Stochastic Man Read online

  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.

  44

  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, elimination 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 ear 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.

  What we build here is a community dedicated to the abolition of uncertainty, the absolute elimination of doubt. Ultimately we will lead mankind into a universe in which nothing is random, nothing is unknown, all is predictable on every level from microcosmic to the marcocosmic, from the twitching of an electron to the journeys of the galactic nebulae. We’ll teach humanity to taste the sweet comfort of the foreordained. And in that way we’ll become as gods.

  God? Yes.

  Listen, did Jesus know fear when Pilate’s centurions came for him? Did he whimper about dying, did he lament the shortening of his appointed role, serenely aware that what was happening to him was part of a predetermined and necessary and inevitable Plan. And what of Isis, the young Isis, loving her brother Osiris, knowing even as a child everything that was in store, that Osiris must be torn apart, that through her he would be restored, that from their loins would spring the potent Horus? Isis lived with sorrow, yes and Isis lived with the foreknowledge of terrible loss, and she knew these things from the beginning, for she was a god. And she acted as she had to act. Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead. And gods do not know fear or self-pity or doubt, because they are gods and many not choose any path but the true one. Very well. We shall be as gods, all of us. I have come through the time of doubt, I have endured and survived the onslaught of confusions and terrors, I have moved into a realm beyond those things, but not into a paralysis such as afflicted Carvajal; I am in another place, and I can bring you to it. We will see, we will understand, we will comprehend the inevitable, we will be no pain. We will live in beauty, knowing that we are aspects of the one great Plan.

  About forty years ago French scientist and philosopher named Jacques Monod wrote, “Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence he has emerged by chance.”

  I believed that once. You may believe it now.

  But examine Monod’s statement in the light of a remark that Albert Einstein once made. “God does not throw dice,” Einstein said.

  Once of those statements is wrong. I think I know which one.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1975 by Robert Silverberg

  Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

  ISBN 978-1-4976-3240-0

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16
/>   Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44