Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Fool! The Observer in the Crypt is a machine. It thinks mechanically. It has tried this before. It deliberately confused itself about your identity so that you could order it to cure me. It never stops seeking to cure me. It sent you here because it does not tire of futile repetition. It must go through its options in their mechanical order of priority.

  Your wish is to die. To die, you need only think of the place where your body has been set for safekeeping. Or, if you wish to live, you must also think of how to safeguard that body.

  Gosseyn could not hide his thoughts from himself.

  Aloud, Enro said, “I see him.”

  The mirror before the shadow-figure seemed to recede and fade. Enro’s power summoned an image of the Crypt of the Sleeping God, a view of another galaxy. There lay Gosseyn’s body, its head and shoulders visible through the transparent upper panels of the Crypt.

  Gosseyn could feel the action of “his” double brain when X memorized a section of the hull floor near the foot of the two curving staircases that led up to the location of the Crypt.

  X triggered the distortion.

  DURING the moment of darkness, the madness ended. The distorter passage broke the forced similarity holding his mental patterns in the other man’s nervous system.

  Gosseyn was himself again. Before he even opened his eyes, he performed the Null-A pause, and the wonted calm returned. His first thought was: Even if I had been convinced to kill myself, how could I have done it? Obviously, there had been a trick at a basic level.

  The second: X had filled that room of mirrors with deadly radiation—why? The obvious reason: to stop Gosseyn from seizing control of the body, and solidifying, and using that body’s extra brain to deflect the energies X had been using to manipulate their shared nervous system. Conclusion: X had not learned of Gosseyn’s space-deception technique the Observer had programmed into Gosseyn via mechanical educator. Gosseyn’s thoughts had been too disorganized by Enro’s passions and roaring emotions to bring that thought to the fore.

  The third: X was here.

  Gosseyn opened his eyes. Through the transparent lid of the Crypt, he saw the manlike outline of a faceless shadow fade into insubstantial being.

  The center of the shadow-being darkened slightly. Gosseyn’s tertiary brain could feel what his unaided secondary brain could not: the slight distortions and ripples in the fabric of time-space, as all the particles in an area—the volume involved was roughly a third of a light-year—were preparing to dissociate from each other.

  No matter or energy of any kind, including the brain information of a dying Gosseyn body, would be able to depart the area, or could exist inside it, once the effect was complete.

  But then: a pause. The Shadow Man did not trigger the effect.

  What was he waiting for?

  37

  Every assumption contains an element of falsehood. Nevertheless, if the assumptions made retain a general structural similarity to reality, they can be used.

  Gosseyn realized his false assumption. He? They. The two minds in the nervous system were not in agreement. Although the silhouette lacked any face or expression, Gosseyn could now see from the set of its shoulders, the hunched position of the head, the shadowy hands balled into insubstantial fists … the X-Enro composite being was suffering agitation.

  Of course. This was the most sacred shrine, the holy of holies, of Enro’s religion. To X it was merely a spaceship, a museum piece, whose controlling ship’s brain was a source of potential danger. Enro was preventing X from destroying the ship. That same overwhelming passion, that brutal and magnetic personality that brooked no opposition, that had disoriented Gosseyn with its illogic, had no doubt turned its force on X.

  Rational and dispassionate, Null-A men like X and Gosseyn could eventually establish a pattern of sane logic-habit over the raging beast-man brain of Enro … eventually. Mania could not be sustained; it always exhausted itself, leaving depression, despair, and strange psychological reversals. But in the short run, emotion overturned reason.

  “Observer!” Gosseyn said aloud. “I almost died. What was the point of transferring me into Enro’s body?”

  It was part of the curative process you ordered, O Ptath.

  “He almost killed me!”

  Your belief is false-to-facts, a deception. The curative process was very nearly complete, but you interfered by means of a hypnotic technique.

  “What deception?”

  Your unambiguous orders on this topic prevent me from answering that question, O Ptath.

  “I countermanded those previous orders.”

  These are the orders you are currently giving me. Of the orders you are uttering at this time, I cannot follow the one to expel you from the coffin, to subject your body to a lethal dose of radiation, and so on, as this contradicts your previous order to cure you….

  So X was communicating with the Observer silently while also wrestling with Enro. The Machine’s deliberately self-induced confusion about Gosseyn’s identity was the only thing standing between Gosseyn and destruction.

  Gosseyn said, “What is the next step of the curative process?”

  Reestablish the mind-to-mind similarity. You will not be destroyed, but cured.

  Gosseyn stared through the crystal walls of the coffin. Should he trust that the Observer was undamaged in its calculation centers, was not under further orders to deceive and manipulate him?

  Gosseyn asked, “How was Ptath damaged by passing through the shadow-cloud during the Great Migration? What is the damage you are attempting to cure?”

  The Machine answered, His tertiary brain suffered physical trauma. As a result, he was able to block predictive examinations of his future. His own prediction power continued to operate in a limited way, and he claimed that a comparison of what was happening with what should be happening allowed him to detect extra-dimensional interference with reality at a basic level.

  “What interference?”

  He said that he became aware that his secondary brain was being manipulated in a subtle fashion by a time-controlling entity he called the Ydd, which lived inside the shadow-substance the tertiary brain had been designed to control. He claimed the control was two-way. As men used their tertiary brains to control the shadow, the shadow was using their tertiary brains to control them. He claimed that the perceptions of all members of the race, all but his own, had been compromised. The manipulations of the Ydd were the indirect cause of the shadow disaster overwhelming the primal galaxy.

  The Machine concluded blandly: My programming found these statements to be outside the anticipated psychological reactions: I had no choice but to conclude he was hallucinating, and must be repaired.

  Gosseyn asked the Machine carefully about its definitions of sanity and cures for insanity: The answers were given in terms of Null-A correspondences between perception and object. In theory, what the Machine contemplated would cause no organic damage.

  In theory. Gosseyn stared through the crystal lid at the shadowy form of his adversary. There was not much time. To do nothing meant death. Even if the “cure” set in motion harmed him, he must make the attempt.

  Carefully, with his secondary brain, Gosseyn took a mental photograph of his whole nervous system and tied this to a trigger, so that if he should begin to lose control of his mind, his secondary brain would push him out of similarity with the Shadow Man.

  With his tertiary brain, he cautiously began probing the shadow-figure and studying the wavelengths used to send nerve-communication waves to the Observer: He knew the Shadow Man had to be in synch with the Observer on some level.

  There: He detected an energy tension.

  Next, the question was to locate, like a radio operator tuning to higher and lower bands to find a signal, the special set of frames of reference the Shadow Man was using.

  Somewhere in the environment was a cluster of particles (probably a simple helium atom nucleus) that occupied the ambiguous frame of reference. To the particle, X-Enro
was solid and occupied a defined position in time and space; to the particle, the energy-rays controlled by the shadow-being, both its communication and weaponry forces, were also definite in location and duration; but the rays and the body did not have a specific existence in reference to each other. Once he found the controlling particle group, Gosseyn could backtrack: He could “define” the shadow surrounding X-Enro and attune his own energy structures to that frame.

  A reflected signal registered in his tertiary brain.

  With his secondary brain, Gosseyn memorized several power sources in the ship, including the medical instruments in the coffin with him. One instrument was a psychological machine of very advanced design, much more complex than a lie detector. Using the rhythms put out by this machine as a basic wave-form, Gosseyn imposed upon it several thought-messages.

  Here his own knowledge of himself was invaluable. In addition to the cortical-thalamic pause, there were other Null-A-trained reflexes meant to bring a shocked mind back to sanity, to restore buried memories, to confront complex emotional neurosis with an analytical process, to stimulate the imaginative processes to regard semantic disturbances from several points of view at once…. A battery of slow, calm, quietly sane thoughts was being planted softly….

  A trickle of thought-information began to steal back along the link, from the Shadow Man, to the helium nuclei, to the psychology circuit, to Gosseyn.

  The prime source of madness in the brain of X-Enro was identity confusion. X was aware that he had deceived himself in order to deceive Gosseyn during the moment when their thoughts were mingled. The only way to deceive a man whose thoughts are one with yours is to deceive yourself, which the master psychologist had done. X was contemplating the fact that only that last-ditch effort had saved X from the curative process Gosseyn had set in motion. X’s fear was that if Gosseyn suspected the truth …

  Gosseyn attempted to trace that thought back to its roots. What truth?

  At this moment, X-Enro became aware that Gosseyn was in his thoughts. The Shadow Man must have had a trigger set in his secondary brain, because the reaction was swifter than any mechanical switch thrown: The Shadow Man blinked out of existence, similarized to some distant location.

  And it was a location beyond Gosseyn’s reach. The similarity connection he had with the enemy’s thoughts grew dim and tenuous until he was no longer aware of it. Gosseyn no longer had the Sphere of Accolon connecting him to a mighty network of amplification Spheres, but X was still in neural synchronization with the ancient Sphere system of the Shadow Galaxy. X could cross intergalactic space in an instant.

  And see across it. With his secondary brain, Gosseyn could detect the slight stresses in space, less than fifteen decimal points, caused by the attunement of Enro’s clairvoyance.

  The great dictator was watching him.

  The weapon Enro had used to kill Crang would not work on Gosseyn if Gosseyn assumed his shadow-form, nor could a shadow-form be pulled out of the center of the Crypt of the Sleeping God by distorter. Enro perhaps did not know that Gosseyn dared not assume that form, lest he be destroyed by the Ydd. But Enro could similarize any ordinary weapon into this spot, from an atomic bomb to the energy output of fifty suns.

  All that held his hand was that the ship was a sacred shrine to his Cult.

  And how long would it take before the master psychologist, X, gained sufficient control of their shared nervous system to overcome those religious sentiments?

  Gosseyn assumed he had only a matter of minutes in which to act, but he had to act without leaving the Crypt of the Sleeping God.

  Because X was Gosseyn. That insane being had spoken the literal truth when first they met. The Observer confirmed it: one mind occupying two bodies. Two memory chains, one ancient beyond measure; and the other young, baffled by amnesia, but otherwise hale and whole. Two parallel memories of one being.

  One being sundered in half! The vast and intricate knowledge of mental and physical sciences under their command was roughly equal. Their powers were almost the same: Each knew the secrets of similarization, energy-manipulation, clairvoyance, prognostication, the ability to assume the shadow-form of the Follower, the technique to imprint a mind in a foreign brain, the tertiary brain and its space-deception technique, which allowed one to survive the shadowy nonidentity effect … both beings were equipped with the same arms and armor, the same system of attacks and defenses.

  Who knew the truth about him, the real him, knew his weaknesses, his strengths?

  Who could advise him on how to defeat … himself?

  Gosseyn said aloud, “Observer! Imprint me into the mind of the Chessplayer. I am tired of being a pawn in someone else’s hand.”

  THE first thing he was aware of was a mirror. It hung against a dark background, but it was bright. Within the frame was an image. The image was of a queenly figure garbed in a dark and flowing gown, with opals glittering at her waist and throat, seated, half-reclining, on a throne.

  The chair was ornate, made of jade and onyx and lapis lazuli, dotted with clusters of emeralds and star sapphires. Its back was shaped something like the fan of a peacock’s tail, and the arms were also carved and set with a mosaic of semiprecious and precious stones. A throne—the identification was so automatic that it took Gosseyn a moment to wonder how he knew it.

  She knew she was seated on a throne, and because he was imprinted on her nervous system, he knew also.

  The gown (the recognition also came from her) was a symbol of power. In ancient times on the planet Yalerta, a particular dye was prized because of its rarity. The sea life from which the dye was made only produced this hue at one unexpected and random period in its glandular-chemical cycle. Only a Predictor could order the sea-slugs plucked at the right time.

  The room was dark because she knew that waking up inside a strange nervous system could be disorienting. She did not want her visual centers to be overstimulated, because she did not want his first sight to be confused.

  She was watching herself in the mirror, her eyes glittering with sardonic emotion. She had anticipated the minute and second of his arrival. She wanted the first thing Gosseyn would see to be her face.

  Her lips moved; her voice was musical with amusement, the voice of a woman who had waited an endless time to address him: “Do not fear me, for I am not the woman I seem. In one sense I am her, but I am no longer merely her: not after having lived all the eons to the end of time, surviving the second Big Bang, and living through fifteen billion more years to the present.

  “I am Inxelendra, the Gorgzor-Reesha, third of the four passengers sent in the same survival ship as Ptath during the Great Migration.”

  THE ringing voice continued, “Yes, your ship. That one ship which, out of all the millions of survival vessels, was damaged in such a way as to prevent it from carrying out its original program. The migrant populations were meant to arrive only with their survival skills intact, no personal memories, no clues about their origins. Once they were lodged on their host planets, and once their ship’s Observer had interfered with the local biology, and planted artificially aged fossils into their geologic strata, the Observers were meant to dismantle themselves, destroying all the records of the past.

  “But my husband—yes, I found a man and fell in love, back on the green and lovely planet Xia the Centermost, the gem of all the worlds of the Shadow Galaxy, back before the shadow fell—my husband was damaged when we passed through the cloud, and so were some of the medical appliances of our Observer, including those needed to cure him.

  “I removed certain critical thought-circuits so our Machine could not self-destruct. It had to keep my husband alive. With him alive, there was no point in acting against us. As long as the three healthy passengers cooperated with its effort to erase all evidence of the origin of man, and kept our secrets to ourselves, the Observer permitted us to keep our memories, and pass them along to our duplicates: three immortal beings within a galaxy of mortals, all now amnesiacs, all thrown
back into stone ages of history.

  “Ages passed, and still I hoped the technology would arise on some world with the means to cure my beloved husband.

  “But then, under your instructions, you had the Observer release his brain-dead body from its medical coffin. My memories of this time show that he survived. He lived and was cured! I thought you were going to order Secoh to surrender, to end the war. But no, you provoked Secoh into destroying my husband. You killed him! You!”

  It was Leej. The woman speaking was Leej the Predictress of Yalerta.

  GOSSEYN’S thoughts were dazed with the implications. “You are the Chessplayer, you, the mysterious figure behind every secret in my life?”

  The regal figure rose to her feet, smiling bitterly. “Well, I had no great reason to make your life a comfortable one, did I, my little puppet? You used the infatuation I once had for you, my loyalty, my sanity, my life, as part of your plan to save the universe from total annihilation. Now that the cosmic cycle has come back once more, and it is my turn, I return the favor. Are you satisfied in your search for answers yet? No? I thought not. But there is no time for anything more. You must be readied for your final trial.”

  And she strode away from the mirror into the darkness of the chamber.

  GOSSEYN was surprised by the crystal-like clarity of the thoughts of the nervous system he occupied. Unlike the brains of the emotionally crippled Ashargin, the neurotic younger version of Leej, or the raging mad Enro, this mind was astonishing in its complexity and thoroughness.

  Every object she saw reminded her not of one thing, or one event, but of a billion things, of an uncountable span of time. When she approached the door to the inner chamber of the Sanctum of Time, she was reminded of the millions of candidates she had brought here in times past. This was the first of the Child Centers of the world-archipelago of Yalerta. Famous men and women of every age of this planet flashed through her mind’s eye as the great doors opened, for she remembered all who had passed through: early bronze-age kings, stone-age priestesses with feathered headdresses, nomads, hunter-gatherers, men in glittering energy-armor from a forgotten high-tech civilization that occupied a prior geologic era, and, from centuries earlier still, women carrying magnetic rifles, scholars armed with muskets … and, from an era prior to this, Neanderthals in strange dark uniforms, carrying well-made instruments….