Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

“I didn’t want to confuse you, Lew.”

“But what do I do? What good is any of the information I’m receiving? How do I distinguish the real visions from the imaginary ones?”

“Be patient. Things will clarify.”

“How soon?”

“When you see yourself die,” he said, “have you ever seen the same scene more than once?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“I’ve had one at least twice.”

“But one more than any of the others?”

“Yes,” I said. “The first one. Myself as an old man in a hospital, with a lot of intricate medical equipment surrounding my bed. That one comes frequently.”

“With special intensity?”

I nodded.

“Trust it,” Carvajal said. “The others are phantoms. They’ll stop bothering you before long. The imaginary ones have a feverish, insubstantial feel to them. They waver and blur at the edges. If you look at them closely, your gaze pierces them and you behold the blankness beyond. Soon they vanish. It’s been thirty years, Lew, since such things have troubled me.”

“And the Quinn visions? Are they phantoms out of some other time line, too? Have I helped to set a monster loose in this country or am I just suffering from bad dreams?”

“There’s no way I can answer that for you. You’ll simply have to wait and see, and learn to refine your vision, and look again, and weigh the evidence.”

“You can’t give me any suggestions more precise than that?”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t possible to—”

The doorbell rang.

“Excuse me,” Carvajal said.

He left the room. I closed my eyes and let the surf of some unknown tropical sea wash across my mind, a warm salty bath erasing all memory and all pain, making the rough places smooth. I perceived past, present, and future now as equally unreal: wisps of fog, shafts of blurred pastel light, far-off laughter, furry voices speaking in fragmentary sentences. Somewhere a play was being produced, but I was no longer on stage, nor was I in the audience. Time lay suspended. Perhaps, eventually, I began to see. I think Quinn’s blunt earnest features hovered before me, bathed in garish green and blue spotlights, and I might have seen the old man in the hospital and the armed men moving through the streets; and there were glimpses of worlds beyond worlds, of the empires still unborn, of the dance of the continents, of the sluggish creatures that crawl over the great planet-girdling shell of ice at the end of time. Then I heard voices from the hallway, a man shouting, Carvajal patiently explaining, denying. Something about drugs, a doublecross, angry accusations. What? What? I struggled up out of the fog that bound me. There was Carvajal, by the door, confronted by a short freckle-faced man with wild blue eyes and unkempt flame-red hair. The stranger was clutching a gun, an old clumsy one, a blue-black cannon of a gun, swirling it excitedly from side to side. The shipment, he kept yelling, where’s the shipment, what are you trying to pull? And Carvajal shrugged and smiled and shook his head and said over and over, mildly, This is a mistake, it’s simply an error. Carvajal looked radiant. It was as though all his life had been bent and shaped toward this moment of grace, this epiphany, this confused and comic doorway dialogue.

I stepped forward, ready to play my part. I devised lines for myself. I would say, Easy, fellow, stop waving that gun around. You’ve come to the wrong place. We’ve got no drugs here. I saw myself moving confidently toward the intruder, still talking. Why don’t you cool down, put the gun away, phone the boss and get things straightened out? Because otherwise you’ll find yourself in heavy trouble, and — Still talking, looming over the little freckle-faced gunman, calmly reaching for the gun, twisting it out of his hand, pressing him against the wall -

Wrong script. The real script called for me to do nothing. I knew that. I did nothing.

The gunman looked at me, at Carvajal, at me again. He hadn’t been expecting me to emerge from the living room and he wasn’t sure how to react. Then came a knock at the outside door. A man’s voice from the corridor asking Carvajal if everything was okay in there. The gunman’s eyes flashed in fear and bewilderment. He jerked away from Carvajal, pulling in on himself. There was a shot — almost peripherally, incidentally. Carvajal began to fall but supported himself against the wall. The gunman sprinted past me, toward the living room. Paused there, trembling, in a half crouch. He fired again. A third shot. Then swung suddenly toward the window. The sound of breaking glass. I had been standing frozen, but now at last I started to move. Too late; the intruder was out the window, down the fire escape, disappearing into the street.

I turned toward Carvajal. He had fallen and lay near the entrance to the living room, motionless, silent, eyes open, still breathing. His shirt was bloody down the front; a second patch of blood was spreading along his left arm; there was a third wound, oddly precise and small, at the side of his head, just above the cheekbone. I ran to him and held him and saw his eyes glaze, and it seemed to me he laughed right at the end, a small soft chuckle, but that may be scriptwriting of my own, a little neat stage direction. So. So. Done at last. How calm he had been, how accepting, how glad to be over with it. The scene so long rehearsed, now finally played.

Carvajal died on April 22, 2000. I write this in early December, with the true beginning of the twenty-first century and the start of the new millennium just a few weeks away. The coming of the millennium will find me at this unprepossessing house in this unspecified town in northern New Jersey, directing the activities, still barely under way, of the Center for Stochastic Processes. We have been here since August, when Carvajal’s will cleared probate with me as sole heir to his millions.

Here at the Center, of course, we don’t dabble much in stochastic processes. The place is deceptively named; we are not stochastic here but rather post-stochastic, going on beyond the manipulation of probabilities into the certainties of second sight. But I thought it wise not to be too candid about that. What we’re doing is a species of witchcraft, more or less, and one of the great lessons of the all-but-concluded twentieth century is that if you want to practice witchcraft, you’d better do it under some other name. Stochastic has a pleasant pseudo-scientific resonance to it that provides the right texture for a disguise, evoking as it does an image of platoons of pale young researchers feeding data into vast computers.

There are four of us so far. There’ll be more. We build gradually here. I find new followers as I need them. I know the name of the next one already, and I know how I’ll persuade him to join us, and at the right moment he’ll come to us, just as these first three came. Six months ago they were strangers to me; today they are my brothers.

What we build here is a society, a sodality, a community, a priesthood, if you will, a band of seers. We are extending and refining the capabilities of our vision, eliminating ambiguities, sharpening perception. Carvajal was right: everyone has the gift. It can be awakened in anyone. In you. In you. And so we’ll reach out, each of us offering a hand to another. Quietly spreading the post-stochastic gospel, quietly multiplying the numbers of those who see. It’ll be slow. There’ll be danger, there’ll be persecution. Hard times are coming, and not only for us. We still must pass through the era of Quinn, an era that seems as familiar to me as any in history, though it hasn’t yet begun: the election that will anoint him is still four years in the future. But I see past it, to the upheavals that follow, the turmoil, the pain. Never mind that. We’ll outlast the Quinn regime, as we outlasted Assurbanipal, Attila, Genghis Khan, Napoleon. Already the clouds of vision part and we see beyond the coming darkness to the time of healing.