Robert Silverberg - In Entropy’s Jaws

Skein offers all the proper cues.

“I won’t accept that! It’s demonic, chaotic, nihilistic theory.”

“You can say that after all you’ve experienced?”

“I’ll go on saying it. What I’ve been going through is a mental illness. Maybe I’m deranged, but the universe isn’t.”

“Contrary. You’ve only recently become sane and started to see things as they really are. The trouble is that you don’t want to admit the evidence you’ve begun to perceive. Your filters are down, Skein! You’ve shaken free of the illusion of linearity! Now’s your chance to show your resilience. Learn to live with the real reality. Stop this silly business of imposing an artificial order on the flow of time. Why should effect follow cause? Why shouldn’t the seed follow the tree? Why must you persist in holding tight to a useless, outworn, contemptible system of false evaluations of experience when you’ve managed to break free of the—”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

By early afternoon they are many kilometers from the hotel, still keeping as close to the shore as they can. The terrain is uneven and divided, with rugged fingers of rock running almost to the water’s edge, and Skein finds the journey even more exhausting than it had seemed in his visions of it. Several times he stops, panting, and has to be urged to go on.

“It isn’t much farther,” the skull-faced man says. “You can make it. Step by step is how.”

“I’m winded. Those hills—”

“I’m twice your age, and I’m doing fine.”

“You’re in better shape. I’ve been cooped up on spaceships for months and months.”

“Just a short way on,” says the skull-faced man. “About a hundred meters from the shore.”

Skein struggles on. The heat is frightful. He trips in the sand; he is blinded by sweat; he has a momentary flashback fugue. “There it is,” the skull-faced man says finally. “Look there, in the pit.”

Skein beholds the conical crater. He sees the golden amoeba

“Go down to it,” the skull-faced man says. “The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

“And will it heal me? So that I’ll function as I did before the trouble started?”

“If you let it heal you, it will. That’s what it wants to do. It’s a completely benign organism. It thrives on repairing broken souls. Let it into your head; let it find the damaged place. You can trust it. Go down.”

Skein trembles on the edge of the pit. The creature below flows and eddies, becoming first long and narrow, then high and squat, then resuming its basically circular form. Its color deepens almost to scarlet, and its radiance shifts toward yellow. As if preening and stretching itself. It seems to be waiting for him. It seems eager. This is what he has sought so long, going from planet to wearying planet. The skull-faced man, the purple sand, the pit, the creature. Skein slips his sandals off. What have I to lose? He sits for a moment on the pit’s rim; then he shimmies down, sliding part of the way, and lands softly, close beside the being that awaits him. And immediately feels its power. Something brushes against his brain. The sensation reminds him of the training sessions of his first go-round, when the instructors were showing him how to develop his gift. The fingers probing his consciousness. Go on, enter, he tells them. I’m open. And he finds himself in contact with the being of the pit. Wordless. A two-way flow of unintelligible images is the only communion; shapes drift from and into his mind. The universe blurs. He is no longer sure where the center of his ego lies. He has thought of his brain as a sphere with himself at its center, but now it seems extended, elliptical, and an ellipse has no center, only a pair of focuses, here and here, one focus in his own skull and one—where?—within that fleshy amoeba. And suddenly he is looking at himself through the amoeba’s eyes. The large biped with the bony body. How strange, how grotesque! Yet it suffers. Yet it must be helped. It is injured. It is broken. We go to it with all our love. We will heal. And Skein feels something flowing over the bare folds and fissures of his brain. But he can no longer remember whether he is the human or the alien, the bony one or the boneless. Their identities have mingled. He goes through fugues by the scores, seeing yesterdays and tomorrows, and everything is formless and without content; he is unable to recognize himself or to understand the words being spoken. It does not matter. All is random. All is illusion. Release the knot of pain you clutch within you. Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept.

He accepts.

He releases.

He merges.

He casts away the shreds of ego, the constricting exoskeleton of self, and placidly permits the necessary adjustments to be made.

The possibility, however, of genuine thermodynamic entropy decrease for an isolated system—no matter how rare—does raise an objection to the definition of time’s direction in terms of entropy. If a large, isolated system did by chance go through an entropy decrease as one state evolved from another, we would have to say that time “went backward” if our definition of time’s arrow were basically in terms of entropy increase. But with an ultimate definition of the forward direction of time in terms of the actual occurrence of states, and measured time intervals from the present, we can readily accommodate the entropy decrease; it would become merely a rare anomaly in the physical processes of the natural world.

The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Skein clambers from the pit and lies by its rim, breathing hard. The skull-faced man helps him get up.

Skein has seen this series of images hundreds of times. “How do you feel?” the skull-faced man asks.

“Strange. Good. My head seems clear!”

“You had communion down there?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“And?”

“I think I’m healed,” Skein says in wonder. “My strength is back. Before, you know, I felt cut down to the bone, a minimum version of myself. And now. And now.” He lets a tendril of consciousness slip forth. It meets the mind of the skull-faced man. Skein is aware of a glassy interface; he can touch the other mind, but he cannot enter it. “Are you a Communicator too?” Skein asks, awed.

“In a sense. I feel you touching me. You’re better, aren’t you?”

“Much. Much. Much.”

“As I told you. Now you have your second chance, Skein. Your gift has been restored. Courtesy of our friend in the pit. They love being helpful.”

“What shall I do now? Where shall I go?”

“Anything. Anywhere. Anywhen. You’re free to move along the timeline as you please. In a state of controlled, directed fugue, so to speak. After all, if time is random, if there is no rigid sequence of events—”

“Yes.”

“Then why not choose the sequence that appeals to you? Why stick to the set of abstractions your former self has handed you? You’re a free man, Skein. Go. Enjoy. Undo your past. Edit it. Improve on it. It isn’t your past, any more than this is your present. It’s all one, Skein, all one. Pick the segment you prefer.”

He tests the truth of the skull-faced man’s words. Cautiously Skein steps three minutes into the past and sees himself struggling up out of the pit. He slides four minutes into the future and sees the skull-faced man, alone, trudging northward along the shore. Everything flows. All is fluidity. He is free. He is free.

“You see, Skein?”

“Now I do,” Skein says. He is out of entropy’s jaws. He is time’s master, which is to say he is his own master. He can move at will. He can defy the imaginary forces of determinism. Suddenly he realizes what he must do now. He will assert his free will; he will challenge entropy on its home ground. Skein smiles. He cuts free of the timeline and floats easily into what others would call the past.