Stochastic Man by Silverberg Robert;

Author:Silverberg, Robert; [Silverberg, Robert;]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1975-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A waiter passing by glanced at what Carvajal was doing to the tablecloth and, coughing slightly, moved on, saying nothing, keeping his face rigid. Carvajal didn’t seem to notice. He continued, “Let’s suppose, now, that a person is bora in the X to Y universe who is able, God knows why, to see occasionally into the X'-Y' universe. Me. Here I am, going from 1939 to 1999 in X-Y, peeking across now and then into X'-Y' and observing the events of their years 1939 to 1999, which are the same as ours except that they’re flowing by in the reverse order, so at the time of my birth here everything in my entire X-Y lifetime has already happened in X'-Y’. When my consciousness connects with the consciousness of my other self over there, I catch him reminiscing about his past, which coincidentally is my future.”

“Very neat.”

“Yes. The ordinary person confined to a single universe can roam his memory at will, wandering around freely in his own past. But I have access to the memory of someone who’s living in the opposite direction, which allows me to ‘remember’ the future as well as the past. That is, if the two-time-lines theory is correct.”

“And is it?”

“How would I know?” Carvajal asked. “It’s only a plausible operational hypothesis to explain what happens when I see. But how could I confirm it?”

I said, after a time, “The things you see—do they come to you in reverse chronological order? The future unrolling in a continuous scroll, that sort of thing?”

“No. Never. No more than your memories form a single continuous scroll. I get fitful glimpses, fragments of scenes, sometimes extended passages that have an apparent duration of ten or fifteen minutes or more, but always a random jumble, never any linear sequence, never anything at all consecutive. I learned to find the larger pattern myself, to remember sequences and hook them together in a likely order. It was like learning to read Babylonian poetry by deciphering cuneiform inscriptions on broken, scrambled bricks. Gradually I worked out clues to guide me in my reconstructions of the future: this is how my face will look when I’m forty, when I’m fifty, when I’m sixty, these are clothes I wore from 1965 to 1973, this is the period when I had a mustache, when my hair was dark, oh, a whole host of little references and associations and footnotes, which eventually became so familiar to me that I could see any scene, even the most brief, and place it within a matter of weeks or even days. Not easy at first, but second nature by this time.”

“Are you seeing right now?”

“No,” he said. “It takes effort to induce the state. It’s rather like & trance.” A wintry look swept his face. “At its most powerful it’s a kind of double vision, one world overlying the other, so that I can’t be entirely sure which world I’m inhabiting and which is die world I see. Even after all these years I haven’t fully adjusted to that disorientation, that confusion.

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