Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

“And you accept this fully?” I asked. I paced the room, restless, agitated, overheated. “To you the book of time is written and sealed and unalterable? Kismet and no arguments?”

“Kismet and no arguments,” he said.

“Isn’t that a pretty forlorn philosophy?”

He seemed faintly amused. “It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality. Look, do you ‘accept’ the present?”

“What?”

“As things happen to you, do you recognize them as valid events? Or do you see them as conditional and mutable, do you have the feeling that you could change them in the moment they’re happening?”

“Of course not. How could anybody change—”

“Precisely. One can try to redirect the course of one’s future, one can even edit and reconstruct one’s memories of the past, but nothing can be done about the moment itself as it flows into being and assumes existence.”

“So?”

“To others the future looks alterable because it’s inaccessible. One has the illusion of being able to create one’s own future, to carve it out of the matrix of time yet unborn. But what I perceive when I see, ” he said, “is the ‘future’ only in terms of my temporary position in the time flow. In truth it’s also the ‘present,’ the unalterable immediate present, of myself at a different position in the time flow. Or perhaps at the same position in a different time flow. Oh, I have many clever theories, Mr. Nichols. But they all come to the same conclusion: that what I witness isn’t a hypothetical and conditional future, subject to modification through rearrangement of antecedent factors, but rather a real and unalterable event, as fixed as the present or the past. I can no more change it than you can change a motion picture as you sit watching it in a theater. I came to understand this a long time ago. And to accept. And to accept.”

“How long have you had the power to see? ”

Shrugging, Carvajal said, “All my life, I suppose. When I was a child I couldn’t comprehend it; it was like a fever that came over me, a vivid dream, a delirium. I didn’t know I was experiencing — shall we say, flashforwards? But then I found myself living through episodes I had previously ‘dreamed.’ That dйjа vu sensation, Mr. Nichols, that I’m sure you’ve experienced now and then — it was my daily companion. There were times when I felt like a puppet jerking about on strings while someone spoke my lines out of the sky. Gradually I discovered that no one else experienced the dйjа vu feeling as often or as intensely as I. I think I must have been twenty before I fully understood what I was, and close to thirty before I really came to terms with it. Of course I never revealed myself to anyone else, not until today, in fact.”

“Because there was no one you trusted?”

“Because it wasn’t in the script,” he said with maddening smugness.

“You never married?”

“No.”

“How could I want to? How could I want what I had obviously not wanted? I never saw a wife for myself.”

“And therefore you must never have been meant to have one.”

“Never have been meant?” His eyes flashed strangely. “I don’t like that phrase, Mr. Nichols. It implies that there’s some conscious design in the universe, an author for the great script. I don’t think there is. There’s no need to introduce such a complication. The script writes itself, moment by moment, and the script showed that I lived alone. One doesn’t need to say I was meant to be single. Sufficient to say that I saw myself to be single, and so I would be single, and so I was single, and so I am single.”

“The language lacks the proper tenses for a case like yours,” I said.

“But you follow my meaning?”

“I think so. Would it be right to say that ‘future’ and ‘present’ are merely different names for the same events seen from different points of view?”

“Not a bad approximation,” said Carvajal. “I prefer to think of all events as simultaneous, and what is in motion is our perception of them, that moving point of consciousness, not the events themselves.”

“And sometimes it’s given to someone to perceive events from several viewpoints at the same time, is that it?”

“I have many theories,” he said vaguely. “Perhaps one of them is correct. What matters is the vision itself, not the explanation. And I have the vision.”

“You could have used it to make millions,” I said, gesturing at the shabby apartment.

“I did.”

“No, I mean a really gigantic fortune. Rockefeller plus Getty plus Croesus, a financial empire on a scale the world’s never seen. Power. Ultimate luxury. Pleasure. Women. Control of whole continents.”

“It wasn’t in the script,” Carvajal said.

“And you accepted the script.”

“The script admits of nothing other than acceptance. I thought you understood that point.”

“So you made money, a lot of money but nothing like what you could have made, and it was all meaningless to you? You just let it pile up around you like falling autumn leaves?”

“I had no need of it. My needs are simple and my tastes are plain. I accumulated it because I saw myself playing the market and growing rich. What I see myself do, I do.”

“Following the script. No questions asked about why.”

“Millions of dollars. What have you done with it all?”

“I used it as I saw myself using it. I gave some of it away, to charities, to universities, to politicians.”

“According to your own preferences or to the design you saw unfolding?”

“I have no preferences,” he said calmly.

“And the rest of the money?”

“I kept it. In banks. What would I have done with it? It’s never had any importance to me. As you say, meaningless. A million dollars, five million, ten million — just words.” An odd wistful note crept into his voice. “What does have meaning? What does meaning mean? We merely play out the script, Mr. Nichols. Would you like another glass of water?”

“Please,” I said, and the millionaire filled my glass.

My mind was whirling. I had come for answers, and I had had them, dozens of them, yet each had raised a cluster of new questions. Which he was willing to answer, evidently, for no reason other than that he had already answered them in his visions of this day. Talking to Carvajal, I found myself slipping between past and future tenses, lost in a grammatical maze of jumbled time and disordered sequences. And he was altogether placid, sitting almost motionless, his voice flat and sometimes nearly inaudible, his face without expression other than that peculiarly destroyed look. Destroyed, yes. He might have been a zombie, or perhaps a robot. Living a rigid preordained fully programmed life, never questioning the motives for any of his actions, simply going on and on, a puppet dangling from his own inevitable future, drifting in a deterministic existential passivity that I found bewildering and alien. For a moment I found myself pitying them. Then I wondered whether my compassion might not be misplaced. I felt the temptation of that existential passivity, and it was a powerful tug. How comforting it might be, I thought, to live in a world free of all uncertainty!

He said suddenly, “I think you should go now. I’m not accustomed to long conversations and I’m afraid this has tired me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stay so long.”

“No need to apologize. All that happened today was as I saw it would be. So all is well.”

“I’m grateful that you were willing to talk so openly about yourself,” I said.