Null-A Continuum (43 page)

“How much of the galaxy do I have ‘memorized' using the Sphere of Accolon?”

“All of it, including the globular clusters and the satellite
galaxies at the Lesser and Greater Magellanic Clouds. Furthermore, the Sphere network apparently exists in both past and future eras, including periods of history, dark ages, when no world in the galaxy possessed the technology to create them.”

“What does the future show?” asked Patricia.

The Games Machine said, “The future information shows unqualified victory for Enro. The Interstellar League, governed by Commissioner Thule, will allow itself to be peacefully absorbed into the Greatest Empire over the next six years, and last for some forty-seven hundred years. It may last longer, but we have no information from Spheres further down the time-continuum.”

“Then Enro will succeed, but the Ydd will fail?” asked Gosseyn in disbelief.

“No,” said the Machine. “You are connected to a system of Spheres through the Sphere at Accolon, which Enro controls. Hence your perception-information that we are correlating comes from Enro's system of Spheres, which extends throughout many millennia. Obviously futures where all life is overwhelmed by shadow are not sending back any information. Futures where Enro is defeated are also ones where his control over the Spheres is broken, and hence the modern-day Spheres would not be receiving any information from them. Mr. Gosseyn, you of all men must be aware that the time-space continuum you see around you is not an accurate reflection of reality, nor can the future information currently examined be taken as inevitable. However, again we remind you of the limited time you have in which to act.”

The second experiment involved no new principle. Like locating Patricia, it only took a short time for the sequential array of Games Machines to comb through Gosseyn's extra brain to locate the distorter patterns for Anslark Dzan and the other members of the Royal Family of Dzan and to bring them to a comfortable spot in Landing City where Peter Clayton explained the situation to them. Anslark was happy to cooperate, and his brothers
and cousins at first seemed awed by the scale of what they were about to attempt. A distorter link was set up between the Dzan, the warship
Aeneas
, and the bright variable star S Doradus in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Null-A machinery was used to attune the Dzan nervous systems to the rhythms of the interference much like those used by the Petrino mind-paralysis robots: like them but better, for the electrons directed by their minds alone had a much finer scale of control than the tubes and energy nodes of the Petrino Standardization Committee robots. After a few experiments in knocking out the crews of Greatest Empire ships or hidden bases either at nearby stars or in other arms of the galaxy, the Royal Family of Dzan said they were ready.

The third experiment was on a larger scale: Gosseyn had the Milky Way Sphere system memorize everything within the action of its radius, some 179,000 light-years. Using a prediction power to get an image of the core of the Andromeda Galaxy 2.9 million light-years away, he memorized the supergiant singularity at that galactic core and forced a similarization. The mass of the Andromeda Galaxy was greater than that of the Milky Way, and so the Milky Way crossed the distance as if there had been no gap.

When the moment of darkness ended, Gosseyn said aloud, “Any collisions?” He would have preferred to transmit the galaxy to a location in empty space, of course, but the mass involved did not allow for that possibility.

James Armour, aboard the
Aeneas
, was the first to answer: “The number of stars in the sky more than doubled, and there is now a second band of stars, a Milky Way stream bisecting the first, but the chance that two stars would be within half a light-year of each other is astronomically remote. It will be years before we can calculate the positions of every new star.”

The voice of Madroleel Enosh, one of the No-men rescued
from Accolon, came over the radio: “Don't bother. I've intuited that there have been no collisions. The disks of the two galaxies are at right angles. The orbits of stars around the galactic core will be disturbed over the next few million years, but the human race will develop the technology to herd stars into more stable orbits before the effect is noticeable.”

Armour said, “More importantly, there is no Shadow Effect visible on our gravitic plates. Whatever was inside any shadow-areas is still in the Milky Way galaxy's original location. Can the Games Machines give you the coordinates to send us to pick up any of Patricia's Amazons who might have been in their shadow-armor? We can worry about Enro's shadow-protected warships later.”

Gosseyn had left a large number of dead stars and dust clouds back at the original location, to give him sufficient mass, sufficiently dispersed, to similarize a ship to practically any point in the now-empty volume, using a combination of similarities and similarity brakes.

Yvana's voice had a lilt of laughter in it: “All the Predictors on every planet in the galaxy just went blind! I bet Enro did not see that one coming!”

The Nexialist in charge of coordinating the groups working with the Games Machines to study the information, a woman named Cil ve Connlin, said over the radio, “The method of prediction-similarization should continue to operate for several hours from our frame of reference: From the point of view of the location where the home galaxy once was, of course, we have some discretion in selecting an approach time. The
Aeneas
can arrive, from the frame of reference of each woman being rescued, within minutes or even seconds of the disappearance of the galaxy around her.”

Patricia said, “That armor is spaceworthy, and has an automatic circuit. My girls can stay alive in them for the better part of a day.” She was staring at what looked to Gosseyn like blank wall. “So many stars! Why can we
see all the new stars? If one of the stars of the Andromeda Galaxy landed even two light-years away, it would still be two years until we saw it, right?”

Gosseyn said curtly, “The photons were already crossing this point in space before we intersected it. Games Machine! Are we prepared for the third experiment? If we can reach into the remote future and contact the superbeings there …”

The voice of the Games Machine was calm and measured: “We have just lost contact with the Spheres to the futureward of this position in time. With only contemporary and pastward Spheres still connected, our range and calculating power has been reduced to less than half of the …”

Patricia put her hand on Gosseyn's shoulder. “Look out! I can see him coming. I'd been hoping you'd catch him in his shadow-form when you moved the Milky Way. He is about nine thousand light-years away … five hundred … he's here….”

Gosseyn turned away from the desk and stood up. The seventeen-year-old version of him was standing in the doorway to the examination room, a slim vertical line between the brows of his young face, a sardonic amusement in the yellow-brown depth of his ancient eyes.

Negative judgment is the peak of mentality.

As before, the young man wore the splendid scarlet uniform of a Greatest Empire officer, with a sash and medallions, and an ornamental triangle-of-eyes emblem clasping his half cape.

Gosseyn did not wait for him to speak but stepped to a memorized location on Mars.
FINE, windblown sand whipped Gosseyn's face, and subarctic temperatures benumbed his face and hands, despite the swell of automatic heat radiating from circuits in his coat. He was standing on an outcropping of rock, and the sky was orange with sandstorm.

The youth was there, his red uniform making him almost invisible in the gale of red dust. “What was the point of that?” The voice, though young and thin, still rang with authority. “I would not hurt Reesha. I will see that she is safely elsewhere before I similarize several dozen suns into Sol and create a nova … thank you for gathering all my opposition in one star system.”

Gosseyn similarized the metallic fabric he had memorized earlier onto the young man's body. His spare frame was as small as Patricia's, so the suit materialized around him, the clasps already shut. Gosseyn with his extra brain triggered the circuit that activated the Shadow Effect running through the fibers of the material. At the same time, with a second nerve path in his extra brain, he brought here a small volume, no more than one cubic foot, of material from the core of the sun and retreated to a second location on the surface of Phobos.

PHOBOS was a mountain of rock in the darkness of space, too small to have an appreciable gravity. Gosseyn drew the space armor from its location in the Vathir Organization ship on Corthid to himself, his teeth chattering as the suit materialized around him and began to pressurize and heat up.

He did not need the amplifying plate in the suit helmet to see the blinding flash on the surface of Mars. The thin Martian atmosphere was disturbed like a ripple in a pond as the supersonic shockwaves traveled over this hemisphere of the planet. A reddish discoloration was the only sign, at this distance, of where the crust of the planet had shattered under the fifteen-million-degree heat. The volcanic debris from beneath the mantle of Mars was thrown into orbit when the superheated atmosphere, like a mushroom
cloud, rose up at a rate greater than the planet's escape velocity. The needles in Gosseyn's helmet registering the energy release in X-rays and heavy particles were against their pins.

The reddish discoloration turned an eerie blue-white as the oxides in the rusted surface of Mars caught fire. At hot enough temperatures, almost anything will burn.

He did not need to speak aloud, since his extra brain was still connected with the thousand Games Machines in sequence. “Well?”

Anslark Dzan's voice was despondent: “We flooded the hemisphere of Mars with a neural wave on the Null-A paralysis frequency. Anyone with cortical-thalamic interconnections should have been frozen … the whole power of the supergiant variable S Doradus was driving our beam…. If he had only remained in solid form …”

The Games Machine voice was dispassionate: “Result negative. We aligned Sphere of Accolon to identify each particle in his body and prevent his assumption of this shadow-form, but the particles were then de-similarized out of our energy pattern by a superior force, something able to achieve a more perfect synchronization.”

Gosseyn thought,
Patricia's shadow-armor should have cut him off from any distorter system or other outside energy sources. What false-to-facts assumption am I making?

Against the glowing backdrop of the burning world, the shadow-form of the youth was clearly visible as he similarized himself to a point a few hundred yards away from Gosseyn. Evidently, the shadow-armor, before it had burned away, had indeed prevented X from similarizing to some other location, but it had not prevented him, within the armor, of putting his body out-of-phase with his environment, immune to all material and energetic harm.

Out from the semitransparent core of the shadow-being came a beam of radio-energy, modulated to be picked up
by an amplitude antenna. Gosseyn's suit radio translated the vibrations into English: “So Gilbert Gosseyn comes to his futile end, having never discovered his origin or his purpose. An immortal man, when facing a god, is merely mortal after all….”

The flood of energy released from the core of the shadow-being was sufficient to pierce Gosseyn's armor and destroy most of his body, even when Gosseyn similarized 99 percent of the energy flow into harmless ground points here and there about the galaxy, where Nova-O-level radiation expanded through the empty space.

The planet Corthid vanished, snatched to some remote location, while Earth and Venus and the inner system of Sol were obliterated in the residual energy Gosseyn could not deflect.

THE shock of seeing his world destroyed almost snapped Gosseyn out of the predictive vision he was having, but he steadied himself with a cortical-thalamic pause and heightened his awareness to absorb additional details.

It was fortunate that he did, for at this point the vision branched. The two possible futures after Earth's destruction were, first, that Gosseyn assumed his shadow-form. That branch of the vision went black at that point, of course, but Gosseyn knew the pain in his body from the Ydd attack would be lethal if he entered the nonidentity environment that was the Ydd's extradimensional body.

The second possible future, where he did not assume his shadow-form, showed Gosseyn waking up in his next body, a nineteen-year-old, in the medical coffin maintained by automatic machinery in a hollowed-out asteroid somewhere in the belt of icebergs circling Saturn. The youth in the scarlet uniform did not even bother to speak to him or gloat: Images of distant stars appeared around Gosseyn as his newly wakened body turned black and died.

In his lightning-quick fashion, Gosseyn examined two
or three scores of visions of the moment, just before the destruction of the inner solar system, when the shadow-being opened fire on him. In each version, Gosseyn was trapped by the law of similarization. His twenty-decimal-point similarity was enough to remove nearly all of the lethal particles from his environment, but it was not perfect similarity, so some small fraction escaped. X clearly had some means of making a more exact representation to the Planck level of Gosseyn's body and the surrounding space than Gosseyn could.

There was yet another possible future: Gosseyn removed the solar system to another arm of the galaxy and placed the star Sirius here, so that the shadowy figure was inside the inferno of the O-type star. This vision ended in basically the same way. X merely followed him and carried out the same result. Gosseyn could not similarize while in a shadow-form, but his enemy had a technique where he could. The bolt of energy from the shadow-figure merely destroyed Gosseyn and obliterated his next body with a controlled Shadow Effect, cutting his distorter link to any future incarnations. It was death, final and absolute.