Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

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Also by the same author,

and available in Coronet Books:

Born With The Dead Unfamiliar Territory

The Stochastic Man

Robert Silverberg

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CORONET BOOKS Hodder and Stoughton

This work was published serially in somewhat different form inThe Magazine of Fantasy and Science

Fiction

First published in Great Britain 1976 by Victor Gollancz Limited

Coronet edition 1978

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person

or actual happening

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,

hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover

other than that in which this is published and without a similar condition including this condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in Great Britain for

Hodder and Stoughton Paperbacks, a

division of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.,

Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks,

Kent (Editorial Office: 47 Bedford

Square, London, WC1 3DP) by

Cox & Wyman Ltd., London, Reading and Fakenham

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ISBN 0 340 22327 8

It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have

become the most important object of human knowledge . . . The most important questions of life are, for

the most part, really only problems of probability.

- LAPLACE,Theorie Analytique des Probabilites

Once a man learns tosee he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly.

-castaneda,A Separate Reality

We are born by accident into a purely random universe. Our lives are determined by entirely fortuitous

combinations of genes. Whatever happens happens by chance. The concepts of cause and effect are

fallacies. There are onlyseeming causes leading toapparent effects. Since nothing truly follows from

anything else, we swim each day through seas of chaos, and nothing is predictable, not even the events of

the very next instant.

Do you believe that ?

If you do, I pity you, because yours must be a bleak and terrifying and comfortless life.

I think I once believed something very much like that, when I was about seventeen and the world

seemed hostile and incom-prehensible. I think I once believed that the universe is a gigantic dice game,

without purpose or pattern, into which we foolish mortals interpose the comforting notion of causality for

the sake of supporting our precarious, fragile sanity. I think I once felt that in this random, capricious

cosmos we're lucky to survive from hour to hour, let alone from year to year, because at any moment,

without warning or reason, the sun might go nova or the world turn into a great blob of petroleum jelly.

Faith and good works are insufficient, indeed irrelevant; any-thing might befall anyone at any time;

therefore live for the moment and take no heed of tomorrow, for it takes no heed of you.

A mighty cynical-sounding philosophy, and mighty adoles-cent-sounding, too. Adolescent cynicism is

mainly a defence against fear. As I grew older I suppose I found the world less frightening, and I became

less cynical. I regained some of the innocence of childhood and accepted, as any child accepts, the

concept of causality. Push the baby and the baby falls down. Cause and effect. Let the begonia go a

week without water and the begonia starts to shrivel. Cause and effect. Kick the football

hard and it sails through the air. Cause and effect, cause and effect. The universe, I conceded, may be

without purpose, but certainly not without pattern. Thus I took my first steps on the road that led me to

my career and thence into politics and from there to the teachings of the all-seeing Martin Carvajal, that

dark and tortured man who now rests in the peace he dreaded. It was Carvajal who brought me to the

place in space and time I occupy on this day.

My name is Lew Nichols. I have light sandy hair, dark eyes, no significant identifying scars, and I stand

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exactly two metres tall. I was married - two-group - to Sundara Shastri. We had no children and now

we are separated, no decree. My current age is not quite thirty-five years. I was born in New York City

on 1st January, 1966, at 0216 hours. Earlier that evening two simultaneous events of historic magnitude

were recorded in New York: the inauguration of the glamorous and famous Mayor John Lindsay and the

onset of the great, catastrophic first New York subway strike. Do you believe in simultaneity ? I do.

There's no stochasticity without simultaneity, and no sanity either. If we try to see the universe as an

aggregation of unrelated happenings, a sparkling pointillist canvas of non-causality, we're lost.

My mother was due to deliver in mid-January, but I arrived twoweeks ahead of time, most

inconveniently for my parents, who had to get to the hospital in the small hours of New Year's Eve in a

city suddenly deprived of public transport. If their predictive techniques had been keener, they might have

thought of renting a car that evening. If Mayor Lindsay had been using better predictive techniques, I

suppose the poor bastard would have resigned at his own swearing-in and saved himself years of

headaches.

Causality is a decent, honourable principle, but it doesn't have all the answers. If we want to make sense

of things, we have to move on beyond it. We have to recognise that many important phenomena refuse to

be packed into neat causal packages but can be interpreted only by stochastic methods.

A system in which events occur according to a law of proba-bility but aren't individually determined in

accordance with the principle of causality is a stochastic system. The daily rising of the sun isn't a

stochastic event: it's inflexibly and invariably determined by the relative positions of the earth and the sun

in the heavens, and once we understand the causal mechanism there's no risk in predicting that the sun

will rise tomorrow and the next day and the next. We can even predict the exact time of sunrise, and we

don'tguess it, weknow it in advance. The tendency of water to flow downhill isn't a stochastic event

either: it's a function of gravitational attraction, which we hold to be a constant. But there are many areas

where causality fails us and stochasticity must come to our rescue.

For instance we're unable to predict the movements of any one molecule in a litre of oxygen, but with

some understanding of kinetic theory we can confidently anticipate the behaviour of the whole litre. We

have no way of foretelling when a particular uranium atom will undergo radioactive decay, but we can

cal-culate quite accurately how many atoms in a block of U-235 will disintegrate in the next ten thousand

years. We don't know what the next spin of the roulette wheel will bring, but the house has a good idea

of what its take is likely to be over the course of a long evening. All sorts of processes, however

un-predictable they may seem on a minute-by-minute or case-by-case basis, are predictable by

stochastic techniques.

Stochastic.According to the Oxford English Dictionary this word was coined in 1662 and is nowrare or

obs. Don't believe it. It's the OED that'sobs., notstochastic, which gets lessobs. every day. The word is

from the Greek, originally meaning 'target' or 'point of aim', from which the Greeks derived a

word meaning 'to aim at a mark', and, by metaphorical exten-sion, 'to reflect, to think'. It came into

English first as a fancy way of saying 'pertaining to guesswork', as in Whitefoot's remark about Sir

Thomas Browne in 1712: 'Tho' he were no prophet ... yet in that faculty which comes nearest it, he

excelled, i.e. the stochastick, wherein he was seldom mistaken, as to future events.'

In the immortal words of Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), 'There is need and use of this stochastical

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judging and opinion concerning truth and falsehood in human life.' Those whose way of life is truly

governed by the stochastic philosophy are prudent and judicious, and tend never to generalise from a

skimpy sample. As Jacques Bernoulli demonstrated early in the eighteenth century, an isolated event is no

harbinger of any-thing, but the greater your sampling the more likely you are to guess the true distribution

of phenomena within your sample.

So much for probability theory. I pass swiftly and uneasily over Poisson distributions, the Central Limit

Theorem, the Kolmogorov axioms, Ehrenhaft games, Markov chains, the Pascal triangle, and all the rest.

I mean to spare you such mathematical convolutions. ('Letp be the probability of the happening of an

event in a single trial, and let s be the number of times the event is observed to happen inn trials . . .') My

point is only that the pure stochastician teaches himself to observe what we at the Centre for Stochastic

Processes have come to call the Bernoulli Interval, a pause during which weask ourselves.Do I really

have enough data to draw a valid

conclusion?

I'm executive secretary of the Centre,which was incorporated four months ago, in August, 2000.

Carvajal's money pays our expenses. For now we occupy a five-room house in a rural sec-tion of

northern New Jersey, and I don't care to be more speci-fic about the location. Our aim is to find ways of

reducing the Bernoulli Interval to zero: that is, to make guesses of ever-increasing accuracy on the basis

of an ever-decreasing statistical sample, or, to put it another way, to move from probabilistic to absolute

prediction, or, rephrasing it yet again, to replace guesswork with clairvoyance.

So we work towards post-stochastic abilities. What Carvajal taught me is that stochasticity isn't the end

of the line: it's merely a phase, soon to pass, in our striving towards full revelation of the future, in our

struggle to free ourselves fromthe tyranny of randomness. In the absolute universe all events can be

regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can't per-ceive the greater structures, it's because our

vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn't need to rely

on mathematical approximations, on sta-' tistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our

percep-tions of cause and effect were only good enough, we'd be able to attain absolute knowledge of

what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing. So Carvajal said. I believe he was right. You

probably don't. You tend to be sceptical about such things, don't you ? That's all right. You'll change

your mind. I know you will.

Carvajal is dead now; he died exactly when and as he knew he would. I am still here, and I think I know

how I will die, too, but I'm not altogether sure of it, and in any case it doesn't seem to matter to me the

way it did to him. He never had the strength that was necessary to sustain his visions. He was just a

burned-out little man with tired eyes and a drained smile, who had a gift that was too big for his soul, and

it was the gift that killed him as much as anything. If I truly have inherited that gift, I hope I make a better

job of living with it than he did.

Carvajal is dead, but I'm alive and will be for some time to come. All about me flutter the indistinct

towers of the New York of twenty years hence, glittering in the pale light of mornings not yet born. I look

at the dull porcelain bowl of the winter sky and see images of my own face, grown much older. So I am

not about to vanish. I have a considerable future. I know that the future is a place as fixed and intransient

and accessible as the past. Because I know this I've abandoned the wife I loved, given up the profession

that was making me rich, and acquired the enmity of Paul Quinn, potentially the most dangerous man in

the world, Quinn who will be elected President of the United States four years from now. I'm notafraid of

Quinn personally. He won't be able to harm me. He may harm democracy and free speech, but he won't

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harm me. I feel guilty because I will have helped put Quinn in the White House, but at least I'll share that

guilt with you and you and you, with your blind mindless votes that you'll live to wish you could call back.

Never mind. We can survive Quinn. I'll show the way. It will be my form of atonement. I can save you all

from chaos, even now, even with Quinn astride the horizon and growing more huge every day.

I was into probabilities for seven years, professionally, before I ever heard of Martin Carvajal. My

business from the spring of 1992 onwards was projections. I can look at the acorn and see the stack of

firewood: it's a gift I have. For a fee, I would tell you whether I think particle chips will continue to be a

growth industry, whether it's a good idea to open a tattooing parlour in Topeka, whether the fad for bare

scalps is going to last long enough to make it worthwhile for you to expand your San Jose depilatory

factory. And the odds are I'd be right.

My father liked to say, 'A man doesn't choose his life. His life chooses him.'

Maybe. I never expected to go into the prophecy trade. I never really expected to go into anything. My

father feared I'd be a wastrel. Certainly it looked that way the day I collected my college diploma. (NYU

'86.) I sailed through my three years of college not knowing at all what I wanted to do with my life, other

than that it ought to be something communicative, creative, lucrative, and reasonably useful to society. I

didn't want to be a novelist, a teacher, an actor, a lawyer, a stock-broker, a general, or a priest. Industry

and finance didn't attract me, medicine was beyond my capabilities, politics seemed vulgar and blatant. I

knew my skills, which are pri-marily verbal and conceptual, and I knew my needs, which are primarily

security-oriented and privacy-oriented. I was and ambright, outgoing, alert, energetic, willing to work

hard, and candidly opportunistic, though not, I hope, opportunistically candid. But I was missing a focus,

a centre, a defining point, when college turned me loose.

A man's life chooses him. I had always had an odd knack for uncanny hunches; by easy stages I turned

that into my liveli-hood. As a summer fill-in job I did some part-time polltaking; one day in the office I

happened to make a few astute com-ments about the pattern the raw data were showing, and my boss

invited me to prepare a projective sampling template for the next step of the poll. That's a programme

that tells you what sort of questions you ought to ask in order to get the answers you need. The work

was stimulating and my excellence at it had ego rewards. When one of my employer's big clients asked

me to quit and do free-lance consulting work, I took the chance. From there to my own full-time

consulting firm was only a matter of months.

When I was in the projection business many uninformed folk thought I was a pollster. No. Pollsters

worked forme, a whole platoon of hired gallups. They were to me as millers are to a baker: they sorted

the wheat from the chaff, I produced the seven-layer cakes. My work was a giant step beyond

polltaking. Using data samples collected by the usual quasi-scientific methods, I derived far-ranging

predictions, I made intuitive leaps, in short I guessed, and guessed well. There was money in it, but also I

felt a kind of ecstasy. When I confronted a mount of raw samples from which I had to pull a major

pro-jection, I felt like a diver plunging off a high cliff into a sparkling blue sea, seeking a glittering gold

doubloon hidden in the white sand far below the waves: my heart pounded, my mind whirled, my body

and my spirit underwent a quantum kick into a higher, more intense energy state. Ecstasy.

What I did was sophisticated and highly technical, but it was a species of witchcraft, too. I wallowed in

harmonic means, positive skews, modal values, and parameters of dispersion. My office was a maze of

display screens and graphs. I kept a battery of jumbo computers running around the clock, and what

looked like a wristwatch on my wrong arm was actually a data terminal that rarely had time to cool. But

the heavy math and the high-powered Hollywood technology were simply aspects of the preliminary

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phases of my work, the intake stage. When actual projections had to be made, IBM couldn't help me. I

had to domy trick with nothing but my unaided mind. I would stand in a dreadful solitude on the edge of

that cliff, and though sonar may have told me the configuration of the ocean bottom, though GE's finest

transponders had registered the velocity of current flow and the water's temperature and turbidity index, I

was altogether on my own on the crucial moment of realiza-tion. I would scan the water with narrowed

eyes, flexing my knees, swinging my arms, filling my lungs with air, waiting until Isaw, until I trulysaw, and

when I felt that beautiful confident dizziness back of my eyebrows I would jump at last, I would launch

myself headlong into the surging sea in search of that doubloon, I would shoot naked and unprotected

and unerring towards my goal.

From September of 1997 until March of 2000, nine months ago, I was obsessed with the idea of

making Paul Quinn Presi-dent of the United States.

Obsessed.That's a strong word. It smacks of Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing, ritual handwashing, rubber

undergarments. Yet I think it precisely describes my involvement with Quinn and his ambitions.

Haig Mardikian introduced me to Quinn in the summer of '95. Haig and I went to private school together

- the Dalton, circa 1980-82, where we played a lot of basketball - and we've kept in touch ever since.

He's a slick lynx-eyed lawyer about three metres tall who wants to be, among many other things, the first

United States Attorney General of Armenian ancestry, and probably will be.

(Probably?How can I doubt it?) On a sweltering August afternoon he phoned to say, 'Sarkisian is having

a big splash tonight. You're invited. I guarantee that something good will come out of it for you.' Sarkisian

is a real estate operator who, so it seems, owns both sides of the Hudson River for six or seven hundred

kilometres.

'Who'll be there?' I asked. 'Aside from Ephrikian, Mis-sakian, Hagopian, Manoogian, Garabedian, and

Boghosian.'

'Berberian and Khatisian,' he said. 'Also—' And Mardikian ran off a brilliant, a dazzling, list of celebrities

from the worlds of finance, politics, industry, science, and the arts, ending with '—and Paul Quinn.'

Meaningful emphasis on that final name.

'Should I know him, Haig ?'

'You should, but right now you probably don't. At present he's the assemblyman from Riverdale. A man

who'll be going places in public life.'

I didn't particularly care to pass my Saturday night hearing some ambitious young Irish pol explain his

plan for revamping the galaxy, but on the other hand I had done a few projective jobs for politicians

before and there was money in it, and Mardikian probably knew what was good for me. And the guest

list was irresistible. Besides, my wife was spending August as a guest of a temporarily shorthanded

six-group in Oregon and I suppose I entertained some hopeful fantasy of going home that evening with a

sultry dark-haired Armenian lady.

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'What time?'I asked.

'Nine,' Mardikian said.

So to Sarkisian's place: a triplex penthouse atop a ninety-story circular alabaster-and-onyx condo tower

on a Lower West Side offshore platform. Blank-faced guards who might just as well have been

constructs of metal and plastic checked my identity, scanned me for weapons, and admitted me. The air

within was a blue haze. The sour, spicy odour of powdered bone dominated everything: we were

smoking doped calcium that year. Crystalline oval windows like giant portholes ringed the entire

apartment. In the eastward-facing rooms the view was blocked by the two monolithic slabs of the World

Trade Centre, but elsewhere Sarkisian did provide a decent 270-degree panorama of New York

Harbour, New Jersey, the West Side Expressway, and maybe some of Pennsylvania. Only in one of the

giant wedge-shaped rooms were the portholes opaqued, and when I went into an adjoining wedge and

peered at a sharp angle I found out why: that side of the tower faced the still undemolished stump of the

Statue of Liberty, and Sarkisian apparently didn't want the depressing sight to bring his guests down.

(This was the summer of '95, remember, which was one of the more violent years of the decade, and the

bombing still had everyone jittery.)

The guests! They were as promised, a spectacular swarm of contraltos and astronauts and quarterbacks

and chairpersons of the board. Costumes ran to formal-flamboyant, with the expect-able display of

breasts and genitalia but also the first hints, from the avant-garde, of thefin-de-sieck love of concealment

that now has taken over, high throats and tight bandeaus. Half a dozen of the men and several of the

women affected clerical garb and there must have been fifteen pseudo generals be-decked with enough

medals to shame an African dictator. I was dressed rather simply, I thought, in a pleatless radiation-green

singlet and a three-strand bubble necklace. Though the rooms were crowded, the flow of the party was

far from formless, for I saw eight or ten big swarthy outgoing men in subdued cloth-ing, key members of

Haig Mardikian's ubiquitous Armenian mafia, distributed equidistantly through the main room like

cribbage pegs, like goalposts, like pylons, each occupying a pre-assigned fixed position and efficiently

offering smokes and drinks, making introductions, directing people towards other people whose

acquaintance it might be desirable for them to make. I was drawn easily into this subtle gridwork, had my

hand mangled by Ara Garabedian or Jason Komurjian or per-haps George Missakian, and found myself

inserted into orbit on a collision course with a sunny-faced golden-haired woman named Autumn, who

wasn't Armenian and with whom I did in fact go home many hours later.

Long before Autumn and I came to that, though, I had been smoothly nudged through a long

musical-chairs rotation of con-versational partners, during the course of which I :

—found myself talking to a female person who was black, witty, stunning-looking, and half a metre taller

than I am, and whom I correctly guessed to be Ilene Mulamba, the head of Network Four, a meeting

which led to my getting a fancy con-sulting contract for design of their split-signal ethnic-zone

telecasts—

—gently deflected the playful advances of City Councilman Ronald Holbrecht, the self-styled Voice of

the Gay Community and the first man outside California to win an election with Homophile Party

endorsement—

—wandered into a conversation between two tall white-haired men who looked like bankers and

discovered them to be bioenergetics specialists from Bellevue and Columbia-Presbyterian, swapping

gossip about their current sonopuncture work, which involved ultrasonic treatment of advanced bone

malignancies—

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—listened to an executive from CBS Labs telling a goggle-eyed young man about their newly developed

charisma-enhancement biofeedback-loop gadget—

—learned that the goggle-eyed young man was Lamont Friedman of the sinister and multifarious

investment banking house of Asgard Equities—

—exchanged trifling chitchat with ,Noel Maclver of the Ganymede Expedition, Claude Parks of the

Dope Patrol (who had brought his molecular sax, and didn't need much en-couragement to play it), three

pro basketball stars and some luminous right-fielder, an organiser for the new civil-service prostitutes'

union, a municipal brothel inspector, an assortment of less trendy city officials, and the Brooklyn

Museum's cura-tor of transient arts, Mei-ling Pulvermacher—

—had my first encounter with a Transit Creed proctor, the petite but forceful Ms. Catalina Yarber, just

arrived from San Francisco, whose attempt to convert me on the spot I declined with oblique excuses—

—and met Paul Quinn.

Quinn, yes. Sometimes I wake quivering and perspiring from a dreamed replay of that party in which I

see myself swept by an irresistible current through a sea of yammering celebrities towards the golden,

smiling figure of Paul Quinn, who waits for me like Charybdis, eyes agleam, jaws agape. Quinn was

thirty-four then, five years my senior, a short powerful-looking man, blond, broad shoulders, wide-set

blue eyes, a warm smile, conservative clothes, a rough masculine handshake, grabbing you by the inside

of your biceps as well as by your hand, making eye contact with an almost audible snap, establishing

instant rapport. All that was standard poli-tical technque, and I had seen if often enough before, but never

with this degree of intensity and power. Quinn leaped across the person-person gap so quickly and so

confidently that I began to suspect he must be wearing one of those CBS charisma-enhancement loops in

his earlobe. Mardikian told him my name and right away he was into me with, 'You're one of the people I

was most eager to meet here tonight,' and, 'Call me Paul,' and, 'Let's go where it's a little quieter, Lew,'

and I knew I was being expertly conned and yet I was nailed despite myself.

He led me to a little salon a few rooms north-west of the main room. Pre-Columbian clay figurines.

African masks, pul-sar screens, splash stands - a nice mixture of old and new decorative notions. The

wallpaper wasNewYork Times, vintage 1980 or so. 'Some party,' Quinn said, grinning. He ran quickly

down the guest list, sharing with me a small-boy awe at being among such celebrities.

Then he narrowed the focus and moved in on me.

He had been well briefed. He knew all about me, where I had gone to school, what my degree was in,

what sort of work I did, where my office was. He asked if I had brought my wife -'Sundara, isn't that her

name ? Asian background ?'

'Her family's from India.'

'She's said to be quite beautiful.'

'She's in Oregon this month.'

'I hope I'll get a chance to meet her. Perhaps next time I'm out Richmond way I'll give you a call, yes ?

How do you like living on Staten Island, anyway ?'

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I had seen this before, too, the full Treatment, the politician's computerised mind at work, as though a

nugget of micro-circuitry were going click-click-click in there whenever facts were needed, and for a

moment I suspected he might be some sort of robot. But Quinn was too good to be unreal. On one level

he was simply feeding back everything he had been told about me, and making an impressive

performance of it, but on another level he was communicating his amusement at the out-rageous

excessiveness of his own con job, as though inwardly winking and telling me,I've got to pile it on, Lew,

that's the way I'm supposed to play this dumb game. Also he seemed to be pick-ing up and reflecting

the fact that I, too, was both amused and awed by his skill. He was good. He was frighteningly good. My

mind went into automatic project and handed me a series ofTimes headlines that went something like this:

BRONX ASSEMBLYMAN QUINN ATTACKS SLUM-CLEARANCE DELAYS

MAYOR QUINN CALLS FOR CITY CHARTER REFORM

SENATOR QUINN SAYS HE'LL SEEK WHITE HOUSE

QUINN LEADS NEW DEMOCRATS TO NATIONWIDE LANDSLIDE

PRESIDENT QUINN'S FIRST TERM: AN APPRAISAL

He went on talking, all the while smiling, maintaining eye contact, holding me impaled. He quizzed me

about my profes-sion, he pumped me for my political beliefs, he iterated his own. 'They say you've got

the best reliability index of any projector in the Northeast ... I'll bet not even you anticipated the Gottfried

assassination, though... You don't have to be much of a prophet to feel sorry for poor dopey

DiLaurenzio, trying to run City Hall at a time like this... This city can't be governed, it has to be juggled ...

Are you as repelled by that phony Neighbourhood Authority Act as I am ?... What do you think of Con

Ed's Twenty-third Street fusion project ? ... You ought to see the flow charts they found in Gottfried's

office safe ...' Deftly he plumbed for common grounds in political philosophy, though he had to be aware

I shared most of his beliefs, for if he knew so much about me he would know I was a registered New

Democrat, that I had done the projections for the Twenty-first Century Manifesto and its companion, the

bookToward a True Humanity, that I felt as he did about priorities and reforms and the whole inane

Puritan idea of try-ing to legislate morality. The longer we spoke the more strongly I was drawn to him.

I began making quiet unsettling comparisons between Quinn and some great politicians of the past -

FDR, Rockefeller, Johnson, the original Kennedy. They had all had that warm beautiful doublethink

knack of being able to play out the rituals of political conquest and simultaneously to indicate to their

more intelligent victims that nobody's being fooled, we all know it's just a ritual, but don't you think I'm

good at it ? Even then, even that first night in 1995, when he was just a kid assemblyman unknown

outside his own borough, I saw him heading into political history alongside Roosevelt and JFK. Later I

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Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

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