Null-A Continuum (41 page)

Within the light-cone were all slower-than-light phenomena, all the particles and galaxies of which man was aware. Outside, faster-than-light but just as real, was a timeless and dimensionless chaos, occupied by nothing but this single archaic, primitive, infinitely powerful being.

Through the Ydd senses, Gosseyn grew aware of a series of impulses, a flow of faster-than-light reactions reaching into and out of the cosmos. The impression was one of a complex and vital relationship: a symbiosis sustaining certain complexities of time and eternity within the universe and giving the Ydd something it needed.

Gosseyn sent the thought: “What is it? What do you need from the universe?”

Through some sense impression of the Ydd for which Gosseyn had no name, Gosseyn became aware of the nature of time, and he sensed a fixity, a cause-and-effect structure the Ydd would otherwise lack. Like a vine growing on a solid tree? No, the relationship was more intimate. Like a single-celled animal passing elements into and out of the membrane that formed its boundary: Except, in this case, the Ydd was the fluid environment surrounding, and it was somehow sustained and nourished by the interaction of the infinitely tiny, precious organism of the universe beating at its center.

The image changed: The Ydd perceived a corruption, and painful fluctuation within the universe that seemed to dissolve the time-structure, to weaken the faster-than-light energy-relations establishing the basic physical constants of the universe. This effect, whatever it was, created intense displeasure within the Ydd. Ydd was aware of a danger: It would topple and collapse back to the form it would have had if the universe were not present. Gosseyn sensed the simplest form of entity: an infinitely small point of unaware nothingness, unperceived by any other being.

“The Ydd life-process is tied directly to the nature of time-space itself, in a fashion that no material life existing in a slower-than-light zone of the universe can be. The Ydd can be damaged or destroyed by an alteration of the fundamental time-arrangement. If the Ydd perish, the universe perishes: The two are interrelated and symbiotic. Hence the rise of biological life within the slower-than-light frame of reference cannot be permitted to grow into a threatening direction. Hence by culling the segments of the universe where threatening behaviors arise the remainder of the universe can be preserved.”

“How large a remainder?”

The answer was in terms of a millionth of a second of time after the Big Bang. Instead of a period of antigravitational inflation, which would lead to a transparent and rarefied universe, the cosmic all of matter-energy would
recollapse immediately after its initial explosion and the universe never grow larger than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom.

“Where do I fit into this?”

“The interloper represents a threat. An alteration to a non-threatening posture is needed.”

“Because I am aware of you?”

“Yes.”

“Define the nature of this alteration. How do I become nonthreatening?”

“The Ydd offer … oneness!”

“My consciousness will be merged with yours?”

“The statement is correct. The partial consciousness of the now-limited being will be made without limit or definition.”

“Will I still be self-aware?” Gosseyn wondered if, once merged with this being, his thoughts could influence it into a nondestructive psychology, cure it. If so, his own annihilation would be a small price to pay. In his mind, he steeled himself to make this sacrifice, if necessary.

“No. Once the signal you call awareness has been summed to the one-in-all being of Ydd, there is no need of separate or partial awareness. There is neither memory nor intellection needed. Sensation will no longer be needed.”

Gosseyn's mind reeled back from the utter inhumanity of the offer. Oneness with … non-being? Death seemed clean and wholesome compared to that.

But the Ydd sent one more thought:
“This environment is the ultimate reality. All chains of causation spring from the Ydd origin; all chains of effect lead toward the Ydd finality. All actions taking place within the cosmos are organized for the pleasure of the Ydd. The Ydd are the absolute against which all else is measured.”

This was nonsense-talk. The emotion-delusion of self-absorption was one of the crudest and most primitive. Only a baby is too simple to know that other beings have value aside from their ability to serve the baby's need.
Even before learning to speak, small children learn to recognize other beings as having their own reality.

Gosseyn said briefly, “Sane men discover for themselves the overall meaning of their lives.”

There came a rumble in the darkness, and swirling churn of the clouds of dark chaotic particles.
“The Ydd express mirth. Limited creature! The events of your life, your separation into multiple copies, your regathering into a final version, were all organized since the dawn of time, since eternity, to serve the purposes of Ydd. The secret and supreme power you have sought your whole life, your Chessplayer moving you like a pawn, is before you. You have pierced the final veil separating human consciousness from utter truth. Look at this darkness around you. This is Ydd. This is the final truth, stripped of all illusion. There is nothing else.”

“Did you create the universe?”

A moment's hesitation, and then, slyly:
“Yes. Of course.”

It was the bald-faced nature of the lie that decided him. There was no point in further talk.

Gosseyn wondered if he had a weapon against this being. The relaxation Anslark had forced on Gosseyn's secondary brain had triggered a reaction with the primordial superhot, superdense matter of the origin point of the universe. In normal time, nothing would come of that reaction for over 170 years. But he was no longer in normal time. In fact, his time-relation to the cosmos was currently … nothing. It was arbitrary.

Gosseyn wondered if he could find a frame of reference in this non-space in which that 170 years would seem to already have passed. All that would be required was a prediction-type similarity to bridge the gap between himself-now and himself-then.

Gosseyn attempted to stimulate the proper sections of his extra brain.

Light!

An explosion of infinite magnitude filled all the nothingness around him.

If death came then, either from his weapon or from the instant and terrible Ydd counterreaction, it came too swiftly for any sensation.

Scientific thought is based on negative judgment: Reality disqualifies any scientific model found guilty of inaccurate prediction. Hence negative judgment demands that the man-made world-view should and must conform to the world.

Gosseyn was whole again, unwounded. He was dressed and standing upright on a floor. The light here came from a series of high, square screens showing images of underground cities or portions of rust-colored desert. Standing before Gosseyn and above him on a dais was a thin-faced older man with a lantern jaw dressed in a high-collared uniform made of photorepeating fabric. He was swaying on his feet, clutching a huge desk next to him for support. To Gosseyn's right a dark-haired pale-skinned woman of striking appearance and a group of glittering-eyed young men were brandishing heavy electric pistols. The woman had a foxlike quirk to her red lips. The young men were shouting, “Illverton! Tune your uniform! Surrender now! Tune to our colors or else! The Safety Authority is finished!”

Yvana, the sly-faced dark-haired woman, was perhaps the quickest of Callidetics there to notice a change in the nuance of circumstance. She holstered her pistol and put a hand out to support Gosseyn.

Why
, thought Gosseyn,
I must look like I'm about to faint!

“What just happened?” she whispered sharply, drawing near. Her tone was not worried but eager: She wanted to find out whatever this new factor in the situation was and exploit it before the other members of her team caught on. Leadership on a world of fickle callidetic geniuses was always an uncertain affair.

Gosseyn's attention was arrested by the blazing sunlight that shined through the repeater screens. Roughly half the desert scenes showed a yellow sun hanging in the cloudless dark-purple sky. Scattered among them were pictures obviously from the other hemisphere, showing the starry skies above the wastelands, with the crescent of a blue planet in the distance, with a smaller crescent, gray-black and crater marked, hanging near it.

The white-haired man was raising his hands uncertainly as the young men pointed their weapons, but as quick as a school of fish all turning at some unseen signal, the squad of armed men all turned to look at Yvana. The fact that she had paused to whisper to Gosseyn checked their hot-bloodedness. Some of the men, almost as quick as Yvana to grasp that the situation had changed, began holstering their weapons.

Gosseyn said, “I do not see how I can be alive, not even theoretically. Did the Ydd return me here?”

Gosseyn raised his hand to wipe his brow (he was shaking and sweating) and he felt a strange
heaviness
in his hand and arm. Distracted, he flexed his fingers, feeling a sensation as if a powerful electrical current were moving through the nerves and muscles of his arm. When he drew a breath, the same massive sensation was in his chest.

When he used his extra brain to photograph his own body, he sensed that the molecules and atoms of which he was composed were connected in some fundamental way with a point infinitely remote in time or space. Dimly, he could sense this point as a white-hot supercharged atom of infinite density … or … no, it was large, larger than
the universe, and this cosmos was the golden pinprick….

Yvana parted her lips to say something but was interrupted by a voice coming over the telephone on the desk: “This is James Armour in advisory command of the warship
Aeneas
hailing the unidentified planet which has materialized in orbit around our home star, Sol. Please confirm your identity and state your intentions.”

Illverton picked up the phone, but a slight rustle of motion passed through the throng of Corthidians there, as they each looked eye to eye, forming their lightning-quick estimates of each other's intentions. Instead of speaking, Illverton turned the telephone's camera toward Yvana and nodded. She spoke: “This is Yvana Vathirid of Organization Vathir, representing the interests of the Safety Authority of the planet Corthid. Are you the ranking officer of the vessel? We seem to have been displaced from the Corthid home system by a cosmic disturbance.”

One of the plates on the walls, in its automatic fashion, had zeroed in on the glimmering two-mile-long cylinder of the Venusian dreadnought. The readout showed the superbattleship was roughly 230,000 miles away.

James Armour said dryly, “My rank is as high as anyone else's aboard. Is that Gilbert Gosseyn there? Cosmic disturbances accompany his presence with noted frequency.”

Gosseyn stepped forward and spoke into the microphone: “Mr. Armour, can your ship set up a relay link between the Games Machines of Corthid and Venus? I would like them to compare information. I have suffered a complete de-identification with the sidereal universe, which should have rendered it impossible for me to return. Also, I am aware of a … disturbance … a tension in space-time … between my body and some distant point….”

Even as he spoke, this tension became a pull. He could feel something attempting to similarize the atoms
in his body to widely scattered positions outside of time and space. Pain ran through his nerves like fire.

He started to assume his shadow-form, but the pain grew more intense. He gritted his teeth. His future went blank in just a moment, which either meant that he would use his extra brain, or that he would perish.

And the sense of nausea shivered through him, aching.

His overriding thought was:
If this is an illusion
,
what is really happening?

Over the telephone, James Armour said, “Mr. Gosseyn, the distorter engines of the drive core of the
Aeneas
just fluctuated, and the astronomy team says the effect came from your position or nearby. Is the disturbance you mentioned the cause of a radical change in the fundamental properties of space-time?”

Gosseyn was not sure about the answer to that allimportant question.

Over the phone, Armour said in a tense voice, “Miss Yvana, how quickly can you bring Gosseyn to a spot where a Games Machine can examine him? The readings the shipboard astronomy team reports show a massive buildup of space-disturbance … we may have only minutes.”

Yvana simply had her men shove Gosseyn out of the window. Once he was falling free from the building, the Vathir organization spaceship, which was still hovering overhead, picked him up on a force-pencil and swung him over to the huge pyramidal tower housing of the Games Machine of Corthid. It was as swift as that.

The Machine, by this time, had been linked through distorter radio to the Games Machine of Venus. During the tense minutes while the examination took place, the other Null-A Games Machines of various planets in the local arm of the galaxy joined the distorter-radio hookup. It was a mental force of some twenty-five million electronic brains that examined Gosseyn's mind and body structure down to the Planck level of detail.

The combined Games Machines reported: “You are
aware at a fundamental level that the reality around you is false. Under normal conditions, this would be an indicator of severe psychotic break.”

Gosseyn said, “What about the sensation that something is trying to pull me out of the universe?”

“It is a self-imposed symbolic delusion.”

Gosseyn was sitting at a metal desk in one of the many rooms surrounding the base of the great machine's housing. In his hands he held the metal contacts with the sensitive instruments probing him. Before him was a wall of electron tubes, glowing softly blue, purple, and purple-red.