Null-A Continuum (49 page)

Gosseyn pressed the point: “Nonetheless, the Observer said I was on the brink of success against X, but it seemed to me, at the time, that I was about to lose my mind and individuality. What was the deception involved?”

“Oh, that!” Her tone was dismissive. “I should have thought it obvious by now.”

Gosseyn sheepishly realized that it
had
been obvious.

Both X and Lavoisseur believed the other one was a created copy of himself. But only one belief was false.

Which was more likely: That the foremost Null-A psychiatrist in history could create an insane version of himself, with just the precisely designed mental derangement that would make the madman suited to the task of uncovering the plot against Null-A? Or that the insane murderer could create the psychiatrist?

The belief in the brain of X that he was the older, the original, was false, one of many false beliefs imprinted by Lavoisseur in order to make X have the insanities necessary to commit him to Enro's mad program of galactic dominion.

Gosseyn said slowly, “But the Observer Machine said that you arranged to have the Lavoisseur memory chain split off from the X variation—” Then he stopped. Because the Machine had
not
used those words. The Machine, which had induced in itself confusion about Lavoisseur's identity, had not been able to identify the break-off by name, nor the original.

X once had claimed that the Observer Machine had altered a copy of X to create Lavoisseur, the Lavoisseur who had brought Null-A to Earth. Another false belief.

Inxelendra was answering the half-unspoken question: “X is nothing more than a false memory chain, deliberately established out of the Ptath memory template by me. I made him at the same time I made the artificially aged version, the graybeard, who I placed in charge of the Semantics Institute. The old-looking Lavoisseur was meant to be seen to die when Thorson died. This was not done merely to fool you, but also to stop any successor to Thorson, who might also seek out the secret of immortality. This death also allowed me to maneuver X into Enro's service. Lavoisseur and I combined our skills to create X. A masterpiece of work, if I say so myself. The personality was stable to a point, but constructed with a crucial weak spot, so that the false memories in X would come unraveled once they had served their purpose.”

“What is the key? What is the difference in psychology?”

“You are asking me what it would take to turn you into a totalitarian mass murderer like him?”

“I suppose that is the question.”

“He can't fall in love.”

“That's all?”

Inxelendra smiled and said coolly, “That's all. The Isolation
Syndrome, leading to morbid egotism, leading in turn to an intellectual inversion of basic drives. Loveless men are unsympathetic. The suffering of others does not enter their calculations. Everything else, the difference between murdering one man and galaxy-wide genocide, is just a matter of scale.”

“Why didn't it work? Why didn't the false memories unravel? The X personality seemed convinced it was about to absorb me and erase my separate identity. I was about to die.”

“That conviction was false-to-facts, Gosseyn. You were in no danger. The fundamental truth he is trying to hide from you is the same he tries to hide from himself. Obviously X is not the ancient Ptath being. The civilization of the Null-A galaxy would not have permitted a murderer to exist in their midst, uncured, or placed him in a position to engineer the ship minds of the Great Migration. The thoughts you encountered while in the nervous system of X, the panic that you were about to be absorbed, the belief that the younger memory chain was about to be integrated into the older: Those were his thoughts, not yours. He merely inflicted those thoughts on you during your moment of similarity, a desperation ploy. You fell for it, and you used a hypnotic technique to prevent the levels of logic from completing the cycle: This granted him a delay. Not a reprieve. He may continue to exist for a few more hours or days.” She shrugged.

“Why didn't the Observer warn me what was about to happen?”

“Because the Machine cannot reach that conclusion. In order to be able to take orders from you, the Machine had to program itself with a confusion over your identity. It does not know who is older and younger among your versions, because it was forced to program itself to think all of your versions were one identity.”

“So the original Lavoisseur, the man who made me, is not dead?”

“Obviously not.”

“Where is he now?”

“You can ask him yourself when you see him.”

Leej, or rather Inxelendra, with no hint of modesty, had by this time disrobed and cast the rich gown aside. Clad only in her jewels, which must have been electronically neutral, she lowered herself into the thick, oily life-support fluid of the sense-deprivation tank. She affixed a soft breathing-mask to her face. She lowered herself beneath the surface. The fluid rolled over her head.

It was dark. And Gosseyn was elsewhere.

When information enters the nervous system, it creates entropy outside the system, and therefore memory operates in the direction of increasing entropy, the direction we call future. On the fine level, these distinctions are proven to be artificial.

Gosseyn became aware of the time-energy. It was rushing from the past to the future in its mindless, mechanical fashion, each second containing the mass of the entire universe, a three-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional river. In places where those slices had been massively disturbed, a universe-second displaced from the time-energy stream began reproducing itself out of the cosmic ylem, erecting a parallel structure.

The number of streams was in the hundreds of thousands. Some were shining with vitality and strength; some were thin and weak, containing only the mass of a galaxy or even a single planetary system. All were separated from their parallel neighbors by an insulation of the non-identity: the Shadow Effect.

In places the shadow was thin, and here and there were
counter-streams, energy flows rushing backward against the time-stream, forming odd swirls and knots and infinitely regressive loops.

The whole structure pulsed with a terrifying aliveness: It shined and throbbed and flashed like lightning, and flares of power flickered back and forth across the whole titanic length.

In one direction, all the streams were issuing from a single point, smaller than the nucleus of an atom. In the other direction, the streams of fire dimmed, becoming vague and tenuous, and they seemed to curve in a vast fourth-dimensional horizon back together again, approaching an end point as infinitely dark even as the origin point was infinitely bright.

The earliest epochs of the universe, less than one ten-millionth of the whole structure, the mere roots of this fantastic many-branching tree, were bright and hot. These were regions of time-space flooded with a dense, opaque, nucleonic plasma like the core of a heavy star. Next was an era of precipitation, where early galaxies were forming out of the primordial nebulae into a transparent universe. Then a short period where stars in their cycles arose and died and rose again from the ashes of earlier generations, slowly building atoms of greater complexity and weight as century upon century fled past. Then came an era of twilight, when galaxies of red giants burned briefly in the cosmic gloom, galaxies eaten by the ever-growing black holes at their cores.

Then came the main span of the universe, the Dark Eon, long after all light had passed, and all energy came from the decay of black holes into photons. Atoms no longer existed, for whatever was not superdense hyper-neutronium was fading gamma radiation. This era was so long that the bright origin-moment of the universe could not clearly be distinguished, at this scale, from the crowded split instant of galaxy formation and decomposition.

After darkness was night, when even photons had decayed into quantum flux. Here, no matter what had taken place in the previous universes, all events were at a terrible cosmic oneness.

From that dark eschaton, that infinitely distant end point toward which all the universes were streaming, now came a mental force that reached across the abyss of time and touched Gosseyn's mind.

“I am All,” came the words. “I am the Living Universe. Every particle of matter and energy that remains, though scattered over light-centuries, is part of my mental system, a switch or impulse in my artificial brain. It is a brain less dense than a nebula, extended to all parts of space. My thoughts are slow indeed, for space is many orders of magnitude wider than in your time.

“You have seen the parallel universes, created by the tampering with the time structure. Each of the hundreds of thousands of timelines contains an alternate possibility. By my point in time, one times ten to the power of one hundred fifty years in your future, the distinctive characteristics of the parallels have vanished, and similarity connections naturally formed between them. No matter what the prior events of the inanimate beginnings of the universe, no matter what the thoughts of the long eons of the living universe, by this era, all thought-chains of all parallel possible universes, all parallel possible versions of the Absolute Intelligence, have reached the same end-conclusions. The countless myriads of possibilities are played out: Every equation reaches this same result. Thought itself by its very nature is forced into fewer and fewer logical paths: till there is only me, the self-contemplation of a self-aware universe, composed entirely of thought thinking itself.”

Gosseyn asked cautiously, “What do you think about?”

He became aware of a sensation of vast, jovial, godlike amusement. “About thought! What else is there? And the great paradox of being remains.”

“What is that paradox?”

“No mind can fully comprehend itself. There is no solution to the problem of the levels of logic.”

Gosseyn realized what it was he was confronting. This Absolute Intelligence of the end universe was not perfectly harmonized. It was built up of lesser component minds, which, had they been housed in matter, would have filled worlds, star systems, galaxies, clusters and superclusters of galaxies, or larger regions still. This “mind” was in fact trillions of minds, all interconnected.

But perfect unity of thought was not possible within any logic structure, nor was perfect self-awareness. Even a being such as this, the most ultimate of all ultimate entities, had a subconscious part to its life, whole nations and races and worlds of thought-entities of which the Final Mind was unaware. It had levels to its vast mind, and each level operated by its own logic.

It could not police itself. Like all minds, it struggled for self-control.

“Then the Ydd entity is … part of you?”

“I will explain. In my immediate future is the singularity, the absolute nothingness, of the end point of the universe. To you it would seem a span of time immense beyond meaning, but to me only a small fraction of my life remains and the universal end point is rapidly approaching. When all matter-energy reaches its final rest state, a null point of perfect entropy, it is indistinguishable from the null point of perfect energy. No system of prediction can determine the nature of the singularity. No one can guess what lies beyond.

“Either it is the final and absolute end of the universe, or else it is the origin point of the next cosmic cycle of being, the creation moment of a universe almost indistinguishable from this one.

“In the one case, the uncertainty threshold will allow small amounts of matter-energy, roughly equal to a human body mass, to be passed safely to the next universe without interfering in the creation constants. One person can survive. However, one person, properly
trained, is sufficient to create a small but real improvement in the conditions, perhaps to be the first of an infinite chain of universes, each better than the last.

“In the second case, the uncertainty threshold will allow me to extend my existence by a number of years, perhaps large, perhaps small, but it will be finite, and there will be insufficient energy after that time to trigger a Great Collapse, so there will be no next universe, no possibility of matter or energy ever again reaching any level of organization: All signals will reach zero and so remain forever.

“Here am I, the pinnacle of material and intellectual evolution, but since I am constrained by the nature of entropy itself, I must allow myself to perish so that my components, the matter-energy sum of the universe, are available to trigger the Great Collapse leading to the next universe, one which may be a more perfect one than this. Either I may think or I may use the universe-mass of my thought-components for a constructive purpose: I cannot do both.”

Gosseyn understood. “The Ydd comprise your component minds not willing to make the sacrifice to restart the universe.”

A note of sorrow entered the great being's thought. “The tendency is that those components who wish to live at any price will outlast those willing to contemplate self-sacrifice for the greater good. In future millennia, the physical structure that sustains my mind, the internal communication and nervous systems, will degrade. Both intelligence and moral capacities will fall. In the last times, the mind of the living universe will become senile: That is the Ydd entity.”

The voice continued, “And that degradation has already begun. My communication with you has triggered an inevitable cascade of events. The civil war of the cosmic mind is beginning even as we speak: Even now, certain of my constituent sub-minds have begun using the imprinting techniques, not fundamentally different from those
you know, to impose thought-structures from one level of logic within my hierarchy to another. The Ydd will achieve the mental uniformity I lack, but only by the suppression of all intuitive, creative, and scientific thought within the structure. The Ydd will then embark upon a massive attempt to reengineer the cause-and-effect relations of time, seeking out, as agents, minds psychologically similar to its own, and using them to edit events in your era and others.