Null-A Continuum (24 page)

Patricia said, “Not to my knowledge.”

Dr. Halt said to the lie detector built into his desk, “Well?”

The machine answered thoughtfully, “The neural activity I am picking up is consistent with the presence of additional material grown from the brain stem. If this is a natural mutation, it is complex and complete beyond any on record.”

Patricia said, “He turned on the phone without touching it. He moved an object—excuse me, I remember seeing the phone move from one side of the room to the other by what I took to be a process of dematerialization and rematerialization. The phone did not appear different after the process to casual inspection: For all practical purposes, it was the same phone.”

The lie detector said, “She's telling the truth.”

Gosseyn said, “I can explain the physics involved.”

Dr. Halt said, “That will not be necessary for my purposes. Each possibility is impossible. You see,
Mr. Gosseyn, the existence of a hitherto-unknown mutation of man, a hitherto-unknown technology based on a hitherto-unknown law of nature, or the ability of a man to go insane without cause and without any sign of insanity, and to likewise share his delusions with his wife, so thoroughly that a lie detector cannot sense any deceptive intent, are all equally impossible according to how modern science thinks the universe works. I need to discover how you and I can both be sane, that is, can both operate with our nervous systems adjusted to an accurate model of the universe, and yet have conclusions about the universe that are mutually exclusive. Either you are mad or the universe is. Let us eliminate the first possibility. Mrs. Gosseyn, if you will wait here?”

The doctor led him into an inner examination room with insulated walls. The lights here were lowered, and the room was uncomfortably cool, since some of the electron tubes of the equipment were delicate enough to react to light and heat.

He had Gosseyn sit down in a chair made of electronically neutral amalgam, and he lowered a domelike instrument to delicate contact with Gosseyn's skull. The edge of the dome was at his collarbone. Gosseyn's vision was cut off.

“I am sending signals into various segments of your brain, the cortex, the medulla oblongata, the brain stem, to study the reactions in your neural flow. You are Null-A trained? Enter an alpha-wave biofeedback state for me, please. If you can do it without artificial aid …”

Gosseyn relaxed into a semitrance. He was aware only of occasional pressures and tingles in his limbs, as energy from the apparatus accidentally stimulated sensory nerves in the periphery of his nervous system. As the machine tuned itself more completely to his individual life-rhythms, this sensation dropped away.

Dr. Halt said, “There are energy connections leading to your wife—or should I say, to the woman in the other room, since you do not seem to regard her as being your
real wife, or even real at all—that are abnormally strong. The energy density involved is greater than the total mass-energy value of the universe. There is only one conclusion to be faced.”

Gosseyn, alarmed, raised his hand toward the domelike helmet over his head and tensed his muscles, as if to begin to stand.

The doctor's voice rang through the darkened chamber without emotion, cool and precise: “This universe is false, and all existence within it is illusionary: You are an entity from a superior manifestation of reality. Someone or something—a Deceiver—is projecting a four-dimensional energy-form through your nervous system to force you to create this false reality around yourself, based on your memories. I assume it is based on your memories, since otherwise I would not be present in the dream to be helping you wake from it. I am clearly a dream-element arising from your unconsciousness, not something the Deceiver would have chosen to put in this dream. By tracing the nerve paths the outside force is using to create this illusion, I can neutralize it.”

As Gosseyn struggled to rise, a strange fatigue, a heaviness, entered his limbs at that moment: a bout of the dizziness he had been suffering all day.

“Stop!” croaked Gosseyn, a feeling of nightmarish heaviness and slowness hindering his motions. Putting his numb hands to his head was like pushing them through glue. His fingers fumbled uselessly: He could not get the helmet of equipment away from him. “Stop! If you shatter this reality, everyone will die! Patricia, the Earth! Venus and the Mars colonies! Don't …”

He pushed the helmet away. There in the semidarkness was the psychiatrist, merely a silhouette standing next to his control panel.

A dry chuckle. “Come now, Mr. Gosseyn. A false existence is not worth sustaining. You know that.”

From the tiny red light winking on the desk Gosseyn could see the slim fingers of the psychiatrist push a
plunger. There was a low hum from the walls, and Gosseyn felt activity in his extra brain. The distorter cycle in his brain had activated without a conscious cue from him: He felt the energy surging in his brain. The process of twenty-decimal similarity was about to move him to … somewhere….

There was a moment of darkness.

“Category” confusion in an organism is caused by the attempt of the nervous system to identify one object, process, or event as another; neurosis is the rejection of all evidence to the contrary. The purpose of non-Aristotelian logic is to avoid such errors of categorization.

In the Shadow Galaxy, some three million light-years from the Milky Way, the superscientific ship
Ultimate Prime
was dropping to the surface of a planet of the Primordials.

Overhead the sun was not white but black, surrounded with a white halo of flame: This was a collapsed star. It was slowly eating its brown dwarf companion, as long streamers of star matter were pulled out of the dim photosphere of the dying dwarf star and pulled into the relentless gravity well of the collapsed star: Each particle of matter and energy was bent and pulled apart by the tidal forces involved as it passed through the accretion disk surrounding the black hole. The X-rays given off heated the other incoming matter to incandescence, and the deadly black sun was brighter than the full moon of Earth.

Gosseyn stood on the observation deck, watching the approaching landscape through an armored section of transparent hull. Dense clouds parted, revealing a world
of rippling browns and golds, dull grays and tawny yellows. The mountains were no more than low mounds, barren; the rivers were no more than tracks of salt across a flat plain, long ago silted up and choked. The oceans were shallow, ink-black with millennia of erosion. This was a world that had long, long ago lost all tectonic activity.

Here and there stood the mile-high towers of the Primordials, rising sheer from the gray-white soil, or tilted at alarming angles. Only a few had toppled entirely and stretched out flat, fallen giants. Elsewhere were black, white, and silver domes, looking like power stations and atomic piles.

Dr. Curoi of Petrino, the ship's nexialism officer, was standing at Gosseyn's shoulder. He pointed. “This solar system you similarized across space next to the ship was a good choice: The atmosphere is almost entirely argon and other inert gasses, and the remnants of the ancient civilization have been almost perfectly preserved. Their engineering skills were simply miraculous: The ship's radiation officer tells me that our plates are picking up controlled radioactivity from those domes. I suggested to Grand Captain Treyvenant that we start our experiment near that crater impact the astronomy team detected on the equatorial continent.”

They passed quickly over a stretch of gray-black, lifeless ocean. Here was a peninsula of land, as flat and dull colored as the rest of the planet. In one place was a crater-lake some eighty miles wide. Surrounding the crater, and evidently toppled by the impact, were numbers of the mile-high towers. Several of the towers had long sections of their armor torn away or had split along their corners, revealing, like the hexes of a honeycomb, level upon level and deck upon deck of the vertical cities within.

Dr. Petry of the ship's archeology department was talking over the ship's intercom. Gosseyn's belt-phone picked up the comment and forwarded it to him. “Our suspicions were correct. The material of these towers is
an artificial form of matter, composed of locked positron-electron pairs. The Brownian motion of the atoms itself produced their energy, light and heat, a nearly inexhaustible supply. The outer layer of tower-crystal was designed to shed the excess as harmless radiation. When they moved this world between stars, the structures would provide enough light and heat to keep the atmosphere warm, and the landscape flooded with brilliant light.”

Another voice on the same channel said, “The high-energy paleoanthropology team developed the plates we took passing over the South Pole. We think the megalithic structures are the remains of part of the artificial gravity mechanism used to stabilize the planet during interstellar flight. The main energy centers were probably off-planet, as were the distorter engines.”

In a short time, the ship came to rest on the dark soil of the dead world. Gosseyn and Curoi disembarked, along with Dr. Kair, the Null-A psychiatrist, and Leej the Predictress. Some scientists from the high-energy physics department, xeno-archeology, and neuropsychology were also present. In charge of this landing party was one of the lesser captains, Mandricard of Accolon. All were equipped with heavy armor, electromagnetically shielded to block the deadly X-rays issuing from the black sun. The robotools of the archeologists floated to the left and right, photographing, testing, sampling.

There were corpses everywhere. Some peculiarity of the atmosphere had almost perfectly preserved the mummified forms: blackened skin, paper-thin, covering skulls. In his lightning fashion, Gosseyn counted the bodies spilled just from one tower: over a million people. He multiplied that by the number of towers he saw, either toppled in the near distance or, on the horizon, rising in rank on rank.

Dr. Curoi's voice over the suit radio sounded strangely near-at-hand, even though the man himself was not in sight, having stepped into the toppled structure. “Note
the lack of children's bodies. This suggests the race discovered personal immortality.”

Gosseyn said, “The population of this world must have been in the tens of billions. And yet there is no sign of agriculture, aquaculture, or cattle-herding. How did they eat?”

Curoi said, “We may know more after the seismic teams analyze the echo-reflection data from the machines at the world's core. Autopsy might tell us if those odd, specialized organs in the digestive tract converted broadcast energy from the core machine directly into cell nutrients.”

Leej was walking near Gosseyn. While her armor was as bulky as everyone else's, her footsteps were more uncertain, because she was a novice at spacesuit work, her planet having never achieved space flight. She said, “The future is about to blur in two minutes, right after the archeologist makes his announcement.” Gosseyn saw from his helmet readout that this was sent on a private channel, narrow-beamed to him alone.

“Is it something I do?” Gosseyn sent back.

There was a rustling sound, and then an embarrassed sigh. The rustling sound must have been Leej shaking her head, her hair scraping the earphones, and then a sigh because she remembered no one could see her head move. “No way to tell. It may come as a result of my experiment.”

Gosseyn drew his sidearm. This weapon's aiming beam was linked through the ship's electronic brain to a number of other power sources on the ship, so that an ever-increasing amount of power could be sent by distorter circuit through the hand weapon, including the whole force of the ship's main reactors.

Up ahead, Dr. Kair was studying one of the corpses through the viewing device on his helmet. On the general channel, Dr. Kair's voice came: “It is fairly certain that these people were killed instantaneously by the negative
distortion effect. The identity and position of the atoms in their bodies fell below the critical threshold level for molecular and atomic actions to continue. But I notice the effect is uneven. Leej, how much mass do you need to perform your prediction? We may be able to find some atoms intact.”

Leej said, “It does not work by mass. Events are linked by cause and effect. I cannot predict the decay of a radioactive atom, because one atom would not affect anything in my environment, but I can predict the behavior of a sensitive Geiger counter.”

Curoi the Nexialist said, “We have instruments much more sensitive than that.”

At that moment, the chief archeologist said, “We've found a body you can use for your experiment. It is in good condition, but it is not unique. Out of all this graveyard, I think the archeology team can let you disturb one of these poor souls.”

Leej moved over toward the body. It was slumped over in the bottom of what seemed the basin of a dry fountain. The body was blackened and burnt, but the clothing was strangely well preserved: a dark and simple garment with traces of rust at the collar, shoulders, and wrists, as if there had been clasps or ornaments long ago weathered away. The boots seemed to be a continuation of the pantleg fabric, merely thickened.

Curoi pointed at something on the corpse. “Look. Photovoltaic cells woven into the thread. The clothes are self-repairing. That's why the corpses fallen in the shadow are nude.”

Dr. Kair pulled a flat boxlike instrument out of his legpouch and passed it to Leej. “This cable attaches to your life-support. Otherwise the nervous energy of the unit will not penetrate your armor. As I explained before, the unit will put your brain into a relaxed state, and, if all goes well, trigger the complex of posthypnotic suggestions I've helped you implant in your mind. If I am correct,
your ability to overcome the illusion of time only in one direction, the future, is a psychological limit. Once you are subconsciously convinced that your powers can reach backward as well as forward, you should be able to summon up a vision of the past as easily as of the future.”