Null-A Continuum (28 page)

Leej remembered Gosseyn's story he had told Dr. Kair. “The Shadow Men of A.D. Three Million supposed it would only be a matter of a few hundred years before time-travel was perfected. Are you saying that here, long after the death of the star-making phase of the universe, you still have no clue as to how it is done?”

Gosseyn-Aleph, or one of them, replied, “We know how it is done. Certain energy formations in epochs of intense gravity—such as exist at the core of dead neutron stars—have nineteen points of similarity between
themselves here/now and themselves at a prior time. The prediction power shows that the interval can be bridged. During the current span of the universe, where all remaining matter is neutronium and therefore naturally partially similarized backward and forward through time, our ability to investigate the phenomenon is greatly enhanced.”

A second one said, “But there is a negative energy barrier, a Shadow Effect, that normally prevents such time-distortions. The erection of this barrier was something imposed simultaneously upon all ages of the universe, a first step of an extra-universal attack, something meant to change the basic structure of reality itself.”

Leej said, “The other Aleph spoke of an infinite enemy, a creature called the Ydd.”

One of the Gosseyn-Alephs said, “It is to oppose the Ydd entity that this council has gathered, that we have taken the desperate steps we have. The youngest of us comes from as early as fifty thousand years after the Shadow Men. The eldest has not yet been born, but is present only in a copy of his brain we made through prediction power, transcribing his future thoughts into a blank matrix.”

Leej asked, “And …? How can you fight something not of this universe?”

“We have created not merely millions but billions of the Space-time Sphere amplifiers here in our own eon, scattered over a much larger radius than merely one galaxy, to create a correspondingly larger base-axis of operation. The Spheres will be oriented to Gosseyn the moment he wakes. This operation has used up most of our limited supply of uncorrupted atomically organized matter. Atoms are as rare, to us, as quasar pockets of the original Big Bang plasma are to you: the remnant of the universe as it once existed in a higher and more primal energy state.”

Leej whispered, “Are the stakes truly so high?”

“Observe!”

LEEJ had a sensation of immense speed. Darkness was again around her. She was unaware of her body. Her consciousness was like a moving point, speeding onward, faster and ever faster.

But not onward: backward. This was the second time her prediction power had been used to reach into the far past.

She saw the Shadow Galaxy again, but this time, it was an image from before the nonidentity effect had darkened it. This was the Primordial Galaxy of man in its pristine glory.

This image was one of a galaxy blazing with stars, the galaxy surrounded by a gemlike cloud of globular clusters, the spiral arms rich with multicolored clouds of nebulae, nurseries of fire where young stars where born: And here and there, pinpoints of intolerable brightness, were novae and supernovae, exploding outward to shower the surrounding universe with newer and heavier elements.

The picture was encompassing millions of years at a glance, so the galaxy, glinting, shining, coruscating, seemed a moving thing, the spiral arms lengthening and turning like some ancient sea-creature made of fire, its hidden heart pulsing behind a curtain of red, orange, and purple nebular gas-clouds.

Again, another picture: The galaxies were closer together now, and most of them were clouds in the shape of cylinders or toroids. The stars were the uniform white color, hydrogen-burning. The great nebulae reached from galaxy to galaxy, so that they seemed to be flowing rivers in which the galactic clouds were mere islands of foam. This was a very early picture of universal time. The element of helium had not yet been burned into existence by the slow process of cosmic evolution.

Next, an even earlier picture: a small white-hot universe where vents of superheated plasma were issuing from a tiny pinpoint, smaller than the core of an atom.
Time-space was enormously bent, so that light circling the miniature universe many times brought reflected images of the tiny point and its surrounding prominences to every side of the cosmos, spread and distorted as if in the surface of a curving mirror.

Leej was staring in utter bewilderment. To her it was a meaningless glare of lights.

Then, rising up from within her, that sensation of calmness and certainty she came to associate with Gilbert Gosseyn. He was awake!

His thoughts were here, once again were with her. She could see that he noted and knew that they were viewing the early universe. The universe was so small that tiny quantum-level uncertainties distorted the otherwise uniform flow of the prominences: Some swelled up like bubbles, creating eddies and ripples.

Within these eddies, so dense was the matter-energy involved that time and space were distorted, sometimes permitting time to flow backward, or for matter to spill out into the universe faster than the speed of light, “creating” an interval of space around it in which it could have its being. The whole universe was undergoing a rapid expansion and evolution. The primal ylem was breaking down into distinct variants of matter and energy, creating the dimensions of time and space as it did so.

Gosseyn and Leej both noticed an area of darkness, of shadowy non-being, issuing between the prominences.

Leej:
What is that?

Gosseyn did not know. He did the mental action of attempting to take a “photograph” of it with his extra brain. He sensed the underlying nothingness of the Shadow Effect: Even in this environment of immense pressures and temperatures so hot that no particles could exist for more than the merest infinitesimal fraction of a second, the shadow-stuff maintained its cold and vacuous nature, its fundamental non-being.

The shadow reacted. Gosseyn's extra brain felt the distortion of time-space around him as something within
that shadow-cloud formed a twenty-decimal-point similarity with him.

Overpowering alien thought-forms crashed into his brain:
Ydd extrusion fourteen communicates with Ydd central consciousness and reports interference within the prime radiant-from-origin segment of the fourteenth arc of time.

YDD OVERMIND CONSULTS WITH YDD ANALYTIC SUB-MIND AND SOLICITS A RESPONSE: SHOULD THE SURROUNDING UNIVERSE FROM WHICH THIS IRRITANT ISSUES BE ANNIHILATED?

Ydd Analytic replies in the affirmative. This is a universe in which life shall one day arise. Life poses an unacceptable potential threat.

YDD OVERMIND CONFIRMS. BEGIN PROCEDURE TO NULLIFY THE UNIVERSE.

The mental “words” were shockingly loud: Gosseyn's own thoughts were scattered and confused merely by the impact of the Ydd mental forms.

Leej was the first to recover. She saw a possible future and urged it toward Gosseyn: “You have already been taught by the Council of Alephs how to survive the Shadow Effect. They've made you into a being like the Follower. Use that power now! Quickly!”

Leej felt Gosseyn reach out and … break … the similarity allowing the Ydd to communicate with them. What was once identical he made non-identical.

The similarity existing between Leej's perception and the matter-energy conditions of the early universe also was broken. The vision vanished.

Leej blinked, expecting to see the curving table and the high dome of the Aleph giants all around her. Instead was … strangeness.

Human abstraction therefore is conditioned by environment: We make those distinctions and see those similarities useful to our thought process. In novel environment, those unconscious, automatic habits of assumption will no longer be accurate.

Around her was darkness, punctuated by terrifically small golden dots. Gosseyn was able to detect, very widely spaced, pinpoints of intense gravitational pressure, distorting the metric of space-time. These were massive black holes, scattered across billions of light-years, the rough cloud of them occupying an otherwise dark, blank, and empty universe. The golden pinpoints were the remnant of the civilization from which the Aleph Council had come. Leej noticed that she was perceiving these golden dots not with her eyes but with her prediction power: They were disturbing the fabric of time and probability. Gosseyn would not have been aware of them had he been in his own form.

And the black holes were melting, disintegrating, and shrinking into Hawking radiation. Leej was not occupying one moment of time but was viewing countless billions of years compressed into each passing second. She was racing from 10
⁴⁰
years to 10
¹⁰⁰
. A number so large only mathematicians had a name for it: the googol.

Leej thought,
I'm in space. Why can I breathe?

She felt a sensation of anger burning in Gosseyn's mind.

In his sanity fashion he put the anger aside, and in flashing thoughts he answered her briefly: Her body had been turned into shadow-stuff, like the Follower. The normal atomic and chemical reactions that would otherwise afflict her, such as oxygenation in the lungs, running out of air, explosive decompression, had no effect here.

“Your body, back wherever it is, in the past, in the chamber of the Aleph Council, is still breathing. The Follower needed a distorter circuit at the landing point wherever he cast one of his shadow-images. Aleph can evidently cast our shadow-image through time rather than space, and he put us here. And, apparently, Aleph needs no distorter circuit at this end….”

But then Gosseyn's thoughts leaped away from that chain of thinking, fascinated. For he had recognized the overall structure of the gravitic disturbances caused by the black holes that formed the remnants of long-dead galaxies.

It was a distorter circuit. It occupied all the available space, all the degenerate matter and energy left in this long-dead universe, but there it was: a machine the size of the universe, made of pulsations of gravitons.

The governing mechanism was a time-distortion coming from the golden pinpoints, which altered uncertainties on a supermicroscopic scale, so that each flying particle from the disintegrating singularities met and matched the particles from each other disintegrating singularity and the huge, intricate dance of very low, dull, slow energy formed a pattern of forces. This pattern of forces, in turn …

An engine of thought. An electronic brain, no, a
gravitonic
brain, composed of all the remaining stuffs of the universe.

But Leej was interested in what prompted his burst of anger upon arriving here.

Gosseyn could not hide his thoughts from her:
They lied to you.

The council of Aleph-Gosseyn-Lavoisseur beings had been lying. Gosseyn had not blacked out because the timeless condition had interrupted his thoughts. Had that been true, why would it affect him and not Leej? Gosseyn had not blacked out; he had been overwhelmed by nausea. The same dizziness he had felt back in the
pocket-sized universe, while being investigated by Dr. Halt.

The dizziness that signaled that the universe was a false one, too.

Leej merely laughed. “Dr. Kair knew it. So did Dr. Curoi. The ultimate Gosseyn means for all of us to die. This universe will not survive. It's another illusion, meant to trap you, and you will break out of it and destroy us.”
Because that is just the way some men are.

But Gosseyn's irresistible logic, in thoughts he could not hide from her, drove him further, to a conclusion more bitter than this: Gosseyn-Aleph had chosen Leej partly because her prediction power was needed to teleport Gosseyn into ever further future segments of his false universe. Obviously the effort was meant to find some point not covered by the negative energy barrier prohibiting time-travel.

But there was a second purpose here. The forced intimacy, the sharing of thoughts, had impressed upon Leej in a fashion nothing else could have done how fundamentally different, incompatible, Gosseyn was from her. Seeing the succession of ever stranger superbeings Gosseyn was destined to become had driven the point home. And then, meeting a whole council of them …

Gosseyn had to assume his far-future selves were as competent master psychologists as Lavoisseur had been: Lavoisseur, who with one casual-seeming comment had deadened Gosseyn's curiosity about his own origins of being, and had done so without Gosseyn's suspicions being roused.

… the council had manipulated her psychologically. Their talk of the desperation of the stakes, their exposing her to the ruthless mental impact of the Ydd creature at the dawn of time …

Gosseyn thought to her,
They mean you to sacrifice yourself. I am not sure how, or why, but something about you is unique, and useful to them….

Even as he thought this, he knew the answer. Dr. Halt had mentioned it: “There are energy connections leading to your wife…. The energy density involved is greater than the total mass-energy value of the universe.”

The emotions of Leej, the powerful infatuation, not only altered her electrochemical and glandular balances in her body but, acting through her Predictor power, also influenced the universe around her. Even an untrained brain, under the powerful influence of romantic devotion, could form a crude sympathy or similarity between two nervous systems. After all, the distinctions between mind and body, self and other, were as artificial, as far as the universe was concerned, as those distinguishing time and space. The powerful emotion of Leej the Predictress would be drawn to him, even across the boundaries of time.

And Gosseyn's horrible realization, in thoughts that he could not hide from her, was that he would have done the same thing, would have treated her, or himself, or anyone, as ruthlessly, once he was convinced of the need to do so. Gosseyn-Aleph, the ultimate version of him, had no doubt predicted exactly this flow of events, exactly these conclusions of this thought, to bring Gosseyn and Leej to the mental realization that …