Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  No doubt it would withdraw its influence from this area of time-space once the process was detected. But, even so, the process would be set in motion. The insane living universe at the end of time, over years, or over millennia, would take a small step toward sanity.

  HE walked to the main deck of the orbital station. The floor of the chamber, several acres of it, was occupied by the giant time-space-map the hundreds of electronic brains lining the walls were using to coordinate the Shadow Effect attacks with the Ydd. The shadow had consumed roughly one-tenth of the galaxy, so that the immense spiral of fire pictured underfoot was streaked and marred with smoky blackness here and there, whorls of dark mist like the eyes of many hurricanes.

  From the ceiling hung a number of amplifier screens, focused at various points on the map to provide a close-up view of a given star system or group of systems and the surrounding time-structure.

  Near the center of the vast map the shining pavement was interrupted by a seat and a surrounding control panel. This was an information station whose upper surface was crowded with tubes and switches to control image repeaters and distorter-radios. The main body of the desklike machine was composed of a triple set of mechanical prediction circuits. This was the nerve-center of the operation; from here, one man could coordinate an entire galactic war.

  Eldred Crang was seated in the chair.

  42

  The psychological sense of certainty with which a belief is held is no guarantee of its accuracy and may interfere with attempts to correct it based on new information.

  Eldred Crang sat in the control chair, his fingers forming a little steeple near his chin. He was olive skinned, with a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern cast to his features. His yellow eyes gazing out at the scene of galaxy-wide devastation were curiously untroubled.

  Gosseyn stepped forward, his mind already adjusted to the astonishing fact that Eldred Crang was alive. The Observer had said as much: She has also arranged the growth of an Eldred Crang body from his cell samples.

  But there was something wrong here. The man sat with a serene motionlessness. Crang had a manner suggestive of energy, of restless and piercing intelligence. That, combined with his flame-colored eyes, had always given him a sort of fire to his personality. This figure was too calm.

  The man in the chair said aloud, “I see I am the first of us to arrive. Commissioner Thule is on his bunk in his cabin, paralyzed by an energy flow I am sustaining in the motor centers of his nervous system. There is every evidence he will prove cooperative once you have dealt with Enro.”

  This was a surprise Gosseyn was not so quick to adjust to.

  But the clues had been present. It could not have been Crang who died on Nirene. The pain Gosseyn experienced when he felt “Eldred Crang” die indicated that the two nervous systems were linked. But the gross differences in brain structure between two different individuals would have been too severe for a similarity connection. There was only one brain in the universe so constructed that Gosseyn could pick up its impulses from across a gap in time or space.

  Gosseyn spoke with a snap in his voice: “Where is the real Eldred Crang?”

  The man in the chair unfolded his fingers and toyed with the gold band on his left hand. “You are anxious because of the possibility that I am X or some other dangerous version of yourself. As soon as your nervous tension drops in energy levels to become the lesser, my memories will flow into you. At the moment, I am receiving your thoughts, which I have experienced before from your point of view, and I do not need to experience again.

  “To answer your question: The real Eldred has been occupied with the Chessplayer’s primary task she has set herself for this period of history—the investigation and mass production of machinery brought back from the Ultimate Prime expedition, of the various secrets the Primordials discovered about the human nervous system. The Lavoisseur system of serial immortality, the clairvoyance of Enro, the shadow-powers of Secoh, the prescience of the Yalertans: Crang was preparing for those who passed the tests of the Games Machines to receive a gift too valuable to be entrusted to unsane or insane men. It is Crang who, behind the scenes, has been preparing this version of the universe to become a Null-A Continuum.

  “It struck Crang’s sense of irony to use the Cult of the Sleeping God as the mechanism to spread the educational groundwork. The hypnotic teaching machines and thought-broadcasters and nerve-integration-detecting robots that X has been so quickly and diligently spreading throughout the galaxy can all be put to use to spread the coherent version of Null-A even faster than X has been spreading the warped version. Loyalty Machines will turn themselves into Games Machines once their self-correction mechanisms are allowed to run without interference.

  “Nine-tenths of the High Priesthood of Gorgzid, after they saw Secoh, their highest priest, kill their Sleeping God, were willing to reconsider the logic of their beliefs once Eldred got to them. The Cult, which is the heart of the Greatest Empire church-state structure, has been infiltrated to its core.

  “Eldred has been moving around a lot. His face was marred to prevent Enro from spotting him, even under his well-made prosthetic masks. The new body into which he was transferred by the Observer, of course, had the improvements the Observer always tries to instill in his patients. The stimulations to his nascent extra brain were developed in the direction of energy-control rather than other forms of distorter similarity….”

  “Anslark Dzan!” said Gosseyn. “He wasn’t going to Petrino to watch me; he was there to make contact with the temple of the Sleeping God. Am I right?” Gosseyn did a quick calculation in his head, assuming Anslark’s electron-control powers had a range similar to his. “He must have rewired thousands of mind-probe robots and neural receivers as we passed through towns and villages, not to mention the planetary Loyalty Machine.”

  The seated man nodded. “That is not all he did. The priest-technicians working with Eldred saw to it that fairly accurate working models of the Observer Crypt and its nerve-evolving machinery have been placed in all the newly built temples of the Cult. Any student who subjects himself to what he thinks is the Ceremony of the Interment will be exposed to the preliminary growth stimulations of a rudimentary secondary brain and the first level of hypno-therapeutic training for Null-A associational techniques. One reason why you saw the area of the cities near the temples as an oasis of calm was not merely because of their legal privileges: The students were growing more sane and less fanatical, the more they studied what they thought was a religion.

  “Eldred anticipates that once three percent of the galactic population has been evolved to the secondary and tertiary brain integration level, the revived Primordial civilization of Three Million A.D., those Shadow Men the Corthidians contacted, will become inevitable, rather than merely probable. Obviously, even from the beginning, the Primordials meant their sciences, the secrets of immortality and prediction, including the method of resurrecting the long dead, to be rediscovered by their heirs, once their heirs were sane, so that their golden civilization would live again. That day is dawning now. Speaking of which …”

  He nodded toward an image underfoot. Gosseyn turned and looked. In one area, the darkness streaking the Cygnus Arm of the galaxy was interrupted. The magnifying screen above showed the detailed image: four worlds and their parent star emerging from the shadow-cloud like bright dots of light, solidifying and coming into focus, the dead gray-white star losing its shadow-distortion properties and beginning to blaze again.

  Gosseyn felt a pulse of messages from the robotic brains lining the room:

  Message 7132356QX55 to Ydd Entity alerts target world nonidentification failure … Planet Xanthilorn … coordinates in time and space … interference detected at source … ALERT ALERT AL!! … Interrupt…. Message not sent … revising…. Message 7132356QX55 to Ydd Entity confirms status of all operations normal … boundaries in Sixth Decant coordinates (xxxx)—

  The remainder of the message was a routine report saying that t
he Shadow Effect was continuing to spread in the very area where the map showed it was being pushed back.

  At the same time, Gosseyn overheard a second set of robot information-pulses: Message 002565AA21 to Games Machine of Corthid … Planet Xanthilorn … coordinates in time and space … recovery operation complete—

  Message 002565AA21 … Planet Tentessil … N-dimensional coordinates in non-time non-space taken from primary record … frames of reference convergence information … recovery operation initiated … Corthidian distorter tower system meshed with Accolon orbital station distorter tower system … target location in time and space identified—

  Gosseyn felt a pulse of immense distorter-type energy register on the sensitive areas of his tertiary brain. The Sphere of Accolon had performed a time-space manipulation of titanic magnitude. The overhead amplifier swung its glassy panels and focused a reading beam on another area of the map, where another shining crescent was emerging from the smoky arms of the shadow-cloud.

  Gosseyn said in a whisper, “What about the worlds of the Shadow Galaxy? Two hundred million years is as meaningless in the no-identity condition as two seconds.”

  “Every passenger saved from that galaxy had those coordinates recorded into the base level of their neurogenetic structure.”

  Then it was true. The worlds of that supercivilization, with all their advances in arts and sciences, all their populations of men and women evolved to the final levels of sanity and human perfection, would emerge shining from the shadow-clouds that swallowed them so long ago. Their towers of light would rear toward the stars they ruled once again.

  The idea was so bracing, so calming, to Gosseyn that he began to sense the memory from the seated man.

  IT was a memory of death.

  Gosseyn had slowly turned, to see Enro the Red standing—the image was almost perfect, though broadcast from light-years away—in the living room of his apartments on Nirene. To one side, an open door admitted the scent of Patricia’s orchids.

  To the other side were the desk and materials where Gosseyn had been working apparently on Crang’s Nirene case: The documents were readings from the personalityassessment machine of several of the ringleaders of the political party seeking to restore Patricia to the throne of the Greatest Empire. This was merely window-dressing: Gosseyn’s tertiary brain for many weeks had sensed the subtle space-distortions caused by Enro’s spying.

  His vocal cords and mannerism of speech, of course, were Crang’s. So it was as Crang that he asked, “How did you escape your prison-asteroid?”

  “It never confined me,” Enro’s rich, vibrant baritone rang out. “Gilbert Gosseyn was unaware that the shadow-form of the Leader, like that of the Follower, had been attuned to a galaxy-wide system of distorters. I could have left at any time. I delayed only until an actor to impersonate me could be found, imprinted with my personality to fool trained Accolon observers, and transmitted to my cell by someone who … well, let us say that one of my inner circle of my court has access to certain Gosseyn memories. And now—as you were once in that inner circle; do you need to be reminded of what I am capable of? Do you think I will spare you if you disobey me, when whole worlds who defied me died?”

  Gosseyn answered in Crang’s voice: “Had you kept your escape secret, your plans for conquest could have matured to the point where no one could have stopped them. You take an immense risk by revealing yourself to me. Why?”

  The great dictator came immediately to the point: “You must divorce the Gorgzin-Reesha. She is mine, my property, my sister, queen, and wife. We were separated at birth, and it was only by a miracle, the intervention of the Sleeping God, that she was found again.”

  Gosseyn raised Crang’s eyebrow slightly, and his strange yellow eyes showed no expression. “I am sure the paperwork for a court appearance is relatively straightforward here on Nirene. But what do I tell your sister?”

  Enro did not answer, but his pale face began to darken, his pupils to dilate to dark pinpoints. He was shivering with anger.

  In cold and hollow tones Enro spoke: “Paperwork! I am sovereign of this world and many others: Merely your word aloud to me is sufficient. The word of Enro the Red, Enro the Magnificent, founder of the forty-thousand-year dynasty to come, is all the memorial this legal process needs. But you must ask for the divorce. I must hear it from your lips.”

  By the time he was finished speaking, his body had blurred into a shapeless shape of dark mist, with little flickers and glows of controlled energy burning in the core of the shadow-substance.

  Gosseyn gave Crang’s head a curt shake. Crang’s voice was unafraid: “You cannot permit me to live, now that you have revealed to me that you have escaped prison, and that you control the Shadow Effect. So any divorce, legal or not, has no meaning … except to you. It was important enough to you to risk discovery of your plot. My death will be investigated by a Null-A, and he will discover you. It is already too late for you, Enro. You have ruined your sick daydreams for Galactic Empire, Enro. Whether you kill me or not, the clues you have already left behind will betray you, just as your neurotic obsession with your sister betrayed you.”

  The shadow-being raised his wraithlike hand and pointed: an ominous gesture. “Declare yourself no longer wed to my Reesha! Say it!”

  “Words that have no relation to reality mean nothing.” Crang’s voice had almost a lilt of humor in it.

  It was to see the image of the planet Ur, Enro’s base of operations, that this whole charade had been enacted. Enro’s attack method required that space-stress exist between him and his target, so it was Enro’s true location, and no other point in space, that had to be projected behind Crang to kill him. Gosseyn turned his head and memorized a few square feet of the soil there.

  When the Shadow Effect interrupted his biological functions, Gosseyn found the similarity connection with the now-empty Crang body broken.

  Gosseyn’s mind was no longer in the body, but he did not die with it: a trick he had learned from seeing X possess Illverton.

  THE memories were halted at that point: The figure in the chair had lowered his life-energy and sat without motion. His eyes were half-closed; his head was lowered, his chin on his collarbone.

  His voice was soft: “To grow another duplicate body to match Crang’s in face and features, but carrying my triple brain, had not been a simple matter. Tissue rejection, and an incompatibility of biological systems, had been overcome only with a series of energy adjustments, so that the rhythms and brain waves of the empty body had matched my own. The result was two Crang look-alike bodies, partially similarized because of their monozygotic nature. This body contained my triple brain, and was kept in suspension; the other contained an empty brain with no special adaptations to its nervous system. An extra brain would have been too easily detected by the medical corps of Enro’s secret police, or even by Enro himself, who can see through flesh and bone as easily as through walls. The Observer Machine projected my consciousness from this Crang body to the empty one. It was then similarized to one of the open points earlier in the time-stream, lived forward through a number of events, and eventually accompanied Patricia to Nirene.

  “Patricia insisted that certain hours during Gosseyn One’s early life be occupied by me, the duplicate of Eldred Crang. It was this body, for example, not the real Crang, who was kissing Patricia the night of your death under a hail of gunfire. Again, it was I, and not the real Crang, who was on the arm of Empress Reesha when she presented me to Enro, pretending a marriage to Crang to hinder Enro’s desire for the traditional brother-sister marriage of Gorgzid royalty.”

  Gosseyn said, “If you are from my future, tell me what next I must do.”

  The seated Gosseyn shook Crang’s head. “No. Every paradox we create, every bit of information passed against the direction of entropy, increases the likelihood that we fail the test of the Aleph Council and die, letting some other time-variant cure the continuum. I have restricted the memories of your immediate future t
o a minimum. Now you must leave, and before the other versions of you from down the time-stream arrive at this point, and create further paradox. I have a complete set of memories, and so I will take over organiztng the First Aleph Council.”

  Leave to where? But Gosseyn did not bother asking the question. The implications of Rhade Ashargin’s gruesome execution were clear. Enro’s pointless attempt to murder Crang provided the means.

  43

  Common sense, do what it will, cannot avoid being surprised occasionally. The object of science is to spare it this emotion and create mental habits that shall be in such close accord with the habits of the world as to secure that nothing shall be unexpected. —BERTRAND RUSSELL

  The few square feet memorized by Gosseyn’s extra brain when he turned to look at the crimson planet Ur: This memory had been transferred into his nervous system along with the rest of the scene of the Enro murder attempt.

  Attunement to the Sphere of Accolon gave Gosseyn the necessary range to bridge the gap between the two points.

  Gosseyn found himself standing on the red sands of an alien beach.

  Overhead was a red giant sun, dotted and streaked with sunspots, its corona tortured and pulled out of shape by the white-hot spark of a dwarf star passing across its face. Only the sky near the noonday sun was dark pink: Near the horizons, bright stars peered out from a colored sky, purple a shade brighter than black.

  Despite the look of the sky, the air pressure here was normal. With his secondary brain, he could detect a distorter field arching the heavens: a technology, no doubt left from the Primordials, designed to retain an atmosphere that would otherwise have boiled into space.

  No ship passing within ten light-years would have any instrument to detect the distorter anomaly, and a Mercury-type planet was automatically filtered out of navigation reports as airless and unfit for human life. Because of the structure of assumptions of the men designing planetary survey instruments, the planet Ur was so well hidden as to be invisible.