Null-A Continuum (7 page)

He closed his eyes. The sensations grew stronger.

Immediately he saw the galaxy of darkness.

A black hole, hundreds of light-years in diameter, occupied the vast center of the dark spiral. Brown dwarf stars, neutron stars, and black holes orbited slowly in the unlit spiral arms. Nebular gas and dust there were in abundance, but even when they gathered together under the enormous pressure of billions of tons in the center of a shrinking nebula, no ignition occurred. Here and there were globular masses of dark gas, hundreds or thousands of times the size of Jupiter, but the atoms at the core did not fuse but broke into a cold, dense plasma: a state of matter unknown to any science of the Milky Way.

In this empty zone between the dead stars and the supermassive black hole core hung the scientific superstar-ship
Ultimate Prime
, a five-mile-long torpedo-shaped machine.

To one side of the ship, the collapsed galactic core was dark, a monster of outer space that consumed all it touched, but it was not silent: Radio picked up the continuous hissing crackle of the X-ray storm issuing
from the event horizon, as nebulae larger than worlds were sucked over the lightless brink. A wide area of ten thousand light-years surrounded the dark core, and had been swept clear of matter over millions of years, till only one particle per square parsec could be detected. Beyond this empty zone, to the other side of the ship, the dark stars in their millions, choked with streamers of cold nebulae, clouds of dust and gas thousands of light-years across, slowly circled the galaxy, a ring of ash that would never again wake to fire.

Gosseyn Three hung, weightless, in the giant cylindrical chamber of the navigation room. To each side of him, and above and below, vision-plates the size of football fields shined with the images of the desolation of the dead galaxy. He could see astronomers from the navigation crew slowly pacing across the panels of the vast vision-plates, held like flies on a wall by artificial gravity, now and again making measurements, or placing an amplifier between their feet, and bending with interest over the eyepiece.

His belt telephone rang. He pressed a pushbutton on the earpiece. “Yes?”

It was Dr. Lauren Kair, the Null-A psychologist. He was a tall, heavily built man in his late fifties, and his voice over the phone was strong and gravelly: “The ship's electronic brain says we are ready to make the energy connections to the Spheres. It will require all the distorter-based engines of the ship to make the primary connection. Dr. Petry of the archeology department assures me that any of the Spheres that are still active will send the connection to the next, outer rank of Spheres. If only one in forty still have any active circuits after so many millions of years, the resulting field should still stretch across a major segment of this galaxy, a cone-shape centered in the core radiating out to the fringes, some twenty-five hundred thousand light-years along its axis.”

Gosseyn said, “And what does the ship's psychology
department say, Doctor? If my extra brain cannot encompass the energies involved, the experiment is pointless.”

In this vast empty area between the arms and core, the expedition had found evidence of the lost civilization of the Primordial Humans. Giant geodesic spheres, metallic constructs larger than Jupiter, were here, hundreds and thousands and millions, each one separated from its neighbor by a distance of one thousand light-years, roughly the distance from Sol to Rigel. Amphibians ruled the torrid swamps of Earth at the time when these artifacts were built, and the dinosaurs were not yet born. The archeology department estimated that a little over 5 percent of the mass of the dark galaxy had been converted into the materials used to construct these Spheres.

Archeological teams had descended into more than one Sphere, cutting through layers of armor, miles of machinery, and standing in awe to gaze at circuits the size of continents, but a three-dimensional volume larger than Jupiter was simply too huge to examine. “We're like ants exploring the headlamp of an automobile,” John Grey, the Earthman on the team, had said, after they had penetrated only a hundred miles or so under the surface. “We can only guess what the main engine does.”

But the ship's nexialism officer, the “Expert Generalist” named Curoi, from the planet Petrino, had combined the findings of the high-energy physics and archeological departments with the speculations of the experimental distorter engine research team. Curoi's conclusion, which he presented at the last meeting of the Council of Captains (for the ship was too large to be governed by one captain), was that the primordial humans had been attempting to stop the spread of the Shadow Effect that was consuming their galaxy.

Gosseyn remembered overhearing the conversation. Dr. Kair had left his belt-phone running, the circuit to Gosseyn's phone engaged, so that Gosseyn heard Curoi's calm, uninflected voice: “The effect—and we don't know
what it is—is related in some way to the distorter technology, to the fundamental realities underpinning time and space, energy and matter. The Shadow Effect must have spread, by the time the Spheres were built, to the degree that escape by faster-than-light distorter was impossible: This is why the Primordials colonized the Milky Way so slowly. A ship like
Ultimate Prime
, with her twenty-five-point similarity matrices, would not have been able to operate, to bridge the gap across space-time, in the conditions that obtained then.”

The officer from the Engine Design Research department objected: “This ship's design is, itself, a product of this long-dead supercivilization at her height: How do we know under what conditions the engines would not have been able to function?” There was no need for him to say that there were elements and circuits in the engines whose functions were still unknown. The machinery occupied over nine-tenths of the available volume beneath the hull, and on hops across the short distances available inside a galaxy many of the circuits and energy-mechanisms had not yet been observed in play. His team's sole purpose during the expedition was to study these engines in operation.

Curoi said slowly, “The archeological team estimates that the Primordials fled this galaxy much more slowly than we are now approaching it, and used many small, slow four-man ships at sublight speeds. A strange choice from an engineering standpoint. Not a strange choice from a military standpoint, if they were scattering deliberately, allowing most of themselves to die on the gamble that some would live. The Primordials fled as if they were under fire. Therefore, we cannot assume the Shadow Effect that consumed this galaxy was a natural phenomenon. These Spheres, gentlemen, were their last line of defense. The Spheres are components of a distorter engine large enough to influence the entire structure of space-time on a galactic scale.”

The Grand Captain of the expedition, Treyvenant, a
man from Accolon, chief world of the League, said, “There are countless millions of Spheres. How could they be controlled?”

Curoi spoke to Dr. Kair: “The Venusian man who is helping us make the million-light-year distorter jumps, Gosseyn, what is the theoretical maximum limit on his ability? We know he can teleport a man-sized object, like himself, from one deck of this ship to another, when he is too impatient to wait for an express elevator….” (There was some murmured laughter at that.) “… But can he shift a building from a planet to its moon? A city? Can he shift a planet out of orbit? Can he memorize an entire solar system?”

Kair explained that the number of possible neural interconnections in Gosseyn's secondary brain exceeded the number of estimated particles in the universe. “As with most of the secrets of the human nervous system, the potential has not yet even begun to be explored.”

There was a muttering of dismay from around the table. Grand Captain Treyvenant said heavily, “Without Mr. Gosseyn's special abilities, if anything happened to him, the ship would require fifty years rather than five months to return to our home galaxy! The risk is unacceptable!”

Leej the Predictress spoke next. Gosseyn heard her calm, patrician tones over his belt-phone. “Gentlemen, need I remind you why the Galactic Assembly launched this expedition? The Predictors of my planet, Yalerta, foretell that the Shadow Effect may soon appear in our galaxy as well. If this experiment yields clues as to how these Spheres arrested the Shadow Effect, the risk must be faced.”

E-Vroi, an officer from Planet Corthid, spoke in the rapid staccato accents of his planet: “The Spheres did not save the Shadow Galaxy. What luck will we have, following a failed attempt?”

Curoi said somberly, “The evidence from the astronomy and paleontology departments suggests they were
constructed after the Shadow Effect was much advanced, perhaps even after it was clear that it was too late for them. There is a mystery as to why they went to the effort.”

E-Vroi uttered a high, sharp laugh. “Perhaps they left them for us. A generous effort!”

Curoi said, “Be that as it may, the Spheres attune two areas of space-time to each other to force them to behave according to a normal metric. Any defense against the Shadow Effect our own scientists might examine naturally will follow similar lines. Instead of starting from scratch, we have here the end product of an entire galaxy of scientific genius working for centuries on the problem, embodied in a physical form, reduced from theory to practice. It would be criminal to ignore the mass of data these Spheres could give us—if only we could measure them in operation.”

Curoi's suggestion was to use the ship's engines to engage the ancient Sphere distorter circuitry, with Gilbert Gosseyn as part of the circuit. He was convinced the physiology of the Primordials was something like Gosseyn's and that the giant machines were meant to intermesh with a human nervous system.

The vast navigation chamber was the only place on the ship large enough, and insulated enough, to allow the energies from the ship's distorter engines to pass through.

So Gosseyn found himself in the middle of the half-mile-wide chamber, floating with his local gravity turned off.

Dr. Kair, over the belt-phone, was saying, “I cannot guarantee your safety. Leej the Predictress does not foresee a good outcome: Once we engage the engines, it is all a blur to her.”

Gosseyn said, “I should be expected to endure more danger than a man with only one life: Otherwise, I'm shirking.”

“Very well. The ship's electronic brain is engaging the engines … now!”

At first, Gosseyn detected nothing strange. Then, the sensation came upon him as if a million tiny particles, grains of sand and droplets of mist, were being “memorized” automatically by an action of his extra brain. A steady, powerful flow was rushing through his extra brain, so quickly that it was without turbulence, a blur of motion so swift that it seemed solid. Gosseyn realized that he could not move: The neural pressure in his body was too great for a signal to react from his cortex to his motion centers.

Then, a shift of perspective: The tiny grains and droplets he was memorizing were dead worlds and dead stars; the clammy clouds of mist were nebulae two hundred light-years wide.

Only one thing was alive within the dead galaxy: the Sphere network. Like a warm ring of fire, the electronic and nucleonic circuitry of the mighty Spheres tingled in Gosseyn's brain, sending his perception further and further….

Experimentally, Gosseyn selected one of the millions of star systems he had memorized: two neutron stars with a companion brown dwarf, surrounded by dozens of frozen gas giants and hundreds of smaller ice-planets and asteroids. He shifted this system from its location in one of the outer spiral arms to a position less than a light-year from the
Ultimate Prime.

The transition was smooth and effortless.

Gosseyn reached out and out with his perceptions. Some of the neutron stars he was memorizing seemed oddly smeared, as if he were perceiving them over more than one period of time at once…. All the stars in the galaxy were “blurred” along lines radiating from a single point, centered on a vast disturbance in space-time, a bubble of antigravity filling a superhot, superdense area of space … no, not of space … of the medium, whatever it was, that the early universe occupied before the balancing relations of space-time and matter-energy were
settled. Pre-space. The Sphere-energies rushing through Gosseyn's extra brain were trying to take a photograph of the early universe, the origin point of all things.

Gosseyn opened his eyes. Dimly, he heard the ship's alarms ringing. The acres of vision-panel had gone a dark gray hue, and, even as he watched, they swelled outward and away from him, becoming misty and semitransparent. The ship was gone. Instead was a black misty nothingness, a shadowy cloud whose dim billows could be glimpsed by the stray sparks of some unknown energy that flickered between them.

Gosseyn Three remembered seeing such an effect before, when Secoh, the High Priest of the Sleeping God, had assumed his guise as the shadow-being called the Follower. But this time, it was not a human body but the ship, and the galaxy surrounding, and the circumambient universe that had lost its identity.

Through the black mist, toward him, a vaguely human figure, a man made of shadows, was walking. The figure seemed, in some strange, impossible way, to be walking forward across eternity, out from the origin point of the universe, down along the strands of blurred time-energy toward the present moment. An aura of colorless and deadly light was around him, making him visible: a smoky black figure against a smoky black background.

Immediately Gosseyn Three felt the tug of an attunement between the two of them. When the shadow-figure raised its hand, he felt his paralyzed hand rise of its own accord in response.

The rapid thoughts of the other being leaped into his brain: “I detect that the amnesiac version of Lavoisseur called Gosseyn has almost achieved the no-time, no-space condition: But he has not yet attuned. His death must be instantaneous, for he is aware of my thought-patterns, but has not realized my identity. The isolation technology of the primal Ydd life will distort his relation to the continuum below the twenty-five decimal places needed for existence to maintain self-identification.”