Null-A Continuum by John C. Wright Page B

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 psychologydepartment 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 knowwhat 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