Robert Silverberg - In Entropy’s Jaws

“Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.”

“Follow along this way. You have your passport handy?”

The familiar words. Skein is prepared to discover he is merely in fugue, and expects to drop back into frustrating reality at any moment. But no. The scene does not waver. It holds firm. It holds. At last he has caught up with this particular scene, overtaking it and enclosing it, pearl-like, in the folds of the present. He is on the way out of the terminal. The skull-faced man helps him through the formalities. How withered he is! How fiery the eyes, how gaunt the face! Those frightening orbits of bone jutting through the skin of the forehead. That parched cheek. Skein listens for a dry rattle of ribs. One sturdy punch and there would be nothing left but a cloud of white dust, slowly settling.

“I know your difficulty,” the skull-faced man says. “You’ve been caught in entropy’s jaws. You’re being devoured. The injury to your mind—it’s tipped you into a situation you aren’t able to handle. You could handle it, if you’d only learn to adapt to the nature of the perceptions you’re getting now. But you won’t do that, will you? And you want to be healed. Well, you can be healed here, all right. More or less healed. I’ll take you to the place.”

“What do you mean, I could handle it, if I’d only learn to adapt?”

“Your injury has liberated you. It’s shown you the truth about time. But you refuse to see it.”

“What truth?” Skein asks flatly.

“You still try to think that time flows neatly from alpha to omega, from yesterday through today to tomorrow,” the skull-faced man says, as they walk slowly through the terminal. “But it doesn’t. The idea of the forward flow of time is a deception we impose on ourselves in childhood. An abstraction, agreed upon by common convention, to make it easier for us to cope with phenomena. The truth is that events are random, that chronological flow is only our joint hallucination, that if time can be said to flow at all, it flows in all ‘directions’ at once. Therefore—”

“Wait,” Skein says. “How do you explain the laws of thermodynamics? Entropy increases, available energy constantly diminishes, the universe heads toward ultimate stasis.”

“Does it?”

“The second law of thermodynamics—”

“Is an abstraction,” the skull-faced man says, “which unfortunately fails to correspond with the situation in the true universe. It isn’t a divine law. It’s a mathematical hypothesis developed by men who weren’t able to perceive the real situation. They did their best to account for the data within a framework they could understand. Their laws are formulations of probability, based on conditions that hold within closed systems, and given the right closed system the second law is useful and illuminating. But in the universe as a whole it simply isn’t true. There is no arrow of time. Entropy does not necessarily increase. Natural processes can be reversible. Causes do not invariably precede effects. In fact, the concepts of cause and effect are empty. There are neither causes nor effects, but only events, spontaneously generated, which we arrange in our minds in comprehensible patterns of sequence.”

“No,” Skein mutters. “This is insanity!”

“There are no patterns. Everything is random.”

“No.”

“Why not admit it? Your brain has been injured. What was destroyed was the centre center of temporal perception, the node that humans use to impose this unreal order on events. Your time filter has burned out. The past and the future are as accessible to you as the present, Skein: you can go where you like, you can watch events drifting past as they really do. Only you haven’t been able to break up your old habits of thought. You still try to impose the conventional entropic order on things, even though you lack the mechanism to do it, now, and the conflict between what you perceive and what you think you perceive is driving you crazy. Eh?”

“How do you know so much about me?”

The skull-faced man chuckles. “I was injured in the same way as you. I was cut free from the timeline long ago, through the kind of overload you suffered. And I’ve had years to come to terms with the new reality. I was as terrified as you were, at first. But now I understand. I move about freely. I know things, Skein.” A rasping laugh. “You need rest, though. A room, a bed. Time to think things over. Come. There’s no rush now. You’re on the right planet; you’ll be all right soon.”

Further, the association of entropy increase with time’s arrow is in no sense circular; rather, it both tells us something about what will happen to natural systems in time, and about what the time order must be for a series of states of a system. Thus, we may often establish a time order among a set of events by use of the time-entropy association, free from any reference to clocks and magnitudes of time intervals from the present. In actual judgments of before-after we frequently do this on the basis of our experience (even though without any explicit knowledge of the law of entropy increase): we know, for example, that for iron in air the state of pure metal must have been before that of a rusted surface, or that the clothes will be dry after, not before, they have hung in the hot sun.

A tense, humid night of thunder and temporal storms. Lying alone in his oversize hotel room, five kilometers from the purple shore, Skein suffers fiercely from fugue.

“Listen, I have to forbid this. Those turtles are almost extinct. Do you understand that? Muerto. Perdido. Desaparecido. I won’t eat a turtle. Throw it back. Throw it back.”

“I’m happy to say your second go-round has been approved, Mr. Skein. Not that there was ever any doubt. A long and happy new life to you, sir.”

“Go down to it. 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!”

“Show you the mosyics? Help you understand this marvelous building? A dollar. No? Maybe change money? A good rate.”

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

“I love you.”

“Get away from me!”

“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.”

Breakfast on a leafy veranda. Morning light out of the west, making the trees glow with an ultramarine glitter. The skull-faced man joins him. Skein secretly searches the parched face. Is everything an illusion? Perhaps he is an illusion.

They walk toward the sea. Well before noon they reach the shore. The skull-faced man points to the south, and they follow the coast; it is often a difficult hike, for in places the sand is washed out and they must detour inland, scrambling over quartzy cliffs. The monstrous old man is indefatigable. When they pause to rest, squatting on a timeless purple strand made smooth by the recent tide, the debate about time resumes, and Skein hears words that have been echoing in his skull for four years and more. It is as though everything up till now has been a rehearsal for a play, and now at last he has taken the stage.

“Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein?”

“I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth.”

“Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves.”