Null-A Continuum (27 page)

Someone had laid out on her bed the insulated suit, webbed with lie detector–style neural amplification circuitry,
that she was to wear while entering the navigation core during the experiment.

Leej stared at the clothing on the bed with a mounting sense of frustration, shame, and a sarcastic amusement at her own situation.

With a bitter laugh and an abrupt gesture, she tore off her clothes and stood staring into the full-length mirror on the wall, her hands on her hips. She was a good-looking, well-groomed woman, in her thirties, dark haired, her head perhaps a shade too large for her frame.

“Well?” she said aloud. “Do you see what you've been missing?”

Gosseyn noted that staring at a woman through a woman's eyes, with the glandular and neural reactions of the woman, produced none of the normal animal reaction that a healthy young male might have felt. His feeling, again, was one of clinical detachment. Leej might be offended that she had a voyeur lodged in her brain, but she also knew from Gosseyn's own unconcealed and inconcealable thoughts that he meant not to embarrass her, not even in this situation of forced intimacy.

“Don't you find me even a little attractive?”

Gosseyn's thought:
Only once you are aware that your reactions to events are based on false-to-facts associations can you adjust your emotions to reality. Rage or frustration or cynicism is a negative feedback signal, warning you of maladjustment. The signal will cause pain but will not correct the behavior causing the pain, because your attempts at correction are based on a false picture. This false picture was evolved to flatter you rather than tell you how to negotiate with reality.

Her reaction (of course) to this little lecture was one of rage and frustration and cynicism. And then suddenly, welling up inside of her like a dam breaking, came misery: the misery of a woman in love, never to be loved in return, because the immortal superhuman man she loved regarded her as mortal, worthless, and weak.

To Gosseyn's surprise, Leej sank down on the bed in tears, hiccoughing, swallowing her sobs so as to make no noise, her nose stinging, trying her best to weep silently, lest someone in the companionway overhear.

And this was apparently the future she had selected where the two of them adjusted to the inconvenience of sharing a body as quickly and harmoniously as possible.

Since Gosseyn himself also felt all the neurological and physical sensations of stabbing sorrow and womanly hurt, he performed the cortical-thalamic pause, trying to retain his sanity amid the turbulent flow of emotion.

And her emotions, naturally, were calmed as well. After a brief while, the tears subsided. Leej, her eyes red, said to the mirror bitterly, “Am I really so much worse than Patricia?”

It is not a question of better or worse.

But Patricia's rejection of her own royal birth was the very thing Leej lacked: an objective sense of her own self-worth, based on real accomplishment. The sunny humor and cool self-control of Patricia contrasted sharply with the bitterness of this neurotic, self-deluded female. Gosseyn could not prevent himself from thinking the unflattering comparison.

Leej's reaction was arch.

“I thought you could never be attracted to a woman who had no Null-A training. But you do love her, do you not?”

I do not. Those feelings were implanted as false memories.

“Then why do you miss her cooking? Why do you miss your little fruit farm?”

And for that he had no clear answer, not even in his own thoughts.

The human nervous system is limited in its capacity to draw meaningful distinctions and therefore must treat similar objects as if they are identical: This is always done with reference to some purpose.

Soon Leej was zippered into her skintight insulated suit and floating in the center of the vast cylindrical space of the navigation core. She had braided her hair tightly and held it in place with the clip, to make it less of a nuisance in zero-gee. A half a dozen umbilical cords and wires connected her with instruments and recorders. Over her belt-phone she spoke with Dr. Kair and Curoi and Grand Captain Treyvenant as preparations were made and the final countdown began. As before, the distant hull above, below, and to each side was black with vision-plate images of the surrounding galaxy.

Leej said into her phone, “I don't see how this can work, even theoretically. Gosseyn's thoughts may be living in my head, but his extra brain is still back in his head, unconscious.”

Dr. Kair said, “Aleph established a nineteen-point similarity between Gosseyn's thought-patterns and his body. Our instruments are picking up readings of the energy signals passing back and forth from his unconscious body. We believe that when Gosseyn thinks the proper sequence in your brain, this will push the similarity to the final decimal point, and remotely trigger the nerve connections in his extra brain.”

Leej said, “What if it doesn't work?”

But it did work.

Leej's first impression was of a sudden, dizzying increase in the clarity and range of prediction-pictures surrounding the vision-plates: She saw the tremendous and slow astronomical motions of dead stars orbiting the
black center of the Shadow Galaxy, the great sweep of the spiral arms, moving and collapsing, like the froth of a whirlpool, spiraling inward.

There were no duplicate or parallel pictures, as she might have seen surrounding predictions of human behavior, where there was some free will or uncertainty involved. With slow, titanic motions, the orbits of the black stars decayed, the spiral arms fell inward on themselves, the galaxy condensed into a small irregular cloud and sprays of black star clusters, and finally the vast singularity at the core of the galaxy consumed the remainder.

Normal prediction could reach three or four weeks into the future. Larger and less-avoidable events, such as natural disasters, could be seen a year or two before the event. But this scene, the old age and death of millions of stars of the Shadow Galaxy—Gosseyn estimated the time interval involved to be between fifteen and twenty million years.

Unexpectedly, the prediction-picture broadened, embracing the surrounding galaxies, as dust and other fine particles of matter (to which their vision was evidently attuned) spread across the universe as the Shadow Galaxy dissolved.

A new vision arose: There were still a few dim red stars scattered throughout the universe, fewer and fewer per galaxy. Stellar formation had ceased long ago, but the smaller, cooler stars were tarrying before they burned out. Galaxies were nebular clouds composed of compact bodies: planets, burnt-out dwarf stars, neutron stars, black holes. Matter was undergoing inevitable degeneration as proton decay set in.

Leej said,
This future is from one hundred trillion years hence.

Gosseyn asked,
How can you tell?

A Predictor can just … feel … from the length of the vision how far it has traveled.

In other words (Gosseyn thought), Leej did not understand
how she knew. She was not an analytical person and her culture not a scientific one. But for all that, he did not doubt her conclusion.

The vision shifted again: Gravitational perturbations had flung the planets, slowly, over eons, out of their orbits, and they either fell toward cold stars or sailed away into lonely, everlasting night.

Gosseyn:
How long?

Leej:
The number of years is ten to the exponential power of fifteen. An immensity! If the life of the universe up to the point of the previous vision were lived over again ten times, that would approach this epoch. The eons it took for all the stars to be born and reborn, grow old, and finally die were only the first beginning. This is a universal night ten times the length of the universal day.

Next came another vision, this one even darker, older, colder than before. A huge segment of space-time, large enough that Gosseyn, through Leej's vision, could sense the curvature of the universe itself, was included within the view. Here there were no galaxies, for each galaxy had lost its stars. The stars had either fallen into supermassive black holes at the galactic core or been sent wandering, cast adrift in the endlessness. The dead and dying stars were now as far from each other, on average, as the supergalactic clusters had been in Gosseyn's time.

Leej:
And this is ten times further again. This is ten to the exponential power of sixteen years. But we must reach farther … farther….

Gosseyn:
Surely all life died off long ago!

Leej:
No. I am still detecting the disturbances from free will. Something in the vast void is thinking, is acting, is changing its own future….

Again the vision blurred and sharpened. Now the mass of the universe was mostly composed of a haze of gamma radiation Gosseyn could dimly detect with his extra brain. Gosseyn, able to sense and memorize the clouds of matter across thousands of light-years, did a random
sampling and made an estimate: Roughly half the mass of the free-floating matter in the universe had been converted to gamma rays due to proton decay.

Leej said,
This is ten to the exponential power of forty years. And yet there is still life here.

Gosseyn:
Where?

She showed him first one golden point of light, hovering in orbit around the supermassive black hole remnant of what had once been the core of a galaxy. And then, many numberless billions of light-years away, a second one, and then a third.

There was a slight refraction to the mental picture, as if there were more than one possibility here. Something more than the mere mechanical actions of the laws of nature was at work. Whatever this golden atom was, it was man-made.

Gosseyn attempted to “memorize” one of those golden points of light with his extra brain. He had a sense of immense
smallness
, as if the thing were many times smaller than the core of an atom … and yet it was massive, heavier than many solar masses. But it did not seem to possess the flattened smoothness of neutronium. His impression was one of cunning, gemlike intricacy, like the workings of a Swiss watch, but on a subatomic level, dealing with forces and energies immeasurably powerful, compressed into a measurelessly small space.

What was it?

Gosseyn suddenly felt a sensation, a distortion, as if Leej were being “photographed” by a distorter circuit.

From the tiny golden atom came an irresistible
pull.
…

Darkness!

LEEJ found herself lying facedown, her cheek pressed against a hard, cold surface, harder than glass. She put her hands under her and rose.

She was still wearing her insulated suit, but whatever force had plucked her out from the middle of the
Ultimate Prime
had very carefully unlatched her umbilical cords, removed medical sensors, and unscrewed fittings from sockets on her suit without tearing the suit.

There were a dozen golden giants with Gosseyn's face here, surrounding her. They sat in a circle on an elevated stage, leaning across a table of dark substance. The table was shaped like two horseshoes set end-to-end: Leej stood on a depressed circle of floor in the middle. Overhead was a black dome. Whether it was the sky of this lightless universe or merely a dome of black glass Leej could not tell.

There was a second ring of Gosseyn-faced men seated behind and above the first, and a third ring above and behind them.

Leej said, “You again! Doesn't anyone live to make it all the way into far future but you, Gilbert Gosseyn?”

One of the figures spoke in a voice like the bass string on a viol, his tones rich with humor: “It is not that the Gosseyn-Lavoisseur line is particularly long-lived; it is merely that we have the primary interest in meeting our remotest version, and so arranged to be at the time and place when and where he would manifest.”

Leej became aware of the fact that Gosseyn was no longer in her thoughts. His calming presence had vanished. Had she been catapulted into the remote future by herself? She could feel the panic rising in her.

A second one said, “We are maintaining the gravitational metric at the surface of a neutron star by de-similarizing the matter here from the effect of the gravity well. We do not normally appear in physical form. The atoms and molecules around you, including the substance of our bodies, were restored out of memorized distorter patterns matrixed in the core of the neutron star. Since the material universe has entered a period of low-energy disintegration, the minds that were once composed of all living beings in the galaxies have retreated into an out-of-phase condition, so that their thoughts do not occupy a particular point in time or space.”

A third Gosseyn-Aleph spoke: “The engine that maintains this cosmic thought-record is housed in those superheavy atoms you sensed during your approach. When Gosseyn attuned you to one of them, it reacted automatically to memorize and preserve your brain information: The side effect brought you here.”

Leej said, “What happened to Gosseyn? Why isn't he here?”

A fourth one answered her: “The nature of memory is fundamentally tied to the nature of time: The human nervous system interprets the direction of greater entropy as the direction of consciousness, since memory is an organization of thought, and internal organization creates greater disorganization externally. Gosseyn's thoughts are suspended: To the unprepared mind, a condition of no-time forces a condition of no-thought.”

The first one spoke again: “The moment he wakes, his mind-patterns will be similarized to our own, and he will be mechanically educated with the processes he needs to be able to survive the Shadow Effect. At that time, we will assist you, so that you may continue your journey.”

Leej said, “And what is the meaning of this? Why did you send one of your numbers back into the past to meet us?”

The second Gosseyn-Aleph answered, “The Gosseyn you saw is from our future, possibly the ultimate or last of us. He has accomplished what we have not yet accomplished, and breached the time barrier.”