Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man

Soldiers move through the canyons of New York, five abreast, looking warily to all sides. I watch them from an upper-story window. They wear bizarre uniforms, green with red piping, gaudy yellow and red berets, ruffles at their shoulders. They are armed with weapons that look a little like crossbows — sturdy metal tubes about a meter in length, widening to a fan at the outer end and bristling with lateral whiskers of bright wire coil — which they carry with the wide ends balanced across their left forearms. The self who watches them is a man of at least sixty, white-haired, gaunt, with deep vertical lines scored in his cheeks; he is recognizably myself, and yet he is almost wholly strange to me. In the street a figure erupts from a building and rushes wildly toward the soldiers, shouting slogans, waving his arms. One very young soldier jerks his right arm up and a cone of green light emerges quietly from his weapon; the onrushing figure halts, incandescent, and disappears. Disappears.

The self I see is still youthful, but older than I am now. Say, forty: then this would be about the year 2006. He lies on a rumpled bed next to an attractive young woman with long black hair; they are both naked, sweaty, disheveled; obviously they have been making love. He asks, “Did you hear the President’s speech last night?”

“Why should I waste my time listening to that murderous fascist bastard?” she replies.

A party is going on. Shrill unfamiliar music, strange golden wine poured freely from double-spouted bottles. The air is dense with blue fumes. I hold court at one corner of the crowded room, talking urgently with a plump freckle-faced young woman and one of the young men who had been with me at that red-shingled house. But my voice is covered by the raucous music and I perceive only shreds and scraps of what I am saying; I pick up words like miscalculation and overload and demonstration and alternative distribution, but they are embedded in gibberish and it is all ultimately unintelligible. The clothing styles are odd, loose irregular garments decked with patches and strips of mismatched fabrics. In the middle of the room about twenty of the guests are dancing with weird intensity, milling in a ragged circle, slashing the air fiercely with elbows and knees. They are nude; they have coated their bodies entirely with a glossy purple dye; they are altogether hairless, both men and women totally depilated from head to foot, so that but for their jiggling genitals and bobbing breasts they might easily pass for plastic mannequins jolted into a twitching, spasmodic counterfeit of life.

A humid summer night. A dull booming sound, another, another. Fireworks explode against the blackness of the sky over the Hudson’s Jersey shore. Skyrockets litter the heavens with Chinese fire, red, yellow, green, blue, dazzling streaks and starbursts, cycle upon cycle of flaming beauty accompanied by terrifying hisses and pops and roars and bangs, climax after climax, and then, just as one assumes the splendor now will die away into silence and darkness, there comes an amazing final pyrotechnical frenzy, culminating in a grand double set piece: an American flag spectacularly quivering above us with every star discernible, and, exploding out of the center of Old Glory’s field, the image of a man’s face, limned in startling realistic flesh tones. The face is the face of Paul Quinn.

I am aboard a great airplane, a plane whose wings seem to stretch from China to Peru, and through the porthole beside me I see a vast gray-blue sea on whose bosom the reflected sun shines in a furious glaring brightness. I am strapped down, awaiting landing, and now I can make out our destination: an enormous hexagonal platform rising steeply from the sea, an artificial island as symmetrical in its angles as a snowflake, a concrete island encrusted with squat red-brick buildings and split down its middle by the long white arrow of an airstrip, an island that is entirely alone in this immense sea with thousands of kilometers of emptiness bordering each of its six sides.

Manhattan. Autumn, chilly, the sky dark, the windows overhead glowing. Before me a colossal tower rising just east of the venerable Fifth Avenue library. “The tallest in the world,” someone says behind me, one tourist to another, twanging Western accent. Indeed it must be. The tower fills the sky. “It’s all government offices,” the Westerner goes on. “Can you catch it? Two hundred floors high, and all government offices. With a palace for Quinn right at the top, so they say. For whenever he comes to town. A goddamned palace, like for a king.”

What I particularly fear as these visions crowd upon me is my first confrontation with the scene of my own death. Will I be destroyed by it, I wonder, as Carvajal was destroyed — all drive and purpose sucked from me by one glimpse of my last moments? I wait, wondering when it will come, dreading it and eager for it, wanting to absorb the terrifying knowledge and be done with it, and when it does come it’s an anticlimax, a comic letdown. What I see is a faded, weary old man in a hospital bed, gaunt and worn, perhaps seventy-five years old, maybe eighty, even ninety. He is surrounded by a bright cocoon of life-support apparatus; needled arms arch and weave about him like the tails of scorpions, filling him with enzymes, hormones, decongestants, stimulants, whatever. I’ve seen him before, briefly, that drunken night in Times Square when I crouched dazzled and astounded, tripping out on a torrent of voices and images, but now the vision continues a little further than that other time, so that I perceive this future me not merely as a sick old man, but as a dying old man on his way out, sliding away, sliding away, the whole vast wonderful lattice of medical equipment unable any longer to sustain the feeble beat of life. I can feel the pulse ebbing in him. Quietly, quietly, he is going. Into the darkness. Into the peace. He is very still. Not yet dead, else my perceptions of him would cease. But almost. Almost. And now. No more data. Peace and silence. A good death, yes.

Is that all? Is he truly dead, out there fifty or sixty years from now, or has the vision merely been interrupted? I can’t be sure. If only I could see beyond that moment of quietus, just a glimpse past the curtain, to watch the routines of death, the expressionless orderlies placidly disconnecting the life-support system, the sheet pulled up over the face, the cadaver wheeled off to the morgue. But there is no way to pursue the image. The picture show ends with the last flicker of light. Yet I am certain that this is it. I am relieved and almost a bit disappointed. So little? Just to fade away at a great old age? Nothing to dread in that. I think of Carvajal, crazy-eyed from having seen himself die too often. But I’m not Carvajal. How can such knowledge harm me? I admit the inevitability of my death; the details are mere footnotes. The scene recurs, a few weeks later, and then again, and again. Always the same. The hospital, the spidery maze of life-support stuff, the sliding, the darkness, the peace. So there is nothing to fear from seeing. I’ve seen the worst, and it hasn’t harmed me.

But then all is cast into doubt and my newfound confidence is shattered. I see myself again in that great plane, and we are swooping toward the hexagonal artificial island. A cabin attendant rushes up the aisle, distraught, alarmed, and behind her comes a bellying oily burst of black smoke. Fire on board! The plane’s wings dip wildly. There are screams. Unintelligible cries over the public-address system. Muffled, incoherent instructions. Pressure nails my body to my seat; we are plunging toward the ocean. Down, down, and we hit, an incredible cracking impact, the ship is ripped apart; still strapped in, I plummet face first into the cold dark depths. The sea swallows me and I know no more.