Robert Silverberg - In Entropy’s Jaws

A tendril of his mind goes to Michaels, now. A tendril to Miss Schumpeter. Skein opens his filters. “Now you’ll meet for the first time,” he tells them. Michaels flows to her. Miss Schumpeter flows to him. Skein is merely the conduit. Through him pass the ambitions, betrayals, failures, vanities, deteriorations, disputes, treacheries, lusts, generosities, shames, and follies of these two human beings. If he wishes, he can examine the most private sins of Miss Schumpeter and the darkest yearnings of her future husband. But he does not care. He sees such things every day. He takes no pleasure in spying on the psyches of these two. Would a surgeon grow excited over the sight of Miss Schumpeter’s Fallopian tubes or Michaels’s pancreas? Skein is merely doing his job. He is no voyeur, simply a Communicator. He looks upon himself as a public utility.

When he severs the contact, Miss Schumpeter and Michaels both are weeping.

“I love you!” she wails.

“Get away from me!” he mutters.

Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. Oily orange sea.

The skull-faced man says, “Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein? The notion that there’s a consecutive series of events is nothing but a fraud. We impose form on our lives, we talk of time’s arrow, we say that there’s a flow from A through G and Q to Z, we make believe everything is nicely linear. But it isn’t, Skein. It isn’t.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth. G can come before A, and Z before both of them. Most of us don’t like to perceive it that way, so we arrange things in what seems like a more logical pattern, just as a novelist will put the motive before the murder and the murder before the arrest. But the universe isn’t a novel. We can’t make nature imitate art. It’s all random, Skein, random, random!”

“Half a million?”

“Half a million.”

“You know I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Let’s not waste time, Mr. Coustakis. You have assets. Pledge them as collateral. Credit is easily obtained.” Skein waits for the inventor to clear his loan. “Now we can proceed,” he says, and tells his desk, “Get Nissenson into a receptive state.”

Coustakis says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

“No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will came come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”

“And if he doesn’t have the answer?”

“He will.”

“And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?”

“He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

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 so 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.”

“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

We conceive of time either as flowing or as enduring. The problem is how to reconcile these concepts. From a purely formalistic point of view there exists no difficulty, as these properties can be reconciled by means of the concept of a duratio successiva. Every unit of time measure has this characteristic of a flowing permanence: an hour streams by while it lasts and so long as it lasts. Its flowing is thus identical with its duration. Time, from this point of view, is transitory; but its passing away lasts.

In the early months of his affliction he experienced a great many scenes of flashforward while in fugue. He saw himself outside the nineteenth-century mansion, he saw himself in a dozen lawyers’ offices, he saw himself in hotels, terminals, spaceliners, he saw himself discussing the nature of time with the skull-faced man, he saw himself trembling on the edge of the pit, he saw himself emerging healed, he saw himself wandering from world to world, looking for the right one with purple sand and blue-leaved trees. As time unfolded most of these flash-forwards duly entered the flow of the present; he did come to the mansion, he did go to those hotels and terminals, he did wander those useless worlds. Now, as he approaches Abbondanza VI, he goes through a great many flashbacks and a relatively few flashforwards, and the flashforwards seem to be limited to a fairly narrow span of time, covering his landing on Abbondanza VI, his first meeting with the skull-faced man, his journey to the pit, and his emergence, healed, from the amoeba’s lair. Never anything beyond that final scene. He wonders if time is going to run out for him on Abbondanza VI.

The ship lands on Abbondanza VI half a day ahead of schedule. There are the usual decontamination procedures to endure, and while they are going on Skein rests in his cabin, counting minutes to liberty. He is curiously confident that this will be the world on which he finds the skull-faced man and the benign amoeba. Of course, he has felt that way before, looking out from other spaceliners at other planets of the proper coloration, and he has been wrong. But the intensity of his confidence is something new. He is sure that the end of his quest lies here.

“Debarkation beginning now,” the loudspeakers say.

He joins the line of outgoing passengers. The others smile, embrace, whisper; they have found friends or even mates on this voyage. He remains apart. No one says goodbye to him. He emerges into a brightly lit terminal, a great cube of glass that looks like all the other terminals scattered across the thousands of worlds that man has reached. He could be in Chicago or Johannesburg or Beirut: the scene is one of porters, reservations clerks, customs officials, hotel agents, taxi drivers, guides. A blight of sameness spreading across the universe. Stumbling through the customs gate, Skein finds himself set upon. Does he want a taxi, a hotel room, a woman, a man, a guide, a homestead plot, a servant, a ticket to Abbondanza VII, a private car, an interpreter, a bank, a telephone? The hubbub jolts Skein into three consecutive ten-second fugues, all flashbacks; he sees a rainy day in Tierra del Fuego, he conducts a communion to help a maker of sky-spectacles perfect the plot of his latest extravaganza, and he puts his palm to a cube in order to dictate contract terms to Nicholas Coustakis. Then Coustakis fades, the terminal reappears, and Skein realizes that someone has seized him by the left arm just above the elbow. Bony fingers dig painfully into his flesh. It is the skull-faced man. “Come with me,” he says. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

“This isn’t just another flashforward, is it?” Skein asks, as he has watched himself ask so many times in the past. “I mean you’re really here to get me.”

The skull-faced man says, as Skein has heard him say so many times in the past, “No, this time it’s no flashforward. I’m really here to get you.”