Null-A Continuum (50 page)

“You have seen the results of some of these manipulations. Of others you are unaware. In an early maneuver, the Ydd eliminated all forms of higher biological development, all intelligent species except for man. The Ydd spared man because, of all forms of intelligence in the original universe, your species took the longest to achieve and sustain civilization. Man is the organism most unsuited for sanity. The early form of the Absolute Intelligence which rose from that event was short-lived and badly constructed, so the onset of senility was rapid, so that the Ydd occupied many more millennia of the end universe than previously. However, man's emotional nature also gave him a drive and vision to explore even unlikely goals, and to unlock all the secrets of the human nervous system. The development of advanced scientific philosophies was pushed to a higher level of genius by man, so that early version of me was in a position also to manipulate time, and retroactively seed history with the Null-A philosophy, and other scientific advances in thought-systems. Leej of Yalerta was preserved through the prior universe with the knowledge needed to speed the mental evolution of mankind.

“You are the candidate for the next preservation.

“When you are ready, you may trigger the deep neural connections implanted by Dr. Halt, and break out of this false version of the universe.”

Gosseyn said, “Surely it is a great crime to destroy you and every living being on all the planets of all the ages of this continuum.”

“The Ydd are seeking a universe which gives rise to the Ydd directly, without the need for a prior biological race to create them. The Ydd are convinced that one possible universe must exist, out of the infinities of possibilities, where the particle structures of the early cosmos will, entirely by accident and coincidence, fall together and produce its complex mental structure and supporting energy-machinery. The Ydd will continue destroying ever earlier periods of time until they eventually erase themselves, me, and all other things. It is the self-destructive power of self-delusion at its most basic.

“This is not a sane universe. My intellect, mighty as it may seem to you, is insufficient. This plenum will perish, for this is not the version of reality where the Absolute Intelligence is composed of entirely sane and benevolent constituent minds.

“A more perfect version of the living universe must be created.

“Once that first Null-A continuum is erected, a structure will be in place to support all false and partial continua created by time-manipulation. The parallel continuum created from the Stability Sphere information the Ptath Council manipulated in order to have an early Ptath version send a message to you will be reinstated. Even that tiny universe created by Lavoisseur's intervention from your memories, a plenum no bigger than your solar system, where you met Dr. Halt, this can be brought out of non-being and fitted into the cause-effect structure of the Cosmic All. All parallels can be stabilized, once a sane and self-aware base universe is established to support them.

“Your experience with the recovery of the planet Corthid shows you the nature of the Shadow Effect is limited to certain frames of reference. A planet or a continuum that dies according to one point of view still exists according to a point of view attuned with it, provided sufficient information exists to force the similarity and
reimpose the proper identity relations onto the confusion of the Shadow Effect.

“You have the tools sufficient to undo the work of the Ydd, and have seen, in the depths of time, these thoughts of mine which lie in the furthest future sanity can reach. This universe has served its purpose: It now must give way so that the next can arise.”

Gosseyn's mind, stable as it was, reeled under the magnitude of the undertaking revealed to him. “You mad creature! Do you actually expect me to destroy the universe and create a new one? No one man, no one mind, has that power!”

The vast and jovial laughter rang silently through eternity. “Young fool, every man has the responsibility to remake his own mind, which is as much of the universe as falls under his control. Act swiftly, for even now my minds are eroding into the Ydd structure, and my regrets for addressing you begin to overwhelm my reason. Ancient and vast as I am, only you, a frail man who knows not who or what he is, only you, can decide whether the living universe shall prosper or shall destroy itself.”

Gosseyn saw in the superbeing's thoughts how, even now, vast energies were being gathered in that infinite cosmic mind occupying so many millions of millennia of universal night.

The anger of the living universe was roused. Particle masses in excess of the energy value of a galactic supercluster were being readied to wipe out the sections of time-space occupied by any version of Gilbert Gosseyn.

Performing the cortical-thalamic pause, Gosseyn became aware of the buried neural structures maintaining this continuum. A simple stimulus of the proper nerve centers interrupted the illusion. The now-familiar sense of pressure and nausea overwhelmed him.

He awoke in a condition outside of time-space.

The universe was gone.

The perception of time is a categorical perception that identifies the plenum of events as broken into cause and effect.

Gosseyn, braced for a continuation of the deadly attacks of the Ydd entity, encountered … nothing.

So tense was every nerve for combat that the absence of opposition actually disoriented him, like a man who crashes through an unexpectedly unlatched door. His shadow-form blurred slightly as his control over his body particles stumbled. Gosseyn performed a cortical-thalamic pause with all three of his brains, before his nerves were steady again.

Now he examined the nothingness-environment of non-space-time. His eyes told him no information: Photons could not exist here. His secondary brain likewise was in the no-signal condition: Neither particles nor energy flows registered. But the special capacities of his tertiary brain detected first one, then thousands, then clouds and nebulae of disconnected shadow-motes, each existing in its own isolated frame of reference, each subatomic particle or quantum of energy existing only in its own perceptual universe. The distorter-style connections, which should have existed between them, were absent.

The Ydd entity was without thought or motion. It was dead.

Measuring the nebular “body” was difficult, since the curvature of space here made distances meaningless. Before he lost track, Gosseyn estimated a range of two hundred billion light-years, something more than five orders of magnitude larger than the whole of space in Gosseyn's epoch.

The cause of death: Gosseyn concluded that the absence of the universe, of the time-structure the Ydd had
used to support itself, caused it to collapse into its elements.

Curious, Gosseyn decided to see what his secondary brain had done to fight and win this battle. Probing the memories in his secondary brain, Gosseyn forced a similarity between certain cell clusters and his cortex, so that his conscious mind had a link with that disconnected tissue mass that was his secondary brain.

And he saw … dazzling complexity.

His secondary brain was open to signals in the universe. That was its function. Someone had been pouring signal groups into his brain to “memorize” the various segments of the universe that came within his range, and passing the information along to the array of Space-time Spheres artificially maintaining the cosmos.

Someone? The energy-group associated with Leej and her emotion-activity toward him, her unrequited love, had been the channel manipulated. The Absolute Intelligence at the end of time had been using Gosseyn's extra brain as the conduit through which they fought this battle. If battle it could be called.

His whole of this so-called battle with the Ydd entity had merely been an attempt by his secondary and tertiary brains to trace the linkages and connections the Ydd used to maintain contact within itself. Each time another volume of the Ydd had been comprehended and memorized, Gosseyn's extra brains in an automatic fashion had passed the information along to circuits within the Sphere. Each time the Ydd struck at him with energy-forms of any kind, Gosseyn's special brain reflexes simply traced the identification patterns of the controlling link used back to its origin and memorized yet another frame of reference occupied by the volume of the being.

There was no memory in any of his brains about the conclusion of the battle. But its end was easy to deduce: The Ydd had reached into the universe and destroyed the Space-time Sphere system in order to erase all record of
itself. Collapsing the Spheres had collapsed the structure of time-space, and this, in turn, ended the energy-process of the Ydd.

It had killed the continuum on which it existed as a parasite, killing itself in the process.

Why? What had made it so fearful of discovery that it preferred death over a record being made of its internal mental architecture? The psychology was more than merely aberrant.

Gosseyn turned away from the question to contemplate a more pressing matter. Where was the next universe?

Surely some natural process was about to bring it into being?

Then he saw the spark.

Just as suddenly, it was gone.

A pearly light, immeasurably distant, flickered into existence and vanished, all so swiftly that Gosseyn could perceive it only by using the prediction system of the Yalertans to review that same split instant multiple times and slowly build up a dim energy-picture in his secondary brain. The estimated life span was less than a microsecond: The mass-energy was on the order of a few ergs. If that had been a universe, it was a small and weak one indeed.

The disconnected shadow-particles merely by random motions were entering each other's frames of reference closely enough to interact. The geometry of interaction defined what energy appeared: rotations manifested electromagnetism, whereas flat or curved motions created time-space metrics, such as gravity or strong nuclear force.

After a few hours of subjective time, Gosseyn had seen enough of the pearly sparks flickering and vanishing to confirm a statistical distribution. The likelihood of an irruption was an inverse function of its total energy.
The amount of time it would take for something the total size of the universe to spring into being naturally … the number was so large as to be meaningless.

Gosseyn began to reorganize the shadow-substance in his body. Up till now, he had held it in a roughly humanoid shape, because that was mathematically easy. Now, he began pulling all the particles of his body into one point in space, but distributing them into two directions he arbitrarily designated as “future” and “past.” Using his secondary brain to similarize energy flows across his own internal frames of reference, he enforced a rule that entropy was always the direction of the future.

From his own point of view, of course, Gosseyn still retained a body, the atoms and molecules and cells whereof remained in their normal cause-effect relations to each other. From an outside point of view, it seemed as if his body mass, with one atom every millisecond, could spread out through a time-volume of roughly 21 trillion millennia.

His tertiary brain allowed him to operate within that frame. He used the Predictor technique to look up and down the time interval occupied by his body, to locate each “spark” created by a frame-of-reference collision the split second of its existence, and used his secondary brain to memorize the spark when it appeared. Each time he memorized a spark, it entered his frame of reference and became a white light like a fixed star.

That was why the Ydd had reacted so violently when Gosseyn had oriented toward a particle when first they'd met: Gosseyn had been unintentionally beginning the process of universe-creation, using the Ydd body as a raw material.

Gosseyn saw he had insufficient mass. Selecting the spark farthest futureward of his time location, he similarized his body to that spot, while maintaining his attunement to the sparks already located. He repeated the process several times, gathering more particles. He used
several different techniques to try to decrease the subjective amount of time the particle-gathering process would occupy.

He did it again. And again. After a day or two of his own subjective time, he had covered only 210 trillion millennia of time-distance and had gathered nine times 10
⁵⁷
atoms. About enough to make ten solar systems.

He stopped. The sheer magnitude of the task was overwhelming. It would require billions of years of subjective time to gather enough mass-energy for what he had in mind.

What was his error?

Gosseyn wondered what categorical assumption he was making about the nature of time and space that caused him to perceive the non-being of the pre-universe in this fashion.

His brain had been evolved inside the context of the continuum. Even in this nothingness, he still thought of himself as possessing a body extended in three dimensions of space, a linear dimension of time. But these perceptions were false-to-facts.

Gosseyn told himself that he was actually perceiving the essential nothing. A paradox, because non-being had no properties and nothing to perceive. Therefore … what was he looking at?

If time and space were merely categories of perception, here he must assume that all the particles of the Ydd body were “actually” in one moment of time, one point in space, and had no separate identity. Which meant that they were merely not interacting because of an error of reference: a manipulation of perception similar to what the Follower had done to allow himself to affect his environment without being affected by his environment. A trick, a misperception.

Of course! Foolish not to have seen it before. From the Ydd's own point of view, all the mass of its body must be within the same frame of reference. Which meant there had to be a control system, a set of references to which all
particles oriented, even if they were not oriented to each other. And since each particle separately must contain within it some memory of that reference …