Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

I had breakfast alone and watched morning come rushing out of the Atlantic at us. I took the morning Times out of its door slot and was pleased to see that Quinn’s speech had made the front page, below the fold but with a two-column photo. MAYOR CALLS FOR FULL HUMAN POTENTIAL. That was the headline, a bit below the Times ’ usual standard of incisiveness. The story used his Ultimate Society tag as its lead and quoted half a dozen glittering phrases in the first twenty lines. The story then jumped to page 21, and the complete text was in a box accompanying the jump. I found myself reading it, and as I read I found myself wondering why I had been so stirred, for the printed speech seemed to lack any real content; it was purely a verbal object, a collection of catchy lines, offering no program, making no concrete suggestions. And to me last night it had sounded like a blueprint for Utopia. I shivered. Quinn had provided nothing more than an armature; I myself had hung the trimmings on, all my vague fantasies of social reform and millennial transformation. Quinn’s performance had been pure charisma in action, an elemental force working us over from the dais. So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

The phone began ringing a little after eight. Mardikian wanted to distribute a thousand videotapes of the speech to New Democratic organizations all over the country; what did I think? Lombroso reported pledges of half a million to the as yet nonexistent Quinn-for-President campaign kitty in the aftermath of the speech. Missakian … Ephrikian … Sarkisian…

When I finally had a quiet moment, I came out and found Catalina Yarber, wearing her blouse and her thigh chain, prodding Lamont Friedman into wakefulness. She gave me a foxy grin. “We’ll be seeing more of each other, I know,” she said throatily.

They left. Sundara slept on. There were no more phone calls. Quinn’s speech was making waves everywhere. Eventually she emerged, naked, delicious, sleepy, but perfect in her beauty, not even puffy-eyed.

“I think I want to know more about Transit,” she said.

Three days later I came home and was startled to find Sundara and Catalina, both nude, kneeling side by side on the living-room carpet. How beautiful they looked, the pale body beside the chocolate one, the short yellow hair and the long black cascade, the dark nipples and the pink. It was not the prelude to a pasha’s orgy, though. The air was rich with incense and they were running through litanies. “Everything passes,” Yarber intoned, and Sundara repeated, “Everything passes.” A golden chain constricted the dusky satin of my wife’s left thigh and the Transit Creed medallion was mounted on it.

She and Catalina displayed a courteous don’t-mind-us attitude toward me and went on with what they were doing, which evidently was an extended catechism. I thought they would rise at some point and disappear into the bedroom, but no, the nudity was purely ritual, and when they were done with the teachings they donned their clothes and brewed tea and gossiped like old friends. That night, when I reached for Sundara, she said gently that she couldn’t make love just now. Not wouldn’t, not didn’t want to, but couldn’t. As if she had entered into a state of purity that must not at the moment be defiled by lust.

So it began, Sundara’s passage into Transit. At first there was only the morning meditation, ten minutes in silence; then there were the evening readings, out of mysterious paperbound books poorly printed on cheap paper; in the second week she announced there would be a meeting in the city every Tuesday night, and could I manage without her? Tuesdays became nights of sexual abstinence for us also; she was apologetic but firm about that. She seemed distant, preoccupied, engrossed with her conversion. Even her work, the art gallery she ran so shrewdly, seemed unimportant to her. I suspected she was seeing Catalina often in the city during the day, and I was right, though in my naпve Western materialist way I imagined they were merely having a love affair, meeting in hotel rooms for interludes of slippery grapplings and tonguings, when in fact it was Sundara’s soul far more than her body that had been seduced. Old friends had warned me long ago: marry a Hindu and you’ll be twirling prayer wheels with her from dusk to dawn, you’ll turn into a vegetarian, she’ll have you singing hymns to Krishna. I laughed at them. Sundara was American, Western, earthy. But now I saw her Sanskrit genes taking their revenge.

Transit, of course, wasn’t Hindu — more a mixture of Buddhism and fascism, actually, a stew of Zen and Tantra and Platonism and Gestalt therapy and Poundian economics and what-all else, and neither Krishna nor Allah nor Jehovah nor any other divinity figured in its beliefs. It had come out of California, naturally, six or seven years ago, a characteristic product of the Wild ‘90s that had succeeded the Goofy ‘80s that had followed the Horrid ‘70s, and, diligently proselytized by an ever-expanding horde of dedicated proctors, it had spread rapidly through such less enlightened places as the eastern United States. Until Sundara’s conversion I had paid little attention to it; it was not so much repugnant as irrelevant to me. But as it began to absorb more and more of my wife’s energies, I started to take a closer look.

Catalina Yarber had been able to express most of the basic tenets in five minutes, the night she and I bedded. This world is unimportant, the Transit folk assert, and our passage through it is brief, a quick trifling trip. We go through, we are reborn into it, we go through again, we keep on going through until at last we are freed from the wheel of karma and pass onward to the blissful annihilation that is nirvana, when we become one with the cosmos. What holds us to the wheel is ego attachment: we become hooked on things and needs and pleasures, on self-gratification, and so long as we retain a self that requires gratification we will be born again and again into this dreary meaningless little mud-ball. If we want to move to a higher plane and ultimately to reach the Highest, we must refine our souls in the crucible of renunciation.

All that is fairly orthodox Eastern theology. The special kicker of Transit is its emphasis on volatility and mutability. Transition is all; change is essential; stasis kills; rigid consistency is the road to undesirable rebirths. Transit processes work toward constant evolution, toward perpetual quicksilver flow of the spirit, and encourage unpredictable, even eccentric, behavior. That’s the appeal: the sanctification of craziness. The universe, the proctors say, is in perpetual flux; we never can step twice into the same river; we must flow and yield; we must be supple, protean, kaleidoscopic, mercurial; we must accept the knowledge that permanence is an ugly delusion and everything, ourselves included, is in a state of giddy unending transition. But although the universe is fluid and wayward, we are not therefore condemned to blow haphazardly in its breezes. No, they tell us: because nothing is deterministic, because nothing is unbendingly foreordained, everything is within our individual control. We are the existential shapers of our destinies, and we are free to grasp the Truth and act on it. What is the Truth? That we must freely choose not to be ourselves, that we must discard our rigidly conceived self-images, for only through the unimpeded flow of the Transit processes can we abolish the ego attachments that tie us to intransient low-plane states.

These teachings were threatening to me. I am not comfortable with chaos. I believe in order and predictability. My gift of second sight, my innate stochasticity, is founded on the notion that patterns exist, that probabilities are real. I prefer to believe that while it is not certain that tea over a flame will boil or that a rock thrown in the air will fall, these events are highly likely. The Transit people, it seemed to me, were striving toward abolition of that likelihood: to produce iced tea on a stove was their aim.