The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72

by Robert Silverberg

  His office. All its gilded magnificence. A crystal dome at the summit of Kenyatta Tower. With the amplifiers on he can see as far as Serengeti in one direction, Mombasa in another. Count the fleas on an elephant in Tsavo Park. A wall of light on the east-southeast face of the dome, housing his data-access units. No one can stare at that wall more than thirty seconds without suffering intensely from a surfeit of information. Except Skein; he drains nourishment from it, hour after hour.

  As he slides into the soul of that earlier Skein he takes a brief joy in the sight of his office, like Aeneas relishing a vision of unfallen Troy, like Adam looking back into Eden. How good it was. That broad sweet desk with its subtle components dedicated to his service. The gentle psychosensitive carpet, so useful and so beautiful. The undulating ribbon-sculpture gliding in and out of the dome’s skin, undergoing molecular displacement each time and forever exhibiting the newest of its infinity of possible patterns. A rich man’s office; he was unabashed in his pursuit of elegance. He had earned the right to luxury through the intelligent use of his innate skills. Returning now to that lost dome of wonders, he quickly seizes his moment of satisfaction, aware that shortly some souring scene of subtraction will be replayed for him, one of the stages of the darkening and withering of his life. But which one?

  “Send in Coustakis,” he hears himself say, and his words give him the answer. That one. He will again watch his own destruction. Surely there is no further need to subject him to this particular re-enactment. He has been through it at least seven times; he is losing count. An endless spiraling track of torment.

  Coustakis is bald, blue-eyed, sharp-nosed, with the desperate look of a man who is near the end of his first go-round and is not yet sure that he will be granted a second. Skein guesses that he is about seventy. The man is unlikable: he dresses coarsely, moves in aggressive blurting little strides, and shows in every gesture and glance that he seethes with envy of the opulence with which Skein surrounds himself. Skein feels no need to like his clients, though. Only to respect. And Coustakis is brilliant; he commands respect.

  Skein says, “My staff and I have studied your proposal in great detail. It’s a cunning scheme.”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “There are risks for me,” Skein points out. “Nissenson has a powerful ego. So do you. I could get hurt. The whole concept of synergy involves risk for the Communicator. My fees are calculated accordingly.”

  “Nobody expects a Communicator to be cheap,” Coustakis mutters.

  “I’m not. But I think you’ll be able to afford me. The question is whether I can afford you.”

  “You’re very cryptic, Mr. Skein. Like all oracles.”

  Skein smiles. “I’m not an oracle, I’m afraid. Merely a conduit through whom connections are made. I can’t foresee the future.”

  “You can evaluate probabilities.”

  “Only concerning my own welfare. And I’m capable of arriving at an incorrect evaluation.”

  Coustakis fidgets. “Will you help me or won’t you?”

  “The fee,” Skein says, “is half a million down, plus an equity position of fifteen percent in the corporation you’ll establish with the contacts I provide.”

  Coustakis gnaws at his lower lip. “So much?”

  “Bear in mind that I’ve got to split my fee with Nissenson. Consultants like him aren’t cheap.”

  “Even so. Ten percent.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Coustakis. I really thought we were past the point of negotiation in this transaction. It’s going to be a busy day for me, and so—” Skein passes his hand over a black rectangle on his desk and a section of the floor silently opens, uncovering the dropshaft access. He nods toward it. The carpet reveals the colors of Coustakis’ mental processes: black for anger, green for greed, red for anxiety, yellow for fear, blue for temptation, all mixed together in the hashed pattern betraying the calculations now going on in his mind. Coustakis will yield. Nevertheless Skein proceeds with the charade of standing, gesturing toward the exit, trying to usher his visitor out. “All right,” Coustakis says explosively, “fifteen percent!”

  Skein instructs his desk to extrude a contract cube. He says, “Place your hand here, please,” and as Coustakis touches the cube he presses his own palm against its opposite face. At once the cube’s sleek crystalline surface darkens and roughens as the double sensory output bombards it. Skein says, “Repeat after me. I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”

  “I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”

  “—do knowingly and willingly assign to John Skein Enterprises, as payment for professional services to be rendered, an equity interest in Coustakis Transport Ltd. or any successor corporation amounting to—”

  “—do knowingly and willingly assign—”

  They drone on in turns through a description of Coustakis’ corporation and the irrevocable nature of Skein’s part ownership in it. Then Skein files the contract cube and says, “If you’ll phone your bank and put your thumb on the cash part of the transaction, I’ll make contact with Nissenson and you can get started.”

  “Half a million?”

  “Half a million.”

  “You know I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Let’s not waste time, Mr. Coustakis. You have assets. Pledge them as collateral. Credit is easily obtained.”

  Scowling, Coustakis applies for the loan, gets it, transfers the funds to Skein’s account. The process takes eight minutes; Skein uses the time to review Coustakis’ ego-profile. It displeases Skein to have to exert such sordid economic pressure; but the service he offers does, after all, expose him to dangers, and he must cushion the risk by high guarantees, in case some mishap should put him out of business.

  “Now we can proceed,” Skein says, when the transaction is done.

  Coustakis has almost invented a system for the economical instantaneous transportation of matter. It will not, unfortunately, ever be useful for living things, since the process involves the destruction of the material being shipped and its virtually simultaneous reconstitution elsewhere. The fragile entity that is the soul cannot withstand the withering blast of Coustakis’ transmitter’s electron beam. But there is tremendous potential in the freight business; the Coustakis transmitter will be able to send cabbages to Mars, computers to Pluto, and, given the proper linkage facilities, it should be able to reach the inhabited extrasolar planets.

  However, Coustakis has not yet perfected his system. For five years he has been stymied by one impassable problem: keeping the beam tight enough between transmitter and receiver. Beam-spread has led to chaos in his experiments; marginal straying results in the loss of transmitted information, so that that which is being sent invariably arrives incomplete. Coustakis has depleted his resources in the unsuccessful search for a solution, and thus has been forced to the desperate and costly step of calling in a Communicator.

  For a price, Skein will place him in contact with someone who can solve his problem. Skein has a network of consultants on several worlds, experts in technology and finance and philology and nearly everything else. Using his own mind as the focal nexus, Skein will open telepathic communion between Coustakis and a consultant.

  “Get Nissenson into a receptive state,” he orders his desk.

  Coustakis, blinking rapidly, obviously uneasy, says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

  “No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”

  “And if he doesn’t have the answer?”

  “He will.”

  Skein gives no refunds in the event of failure, but he has never had a failure. He does not accept jobs that he feels will be i
nherently impossible to handle. Either Nissenson will see the solution Coustakis has been overlooking, or else he will make some suggestion that will nudge Coustakis toward finding the solution himself. The telepathic communion is the vital element. Mere talking would never get anywhere. Coustakis and Nissenson could stare at blueprints together for months, pound computers side by side for years, debate the difficulty with each other for decades, and still they might not hit on the answer. But the communion creates a synergy of minds that is more than a doubling of the available brainpower. A union of perceptions, a heightening, that always produces that mystic flash of insight, that leap of the intellect.

  “And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?” Coustakis asks.

  “He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

  The desk reports that Nissenson, half the world away in São Paulo, is ready. Skein’s power does not vary with distance. Quickly he throws Coustakis into the receptive condition, and swings around to face the brilliant lights of his data-access units. Those sparkling, shifting little blazes kindle his gift, jabbing at the electrical rhythms of his brain until he is lifted into the energy level that permits the opening of a communion. As he starts to go up, the other Skein who is watching, the time-displaced prisoner behind his forehead, tries frenziedly to prevent him from entering the fatal linkage. Don’t. Don’t. You’ll overload. They’re too strong for you. Easier to halt a planet in its orbit, though. The course of the past is frozen; all this has already happened; the Skein who cries out in silent anguish is merely an observer, necessarily passive, here to view the maiming of his earlier self.

  Skein reaches forth one tendril of his mind and engages Nissenson. With another tendril he snares Coustakis. Steadily, now, he draws the two tendrils together.

  There is no way to predict the intensity of the forces that will shortly course through his brain. He has done what he could, checking the ego-profiles of his client and the consultant, but that really tells him little. What Coustakis and Nissenson may be as individuals hardly matters; it is what they may become in communion that he must fear. Synergistic intensities are unpredictable. He has lived for a lifetime and a half with the possibility of a burnout.

  The tendrils meet.

  Skein the observer winces and tries to armor himself against the shock. But there is no way to deflect it. Out of Coustakis’ mind flows a description of the matter-transmitter and a clear statement of the beam-spread problem; Skein shoves it along to Nissenson, who begins to work on a solution. But when their minds join it is immediately evident that their combined strength will be more than Skein can control. This time the synergy will destroy him. But he cannot disengage; he has no mental circuitbreaker. He is caught, trapped, impaled. The entity that is Coustakis/Nissenson will not let go of him, for that would mean its own destruction. A wave of mental energy goes rippling and dancing along the vector of communion from Coustakis to Nissenson and goes bouncing back, pulsating and gaining strength, from Nissenson to Coustakis. A fiery oscillation is set up. Skein sees what is happening; he has become the amplifier of his own doom. The torrent of energy continues to gather power each time it reverberates from Coustakis to Nissenson, from Nissenson to Coustakis. Powerless, Skein watches the energy-pumping effect building up a mighty charge. The discharge is bound to come soon, and he will be the one who must receive it. How long? How long? The juggernaut fills the corridors of his mind. He ceases to know which end of the circuit is Nissenson, which is Coustakis; he perceives only two shining walls of mental power, between which he is stretched ever thinner, a twanging wire of ego, heating up, heating up, glowing now, emitting a searing blast of heat, particles of identity streaming away from him like so many liberated ions—

  Then he lies numb and dazed on the floor of his office, grinding his face into the psychosensitive carpet, while Coustakis barks over and over, “Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

  Like any other chronometric device, our inner clocks are subject to their own peculiar disorders and, in spite of the substantial concordance between private and public time, discrepancies may occur as the result of sheer inattention. Mach noted that if a doctor focuses his attention on the patient’s blood, it may seem to him to squirt out before the lancet enters the skin and, for similar reasons, the feebler of two stimuli presented simultaneously is usually perceived later…Normal life requires the capacity to recall experiences in a sequence corresponding, roughly at least, to the order in which they actually occurred. It requires in addition that our potential recollections should be reasonably accessible to consciousness. These potential recollections mean not only a perpetuation within us of representations of the past, but also a ceaseless interplay between such representations and the uninterrupted input of present information from the external world. Just as our past may be at the service of our present, so the present may be remotely controlled by our past: in the words of Shelley, “Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung.”

  “Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

  His bottle is open and they are helping him out. His cabin is full of intruders. Skein recognizes the captain’s robot, the medic, and a couple of passengers, the little swarthy man from Pingalore and the woman from Globe Fifteen. The cabin door is open and more people are coming in. The medic makes a cuff-shooting gesture and a blinding haze of metallic white particles wraps itself about Skein’s head. The little tingling prickling sensations spur him to wakefulness. “You didn’t respond when the bottle told you it was all right,” the medic explains. “We’re through the canal.”

  “Was it a good passage? Fine. Fine. I must have dozed.”

  “If you’d like to come to the infirmary—a routine check, only—put you through the diagnostat—”

  “No. No. Will you all please go? I assure you, I’m quite all right.”

  Reluctantly, clucking over him, they finally leave. Skein gulps cold water until his head is clear. He plants himself flatfooted in midcabin, trying to pick up some sensation of forward motion. The ship now is traveling at something like fifteen million miles a second. How long is fifteen million miles? How long is a second? From Rome to Naples it was a morning’s drive on the autostrada. From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was the time between twilight and darkness. San Francisco to San Diego spanned lunch to dinner by superpod. As I slide my right foot two inches forward we traverse fifteen million miles. From where to where? And why? He has not seen Earth in twenty-six months. At the end of this voyage his remaining funds will be exhausted. Perhaps he will have to make his home in the Abbondanza system; he has no return ticket. But of course he can travel to his heart’s discontent within his own skull, whipping from point to point along the time-line in the grip of the fugues.

  He goes quickly from his cabin to the recreation lounge.

  The ship is a second-class vessel, neither lavish nor seedy. It carries about twenty passengers, most of them, like him, bound outward on one-way journeys. He has not talked directly to any of them, but he has done considerable eavesdropping in the lounge, and by now can tag each one of them with the proper dull biography. The wife bravely joining her pioneer husband, whom she has not seen for half a decade. The remittance man under orders to place ten thousand lightyears, at the very least, between himself and his parents. The glittery-eyed entrepreneur, a Phoenician merchant sixty centuries after his proper era, off to carve an empire as a middleman’s middleman. The tourists. The bureaucrat. The colonel. Among this collection Skein stands out in sharp relief; he is the only one who has not made an effort to know and be known, and the mystery of his reserve tantalizes them.

  He carries the fact of his crackup with him like some wrinkled dangling yellowed wen. When his eyes meet those of any of the others he says silently, You see my deformity? I am my own survivor. I have been destroyed and lived to look back on it. Once I was a man of wealth and power, and look at me now. But I ask for no pity. Is that understood?

  Hunching at the b
ar, Skein pushes the node for filtered rum. His drink arrives, and with it comes the remittance man, handsome, young, insinuating. Giving Skein a confidential wink, as if to say, I know. You’re on the run, too.

  “From Earth, are you?” he says to Skein.

  “Formerly.”

  “I’m Pid Rocklin.”

  “John Skein.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “On Earth?” Skein shrugs. “A Communicator. I retired four years ago.”

  “Oh.” Rocklin summons a drink. “That’s good work, if you have the gift.”

  “I had the gift,” Skein says. The unstressed past tense is as far into self-pity as he will go. He drinks and pushes for another one. A great gleaming screen over the bar shows the look of space: empty, here beyond the Panama Canal, although yesterday a million suns blazed on that ebony rectangle. Skein imagines he can hear the whoosh of hydrogen molecules scraping past the hull at eighty lights. He sees them as blobs of brightness millions of miles long, going zip! and zip! and zip! as the ship spurts along. Abruptly a purple nimbus envelopes him and he drops into a flashforward fugue so quickly there is not even time for the usual futile resistance. “Hey, what’s the matter?” Pid Rocklin says, reaching for him. “Are you all—” and Skein loses the universe.

  He is on the world that he takes to be Abbondanza VI, and his familiar companion, the skullfaced man, stands beside him at the edge of an oily orange sea. They appear to be having the debate about time once again. The skullfaced man must be at least a hundred and twenty years old; his skin lies against his bones with, seemingly, no flesh at all under it, and his face is all nostrils and burning eyes. Bony sockets, sharp shelves for cheekbones, a bald dome of a skull. The neck no more than wrist-thick, rising out of shriveled shoulders. Saying, “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.”