Needle in a Timestack

by Robert Silverberg

  The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Skein clambers from the pit and lies by its rim, breathing hard. The skull-faced man helps him get up.

  Skein has seen this series of images hundreds of times. “How do you feel?” the skull-faced man asks.

  “Strange. Good. My head seems so clear!”

  “You had communion down there?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I think I’m healed,” Skein says in wonder. “My strength is back. Before, you know, I felt cut down to the bone, a minimum version of myself. And now. And now.” He lets a tendril of consciousness slip forth. It meets the mind of the skull-faced man. Skein is aware of a glassy interface; he can touch the other mind, but he cannot enter it. “Are you a Communicator too?” Skein asks, awed.

  “In a sense. I feel you touching me. You’re better, aren’t you?”

  “Much. Much. Much.”

  “As I told you. Now you have your second chance, Skein. Your gift has been restored. Courtesy of our friend in the pit. They love being helpful.”

  “Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

  We conceive of time either as flowing or as enduring. The problem is how to reconcile these concepts. From a purely formalistic point of view there exists no difficulty, as these properties can be reconciled by means of the concept of a duratio successiva. Every unit of time measure has this characteristic of a flowing permanence: an hour streams by while it lasts and so long as it lasts. Its flowing is thus identical with its duration. Time, from this point of view, is transitory; but its passing away lasts.

  In the early months of his affliction he experienced a great many scenes of flashforward while in fugue. He saw himself outside the nineteenth-century mansion, he saw himself in a dozen lawyers’ offices, he saw himself in hotels, terminals, spaceliners, he saw himself discussing the nature of time with the skull-faced man, he saw himself trembling on the edge of the pit, he saw himself emerging healed, he saw himself wandering from world to world, looking for the right one with purple sand and blue-leaved trees. As time unfolded most of these flash-forwards duly entered the flow of the present; he did come to the mansion, he did go to those hotels and terminals, he did wander those useless worlds. Now, as he approaches Abbondanza VI, he goes through a great many flashbacks and a relatively few flashforwards, and the flashforwards seem to be limited to a fairly narrow span of time, covering his landing on Abbondanza VI, his first meeting with the skull-faced man, his journey to the pit, and his emergence, healed, from the amoeba’s lair. Never anything beyond that final scene. He wonders if time is going to run out for him on Abbondanza VI.

  The ship lands on Abbondanza VI half a day ahead of schedule. There are the usual decontamination procedures to endure, and while they are going on Skein rests in his cabin, counting minutes to liberty. He is curiously confident that this will be the world on which he finds the skull-faced man and the benign amoeba. Of course, he has felt that way before, looking out from other spaceliners at other planets of the proper coloration, and he has been wrong. But the intensity of his confidence is something new. He is sure that the end of his quest lies here.

  “Debarkation beginning now,” the loudspeakers say.

  He joins the line of outgoing passengers. The others smile, embrace, whisper; they have found friends or even mates on this voyage. He remains apart. No one says goodbye to him. He emerges into a brightly lit terminal, a great cube of glass that looks like all the other terminals scattered across the thousands of worlds that man has reached. He could be in Chicago or Johannesburg or Beirut: the scene is one of porters, reservations clerks, customs officials, hotel agents, taxi drivers, guides. A blight of sameness spreading across the universe. Stumbling through the customs gate, Skein finds himself set upon. Does he want a taxi, a hotel room, a woman, a man, a guide, a homestead plot, a servant, a ticket to Abbondanza VII, a private car, an interpreter, a bank, a telephone? The hubbub jolts Skein into three consecutive ten-second fugues, all flashbacks; he sees a rainy day in Tierra del Fuego, he conducts a communion to help a maker of sky-spectacles perfect the plot of his latest extravaganza, and he puts his palm to a cube in order to dictate contract terms to Nicholas Coustakis. Then Coustakis fades, the terminal reappears, and Skein realizes that someone has seized him by the left arm just above the elbow. Bony fingers dig painfully into his flesh. It is the skull-faced man. “Come with me,” he says. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

  “This isn’t just another flashforward, is it?” Skein asks, as he has watched himself ask so many times in the past. “I mean you’re really here to get me.”

  The skull-faced man says, as Skein has heard him say so many times in the past, “No, this time it’s no flashforward. I’m really here to get you.”

  “Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.”

  “Follow along this way. You have your passport handy?”

  The familiar words. Skein is prepared to discover he is merely in fugue, and expects to drop back into frustrating reality at any moment. But no. The scene does not waver. It holds firm. It holds. At last he has caught up with this particular scene, overtaking it and enclosing it, pearl-like, in the folds of the present. He is on the way out of the terminal. The skull-faced man helps him through the formalities. How withered he is! How fiery the eyes, how gaunt the face! Those frightening orbits of bone jutting through the skin of the forehead. That parched cheek. Skein listens for a dry rattle of ribs. One sturdy punch and there would be nothing left but a cloud of white dust, slowly settling.

  “I know your difficulty,” the skull-faced man says. “You’ve been caught in entropy’s jaws. You’re being devoured. The injury to your mind—it’s tipped you into a situation you aren’t able to handle. You could handle it, if you’d only learn to adapt to the nature of the perceptions you’re getting now. But you won’t do that, will you? And you want to be healed. Well, you can be healed here, all right. More or less healed. I’ll take you to the place.”

  “What do you mean, I could handle it, if I’d only learn to adapt?”

  “Your injury has liberated you. It’s shown you the truth about time. But you refuse to see it.”

  “What truth?” Skein asks flatly.

  “You still try to think that time flows neatly from alpha to omega, from yesterday through today to tomorrow,” the skull-faced man says, as they walk slowly through the terminal. “But it doesn’t. The idea of the forward flow of time is a deception we impose on ourselves in childhood. An abstraction, agreed upon by common convention, to make it easier for us to cope with phenomena. The truth is that events are random, that chronological flow is only our joint hallucination, that if time can be said to flow at all, it flows in all ‘directions’ at once. Therefore—”

  “Wait,” Skein says. “How do you explain the laws of thermodynamics? Entropy increases, available energy constantly diminishes, the universe heads toward ultimate stasis.”

  “Does it?”

  “The second law of thermodynamics—”

  “Is an abstraction,” the skull-faced man says, “which unfortunately fails to correspond with the situation in the true universe. It isn’t a divine law. It’s a mathematical hypothesis developed by men who weren’t able to perceive the real situation. They did their best to account for the data within a framework they could understand. Their laws are formulations of probability, based on conditions that hold within closed systems, and given the right closed system the second law is useful and illuminating. But in the universe as a whole it simply isn’t true. There is no arrow of time. Entropy does not necessarily increase. Natural processes can be reversible. Causes do not invariably precede effects. In fact, the concepts of cause and effect are empty. There are neither causes nor effects, but only events, spontaneously generated, which we arrange in our minds in comprehensible patterns of sequence.”

  “No,” Skein mutt
ers. “This is insanity!”

  “There are no patterns. Everything is random.”

  “No.”

  “Why not admit it? Your brain has been injured. What was destroyed was the centre center of temporal perception, the node that humans use to impose this unreal order on events. Your time filter has burned out. The past and the future are as accessible to you as the present, Skein: you can go where you like, you can watch events drifting past as they really do. Only you haven’t been able to break up your old habits of thought. You still try to impose the conventional entropic order on things, even though you lack the mechanism to do it, now, and the conflict between what you perceive and what you think you perceive is driving you crazy. Eh?”

  “How do you know so much about me?”

  The skull-faced man chuckles. “I was injured in the same way as you. I was cut free from the timeline long ago, through the kind of overload you suffered. And I’ve had years to come to terms with the new reality. I was as terrified as you were, at first. But now I understand. I move about freely. I know things, Skein.” A rasping laugh. “You need rest, though. A room, a bed. Time to think things over. Come. There’s no rush now. You’re on the right planet; you’ll be all right soon.”

  Further, the association of entropy increase with time’s arrow is in no sense circular; rather, it both tells us something about what will happen to natural systems in time, and about what the time order must be for a series of states of a system. Thus, we may often establish a time order among a set of events by use of the time-entropy association, free from any reference to clocks and magnitudes of time intervals from the present. In actual judgments of before-after we frequently do this on the basis of our experience (even though without any explicit knowledge of the law of entropy increase): we know, for example, that for iron in air the state of pure metal must have been before that of a rusted surface, or that the clothes will be dry after, not before, they have hung in the hot sun.

  A tense, humid night of thunder and temporal storms. Lying alone in his oversize hotel room, five kilometers from the purple shore, Skein suffers fiercely from fugue.

  “Listen, I have to forbid this. Those turtles are almost extinct. Do you understand that? Muerto. Perdido. Desaparecido. I won’t eat a turtle. Throw it back. Throw it back.”

  “I’m happy to say your second go-round has been approved, Mr. Skein. Not that there was ever any doubt. A long and happy new life to you, sir.”

  “Go down to it. The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

  “Show you the mosyics? Help you understand this marvelous building? A dollar. No? Maybe change money? A good rate.”

  “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

  “I love you.”

  “Get away from me!”

  “Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein? The notion that there’s a consecutive series of events is nothing but a fraud. We impose form on our lives, we talk of time’s arrow, we say that there’s a flow from A through G and Q to Z, we make believe everything is nicely linear. But it isn’t, Skein. It isn’t.”

  Breakfast on a leafy veranda. Morning light out of the west, making the trees glow with an ultramarine glitter. The skull-faced man joins him. Skein secretly searches the parched face. Is everything an illusion? Perhaps he is an illusion.

  They walk toward the sea. Well before noon they reach the shore. The skull-faced man points to the south, and they follow the coast; it is often a difficult hike, for in places the sand is washed out and they must detour inland, scrambling over quartzy cliffs. The monstrous old man is indefatigable. When they pause to rest, squatting on a timeless purple strand made smooth by the recent tide, the debate about time resumes, and Skein hears words that have been echoing in his skull for four years and more. It is as though everything up till now has been a rehearsal for a play, and now at last he has taken the stage.

  “Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein?”

  “I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth.”

  “Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves.”

  Skein offers all the proper cues.

  “I won’t accept that! It’s demonic, chaotic, nihilistic theory.”

  “You can say that after all you’ve experienced?”

  “I’ll go on saying it. What I’ve been going through is a mental illness. Maybe I’m deranged, but the universe isn’t.”

  “Contrary. You’ve only recently become sane and started to see things as they really are. The trouble is that you don’t want to admit the evidence you’ve begun to perceive. Your filters are down, Skein! You’ve shaken free of the illusion of linearity! Now’s your chance to show your resilience. Learn to live with the real reality. Stop this silly business of imposing an artificial order on the flow of time. Why should effect follow cause? Why shouldn’t the seed follow the tree? Why must you persist in holding tight to a useless, outworn, contemptible system of false evaluations of experience when you’ve managed to break free of the—”

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  By early afternoon they are many kilometers from the hotel, still keeping as close to the shore as they can. The terrain is uneven and divided, with rugged fingers of rock running almost to the water’s edge, and Skein finds the journey even more exhausting than it had seemed in his visions of it. Several times he stops, panting, and has to be urged to go on.

  “It isn’t much farther,” the skull-faced man says. “You can make it. Step by step is how.”

  “I’m winded. Those hills—”

  “I’m twice your age, and I’m doing fine.”

  “You’re in better shape. I’ve been cooped up on spaceships for months and months.”

  “Just a short way on,” says the skull-faced man. “About a hundred meters from the shore.”

  Skein struggles on. The heat is frightful. He trips in the sand; he is blinded by sweat; he has a momentary flashback fugue. “There it is,” the skull-faced man says finally. “Look there, in the pit.”

  Skein beholds the conical crater. He sees the golden amoeba

  “Go down to it,” the skull-faced man says. “The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

  “And will it heal me? So that I’ll function as I did before the trouble started?”

  “If you let it heal you, it will. That’s what it wants to do. It’s a completely benign organism. It thrives on repairing broken souls. Let it into your head; let it find the damaged place. You can trust it. Go down.”

  Skein trembles on the edge of the pit. The creature below flows and eddies, becoming first long and narrow, then high and squat, then resuming its basically circular form. Its color deepens almost to scarlet, and its radiance shifts toward yellow. As if preening and stretching itself. It seems to be waiting for him. It seems eager. This is what he has sought so long, going from planet to wearying planet. The skull-faced man, the purple sand, the pit, the creature. Skein slips his sandals off. What have I to lose? He sits for a moment on the pit’s rim; then he shimmies down, sliding part of the way, and lands softly, close beside the being that awaits him. And immediately feels its power. Something brushes against his brain. The sensation reminds him of the training sessions of his first go-round, when the instructors were showing him how to develop his gift. The fingers probing his consciousness. Go on, enter, he tells them. I’m open. And he finds himself in contact with the being of the pit. Wordless. A two-way flow of unintelligible images is the only communion; shapes d
rift from and into his mind. The universe blurs. He is no longer sure where the center of his ego lies. He has thought of his brain as a sphere with himself at its center, but now it seems extended, elliptical, and an ellipse has no center, only a pair of focuses, here and here, one focus in his own skull and one—where?—within that fleshy amoeba. And suddenly he is looking at himself through the amoeba’s eyes. The large biped with the bony body. How strange, how grotesque! Yet it suffers. Yet it must be helped. It is injured. It is broken. We go to it with all our love. We will heal. And Skein feels something flowing over the bare folds and fissures of his brain. But he can no longer remember whether he is the human or the alien, the bony one or the boneless. Their identities have mingled. He goes through fugues by the scores, seeing yesterdays and tomorrows, and everything is formless and without content; he is unable to recognize himself or to understand the words being spoken. It does not matter. All is random. All is illusion. Release the knot of pain you clutch within you. Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept.

  He accepts.

  He releases.

  He merges.

  He casts away the shreds of ego, the constricting exoskeleton of self, and placidly permits the necessary adjustments to be made.

  The possibility, however, of genuine thermodynamic entropy decrease for an isolated system—no matter how rare—does raise an objection to the definition of time’s direction in terms of entropy. If a large, isolated system did by chance go through an entropy decrease as one state evolved from another, we would have to say that time “went backward” if our definition of time’s arrow were basically in terms of entropy increase. But with an ultimate definition of the forward direction of time in terms of the actual occurrence of states, and measured time intervals from the present, we can readily accommodate the entropy decrease; it would become merely a rare anomaly in the physical processes of the natural world.

  The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Skein clambers from the pit and lies by its rim, breathing hard. The skull-faced man helps him get up.