Null-A Continuum (40 page)

And there were more images, and still more … a galaxy that was still a nebular cloud, from a very early period … a dark fleet of machines as massive as a galaxy but composed entirely of artificial atoms and elements unknown to earlier periods, to form some artificial mental system adapted to the conditions of the dark and sunless universe of the Age of Decay….

Gosseyn heard a voice, but, in his confusion, he could not tell where it came from. Time seemed to be strangely spread out and melted together: He both saw his body lying in its crate and saw the moment when he appeared on
the orbital station and the moment when Enro casually leaned over the edge of the crate and spoke to him.

The voice said, “Excellency, this is Predictor Thule. I can confirm: You will kill Gilbert Gosseyn in fourteen minutes. He is suffering from time-sickness….” (A chuckle.) “Any child of rank from a birth-center on my world knows how to shrug off this side effect … he will be helpless … no, there is no blurring … the future is certain.”

Predictor
Thule! The chief of the Safety Authority on Accolon was not merely one of Enro's agents; he was one of the Yalertans.

The blazing images of past and future filled Gosseyn's mind. He could not look away, as the visions were inside him, part of him, and he was part of the universe.

He tried to find his home galaxy, the eon of time native to him, but the spiral galaxy was now turning like a vast pinwheel, its arms of fire rotating, each star traveling at a different rate. Where was the star Accolon? Or, no, wasn't he on Earth? Wasn't he an old man dying from a soldier's bullet on the floor of the Semantics Institute? No, he was a farmer from Cress Village … no, he was a baby in an artificial crèche, kept in a state of profound unconsciousness, fed by liquids, his brain sensitive to the thought pressures of Lavoisseur …

… was that an earlier picture, or a later one?

Here he was, emerging from his suspension capsule onto the soil of an unknown world in the new galaxy. The two women passengers had survived, and he must select a wife from one of them, but the other man, named Gorgzor, had been fatally wounded. The Observer could keep him alive, barely … the dark-haired woman, who had been betrothed to the wounded man, was already beginning to weep … many children in the next generation were named after him, and one founded a tribe, the Gorgzides, that grew into the nation and empire imposing its name on the world….

Gosseyn saw Enro's face, eyes aglow with gloating
satisfaction, as the great dictator leaned over, looking down into the crate. He was dressed in a military uniform of scarlet and purple. Somehow, he seemed to be seated on an elevated throne of dark iron, and the emblem of the Three Watching Eyes of the Empire hung above and to either side of him.

“How convenient of you to have selected your own coffin, Mr. Gosseyn. X tells me he can prevent the transfer of your consciousness to your next hidden body merely by establishing a system of vibrations throughout this area with his robotic mind-paralysis units….”

Enro raised his hand. From the ghostly translucence of his flesh, Gosseyn realized he was looking at a projection, created by Enro's control over images sent through space.

No, that was not happening yet. This was a vision of a few moments in his future. Where was he? But the galaxy was too large; time was too immense. Gosseyn abandoned that search and looked instead to see if he could pierce and find the source of the billions of energy-lines that had pulled his perceptions so far away from himself.

Then he saw that there were systems of Stabilization Spheres not merely in the future galaxies but also in the past, including early periods of galactic evolution before the formation of planets. A paradox: The Spheres were made of elements, carbon, silicon, iron, uranium, which simply did not exist at that time.

Further, there were Spheres of the same design scattered throughout the Andromeda Galaxy, three million light-years away, and Fornax, and Sculptor, the supergiant galaxy in Triangulum … and farther….

His perception, his mind, encompassed the knowledge and texture of time and space, matter and energy, in all its complexity, of the entire Virgo Supercluster, of which the local cluster of galaxies was merely a small part: His thoughts reached across two hundred million light-years, to the Hydra Supercluster … it was more than any mind, even one as well trained as his, could bear….

Any child of rank from a birth-center on my world knows how to shrug off this side effect …

Gosseyn attempted again to perform a cortical-thalamic pause, but this time he used the hypnotic cues that lay beneath the pause to become aware of the flows to and from his extra brain … he made an effort to relax the nerves and muscles and calm the bloodflows surrounding the sensitive tissues at the base of his brain … because it was this area of the brain, not his thalamus, that was being overwhelmed. It was his perceptions that were insane, not his emotions. If a child could do it, it must not require advanced training…. Gosseyn saw one out of several possible futures … in the ones where he was dead, no information came back. From the future where he lived, the correct combination of cues to force the pause-of-perception came to him. He did not have time to train the unknown brain sections to a proper response conditioning. But he could simply dominate his own buried nerve-paths that same way he dominated the circuitry flows within the machines around him.

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.

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 Ydd? 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.