone of all possible futures extended in one direction: Gosseyn decided this direction was the future. Like an hourglass-shape, there was a similar cone extending in the opposite direction back into the past before the Big Bang point. Perhaps it was an antimatter universe or perhaps the exhausted and collapsing end-time of some previous condition of existence, a before-cosmos. The Big Bang itself was at the touching tips of the two equal-and-opposite cones.

  Within the light-cone were all slower-than-light phenomena, all the particles and galaxies of which man was aware. Outside, faster-than-light but just as real, was a timeless and dimensionless chaos, occupied by nothing but this single archaic, primitive, infinitely powerful being.

  Through the Ydd senses, Gosseyn grew aware of a series of impulses, a flow of faster-than-light reactions reaching into and out of the cosmos. The impression was one of a complex and vital relationship: a symbiosis sustaining certain complexities of time and eternity within the universe and giving the Ydd something it needed.

  Gosseyn sent the thought: “What is it? What do you need from the universe?”

  Through some sense impression of the Ydd for which Gosseyn had no name, Gosseyn became aware of the nature of time, and he sensed a fixity, a cause-and-effect structure the Ydd would otherwise lack. Like a vine growing on a solid tree? No, the relationship was more intimate. Like a single-celled animal passing elements into and out of the membrane that formed its boundary: Except, in this case, the Ydd was the fluid environment surrounding, and it was somehow sustained and nourished by the interaction of the infinitely tiny, precious organism of the universe beating at its center.

  The image changed: The Ydd perceived a corruption, and painful fluctuation within the universe that seemed to dissolve the time-structure, to weaken the faster-than-light energy-relations establishing the basic physical constants of the universe. This effect, whatever it was, created intense displeasure within the Ydd. Ydd was aware of a danger: It would topple and collapse back to the form it would have had if the universe were not present. Gosseyn sensed the simplest form of entity: an infinitely small point of unaware nothingness, unperceived by any other being.

  “The Ydd life-process is tied directly to the nature of time-space itself, in a fashion that no material life existing in a slower-than-light zone of the universe can be. The Ydd can be damaged or destroyed by an alteration of the fundamental time-arrangement. If the Ydd perish, the universe perishes: The two are interrelated and symbiotic. Hence the rise of biological life within the slower-than-light frame of reference cannot be permitted to grow into a threatening direction. Hence by culling the segments of the universe where threatening behaviors arise the remainder of the universe can be preserved.”

  “How large a remainder?”

  The answer was in terms of a millionth of a second of time after the Big Bang. Instead of a period of antigravitational inflation, which would lead to a transparent and rarefied universe, the cosmic all of matter-energy would recollapse immediately after its initial explosion and the universe never grow larger than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom.

  “Where do I fit into this?”

  “The interloper represents a threat. An alteration to a non-threatening posture is needed.”

  “Because I am aware of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Define the nature of this alteration. How do I become nonthreatening?”

  “The Ydd offer … oneness!”

  “My consciousness will be merged with yours?”

  “The statement is correct. The partial consciousness of the now-limited being will be made without limit or definition.”

  “Will I still be self-aware?” Gosseyn wondered if, once merged with this being, his thoughts could influence it into a nondestructive psychology, cure it. If so, his own annihilation would be a small price to pay. In his mind, he steeled himself to make this sacrifice, if necessary.

  “No. Once the signal you call awareness has been summed to the one-in-all being of Ydd, there is no need of separate or partial awareness. There is neither memory nor intellection needed. Sensation will no longer be needed.”

  Gosseyn’s mind reeled back from the utter inhumanity of the offer. Oneness with … non-being? Death seemed clean and wholesome compared to that.

  But the Ydd sent one more thought: “This environment is the ultimate reality. All chains of causation spring from the Ydd origin; all chains of effect lead toward the Ydd finality. All actions taking place within the cosmos are organized for the pleasure of the Ydd. The Ydd are the absolute against which all else is measured.”

  This was nonsense-talk. The emotion-delusion of self-absorption was one of the crudest and most primitive. Only a baby is too simple to know that other beings have value aside from their ability to serve the baby’s need. Even before learning to speak, small children learn to recognize other beings as having their own reality.

  Gosseyn said briefly, “Sane men discover for themselves the overall meaning of their lives.”

  There came a rumble in the darkness, and swirling churn of the clouds of dark chaotic particles. “The Ydd express mirth. Limited creature! The events of your life, your separation into multiple copies, your regathering into a final version, were all organized since the dawn of time, since eternity, to serve the purposes of Ydd. The secret and supreme power you have sought your whole life, your Chessplayer moving you like a pawn, is before you. You have pierced the final veil separating human consciousness from utter truth. Look at this darkness around you. This is Ydd. This is the final truth, stripped of all illusion. There is nothing else.”

  “Did you create the universe?”

  A moment’s hesitation, and then, slyly: “Yes. Of course.”

  It was the bald-faced nature of the lie that decided him. There was no point in further talk.

  Gosseyn wondered if he had a weapon against this being. The relaxation Anslark had forced on Gosseyn’s secondary brain had triggered a reaction with the primordial superhot, superdense matter of the origin point of the universe. In normal time, nothing would come of that reaction for over 170 years. But he was no longer in normal time. In fact, his time-relation to the cosmos was currently … nothing. It was arbitrary.

  Gosseyn wondered if he could find a frame of reference in this non-space in which that 170 years would seem to already have passed. All that would be required was a prediction-type similarity to bridge the gap between himself-now and himself-then.

  Gosseyn attempted to stimulate the proper sections of his extra brain.

  Light!

  An explosion of infinite magnitude filled all the nothingness around him.

  If death came then, either from his weapon or from the instant and terrible Ydd counterreaction, it came too swiftly for any sensation.

  32

  Scientific thought is based on negative judgment: Reality disqualifies any scientific model found guilty of inaccurate prediction. Hence negative judgment demands that the man-made world-view should and must conform to the world.

  Gosseyn was whole again, unwounded. He was dressed and standing upright on a floor. The light here came from a series of high, square screens showing images of underground cities or portions of rust-colored desert. Standing before Gosseyn and above him on a dais was a thin-faced older man with a lantern jaw dressed in a high-collared uniform made of photorepeating fabric. He was swaying on his feet, clutching a huge desk next to him for support. To Gosseyn’s right a dark-haired pale-skinned woman of striking appearance and a group of glittering-eyed young men were brandishing heavy electric pistols. The woman had a foxlike quirk to her red lips. The young men were shouting, “Illverton! Tune your uniform! Surrender now! Tune to our colors or else! The Safety Authority is finished!”

  Yvana, the sly-faced dark-haired w
oman, was perhaps the quickest of Callidetics there to notice a change in the nuance of circumstance. She holstered her pistol and put a hand out to support Gosseyn.

  Why, thought Gosseyn, I must look like I’m about to faint!

  “What just happened?” she whispered sharply, drawing near. Her tone was not worried but eager: She wanted to find out whatever this new factor in the situation was and exploit it before the other members of her team caught on. Leadership on a world of fickle callidetic geniuses was always an uncertain affair.

  Gosseyn’s attention was arrested by the blazing sunlight that shined through the repeater screens. Roughly half the desert scenes showed a yellow sun hanging in the cloudless dark-purple sky. Scattered among them were pictures obviously from the other hemisphere, showing the starry skies above the wastelands, with the crescent of a blue planet in the distance, with a smaller crescent, gray-black and crater marked, hanging near it.

  The white-haired man was raising his hands uncertainly as the young men pointed their weapons, but as quick as a school of fish all turning at some unseen signal, the squad of armed men all turned to look at Yvana. The fact that she had paused to whisper to Gosseyn checked their hot-bloodedness. Some of the men, almost as quick as Yvana to grasp that the situation had changed, began holstering their weapons.

  Gosseyn said, “I do not see how I can be alive, not even theoretically. Did the Ydd return me here?”

  Gosseyn raised his hand to wipe his brow (he was shaking and sweating) and he felt a strange heaviness in his hand and arm. Distracted, he flexed his fingers, feeling a sensation as if a powerful electrical current were moving through the nerves and muscles of his arm. When he drew a breath, the same massive sensation was in his chest.

  When he used his extra brain to photograph his own body, he sensed that the molecules and atoms of which he was composed were connected in some fundamental way with a point infinitely remote in time or space. Dimly, he could sense this point as a white-hot supercharged atom of infinite density … or … no, it was large, larger than the universe, and this cosmos was the golden pinprick….