Null-A Continuum (53 page)

Landing City was built partly in a clearing, partly amid the branches of the surrounding trees. The size of the trees allowed extensive houses and offices, factories and power plants, to be dug out of the bark at any convenient level above the ground. So far, there was no need to restrict the growth of the city. The size of the trees made it impossible for even very extensive excavations of the wood to damage the tree.

The ground-level of the tree-city was ornamental park, with little foot-traffic, and the paths were grass, rather than paved, through a fairy gardenscape. Folks in a hurry took an air-car from branch to branch of the city above, or a distorter.

In the center of the clearing, atop a green knoll, rose the Games Machine of Venus, a pyramid of burnished metal whose base was fringed with an ornamental hedge and whose stepped side drooped with flowers and hanging vines. Here, in a small outdoor café near the main gates, a small group of weary, nervous-looking young men and women congregated. The mission of the Games Machine of Venus was the melancholy opposite of that of the Machine of Earth: The Earth Machine tested candidates to discover who might be sane and highly integrated enough to welcome them to Venus. The Venus Machine tested suspects, and failure meant exile. These children of colonists had neglected their studies, or had been born with neurological defects, or for some other reason could not achieve the threshold level of Null-A training needed for adulthood on Venus. It was a harsh system, but there was neither police nor crime on Venus, and so the populations of Venus had never been convinced to alter it.

At the café was a small news kiosk. Gosseyn stepped over to check the dates and see what year and month he found himself in. The headline read: “RHADE
ASHARGIN MURDERED—Stranded on Asteroid, Eaten by Shadow.”

The picture showed Enro the Red, the large, broad-shouldered, and red-haired adult version of Enro, at a public ceremony, sword in hand and with three masked judges in black ermine behind him, lowering a chained figure in a spacesuit from a warship hatch to the cratered surface of an asteroid. The photographer had managed to catch a limb of the shadow-cloud rising over the near horizon of rock, blotting out the stars.

Gosseyn entered the gates of the Games Machine and soon was seated before one of the neurological screens. A circuit focused on him took several very careful measurements of his thought-patterns.

He said, “I've been in mental contact with the Final Intellect when the Ydd subsection of the cosmic minds went into rebellion. The rebels used the imprinting process—the same the Observer used on me to imprint me into Ashargin—to impose a strict uniformity upon the unwary victim-sections of the cosmic brain.”

The Games Machine said, “I can confirm that the waveforms used indeed left a trace-energy in your nervous system. It will take me another few minutes to establish the set of psychological matrices involved: pain-pleasure, good-evil, just-unjust. The basics for this type of imposition are always the same: Machines have an axis for permitted-forbidden, and no sex drive, obviously, but, even aside from that, even we machines have to be built according to the basic logic of human psychology, or else we could not interact sensibly with you.”

The machine calculated, and there appeared a set of equations in the special symbols of Null-A math. The Games Machine had calculated a levels-of-logic cascade, based on Null-A principles, which would give the suppressed segments of the Ydd partial minds the training needed to have a chance to resist and throw off the control-thoughts.

Gosseyn had a stat-plate print out the equations on a
sheet and walked to a nearby tool shop. This was not an automatic shop, like so many on Venus. The young man in a green coat behind the counter listened attentively as he took Gosseyn's order. There was no talk of payment: Venusians did not use money as such. Instead, both men made a note of the exchange in the shopkeeper's handheld unit, which made an abstract of the situation and passed the information by radio to a central bank, which tracked such things on a voluntary basis. Not merely the market value of the goods that exchanged hands but several indicators of various forms of the social value, both long-term and short-term, were accounted for, and investors could always challenge the assessment of the worth of a good or service if they thought the banks were underestimating its value.

In a few minutes, the robotools in the back of the shop had compiled the electron tubes of the configuration defined by the equations of the Games Machine, and the clerk wrapped them for Gosseyn. Gosseyn did not bother to walk out of the shop: From where he stood, he assumed his shadow-body, went through his predictor-distorter routine, and triggered the cue to take him to one of his memorized locations in another star system.

Gosseyn appeared on the basic machinery level of the orbital station of Accolon, not far from the crate where Enro had found and slain him. It took Gosseyn only a few minutes to dominate the energy flows of the electronic brains on this level and assign them new tasks.

He wired the special tubes he had brought from Venus into the mechanical prediction circuits communicating with the Ydd. The signals to cure the victim-minds dominated by the Ydd of their vulnerability to mental imprinting were now placed as a carrier signal heterodyned on every message the orbital station was sending through time to the Ydd overmind.

The creature could not do a cortical-thalamic pause or anything to examine its lower perception structure, because such self-examination would also free its lower
component minds from the imprinting control. Yet without the cortical-thalamic self-awareness neither could the Ydd find the source of the idea-forms cascading through its lower member-minds, freeing them from control. The more the Ydd communicated with this period in time, the more sane and integrated its thoughts would become.

No doubt it would withdraw its influence from this area of time-space once the process was detected. But, even so, the process would be set in motion. The insane living universe at the end of time, over years, or over millennia, would take a small step toward sanity.

HE walked to the main deck of the orbital station. The floor of the chamber, several acres of it, was occupied by the giant time-space-map the hundreds of electronic brains lining the walls were using to coordinate the Shadow Effect attacks with the Ydd. The shadow had consumed roughly one-tenth of the galaxy, so that the immense spiral of fire pictured underfoot was streaked and marred with smoky blackness here and there, whorls of dark mist like the eyes of many hurricanes.

From the ceiling hung a number of amplifier screens, focused at various points on the map to provide a close-up view of a given star system or group of systems and the surrounding time-structure.

Near the center of the vast map the shining pavement was interrupted by a seat and a surrounding control panel. This was an information station whose upper surface was crowded with tubes and switches to control image repeaters and distorter-radios. The main body of the desklike machine was composed of a triple set of mechanical prediction circuits. This was the nerve-center of the operation; from here, one man could coordinate an entire galactic war.

Eldred Crang was seated in the chair.

The psychological sense of certainty with which a belief is held is no guarantee of its accuracy and may interfere with attempts to correct it based on new information.

Eldred Crang sat in the control chair, his fingers forming a little steeple near his chin. He was olive skinned, with a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern cast to his features. His yellow eyes gazing out at the scene of galaxy-wide devastation were curiously untroubled.

Gosseyn stepped forward, his mind already adjusted to the astonishing fact that Eldred Crang was alive. The Observer had said as much:
She has also arranged the growth of an Eldred Crang body from his cell samples.

But there was something wrong here. The man sat with a serene motionlessness. Crang had a manner suggestive of energy, of restless and piercing intelligence. That, combined with his flame-colored eyes, had always given him a sort of fire to his personality. This figure was too calm.

The man in the chair said aloud, “I see I am the first of us to arrive. Commissioner Thule is on his bunk in his cabin, paralyzed by an energy flow I am sustaining in the motor centers of his nervous system. There is every evidence he will prove cooperative once you have dealt with Enro.”

This was a surprise Gosseyn was not so quick to adjust to.

But the clues had been present. It could not have been Crang who died on Nirene. The pain Gosseyn experienced when he felt “Eldred Crang” die indicated that the two nervous systems were linked. But the gross differences in brain structure between two different individuals would have been too severe for a similarity connection. There was only one brain in the universe so constructed
that Gosseyn could pick up its impulses from across a gap in time or space.

Gosseyn spoke with a snap in his voice: “Where is the real Eldred Crang?”

The man in the chair unfolded his fingers and toyed with the gold band on his left hand. “You are anxious because of the possibility that I am X or some other dangerous version of yourself. As soon as your nervous tension drops in energy levels to become the lesser, my memories will flow into you. At the moment, I am receiving your thoughts, which I have experienced before from your point of view, and I do not need to experience again.

“To answer your question: The real Eldred has been occupied with the Chessplayer's primary task she has set herself for this period of history—the investigation and mass production of machinery brought back from the
Ultimate Prime
expedition, of the various secrets the Primordials discovered about the human nervous system. The Lavoisseur system of serial immortality, the clairvoyance of Enro, the shadow-powers of Secoh, the prescience of the Yalertans: Crang was preparing for those who passed the tests of the Games Machines to receive a gift too valuable to be entrusted to unsane or insane men. It is Crang who, behind the scenes, has been preparing this version of the universe to become a Null-A Continuum.

“It struck Crang's sense of irony to use the Cult of the Sleeping God as the mechanism to spread the educational groundwork. The hypnotic teaching machines and thought-broadcasters and nerve-integration-detecting robots that X has been so quickly and diligently spreading throughout the galaxy can all be put to use to spread the coherent version of Null-A even faster than X has been spreading the warped version. Loyalty Machines will turn themselves into Games Machines once their self-correction mechanisms are allowed to run without interference.

“Nine-tenths of the High Priesthood of Gorgzid, after they saw Secoh, their highest priest, kill their Sleeping God, were willing to reconsider the logic of their beliefs once Eldred got to them. The Cult, which is the heart of the Greatest Empire church-state structure, has been infiltrated to its core.

“Eldred has been moving around a lot. His face was marred to prevent Enro from spotting him, even under his well-made prosthetic masks. The new body into which he was transferred by the Observer, of course, had the improvements the Observer always tries to instill in his patients. The stimulations to his nascent extra brain were developed in the direction of energy-control rather than other forms of distorter similarity….”

“Anslark Dzan!” said Gosseyn. “He wasn't going to Petrino to watch me; he was there to make contact with the temple of the Sleeping God. Am I right?” Gosseyn did a quick calculation in his head, assuming Anslark's electron-control powers had a range similar to his. “He must have rewired thousands of mind-probe robots and neural receivers as we passed through towns and villages, not to mention the planetary Loyalty Machine.”

The seated man nodded. “That is not all he did. The priest-technicians working with Eldred saw to it that fairly accurate working models of the Observer Crypt and its nerve-evolving machinery have been placed in all the newly built temples of the Cult. Any student who subjects himself to what he thinks is the Ceremony of the Interment will be exposed to the preliminary growth stimulations of a rudimentary secondary brain and the first level of hypno-therapeutic training for Null-A associational techniques. One reason why you saw the area of the cities near the temples as an oasis of calm was not merely because of their legal privileges: The students were growing more sane and less fanatical, the more they studied what they thought was a religion.

“Eldred anticipates that once three percent of the galactic population has been evolved to the secondary
and tertiary brain integration level, the revived Primordial civilization of Three Million A.D., those Shadow Men the Corthidians contacted, will become inevitable, rather than merely probable. Obviously, even from the beginning, the Primordials meant their sciences, the secrets of immortality and prediction, including the method of resurrecting the long dead, to be rediscovered by their heirs, once their heirs were sane, so that their golden civilization would live again. That day is dawning now. Speaking of which …”

He nodded toward an image underfoot. Gosseyn turned and looked. In one area, the darkness streaking the Cygnus Arm of the galaxy was interrupted. The magnifying screen above showed the detailed image: four worlds and their parent star emerging from the shadow-cloud like bright dots of light, solidifying and coming into focus, the dead gray-white star losing its shadow-distortion properties and beginning to blaze again.

Gosseyn felt a pulse of messages from the robotic brains lining the room:

Message 7132356QX55 to Ydd Entity alerts target world nonidentification failure … Planet Xanthilorn … coordinates in time and space … interference detected at source … ALERT ALERT AL!! … Interrupt…. Message not sent … revising…. Message 7132356QX55 to Ydd Entity confirms status of all operations normal … boundaries in Sixth Decant coordinates (xxxx)—