Null-A Continuum (45 page)

“What would happen if I asked you to interpret the comment as my opinion?”

I would log the opinion in my medical file under patient's communication, prepare my internal systems for surgery, and stand by for orders from you.

“You said you interpreted a previous order to include me. You used your discretion because you wanted me covered by that order. Why?”

As previously stated: To minimize possible conflicts of priority within my hierarchy of directives. In this case, interpreting orders concerning Ptath to apply to you opens certain possibilities of satisfying a certain high-priority directive that would otherwise be closed.

Gosseyn started laughing.

“Observer! I order you to use any means necessary to restore me, Ptath, in any of my versions to full health and sanity. You may disregard any protest or countermanding orders I may have given in the past or shall give in the immediate future. Any orders I gave you telling you not to answer questions, or to hide information, or to lie, you may disregard. Who is the Chessplayer?”

Inxelendra. The person who arranged to have a Ptath body brought here, and ordered me to cure his affliction, so that a Ptath variant memory chain developed a separation from the memory chain of his prior continuity, was Inxelendra Gorgzor-Reesha, Bride of Gorgzor, the third of my four passengers. She is the widow of the patient you killed.

She has also, from time to time, arranged other circumstances, such as the growth of an Eldred Crang body from his cell samples, or the imprint of your memories onto the Ashargin heir, or the military defeat of the Greatest Empire, and so on.

A suffocating, powerful force-field suddenly paralyzed Gosseyn, holding him immobile. His heart was suspended in its beating; his lungs could not move. He could not blink. He was alive, aware, but utterly motionless down to the cellular level. Gosseyn attempted to grapple with the energies surrounding him, but his extra brain did not respond.

Through the mental link, he shouted, “Stop! Release me!”

Your previous order allows me to disregard your current order. The repair operation requires several steps. This is the first. Please remain calm.

Memory is identity.

Gosseyn was aware of energies probing his nervous system, making adjustments. At one point, his eyesight dimmed and blurred, as something was being done to the visual centers of his brain; at another point, his eyesight suddenly sharpened, his vision clearer and more precise than before. It was not until a moment later that Gosseyn realized, with a shock, that his point of view was not dimmed by the transparent lid of the medical coffin but was hovering a few inches above it.

The Crypt of the Sleeping God was as Gosseyn remembered it: The far wall curved into the chamber. From each corner arched a columned pylon. The four curved pilasters ended on a narrow buttress about twenty feet out from where the wall should have been. It could have been the head of a coffin: Gosseyn could see his own features beneath the surface, which was made in a set of overlapping, sliding plates. The inner wall was translucent and glowed with an all-pervading light. Steps, also made of
sliding plates, led from the bottom to the top of the buttress.

Previously, the chamber had also contained religious paraphernalia: ancient scrolls and stone tablets, jeweled knives and ornamental bells and cylinders of wood inscribed with prayers. All that was gone. Instead, a system of cables led to and from glass cabinets filled with electron and nuclear tubes, and yellow energy-regulators dotted the floor. Cables led from this machinery to the atomic pile near the center of the ship, and other cables led to the steps made of sliding plates, some of which were slid open to reveal the control machinery beneath. Gosseyn recognized an astrogation table, a pilot's yoke, Vernier instruments for taking X-ray sightings on distant quasar sources. The Crypt had been restored to operation. The astrogation table was dark with clouded images: The ship was near a dead star, and a world covered with the blackened debris of the Shadow Effect was below. Long-range telescopic images were being automatically recorded of empty buildings, billions of years old, their sides streaked with the degenerate dark matter of exposure to the effect. Gosseyn was unpleasantly reminded of Crang's corpse. Other telescopic vision-plates were tuned to views of dull red dwarf stars, neutron stars, brown giants, all the dismal astronomical bodies of the Shadow Galaxy.

Gosseyn's point of view swept through the ship. On another deck, an immense library of distorter cells, thousands of them, was shining with activity, as millions or tens of millions of energy connections were being maintained with distant points in space-time. But there was no human crew aboard.

Of course. The ship had been designed to be piloted by the Observer. The astrogation equipment Gosseyn saw was probably not for a pilot but for a passenger. The passenger could no doubt act as copilot when the Observer grew uncooperative: Gosseyn traced several of the control cables to where they had been spliced into the machinery
under the deck, leading to the atomic pile, the distorter-core, and the antigravity-maneuvering plates.

“You've given me Enro's power of seeing at a distance.”

You would require years of practice to achieve his range and flexibility, which extends for several light-years and covers all bands of the electromagnetic-gravitic spectrum. With the Stability Sphere system to amplify him, his range includes everything within the local cluster of galaxies. This was merely a side effect of the nerve-gland stimulation I have begun in preparation for the forced growth of your third brain.

“Third—what do you mean, third brain?”

An extra area of brain tissue, not connected to your current extra brain, is needed for you to be able to overcome the shadow-defense energy-attack combination which would otherwise kill you.

I have reorganized your medulla oblongata to be more efficient, so that half the current nerve cells can perform its current function; the other half will be set aside and mechanically educated to the new function as a tertiary brain.

“Is this what you did to Secoh? Is that why the Follower had the ability to manipulate space-time around him while in his shadow-form?”

Correct. The Follower's technique deceives the fabric of space into an asymmetry. Space, after all, is not a neutral set of absolute locations. The Follower is regarded as being “inside” the frame of reference of energy he is manipulating; for all other purposes, he is “outside” the frame of reference. The three lobes of the brain must be separated, in order that the two mutually contradictory frames of reference have limited communication between them: Otherwise a dangerous energy reaction would occur.

Gosseyn said slowly, “But Secoh did not have the scientific training to understand the implications of this, did he?”

Indeed not. This is the primal secret of the universe.

To act is to interact. Two particles in the same frame of reference are aware of each other only insofar as they identify each other. The identity is what establishes the boundaries of permitted behaviors, which form a statistical region or “cloud” of possible interactions. When the particles are no longer in each other's frame of reference, the statistical region approaches zero, and the particles are unaware of each other.

This, then, is the secret that has baffled the simple Aristotelian and Newtonian physics of positive-belief systems. There is no “action at a distance” because there is no distance. The strong and weak signals we interpret as space-time are measurements of the degree of similarity of the statistical region of behaviors of two particles. The distorter technology, the Predictors of Yalerta, Enro's clairvoyance, the energy-transmission powers of the Royal House of Dzan: All these are based on the fundamental mechanics of forcing particle behaviors into artificial similarity, and thereby mechanically denying the illusion of space-time separation.

The primordial particle of the Big Bang, which contains the total mass-energy of the universe and occupied one Planck unit volume of space, from its own point of view has never moved. Energy signals leaving one pole of the primordial particle and reaching the other pole created the first two frames of references, each of which regarded itself as a distinct particle observing a second particle. The signals were strong at that time, and so the illusionary separation in time and space was small.

But the second law of thermodynamics operated to weaken the signal, and so the appearance of space-time separation increased with dramatic suddenness.

When this happened, the number of possible frames of reference also increased dramatically. Each image or mirror-reflection in curved space of the fundamental particle increased its number of possible perception-paths back to itself. At first all particles were identical,
but entropy decay of some signals degraded the “images” each particle had of all others, and hence differentiated the acceptable behaviors of each perceptual set of particles. The symmetry of behaviors broke into three sets of rules: strong nuclear force, electromagnetism–weak nuclear force, and gravity.

From the point of view of an outside observer, it would seem as if the fundamental particle had somehow ejected matter and energy to locations outside of its own event horizon: a seeming impossibility, since nothing can depart from an event horizon. In reality, what happened is the concept of “location” moved within the primal particle's event horizon.

Gosseyn's mind reeled with the implications of what he was hearing: the origins of the universe, and also the possible end of the universe.

If these “energy signals” the machine spoke of were isolated into parallel time-axis frames of reference but otherwise followed the same event-paths as the previous group of signals, that would explain the nature of these so-called false universes Gosseyn had broken out of, but they were actually no more false or true than the original universe.

Gosseyn said, “What could cause this first energy-link from one pole of the primal particle to another?”

Self-perception.

“So the Big Bang requires an observer to set it in motion?”

The answer is a qualified yes: From the point of view of an observer outside, an observer is needed. From the so-called point of view of the primal particle, of course, no time passes and nothing is changed.

“How can any observer be present before the Big Bang?” But he realized the question was foolish even as he spoke it.

The Machine answered nonetheless:
Present and past are categories of perception only partly accurate. The actions of observers within the bound system of time-space
who investigate their past and ultimate origins are what set the process in motion. Obviously universes in which no intelligent life evolves cannot produce observers of sufficient perception to set the circular chain of events in motion: Such universes, by definition, are stillborn.

“How was the first event set in motion?”

The question is meaningless. Self-perception is the fundamental reality. Matter is an illusionary category used to establish contextual relations between the myriad frames of reference of the fundamental particle regarding itself. Mankind and all its works are an intimate part of the cosmos and the self-perception of the cosmos.

A universe where the self-perception is inaccurate, a continuum of madness, will degenerate quickly back into the fundamental particle as the energy signals lose coherence. All the complexity of matter-energy space-time evolution will be brought to nothing. On the other hand, a universe where the self-perception is accurate, a Null-A Continuum, is self-sustaining.

Do you understand now what the shadow is?

Gosseyn did. It was the deliberate disorganization of the self-perception of the universe itself. “How soon until my tertiary brain is equipped with the Follower's space-deception technique?”

It is done. Are you ready for the next step in your treatment, O Ptath? The insanity in your extra brain, which has been hindering you from the first, must be cured.

“How?”

By training you to acknowledge what you really are.

“What am I?”

You are one individual, O Ptath, who is using a distorter technique to occupy two bodies at once, and suffering from a split personality syndrome. The split can be cured … now.

Gosseyn opened his eyes. He was in another body.

When the symbols an organism uses to grasp and manipulate reality are false-to-facts, this is called a semantic disturbance. Sanity is approached by checking symbols against their referents. Neurosis results from the attempt to protect false-to-facts associations from criticism.

For a moment, he could not see where he was. He felt a floating sensation, but he seemed to be standing upright. But sight inspired him with vertigo, because the ground was somehow wrong. Metallic shapes were above him and below. He was aware of the emotional meaning of the shapes before he could grasp their visual meaning: victory, power, and strength. Also, in the distance was a leaping reddish light that gave him a sense of cruel joy. Many voices roared aloud, and this sensation mingled with the pride pounding in his heart. And over all and behind all was a sense of utter certainty, utter rightness: as if everything he saw was not just right, but fated and ordained.

Then his mind began to interpret sensations: The ground was not wrong; it was merely far below his feet. The sensation of vertigo was caused by the fact that the balcony was tuned to transparent settings, so he seemed to be in midair, above his troops, who marched and rode the wide boulevard between two canyonlike walls of the conquered city. The metallic shapes below were armored vehicles and war-cars, some on treads and some on ground-repulsion plates, from military robots no bigger than crickets or rats to hundred-man walking fortresses, thundering behemoths of steel as large as the fortified positions they were designed to trample. Overhead were as many warships, both aircraft and spacecraft, torpedo shapes ranging in size from small destroyers and frigates to awe-inspiring superdreadnoughts and battlewagons.
In the distance were fireworks rising in celebration, while firefighting spaceships hung above a burning building, spraying the flames … but no: Those were not firefighters. The ships were spraying flammable chemicals onto the blaze, spreading it with beams of incendiaries.