Stochastic Man

by Robert Silverberg

  I nodded. Taking a deep breath, I plunged in. “You knew Leydecker was going to die this spring, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t just guess he’d die. You knew.”

  “Yes.” That same final, uncontestable yes.

  “You knew that Gilmartin would get into trouble. You knew that oil tankers would spill ungelled oil.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “You know what the” stock market is going to do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and you’ve made millions of dollars by using that knowledge.”

  “That’s also true.”

  “Therefore it’s fair to say that you see future events with extraordinary clarity, with supernatural clarity, Mr. Carvajal.”

  “As do you.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “I don’t see future events at all. I’ve got no vision whatsoever of things to come. I’m merely very very good at guessing, at weighing probabilities and coming up with the most likely pattern, but I don’t really see. I can’t ever be certain that I’m right, just reasonably confident. Because all I’m doing is guessing. You see. You told me almost as much when we met in Bob Lombroso’s office: I guess; you see. The future is like a movie playing inside your mind. Am I right?”

  “You know you are, Mr. Nichols.”

  “Yes. I know I am. There can’t be any doubt of it. I’m aware of what can be accomplished by stochastic methods, and the things you do go beyond the possibilities of guesswork. Maybe I could have predicted the likelihood of a couple of oil-tanker breakups, but not that Leydecker would drop dead or that Gilmartin would be exposed as a crook. I might have guessed that some key political figure would die this spring, but never which one. I might have guessed that some state politician would get busted, but not by name. Your predictions were exact and specific. That’s not probabilistic forecasting. That’s more like sorcery, Mr. Carvajal. By definition, the future is unknowable. But you seem to know a great deal about the future.”

  “About the immediate future, yes. Yes, I do, Mr. Nichols.”

  “Only the immediate future?”

  He laughed. “Do you think my mind penetrates all of space and time?”

  “At this point I have no idea what your mind penetrates. I wish I knew; I wish I had some notion of how it works and what its limits are.”

  “It works as you described it,” Carvajal replied. “When I want to, I see. A vision of things to come plays within me like a film.” His voice was utterly matter-of-fact. He sounded almost bored. “Is that the only thing you came here to find out?”

  “Don’t you know? Surely you’ve seen the film of this conversation already.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “But you’ve forgotten some of the details?”

  “I rarely forget anything,” Carvajal said, sighing.

  “Then you must know what else I’m going to ask.”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Even so, you won’t answer it unless I ask it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Suppose I don’t,” I said. “Suppose I just leave right now, without doing what I’m supposed to have done.”

  “That won’t be possible,” said Carvajal evenly. “I remember the course this conversation must take, and you don’t leave before asking your next question. There’s only one way for things to happen. You have no choice but to say and do the things I saw you say and do.”

  “Are you a god, decreeing the events of my life?”

  He smiled wanly and shook his head. “Very much mortal, Mr. Nichols. Decreeing nothing. I tell you, though, the future’s immutable. What you think of as the future. We’re both actors in a script that can’t be rewritten. Come, now. Let’s play out our script. Ask me—”

  “No. I’m going to break the pattern and walk out of here.”

  “—about Paul Quinn’s future,” he said.

  I was already at the door. But when he spoke Quinn’s name I halted, slack-jawed, stunned, and I turned. That was, of course, the question I had been going to ask, the question I had come here to ask, the question I had determined not to ask when I began to play my little game with immutable destiny. How poorly I had played! How sweetly Carvajal had maneuvered me! Because I was helpless, defeated, immobilized. You may think I was still free to walk out, but no, but no, not once he had invoked Quinn’s name, not now that he had tantalized me with the promise of desired knowledge, not now that Carvajal had demonstrated once more, crushingly, conclusively, the precision of his oracular gift.

  “You say it,” I muttered. “You ask the question.”

  He sighed. “If you wish.”

  “I insist.”

  “You mean to ask if Paul Quinn is going to become President.”

  “That’s it,” I said hollowly.

  “The answer is that I think he will.”

  “You think? That’s the best you can tell me. You think he will?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know everything!”

  “No,” Carvajal said. “Not everything. There are limits, and your question lies beyond them. The only answer I can give you is a mere guess, based on the same sort of factors anyone interested in politics would consider. Considering those factors, I think Quinn is likely to become President.”

  “But you don’t know for sure. You can’t see him becoming President.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s beyond your range? Not in the immediate future?”

  “Beyond my range, yes.”

  “Therefore you’re telling me that Quinn won’t be elected in 2000, but you think he’s a good bet for 2004, although you aren’t capable of seeing as far as 2004.”

  “Did you ever believe Quinn would be elected in 2000?” Carvajal asked.

  “Never. Mortonson’s unbeatable. That is, unless Mortonson happens to drop dead the way Leydecker did, in which case it’s anybody’s election, and Quinn—” I paused. “What do you see in store for Mortonson? Is he going to live as long as the election of 2000?”

  “I don’t know,” said Carvajal quietly.

  “You don’t know that either? The election’s seventeen months away. Your range of clairvoyance is less than seventeen months, is that it?”

  “At present, yes.”

  “Has it ever been greater than that?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Much greater. I’ve seen thirty or forty years ahead, at times. But not now.”

  I felt Carvajal was playing with me again. Exasperated, I said, “Is there any chance your long-range vision will return? And give you, say, a vision of the 2004 election? Or even of the election of 2000?”

  “Not really?”

  Sweat was pouring down my body. “Help me. It’s extremely important for me to know whether Quinn’s going to make it into the White House.”

  “Why?”

  “Why, because I—” I stopped, astonished to realize I had no real answer beyond mere curiosity. I was committed to working for Quinn’s election; presumably that commitment wasn’t conditional on knowing I was working for a winner. Yet in the moments when I thought Carvajal was able to tell me. I had been desperate to know. Clumsily I said, “Because I’m, well, very much involved in his career, and I’d feel better knowing the direction it’s likely to take, especially if I knew all our effort on his behalf wasn’t going to go to waste. X—ah—” I halted, feeling inane.

  Carvajal said, “I’ve given you the best answer I can. My guess is that your man will become President.”

  “Next year or in 2004?”

  “Unless something happens to Mortonson, it looks to me as though Quinn has no chance until 2004.”

  “But you don’t know whether something’s going to happen to Mortonson?” I persisted.

  “I’ve told you: I don’t have any way of knowing that. Please believe that I can’t see as far as the next election. And, as you yourself pointed out a few minutes ago, probabilistic techniques are worthless in predicting the date of death of any one person. Probabilities are all I’m going on in this. M
y guess isn’t even as good as yours. In stochastic matters, Mr. Nichols, you’re the expert, not I.”

  “What you’re saying is that your support of Quinn isn’t based on absolute knowledge, only a hunch.”

  “What support of Quinn?”

  His question, so innocent in tone, took me aback. “You thought he’d make a good mayor. You want him to become President,” I said.

  “I did? I do?”

  “You gave huge sums to his campaign treasury when he was running for mayor. What is that if it isn’t support? In March you showed up at the office of one of his chief strategists and offered to do everything you could to help Quinn attain higher office. That isn’t support?”

  “It’s of no concern to me at all whether Paul Quinn ever wins another election,” Carvajal said.

  “Really?”

  “His career means nothing to me. It never has.”

  “Then why are you willing to contribute so heavily to his election kitty? Why are you willing to offer handy tips about the future to his campaign managers? Why are you willing—”

  “Willing?”

  “Willing, yes. Did I use the wrong word?”

  “Will has nothing to do with it, Mr. Nichols.”

  “The more I talk with you, the less I understand.”

  “Will implies choice, freedom, volition. There are no such concepts in my life. I give to Quinn because I know I must, not because I prefer him to other politicians. I came to Lombroso’s office in March because I saw myself, months ago, going there, and knew that I had to go that day, no matter what I’d rather be doing. I live in this crumbling neighborhood because I’ve never been granted a view of myself living anywhere else, and so I know this is where I belong. I tell you what I’ve been telling you today because this conversation is already as familiar to me as a movie I’ve seen fifty times, and so I know I must tell you things I’ve never told to another human being. I never ask why. My life is without surprises, Mr. Nichols, and it is without decisions, and it is without volition. I do what I know I must do, and I know I must do it because I’ve seen myself doing it.”

  His placid words terrified me more than any of the real or imagined horrors of the dark staircase outside. Never before had I looked into a universe from which free will, chance, the unexpected, the random, had all been banished. I saw Carvajal as a man dragged helpless but uncomplaining through the present by his inflexible vision of the immutable future. It frightened me, but after a moment the dizzying terror was gone, never to return; for after the first appalling perception of Carvajal as tragic victim came another, more exalting, of Carvajal as one whose gift was the ultimate refinement of my own, one who has moved beyond the vagaries of chance into a realm of utter predictability. I was drawn irresistibly to him by that insight. I felt our souls interpenetrate and knew I would never be free of him again. It was as though that cold force emanating from him, that chilly radiance born of his strangeness that had made him so repellent to me, had now reversed its sign and pulled me toward him.

  I said, “You always act out the scenes you see?”

  “Always.”

  “You never try to change the script?”

  “Never.”

  “Because you’re afraid of what might happen if you do?”

  He shook his head. “How could I possibly be afraid of anything? What we fear is the unknown, isn’t it? No: I obediently read the lines of the script because I know there’s no alternative. What looks to you like the future is to me more like the past, something already experienced, something it would be futile to attempt to alter. I give money to Quinn, you see, because I have already done so and have perceived that giving. How could I see myself having given, if I fail in fact to give when the moment of my vision intersects the moment of my ‘present’?”

  “Do you ever worry about forgetting the script and doing the wrong thing when the moment comes?”

  Carvajal chuckled. “If you could ever for an instant see as I see, you’d know how empty that question is. There’s no way to do ‘the wrong thing.’ There’s only ‘the right thing,’ that which happens, that which is real. I perceive what will happen; eventually it takes place; I am an actor in a drama that allows for no improvisations, as are you, as are we all.”

  “And you’ve never even once attempted to rewrite the script? In some small detail? Not even once?”

  “Oh, yes, more than once, Mr. Nichols, and not only small details. When I was younger, much younger, before I understood. I would have a vision of some calamity, say a child running in front of a truck or a house on fire, and I would decide to play God, to prevent the calamity from occurring.”

  “And?”

  “No way. However I planned things, when the moment came the event invariably happened as I had seen it happen. Always. Circumstances prevented me from preventing anything. Many times I experimented with changing the predestined course of events, and I never succeeded, and eventually I stopped trying. Since then I’ve simply played my part, reciting my lines as I know they must be recited.”

  “And you accept this fully?” I asked. I paced the room, restless, agitated, overheated. “To you the book of time is written and sealed and unalterable? Kismet and no arguments?”

  “Kismet and no arguments,” he said.

  “Isn’t that a pretty forlorn philosophy?”

  He seemed faintly amused. “It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality. Look, do you ‘accept’ the present?”

  “What?”

  “As things happen to you, do you recognize them as valid events? Or do you see them as conditional and nutable, do you have the feeling that you could change hem in the moment they’re happening?”

  “Of course not. How could anybody change—”

  “Precisely. One can try to redirect the course of one’s uture, one can even edit and reconstruct one’s memories of the past, but nothing can be done about the moment itself as it flows into being and assumes existence.”

  “So?”

  “To others the future looks alterable because it’s inaccessible. One has the illusion of being able to create one’s own future, to carve it out of the matrix of time yet unborn. But what I perceive when I see,” he said, “is the ‘future’ only in terms of my temporary position in the time flow. In truth it’s also the ‘present,’ the unalterable immediate present, of myself at a different position in the time flow. Or perhaps at the same position in a different time flow. Oh, I have many clever theories, Mr. Nichols. But they all come to the same conclusion: that what I witness isn’t a hypothetical and conditional future, subject to modification through rearrangement of antecedent factors, but rather a real and unalterable event, as fixed as the present or the past. I can no more change it than you can change a motion picture as you sit watching it in a theater. I came to understand this a long time ago. And to accept. And to accept.”

  “How long have you had the power to see?”

  Shrugging, Carvajal said, “All my life, I suppose. When I was a child I couldn’t comprehend it; it was like a fever that came over me, a vivid dream, a delirium. I didn’t know I was experiencing—shall we say, flashforwards? But then I found myself living through episodes I had previously ‘dreamed.’ That déjá vu sensation, Mr. Nichols, that I’m sure you’ve experienced now and then —it was my daily companion. There were times when I felt like a puppet jerking about on strings while someone spoke my lines out of the sky. Gradually I discovered that no one else experienced the déjá vu feeling as often or as intensely as I. I think I must have been twenty before I fully understood what I was, and close to thirty before I really came to terms with it. Of course I never revealed myself to anyone else, not until today, in fact.”

  “Because there was no one you trusted?”

  “Because it wasn’t in the script,” he said with maddening smugness.

  “You never married?”

  “No.”

  “How could I want to? How could I want w
hat I had obviously not wanted? I never saw a wife for myself.”

  “And therefore you must never have been meant to have one.”

  “Never have been meant?” His eyes flashed strangely. “I don’t like that phrase, Mr. Nichols. It implies that there’s some conscious design in the universe, an author for the great script. I don’t think there is. There’s no need to introduce such a complication. The script writes itself, moment by moment, and the script showed that I lived alone. One doesn’t need to say I was meant to be single. Sufficient to say that I saw myself to be single, and so I would be single, and so I was single, and so I am single.”

  “The language lacks the proper tenses for a case like yours,” I said.

  “But you follow my meaning?”

  “I think so. Would it be right to say that future’ and ‘present’ are merely different names for the same events seen from different points of view?”

  “Not a bad approximation,” said Carvajal. “I prefer to think of all events as simultaneous, and what is in motion is our perception of them, that moving point of consciousness, not the events themselves.”

  “And sometimes it’s given to someone to perceive events from several viewpoints at the same time, is that it?”

  “I have many theories,” he said vaguely. “Perhaps one of them is correct. What matters is the vision itself, not the explanation. And I have the vision.”

  “You could have used it to make millions,” I said, gesturing at the shabby apartment.

  “I did.”

  “No, I mean a really gigantic fortune. Rockefeller plus Getty plus Croesus, a financial empire on a scale the world’s never seen. Power. Ultimate luxury. Pleasure. Women. Control of whole continents.”

  “It wasn’t in the script,” Carvajal said.

  “And you accepted the script.”