Null-A Continuum (48 page)

“But my husband—yes, I found a man and fell in love, back on the green and lovely planet Xia the Centermost, the gem of all the worlds of the Shadow Galaxy, back before the shadow fell—my husband was damaged when we passed through the cloud, and so were some of the medical appliances of our Observer, including those needed to cure him.

“I removed certain critical thought-circuits so our Machine could not self-destruct. It had to keep my husband alive. With him alive, there was no point in acting against us. As long as the three healthy passengers cooperated with its effort to erase all evidence of the origin of man, and kept our secrets to ourselves, the Observer permitted us to keep our memories, and pass them along to our duplicates: three immortal beings within a galaxy of mortals, all now amnesiacs, all thrown back into stone ages of history.

“Ages passed, and still I hoped the technology would arise on some world with the means to cure my beloved husband.

“But then, under your instructions, you had the Observer release his brain-dead body from its medical coffin. My memories of this time show that he survived. He lived and was cured! I thought you were going to order Secoh to surrender, to end the war. But no, you provoked Secoh into destroying my husband. You killed him! You!”

It was Leej. The woman speaking was Leej the Predictress of Yalerta.

GOSSEYN'S thoughts were dazed with the implications. “You are the Chessplayer, you, the mysterious figure behind every secret in my life?”

The regal figure rose to her feet, smiling bitterly. “Well, I had no great reason to make your life a comfortable one, did I, my little puppet? You used the infatuation I once had for you, my loyalty, my sanity, my life, as part
of your plan to save the universe from total annihilation. Now that the cosmic cycle has come back once more, and it is my turn, I return the favor. Are you satisfied in your search for answers yet? No? I thought not. But there is no time for anything more. You must be readied for your final trial.”

And she strode away from the mirror into the darkness of the chamber.

GOSSEYN was surprised by the crystal-like clarity of the thoughts of the nervous system he occupied. Unlike the brains of the emotionally crippled Ashargin, the neurotic younger version of Leej, or the raging mad Enro, this mind was astonishing in its complexity and thoroughness.

Every object she saw reminded her not of one thing, or one event, but of a billion things, of an uncountable span of time. When she approached the door to the inner chamber of the Sanctum of Time, she was reminded of the millions of candidates she had brought here in times past. This was the first of the Child Centers of the world-archipelago of Yalerta. Famous men and women of every age of this planet flashed through her mind's eye as the great doors opened, for she remembered all who had passed through: early bronze-age kings, stone-age priestesses with feathered headdresses, nomads, hunter-gatherers, men in glittering energy-armor from a forgotten high-tech civilization that occupied a prior geologic era, and, from centuries earlier still, women carrying magnetic rifles, scholars armed with muskets … and, from an era prior to this, Neanderthals in strange dark uniforms, carrying well-made instruments….

Gosseyn saw the island-fortress Inxelendra founded, she and her followers from the planet Gorgzid, the frowning walls and domes protected by an aura of atomic force … during the early years, it had been merely a crude wooden palisade around the towering space ark.

And Yalerta was not the first world on which she had established infant-teaching incubators. Gosseyn saw flashing pictures of worlds with giant crimson suns, or brilliant white dwarfs, or a strange rainbow-colored planet of crystal oceans and glass towers beneath multiple suns of azure and gold and rose-red….

Everyone she'd ever taught, everyone she'd ever met, all their conversations, all the details of their dress and appearance, the customs and sciences of thousands and tens of thousands of worlds, everything was recorded in precise detail, referenced and cross-referenced, formed into associational patterns of astonishing complexity.

The degree of organization in the memories astonished him, for some of the memories were not stored in her brain—there would not have been enough room for that—but were lodged in other versions of herself distributed up and down the timeline, countless hundreds of billions and trillions of years of her, with all the countless trillions of versions organized according to a complex Nexialist system of logical references.

“I was the ship's Nexialist,” she said aloud, as she passed with stately stride through the valves of the magnetically locked door of the sanctum. “Gorgzor was the predictive historian. That is what callidetic science is supposed to be for, you know: not winning card games or even outsmarting the stock exchanges of different worlds, as the Corthidians do, but for guiding the subtle chaos of history, doing for sociology what Null-A did for psychiatry. The other woman was the Nonlinear Ratiocination expert. You were the semantic psychiatrist, our Null-A.”

Within was a domed space, smooth as the inner shell of an egg, made of dark substance. In the center of the room was a sensory-deprivation pool, surrounded, like a fantastic underground grotto with crystal growths, with the shining spears and cylinders of the electron-control technology of the previous galaxy. The lights were kept
dim so that ambient photons would not disturb the delicate workings of the neuropathic instruments.

In her mind, Gosseyn said, “How did you survive the ultimate end point of the universe? How did you reenter this universe at the origin point?”

She said nonchalantly, “The Ydd knew they would be destroyed in the moment of cosmic re-creation, but they needed an observer to see the Big Bang, so that the next universe would arise with the same physical constants as this one, the same path of history be initiated, and lead inevitably to the Ydd.”

Gosseyn said, “Lead to the Ydd?”

She said curtly, “You spoke with the Ydd. The deceptive approach it used, the savage idiocy of its goals … what is that a sign of?”

Gosseyn was embarrassed that he had not seen the obvious before. “Degeneration. The psychology of the ‘true believer' forces the mind to seek simplistic and violent solutions. In this case, the Ydd's true belief centers on self-preservation. The psychology involved suggests a rejection of a more civilized mode of behavior.”

She said thoughtfully, “The Ydd still retained some remnant of the code of their previous civilization. I was mad at the time, you know, out of my mind. Everything had been dead for countless quadrillions of millennia. The universe was empty. The Ydd were noble about preserving me, through the turbulence of the supercollapse, even to the end point, the eschaton, and past it. Quite noble. In the final eon of the universe, the submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in the foam of space-time are the only events registering on the cosmic all: The creation of a pair of opposite reversed particles and the creation of a pair of matter and antimatter universes approach indistinguishability. The Ydd forced the similarity between the end point and the original point of the universe, placing me in the out-of-phase condition so that even the near-infinite energy expansion of the first three seconds of the universe could
not harm me. In that condition, I could observe the event and, by observing it, collapse the uncertainty surrounding the origin-singularity into positive reality.”

Gosseyn was awed. She had lived through all time, all the future, and all the past. This was the final Chessplayer indeed, the one who must know all the answers any one being could know. And yet she was making adjustments to the complex crystalline circuitry of the Yalertan machine, rapidly preparing the energies needed to form a prediction-similarity through time.

His curiosity was too great to follow her chain of thought on that point. There was too much else he wanted to know. “How could the accident that created X have happened? You not only foresaw it; you remember from the previous universe.”

She said, “It was no accident.”

“The passage through the shadow-substance surrounding the Shadow Galaxy, it altered his brain….”

“Deliberately. Ptath used special equipment aboard the ship, so that when we passed through the cloud, it affected his personal future in a special way, to make himself unpredictable. The physics involves breaking the past-to-future similarity with a shadow-effect operating during moments of space-time uncertainty. This was not done to trick or defraud the other Primordials, but to allow Ptath, and everyone his actions touched, to escape the observation of the Ydd, whose existence I had revealed to him. The Ydd perception from the outside of time works on the same principles as Predictor perception of future events. We had no opportunity before that, since creating an artificial shadow, or blind spot, would have registered on all the prediction alarms of Centermost. Only under the cover of the Cloud, where the prediction circuits were blind anyway, could we perform the test. It was the first experiment in half a million years whose outcome was not known beforehand. What fools we were! It was that experiment that damaged Gorgzor.”

She shivered with a sharp and bitter sorrow. “I have
hated Ptath since that day. How ruthlessly he used us! Human lives are just tools to him. The irony was that the Observer Machine was designed with prediction circuits to monitor the behavior of its charges. It had not been programmed with the physics needed to understand the uncertainty cloaking Ptath, and so it interpreted the phenomenon in psychological terms. It could not predict the behavior of Ptath, and so it concluded Ptath was erratic due to psychological damage, and set about trying to cure him.”

She made an arch eyebrow at him. “Naturally you would not have agreed to be cured had you known that the cure was based on a diagnostic malfunction.”

“No. I would have agreed anyway. The Machine had to be ordered by some variant of X to cure him, and I was the only one available to give the order. I still do not know what the end product of the curative process set in motion will be. But it had to be done.”

She said coldly, “At least you are consistent across all your variations. X uses men with the same ruthlessness as you use yourself.”

Gosseyn supposed with his new triple brain he could actually shut off the blind-spot effect created by his double brain; it would expose his future to the enemy, to the Ydd, and so he was not likely to make the attempt. But it gave him a feeling of detached satisfaction to think that the persistent and lonely Observer might one day fulfill its one remaining set of orders.

“Speaking of X, if he was not driven mad during the Great Migration by passing through the shadow-cloud, what caused his insanity?”

“I did. X was created by me to infiltrate Thorson's gang on Earth, and, after he killed the man he thought was Lavoisseur, to infiltrate Enro's inner circle, and find the agent of the Ydd operating in this era.

“Because Enro had fooled his cousin Secoh into assuming the shadow-body of the Follower, it took my detective a long time to discover that Enro was the real Ydd agent. It
was Enro who had opportunity to examine the shadow-distortion device he found in the Crypt of the Sleeping God. Surfaces are transparent to him: He could see the inner workings at a glance. Using the device, he had attuned his clairvoyant senses to the non-being spectrum, and saw through the walls of the universe, sent his perceptions ranging outside of time, and so he came across the Ydd entity. They made a bargain. It was an arrangement of mutual exploitation.”

“Your detective?”

“Eldred Crang. I hired him. You unexpectedly survived your mission to kill Thorson, and had been trained by Dr. Kair to new levels of competence, so I decided to have the Observer imprint you into Ashargin on Gorgzid, in order to distract Enro from Eldred Crang. Eldred conspired with Secoh to overthrow Enro, and then conspired with you to take Secoh out of the picture. Once Enro was dethroned, with all his top men either in jail or swearing allegiance to Ashargin, X was in a position to become a trusted ally. The imposture was complete because X thought of himself as the original Ptath-Lavoisseur. Even the Ydd were fooled. After X handed Enro bloodless victory over the planet Petrino, and promised him a galaxy rendered helpless by warped Null-A, Enro was conditioned to trust him. Yes, trust him even to the point where the two are willing, in emergency, to share one nervous system. Your finding the Observer was that emergency. X imprinted Enro on himself; Enro was the only other double-brained Primordial at hand. That imprint was the final error. The Emperor is in check, and cannot escape the checkmate. Are you ready?”

“Wait. I have questions about my identity, about what was done to me, and for what purpose …?”

“We have little time for your trifling personal problems, Gosseyn,” said the woman, not without a hint of an arch smile at his frustration. “Obviously you had to be kept in the dark, a man without a memory, since your foe is able, when it suits him, to place himself in a passive
state with a simple reduction circuit, and intercept your thoughts.”

Gosseyn's thoughts were colored with anger. “Am I again to be sent to die for causes I don't understand, against foes I don't know?”

“This is no different from any soldier,” the woman said coldly.

“But when I meet X again …”

“You're wasting time. That is a foregone conclusion. In fact, the mere act of being in contact with the mind of X even for a few minutes has probably already set in motion the psychological imbalances needed to destroy him. He is of no importance.”

“Enro …”

“Even less importance. No matter how the next forty-seven thousand years turn out, whether they are ages of liberty or tyranny, happiness or misery, by the time two hundred thousand million years are passed, the civilization that rules the sevagram will occupy basically the same area of the local galactic supercluster, and achieve roughly the same height of enlightenment and technical advancement. You are wasting my time with trifles.”