Needle in a Timestack Read online

  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 bar, 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 skull-faced man, stands beside him at the edge of an oily orange sea. They appear to be having the debate about time once again. The skull-faced 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.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  “I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth. G can come before A, and Z before both of them. Most of us don’t like to perceive it that way, so we arrange things in what seems like a more logical pattern, just as a novelist will put the motive before the murder and the murder before the arrest. But the universe isn’t a novel. We can’t make nature imitate art. It’s all random, Skein, random, random! Look there. You see what’s drifting on the sea?”

  On the orange waves tosses the bloated corpse of a shaggy blue beast. Upturned saucery eyes, drooping snout, thick limbs. Why is it not waterlogged by now? What keeps it afloat?

  The skull-faced man says, “Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves. We filter them. We screen out what doesn’t make sense and admit them to our consciousness in what seems to be the right sequence.” He laughs. “The grand delusion! The past is nothing but a series of films slipping unpredictably into the future. And vice versa.”

  “I won’t accept that,” Skein says stubbornly. “It’s a demonic, chaotic, nihilistic theory. It’s idiocy. Are we greybeards before we’re children? Do we die before we’re born? Do trees devolve into seeds? Deny linearity all you like. I won’t go along.”

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

  Skein shakes his head. “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 skull-faced man insists. “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!”

  “—right, Skein?”

  “What happened?”

  “You started to fall off your stool,” Pid Rocklin says. “You turned absolutely white. I thought you were having some kind of a stroke.”

  “How long was I unconscious?”

  “Oh, three, four seconds, I suppose. I grabbed you and propped you up, and your eyes opened. Can I help you to your cabin? Or maybe you ought to go to the infirmary.”

  “Excuse me,” Skein says hoarsely, and leaves the lounge.

  When the hallucinations began, not long after the Coustakis overload, he assumed at first that they were memory disturbances produced by the fearful jolt he had absorbed. Quite clearly most of them involved scenes of his past, which he would relive, during the moments of fugue, with an intensity so brilliant that he felt he had actually been thrust back into time. He did not merely recollect, but rather he experienced the past anew, following a script from which he could not deviate as he spoke and felt and reacted. Such strange excursions into memory could be easily enough explained: his brain had been damaged, and it was heaving old segments of experience into view in some kind of attempt to clear itself of debris and heal the wounds. But while the flashbacks were comprehensible, the flashforwards were not, and he did not recognize them at all for what they actually were. Those scenes of himself wandering alien worlds, those phantom conversations with people he had never met, those views of spaceliner cabins and transit booths and unfamiliar hotels and passenger terminals, seemed merely to be fantasies, random fictions of his injured brain. Even when he started to notice that there was a consistent pattern to these feverish glimpses of the unknown, he still did not catch on. It appeared as though he was seeing himself performing a sort of quest, or perhaps a pilgrimage; the slices of unexperienced experience that he was permitted to see began to fit into a coherent structure of travel and seeking. And certain scenes and conversations recurred, yes, sometimes several times the same day, the script always the same, so that he began to learn a few of the scenes word for word. Despite the solid texture of these episodes, he persisted in thinking of them as mere brief flickering segments of nightmare. He could not imagine why the injury to his brain was causing him to have these waking dreams of long space voyages and unknown planets, so vivid and so momentarily real, but they seemed no more frightening to him than the equally vivid flashbacks.

  Only after a while, when many months had passed since the Coustakis incident, did the truth strike him. One day he found himself living through an episode that he considered to be one of his fantasies. It was a minor thing, one that he had experienced, in whole or in part, seven or eight times. What he had seen, in fitful bursts of uninvited delusion, was himself in a public garden on some hot spring morning, standing before an immense baroque building while a grotesque group of nonhuman tourists filed past him in a weird creaking, clanking procession of inhalator suits and breather-wheels and ion-disperser masks. That was all. Then it happened that a harrowing legal snarl brought him to a city in North Carolina about fourteen months after the overload, and, after having put in his appearance at the courthouse, he set out on a long walk through the grimy, decayed metropolis, and came, as if by an enchantment, to a huge metal gate behind which he could see a dark sweep of lavish for
est, oaks and rhododendrons and magnolias, laid out in an elegant formal manner. It was, according to a sign posted by the gate, the estate of a nineteenth-century millionaire, now open to all and preserved in its ancient state despite the encroachments of the city on its borders.

  Skein bought a ticket and went in, on foot, hiking for what seemed like miles through cool leafy glades, until abruptly the path curved and he emerged into the bright sunlight and saw before him the great grey bulk of a colossal mansion, hundreds of rooms topped by parapets and spires, with a massive portico from which vast columns of stairs descended. In wonder he moved toward it, for this was the building of his frequent fantasy, and as he approached he beheld the red and green and purple figures crossing the portico, those coiled and gnarled and looping shapes he had seen before, the eerie horde of alien travellers here to take in the wonders of Earth. Heads without eyes, eyes without heads, multiplicities of limbs and absences of limbs, bodies like tumors and tumors like bodies, all the universe’s imagination on display in these agglomerated life forms, so strange and yet not at all strange to him. But this time it was no fantasy. It fit smoothly into the sequence of the events of the day, rather than dropping, dreamlike, intrusive, into that sequence. Nor did it fade after a few moments; the scene remained sharp, never leaving him to plunge back into “real” life. This was reality itself, and he had experienced it before.

  Twice more in the next few weeks things like that happened to him, until at last he was ready to admit the truth to himself about his fugues, that he was experiencing flashforwards as well as flashbacks, that he was being subjected to glimpses of his own future.

  T’ang, the high king of the Shang, asked Hsia Chi saying, “In the beginning, were there already individual things?” Hsia Chi replied, “If there were no things then, how could there be any now? If later generations should pretend that there had been no things in our time, would they be right?” Tang said, “Have things then no before and no after?” To which Hsia Chi replied, “The ends and the origins of things have no limit from which they began. The origin of one thing may be considered the end of another; the end of one may be considered the origin of the next. Who can distinguish accurately between these cycles? What lies beyond all things, and before all events, we cannot know.”

  They reach and enter the Perseus relay booster, which is a whirling celestial anomaly structurally similar to the Panama Canal but not nearly so potent, and it kicks the ship’s velocity to just above a hundred lights. That is the voyage’s final acceleration; the ship will maintain this rate for two and a half days, until it clocks in at Scylla, the main deceleration station for this part of the galaxy, where it will be seized by a spongy web of forces twenty light-minutes in diameter and slowed to sublight velocities for the entry into the Abbondanza system.

  Skein spends nearly all of this period in his cabin, rarely eating and sleeping very little. He reads, almost constantly, obsessively dredging from the ship’s extensive library a wide and capricious assortment of books. Rilke. Kafka. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World. Lowry, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Elias. Razhuminin. Dickey. Pound. Fraisse, The Psychology of Time. Greene, Dream and Delusion. Poe. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Tourneur. The Waste Land. Ulysses. Heart of Darkness. Bury, The Idea of Progress. Jung. Buechner. Pirandello. The Magic Mountain. Ellis, The Rack. Cervantes. Blenheim. Fierst. Keats. Nietzsche. His mind swims with images and bits of verse, with floating sequences of dialogue, with unscaffolded dialectics. He dips into each work briefly, magpielike, seeking bright scraps. The words form a scaly impasto on the inner surface of his skull. He finds that this heavy verbal overdose helps, to some slight extent, to fight off the fugues; his mind is weighted, perhaps, bound by this leaden clutter of borrowed genius to the moving line of the present, and during his debauch of reading he finds himself shifting off that line less frequently than in the recent past.

  His mind whirls. Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—A rope over an abyss. My patience are exhausted. See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul. I had not thought death had undone so many. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hoogspanning. Levensgevaar. Peligro de Muerte. Electricidad. Danger. Give me my spear. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea. There is no “official” theory of time, defined in creeds or universally agreed upon among Christians. Christianity is not concerned with the purely scientific aspects of the subject nor, within wide limits, with its philosophical analysis, except insofar as it is committed to a fundamentally realist view and could not admit, as some Eastern philosophies have done, that temporal existence is mere illusion. A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hieronymo’s mad again. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. It has also lately been postulated that the physical concept of information is identical with a phenomenon of reversal of entropy. The psychologist must add a few remarks here: It does not seem convincing to me that information is eo ipso identical with a pouvoir d’organisation which undoes entropy. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih.

  Nevertheless, once the ship is past Scylla and slowing toward the Abbondanza planets, the periods of fugue become frequent once again, so that he lives entrapped, shuttling between the flashing shadows of yesterday and tomorrow.

  After the Coustakis overload he tried to go on in the old way, as best he could. He gave Coustakis a refund without even being asked, for he had been of no service, nor could he ever be. Instantaneous transportation of matter would have to wait. But Skein took other clients. He could still make the communion, after a fashion, and when the nature of the task was sufficiently low-level he could even deliver a decent synergetic response.

  Often his work was unsatisfactory, however. Contacts would break at awkward moments, or, conversely, his filter mechanism would weaken and he would allow the entire contents of his client’s mind to flow into that of his consultant. The results of such disasters were chaotic, involving him in heavy medical expenses and sometimes in damage suits. He was forced to place his fees on a contingency basis: no synergy, no pay. About half the time he earned nothing for his output of energy. Meanwhile his overhead remained the same as always: the domed office, the network of consultants, the research staff, and the rest. His effort to remain in business was eating rapidly into the bank accounts he had set aside against just such a time of storm.

  They could find no organic injury to his brain. Of course, so little was known about a Communicator’s gift that it was impossible to determine much by medical analysis. If they could not locate the centre center from which a Communicator powered his communions, how could they detect the place where he had been hurt? The medical archives were of no value; there had been eleven previous cases of overload, but each instance was physiologically unique. They told him he would eventually heal, and sent him away. Sometimes the doctors gave him silly therapies: counting exercises, rhythmic blinkings, hopping on his left leg and then his right, as if he had a stroke. But he had not had a stroke.

  For a time he was able to maintain his business on the momentum of his reputation. Then, as word got around that he had been hurt and was no longer any good, clients stopped coming. Even the contingency basis for fees failed to attract them. Within six months he found that he was lucky to find a client a week. He reduced his rates, and that seemed only to make things worse, so he raised them to something not far below what they had been at the time of the overload. For
a while the pace of business increased, as if people were getting the impression that Skein had recovered. He gave such spotty service, though. Blurred and wavering communions, unanticipated positive feedbacks, filtering problems, information deficiencies, redundancy surpluses—”You take your mind in your hands when you go to Skein,” they were saying now.

  The fugues added to his professional difficulties.

  He never knew when he would snap into hallucination. It might happen during a communion, and often did. Once he dropped back to the moment of the Coustakis-Nissenson hookup and treated a terrified client to a replay of his overload. Once, although he did not understand at the time what was happening, he underwent a flashforward and carried the client with him to a scarlet jungle on a formaldehyde world, and when Skein slipped back to reality the client remained in the scarlet jungle. There was a damage suit over that one, too.

  Temporal dislocation plagued him into making poor guesses. He took on clients whom he could not possibly serve and wasted his time on them. He turned away people whom he might have been able to help to his own profit. Since he was no longer anchored firmly to his timeline, but drifted in random oscillations of twenty years or more in either direction, he forfeited the keen sense of perspective on which he had previously founded his professional judgments. He grew haggard and lean, also. He passed through a tempest of spiritual doubts that amounted to total submission and then total rejection of faith within the course of four months. He changed lawyers almost weekly. He liquidated assets with invariably catastrophic timing to pay his cascading bills.