Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

The continents move ponderously about, like hippopotamuses doing a stately polka. The moon dips low in the sky, peering out of its own forehead like an aching white blister, and shatters with a wonderful glassy ping ! that reverberates for years. The sun itself drifts from its moorings, for everything in the universe is in constant motion and the journeys are infinitely various. I see it slide into the gulf of night, and I wait for it to return, but it does not return, and a sleeve of ice glides over the black skin of the planet, and those who live at that time become things of the night, cold-loving, self-sustaining. And across the ice come hard-breathing beasts from whose nostrils fog issues; and from the ice come flowers of blue and yellow crystal; and in the sky shines a new light, I know not from where.

What do I see, what do I see?

These are the leaders of mankind, the new kings and emperors, holding their batons of office aloft and summoning fire from the mountaintops. These are the gods yet unimagined. These are the shamans and warlocks. These are the singers, these the poets, these the makers of images. These are the new rites. These are the fruits of war. Look: lovers, killers, dreamers, seers! Look: generals, priests, explorers, lawgivers! There are unknown continents to find. There are untasted apples to eat. Look! Madmen! Courtesans! Heroes! Victims! I see the schemes. I see the mistakes. I see the miraculous achievements, and they bring tears of pride to my eyes. Here is the daughter of your daughter’s daughter. Here is the son of your sons beyond reckoning. These are nations still unknown; these are nations newly reborn. What is this language, all clicks and hisses? What is this music, all stabs and snarls? Rome will fall again. Babylon will come a second time, and lie astride the world like a great gray octopus. How wondrous are the times to come! All that you can ever imagine will befall, and more, much more, and I see it all.

Are these the things I see?

Are all doors open to me? Are all walls made into windows?

Do I look upon the murdered prince and the newborn savior, on the fires of the destroyed empire burning on the horizon, on the tomb of the lord of lords, on the hard-eyed voyagers setting forth across the golden sea that spans the belly of the transformed world? Do I survey the million million tomorrows of the race, and drink it all down, and make the future’s flesh my own? The heavens falling? The stars colliding? What are these unfamiliar constellations that shape and reshape themselves as I watch? Who are these masked faces? What does this stone idol, tall as three mountains, represent? When will the cliffs that wall the sea be ground to red powder? When will the polar ice descend like inexorable night upon the fields of red flowers? Who owns these fragments? Oh, what do I see, what do I see?

All of time, all of space.

No. Of course it won’t be like that. All I’ll see is what I can send myself out of my own few scruffy tomorrows. Brief dull messages, like the vague transmissions of the tin-can telephones we built as boys: no epic splendors, no baroque apocalypses. Yet even those blurred and muffled sounds are more than I could have hoped to have when I was asleep like you, when I was one of those blind and stumbling figures moving in clumsy sluggish lurches through the kingdom of shadows that is this world.

Mardikian found me a lawyer. He was Jason Komurjian — another Armenian, of course, one of the partners in Mardikian’s own firm, the divorce specialist, a great fullback of a man with oddly sad little eyes set close together within a massive swarthy slab of a face. He was a college classmate of Haig’s, and therefore must have been about my own age, but he seemed older, much older, ageless, a patriarch who had taken upon himself the traumas of thousands of contumacious spouses. His features were youthful, his aura was ancient.

We conferred in his office on the ninety-fifth floor of the Martin Luther King Building, a dark incense-ridden office almost rivaling Bob Lombroso’s for pomp and circumstance, a place as rich and heavy in ornamentation as the imperial chapel of a Byzantine cathedral. “Divorce,” Komurjian said dreamily, “you wish to obtain a divorce, yes, to terminate, yes, a final parting,” rotating the concept in the vast vaulted arenas of his consciousness as though it were some fine point of theology, as though we were talking about the consubstantiality of the Father and Son or the doctrine of the apostolic succession. “Yes, it should be possible to obtain that for you. You live separately now?”

“Not yet.”

He looked displeased. His heavy lips sagged, his beefy face took on a deeper hue. “This must be done,” he said. “Continued cohabitation endangers the plausibility of any suit for termination of matrimony. Even today, even today. Establish separate lodgings. Establish separate financial conduits. Demonstrate your purposes, my friend. Eh?” He reached for an ornate jeweled crucifix on his desk, a thing of rubies and emeralds, and played with it, running thick fingers over its sleek well-worn surface, and for a time he was lost in his own ruminations. I imagined the tones of an unseen organ, I saw a procession of bedecked and bearded priests strolling through the choirs of his mind. I could almost hear him muttering to himself in Latin, not church Latin but a lawyer Latin, a litany of platitudes. Magna est vis consuetudinis, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, eadem sed aliter, res ipsa loquiter. Huius huius huius, hunc haec hoc. He looked up, spearing me with an unexpectedly intent stare. “Grounds?”

“No, not that kind of divorce. We just want to break it up, to go our individual ways, a simple termination.”

“Of course you’ve discussed this with Mrs. Nichols and come to a preliminary understanding.”

I reddened. “Ah — not yet,” I said, uneasy.

Komurjian plainly disapproved. “You must introduce the subject at some point, you realize. Presumably her reaction will be tranquil. Then her lawyer and I will meet and the thing will be done.” He reached for a memo belt. “As for division of property—”

“She can have whatever she wants.”

“ Whatever? ” He sounded amazed.

“I don’t want a hassle with her over anything.”

Komurjian spread his hands before me on the desk. He wore more rings even than Lombroso. These Levantines, these luxurious Levantines! “What if she demands everything?” he asked. “All the assets in common? You yield without contest?”

“She won’t do that.”

“Is she not of allegiance to the Transit Creed?”

Startled, I said, “How do you know that?”

“Haig and I have discussed the case, you must realize.”

“I see.”

“And Transit people are unpredictable.”

I managed a choked laugh. “Yes. Very.”

“She might whimsically ask for all the assets,” Komurjian said.

“Or whimsically ask for none.”

“Or none, true. One never knows. Are you instructing me to accept whatever position she takes?”

“Let’s wait and see,” I said. “She’s basically a reasonable person, I think. It’s my feeling that she won’t make any unusual demand about division of property.”

“And settlement of income?” the lawyer asked. “She will want no continuing payments from you?” You have a standard two-group contract, yes?”

“Yes. Termination ends all financial responsibility.”

Komurjian began to hum, very quietly, almost beneath my threshold of hearing. Almost. How routine all this must seem to him, this severing of sacramental unions! “Then there should be no problems, yes? But you must announce your intentions to your wife, Mr. Nichols, before we go further.”