The Stochastic Man

by Robert Silverberg

  “You were willing to sit back calmly and let my career be destroyed?”

  “Think carefully,” Carvajal said. “I knew you’d be dismissed, yes. Just as I know Sudakis will resign. But what could I do about it? To me your dismissal has already happened, remember. It isn’t subject to prevention.”

  “Oh, Jesus! Conservation of reality again?”

  “Of course. Really, Lew, do you think I’d warn you against anything that might seem to be in your power to change? How futile that would be! How foolish! We don’t change things, do we?”

  “No, we don’t,” I said bitterly. “We stand off to one side and politely let them happen. If necessary we help them happen. Even if it involves the destruction of a career, even if it involves the ruination of an attempt to stabilize the political fortunes of this miserable misgoverned country by guiding into the presidency a man who— Oh, Jesus, Carvajal, you led me right into this, didn’t you? You set me up for the whole thing. And you don’t give a damn. Isn’t that so? You simply don’t give a damn!”

  “There are worse things than losing a job, Lew.”

  “But everything I was building, everything I was trying to shape— How in God’s name am I going to help Quinn now? What am I going to do? You’ve broken me!”

  “What has happened is what had to happen,” he said.

  “Damn you and your pious acceptance!”

  “I thought you had come to share that acceptance.”

  “I don’t share anything,” I told him. “I was out of my mind ever to get involved with you, Carvajal. Because of you I’ve lost Sundara, I’ve lost my place at Quinn’s side, I’ve lost my health and my reason, I’ve lost everything that mattered to me, and for what? For what? For one stinking squint into the future that may have been nothing but a quick fatigue high? For a head full of morbid fatalistic philosophy and half-baked theories about the flow of time? Christ! I wish I’d never heard of you! You know what you are, Carvajal? You’re a kind of vampire, some sort of bloodsucker, pulling energy and vitality out of me, using me to support your strength as you drift along toward the end of your own useless, sterile, motiveless, pointless life.”

  Carvajal didn’t seem at all moved. “I’m sorry to bear you so disturbed, Lew,’’ he said mildly.

  “What else are you concealing from me? Come on, give me all the bad news. Do I slip on the ice at Christmas and break my back? Do I use up my savings and get shot holding up a bank? Am I going to become a sniffer addict next? Come on, tell me what’s heading toward me now!”

  “Please, Lew.”

  “Tell me!”

  “You ought to try to calm down.”

  “Tell me!”

  “I’m holding nothing back. You won’t have an eventful winter. It’s going to be a time of transition for you, of meditation and inner change, without any dramatic external events. And then—and then—I can’t tell you any more, Lew. You know I can’t see beyond this coming spring.”

  Those last few words hit me like a knee in the belly. Of course. Of course! Carvajal was going to die. A man who would do nothing to prevent his own death wasn’t going to interfere while someone else, even his only friend, marched serenely on toward catastrophe. He might even nudge that friend down the slippery slope if he felt a nudge was appropriate. It was naive of me to have thought Carvajal would ever have done anything to protect me from harm once he had seen the harm coming. The man was bad news. And the man had set me up for disaster.

  I said, “Any deal that may have existed between us is off. I’m afraid of you. I don’t want anything more to do with you, Carvajal. You won’t hear from me again.”

  He was silent. Perhaps he was laughing quietly. Almost certainly he was laughing quietly.

  His silence sapped the melodramatic force from my little parting speech.

  “Goodbye,” I said, feeling silly, and hung up with a crash.

  36

  Now winter closed upon the city. Some years no snow comes until January or even February; but we had a white Thanksgiving, and in the early weeks of December there was blizzard after blizzard, until it seemed that all life in New York would be crushed in the grip of a new ice age. The city has sophisticated snow-removal equipment, heating cables buried in the streets, sanitation trucks with melt-tanks, an armada of scoops and catchments and scrapers and skimmers, but no gadgetry could cope with a season that dropped ten centimeters of snow on Wednesday, a dozen more on Friday, fifteen on Monday, half a meter on Saturday. Occasionally we had a thaw between storms, allowing the top of the accumulated pack to soften and slush to drip into the gutters, but then came the cold again, the killing cold, and what had melted turned quickly to knife-edged ice. All activities halted in the frozen city. A weird silence prevailed. I stayed indoors; so did anyone else who had no powerful reason for going out. The year 1999, the whole twentieth century, seemed to be taking leave in frigid stealth.

  In this bleak time I had virtually no contact with anyone except Bob Lombroso. The financier phoned five or six days after my dismissal to express his regrets. “But why,” he wanted to know, “did you ever decide to tell Mardikian the real story?”

  “I felt I had no choice. He and Quinn had stopped taking me seriously.”

  “And they’d take you more seriously if you claimed to be able to see the future?”

  “I gambled. I lost.”

  “For a man who’s always had such a superb sixth sense of intuition, Lew, you handled that situation in a strikingly dumb way.”

  “I know. I know. I suppose I thought Mardikian had a more resilient imagination. Maybe I overestimated Quinn, too.”

  “Haig didn’t get where he is today by having a resilient imagination,” Lombroso said. “As for the mayor, he’s playing for big stakes and he doesn’t feel like taking any unnecessary risks.”

  “I’m a necessary risk, Bob. I can help him.”

  “If you have any notion of persuading him to take you back, forget it. Quinn’s terrified of you.”

  “Terrified?”

  “Well, maybe that’s too strong a word. But you make him profoundly uncomfortable. He half suspects that you might actually be able to do the things you claim. I think that’s what scares him.”

  “That he may have fired an authentic seer?”

  “No, that authentic seers exist at all. He said—and this is absolutely confidential, Lew, it’ll do me harm if he finds out you’ve heard this—he said that the idea that people might really be capable of seeing the future oppresses him like a hand around his throat. That it makes him feel paranoid, that it limits his options, that it makes the horizon close in around him. Those are his phrases. He hates the entire concept of determinism; he believes he’s a man who’s always been the shaper of his own destinies, and he feels a kind of existential terror when faced with somebody who maintains that the future is a fixed record, a book that can be opened and read. Because that turns him into a sort of puppet following a preordained pattern. It takes a lot to push Paul Quinn into paranoia, but I think you’ve succeeded. And what bothers him particularly is that he hired you, he made you a member of his inner team, he kept you close by him for four years, without realizing what a threat you were to him.”

  “I’ve never been a threat to him, Bob.”

  “He sees it differently.”

  “He’s wrong. For one thing, the future hasn’t been an open book to me all the years I’ve been with him. I worked by means of stochastic processes until quite recently, until I got entangled with Carvajal. You know that.”

  “But Quinn doesn’t.”

  “What of it? It’s absurd for him to feel threatened by me. Look, my feelings about Quinn have always been a mingling of awe and admiration and respect and, well, love. Love. Even now. I still think he’s a great human being and a great political leader, and I want to see him become President, and though I wish he hadn’t panicked over me I don’t resent it at all. I can see how from his viewpoint it might have seemed necessary to get rid of me. But I s
till want to do all I can for him.”

  “He won’t take you back, Lew.”

  “Okay. I accept that. But I can still work for him without his knowing it.”

  “How?”

  “Through you,” I said. “I can pass suggestions along to you and you can convey them to Quinn as though you’ve thought of them yourself.”

  “If I come to him with the sort of things you’ve been bringing him,” Lombroso said, “he’ll get rid of me as fast as he got rid of you. Maybe faster.”

  “They won’t be the same sort, Bob. For one thing, I know now what’s too risky to tell him. For another, I don’t have my source any more. I’ve broken with Carvajal. You know, he never warned me I was going to get fired? Sudakis’ future he tells me about, but not my own. I think he wanted me to get fired. Carvajal’s been nothing but grief to me, and I’m not going back for more of the same. But I still have my own intuitive processes to offer, my stochastic knack. I can analyze trends and generalize strategies, and I can relay my insights to you, can’t I? Can’t I? Well fix it so Quinn and Mardikian never find out that you and I are in contact. You can’t just let me go to waste, Bob. Not while there’s still a job to do for Quinn. Well?”

  “We can try,” said Lombroso warily. “I suppose we can give it a try, yes. All right. I’ll be your mouthpiece, Lew. Provided you allow me the option of deciding what I want to pass along to Quinn and what I don’t. It’s my neck on the block now, remember, not yours.”

  “Sure,” I told him.

  If I couldn’t serve Quinn myself, I could do it by prosy. For the first time since my dismissal I felt alive and hopeful. It didn’t even snow that night.

  37

  But the proxy arrangement didn’t work out. We tried, and we failed. I diligently sat down with the newspapers and caught up with current developments—one week out of touch and I had lost track of half a dozen emerging patterns—and then I made the perilous frosty journey across town to the Lew Nichols Associates office, still a going concern though ticking but feebly, and ran off some projections on my machinery. I transmitted the results to Bob Lombroso by courier, not wanting to chance the telephone. What I gave him was no big deal, a couple of piffling suggestions about city labor policy. During the next few days I generated a few more equally tame ideas. Then Lombroso called and said, “You might as well stop. Mardikian shot us down.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ve been feeding your stuff in, you know, a bit at a time. Then last night I had dinner with Haig and when we reached the dessert he suddenly asked me if you and I were keeping in touch.”

  “And you told him the truth?”

  “I tried not to tell him anything,” Lombroso said. “I was cagey, but I guess not cagey enough. Haig’s pretty sharp, you know. He saw right through me. He said, You’re getting this stuff from Lew, aren’t you? And I shrugged and he laughed and said, I know you are. It’s got his touch all over it. I didn’t admit anything. Haig just assumed—and his assumptions were correct. Very amiably he told me to cut it out, that I’d be jeopardizing my own position with Quinn if the mayor started to suspect what was going on.”

  “Then Quinn doesn’t know yet?”

  “Apparently not. And Mardikian isn’t planning to tip him off. But I can’t take any chances. If Quinn gets wise to me, I’m through. He goes into absolute paranoia whenever anyone mentions the name of Lew Nichols around him.”

  “It’s that bad, is it?”

  “It’s that bad.”

  “So I’ve become the enemy now,” I said.

  “I’m afraid you have. I’m sorry, Lew.”

  “So am I,” I said, sighing.

  “I won’t be calling you. If you need to get in touch with me, do it by way of my Wall Street office.”

  “Okay. I don’t want to get you in trouble, Bob.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “Okay.”

  “If I could do anything for you—”

  “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  38

  There was a foul storm two days before Christmas, a mean reptilian blizzard, fierce brutal winds and sub-Arctic temperatures and a heavy fall of dry, hard, rough snow. It was the sort of storm that would depress a Minnesotan and make an Eskimo cry. All day long my windows shivered in their venerable frames as cascades of wind-driven snow pounded them like clusters of pebbles, and I shivered with them, thinking that we still had all the misery of January and February to come, and snow not implausible in March either. I went to bed early and woke up early into a dazzling sunny morning. Cold sunny days are common after snowstorms as clear dry air moves in, but there was something odd about the quality of the light, which was not the harsh brittle lemon hue of a winter day but rather the sweet mellow gold of spring; and, turning the radio on, I heard the announcer talking about the dramatic shift in the weather. Apparently some vagrant air mass out of the Carolinas had moved north during the night and the temperature had risen to improbable late-April warmth.

  And April remained with us. Day after day the unseasonable heat caressed the winter-weary city. Of course everything was a mess at first as the great hummocks of recent snow softened and melted and ran in furious rivers along the gutters; but by the middle of the holiday week the worst of the slush was gone, and Manhattan, dry and trim, took on an unfamiliar well-scrubbed look. Lilacs and forsythias rashly began to break their buds, months too soon. A wave of giddiness swept New York: topcoats and snow robes disappeared, the streets were crowded with smiling buoyant people in light tunics and jerkins, throngs of nude and semi-nude sunbathers, pale but eager, sprawled on the sunny embankments of Central Park, every fountain in midtown had its full complement of musicians and jugglers and dancers. The carnival atmosphere intensified as the old year ticked away and the startling weather lingered, for this was 1999 and what was ebbing was not only a year but an entire millennium. (Those who insisted that the twenty-first century and the third millennium would not properly begin until January 1, 2001, were regarded as spoilsports and pedants.) The coming of April in December unhinged everyone. The unnatural mildness of the weather following so soon on the unnatural cold, the mysterious brightness of the sun hanging low on the southern horizon, the weird soft springlike texture of the air, gave a bizarre apocalyptic flavor to these days, so that anything seemed possible and it would not have been a surprise to behold strange comets in the night sky, or violent shifts in the constellations. I imagine it was something like that in Rome just before the arrival of the Goths, or in Paris on the verge of the Terror. It was a joyous but obscurely disturbing and frightening week; we relished the miraculous warmth, but we took it also as an omen, a portent, of some somber confrontation yet to come. As the final day of December approached there was an odd, perceptible heightening of tension. The giddy mood was still with us, but there was a sharp edge to it. What we felt was the desperate gaiety of tightrope walkers dancing over a fathomless abyss. There were those who said, taking a cruel pleasure in the grim prediction, that New Year’s Eve would be blighted by sudden vast snow, by tidal waves or tornadoes, despite the weather bureau’s forecast of continued balminess. But the day was bright and sweet, like the seven days preceding it. By noon, we learned, it was already the warmest December 31 since such records had been kept in New York City, and the mercury continued to climb all afternoon, so that we passed from pseudo-April into a perplexing imitation of June.

  During this whole time I had kept to myself, shrouded in murky confusions and, I suppose, self-pity. I called no one—not Lombroso nor Sundara nor Mardikian nor Carvajal nor any of the other shreds and fragments of my former existence. I did go out for a few hours each day to roam the streets—who could resist that sun?—but I spoke to nobody and I discouraged people from speaking to me, and by evening I was home, alone, to read a bit, drink some brandy, listen to music without really listening, go early to bed. My isolation seemed to deprive me of all stochastic grace: I lived entirely in the past, like an animal, with no noti
on of what might happen next, no hunches, none of the old sense of patterns gathering and meshing.

  On New Year’s Eve I felt a need to be outdoors. To barricade myself in solitude on such a night was intolerable, the eve of, among other things, my thirty-fourth birthday. I thought of phoning friends, but no, the social energies had deserted me: I would slink solitary and unknown through the byways of Manhattan, like the Caliph Haroun al-Raschid touring Baghdad. But I dressed in my nippy-dip peacock best, summer clothes of scarlet and gold with glistening underthreads, and I trimmed my beard and scraped my scalp, and I went out jauntily to see the century into its tomb.

  Darkness had come by late afternoon—this was still the depth of winter, no matter what the thermometer told us—and the lights of the city glittered. Though it was only seven o’clock, the partying evidently was beginning early; I heard singing, distant laughter, the sounds of chanting, the far-off crash of breaking glass. I had a meager dinner in a small automated restaurant on Third Avenue and walked aimlessly westward and southward.

  Ordinarily one didn’t stroll like this in Manhattan after dark. But tonight the streets were as busy as they were by day, pedestrians everywhere, laughing, peering into shopwindows, waving to strangers, jostling one another playfully, and I felt safe. Was this truly New York, the city of closed faces and wary eyes, the city of knives that gleamed on dark sullen streets? Yes, yes, yes, New York, but a New York transformed, a millennial New York, New York cm the night of the climactic Saturnalia.

  Saturnalia, yes, that was what it was, a lunatic revel, a frenzy of ecstatic spirits. Every drug in the psychedelic pharmacopoeia was being peddled on streetcomers, and sales seemed brisk. No one walked a straight line. Sirens wailed everywhere as the gaiety mounted in pitch. I took no drugs myself except the ancient one, alcohol, which I took most copiously, stopping in tavern after tavern, a beer here, a shot of awful brandy there, some tequila, some rum, a martini, even dark rich sherry. I was dizzy but not demolished: somehow I stayed upright and more or less coherent, and my mind functioned with what seemed like its customary lucidity, observing, recording.