Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

“No,” I said. “I love her, and even today divorce is no joke. I can’t do it on a whim.”

“Your training—”

“To hell with that. Why should I leave my wife, other than the simple fact that we haven’t been getting along very well lately? Breaking up with Sundara isn’t like changing my haircut, you know.”

“Of course it is.”

“What?”

“All events are equal in the long run,” he said.

I snorted. “Don’t talk garbage. Different acts have different consequences, Carvajal. Whether I wear my hair short or long can’t have much effect on surrounding events. But marriages sometimes produce children, and children are unique genetic constellations, and the children that Sundara and I might produce, if we chose to produce any, would be different from children that she or I might have with other mates, and the differences — Christ, if we break up I might marry someone else and become the great-great-grandfather of the next Napoleon, and if I stay with her I might — Well, how can you say that in the long run all events are equal?”

“You grasp things very slowly,” said Carvajal sadly.

“What?”

“I wasn’t speaking of consequences. Merely of events. All events are equal in their probability, Lew, by which I mean that there’s total probability of any event happening that is going to happen—”

“Tautology!”

“Yes. But we deal in tautologies, you and I. I tell you, I see you divorcing Sundara, just as I saw you getting that haircut, and so those events are of equal probability.”

I closed my eyes. I sat still a long time.

Eventually I said, “Tell me why I divorce her. Isn’t there any hope of repairing the relationship? We aren’t fighting. We don’t have serious disagreements about money. We think alike on most things. We’ve lost touch with each other, yes, but that’s all, just a drifting toward different spheres. Don’t you think we could get back together if we both made a sincere effort?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t I try it instead of—”

“You’d have to go into Transit,” he said.

I shrugged. “I think I could manage that if I had to. If the only alternative was losing Sundara.”

“You couldn’t. It’s alien to you, Lew. It opposes everything you believe and everything you’re working toward.”

“But to keep Sundara—”

“You’ve lost her.”

“Only in the future. She’s still my wife.”

“What’s lost in the future is lost now.”

“I refuse to—”

“You have to!” he cried. “It’s all one, Lew, it’s all one! You’ve come this far with me and you don’t see that?”

I saw it. I knew every argument he was likely to muster, and I believed them all, and my belief wasn’t something laid on from outside, like walnut paneling, but rather something intrinsic, something that had grown and spread within me over these past months. And still I resisted. Still I looked for loopholes. I was still clutching for any straw that eddied around me in the maelstrom, even as I was being sucked under.

I said, “Finish telling me. Why is it necessary and inevitable that I leave Sundara?”

“Because her destiny lies with Transit and yours lies as far from Transit as you can stay. They work toward uncertainty, you toward certainty. They try to undermine, you want to build. It’s a fundamental philosophical gulf that’s going to keep on getting wider and can’t ever be bridged. So the two of you have to part.”

“How soon?”

“You’ll be living alone before the end of the year,” he told me. “I’ve seen you several times in your new place.”

“No woman living with me?”

“No.”

“I’m not good at celibacy. I haven’t had much practice.”

“You’ll have women, Lew. But you’ll live alone.”

“Sundara gets the condo?”

“Yes.”

“And the paintings, the sculptures, the—”

“I don’t know,” Carvajal said, looking bored. “I really haven’t paid any attention to details like that. You know they don’t matter to me.”

“I know.”

He let me go. I walked about three miles uptown, seeing nothing around me, hearing nothing, thinking nothing. I was one with the void; I was a member of the vast emptiness. At the corner of Something Street and God-Knows-What Avenue I found a phone booth and dropped a token in the slot and dialed Haig Mardikian’s office, and vipped my way through the shield of receptionists until Mardikian himself was on the line. “I’m getting divorced,” I told him, and listened for a moment to the silent roaring of his amazement booming across the wire like the surf at Fire Island in a March storm. “I don’t care about the financial angles,” I said after a bit. “I just want a clean break. Give me the name of a lawyer you trust, Haig. Somebody who’ll do it fast without hurting her.”

In waking dreams I imagine a time when I am truly able to see. My vision pierces the murky invisible sphere that surrounds us all, and I penetrate into the realm of light. I have been asleep, I have been imprisoned, I have been blind, and now, now that the transformation has come upon me, it is like an awakening. My chains are gone; my eyes are open. About me move slow uncertain shadow-shrouded figures, blind and stumbling, their faces gray with bewilderment and uncertainty. These figures are you. And among you and about you I dance, my eyes luminous, my body ablaze with the joy of new perception. It has been like living beneath the sea, bent under a terrible pressure and held away from the tantalizing brightness by that membrane, flexible yet impenetrable, that is the interface between sea and sky; and now I have broken through it, into a place where everything glows and gleams, everything is haloed with radiance, shimmering in gold and violet and scarlet. Yes. Yes. At last I see.

What do I see?

I see the sweet and tranquil earth upon which our dramas are played. I see the sweaty struggles of the blind and deaf, buffeted as they strive by an incomprehensible fate. I see the years unrolling like the long uncoiling fronds of spring ferns, bright green at the tips, stretching away from me into infinity. In brilliant flashes of intermittent illumination I see decades sprouting into centuries and centuries becoming eons and epochs. I see the slow processions of the seasons, the systole and diastole of winter and summer, autumn and spring, the whole delicately interlocked rhythm of warmth and cold, of drought and rain, of sunlight and mist and darkness.

There are no limits to my vision. Here are the labyrinths of tomorrow’s cities, rising and falling and rising again, New York in lunatic growth, tower piled on tower, the old foundations becoming the rubble on which the new foundations rest, layer upon layer down below like the jumbled strata of Schliemann’s Troy. Through twisted streets scuttle strangers in unfamiliar clothing, speaking a jargon beyond my understanding. Machines walk about on jointed legs. Mechanical birds, twittering like creaky gates, flutter overhead. All is in flux. Look, the ocean recedes, and slippery brown beasts lie stranded and gasping on the naked sea floor! Look, the sea returns, lapping at the ancient highways that span the city’s margin! Look, the sky is green! Look, the rain is black! Look, here is change, here is transformation, here are the whims of time! I see it all!

These are the eternal motions of the galaxies, dim and fathomless. These are the precessing equinoxes, these are the shifting sands. The sun is very warm. Words have become needle sharp. I catch quick glimpses of great entities sprouting and rising and decaying and dying. These are the boundaries of the empire of the toads. This wall marks the place where the republic of the long-legged insects begins. Man himself changes. His body is transformed many times, he becomes gross and then pure and then more gross than ever, he evolves strange organs that tremble like tuning forks from the nodes of his leathery skin, he has no eyes and is seamless from lips to scalp, he has many eyes, he is covered with eyes, he is no longer male and female but functions in the form of some intermediate sex, he is tiny, he is vast, he is liquid, he is metallic, he leaps across the starry spaces, he huddles in moist caverns, he floods the planet with legions of his own kind, he diminishes by choice to a few dozen, he shakes his fist at a red swollen sky, he sings frightening songs in a nasal drone, he gives love to monsters, he abolishes death, he basks like a mighty whale in the sea, he becomes a horde of buzzing insectlike toilers, he pitches his tent in blazing diamond-bright desert sands, he laughs with the sound of drums, he lies down with dragons, he writes poems of grass, he builds vessels of air, he becomes a god, he becomes a demon, he is everything, he is nothing.