Robert Silverberg - Stochastic Man

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First published in The Stochastic Man, 1975

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First published in The Stochastic Man, 1975

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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,Théorie Analytique des Probabilités 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 incomprehensible. 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; anything 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 adolescent-sounding, too. Adolescent cynicism is

mainly a defense 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

exactly two meters 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 1 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 noncausality, we're lost.

My mother was due to deliver in mid-January, but I arrived two weeks 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, honorable 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 recognize that many important phenomena refuse to

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

A system in which events occur according to a law of probability 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 liter of oxygen, but with

some understanding of kinetic theory we can confidently anticipate the behavior of the whole liter. We

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

calculate 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

unpredictable they may seem on a minute-to-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 extension, “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

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 generalize from a

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

harbinger of anything, 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 lets 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 Center for Stochastic

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

have enough data to draw a valid conclusion?

I'm executive secretary of the Center, 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 section of

northern New Jersey, and I don't care to be more specific 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 toward 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 toward full revelation of the future, in our

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

regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can't perceive 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 statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions

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 skeptical 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 not afraid

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

won't 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 onward 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 parlor 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 stockbroker, 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 primarily verbal and conceptual, and I knew my needs, which are primarily

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

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

a center, 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 livelihood. As a summer fill-in job I did some part-time polltaking; one day in the office I

happened to make a few astute comments 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 program 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 mound of raw samples from which I had to pull a major

projection, 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

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

had to do my 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 in the crucial moment of realization. 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 toward my goal.

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

Paul Quinn President 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 meters 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 kilometers.

“Who'll be there?” I asked. “Aside from Ephrikian, Missakian, Hagopian, Manoogian, Garabedian, and

Boghosian.”

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

celebrities from the world 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.

“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 odor 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 Center,

but elsewhere Sarkisian did provide a decent 270-degree panorama of New York Harbor, 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 expectable display of

breasts and genitalia but also the first hints, from the avant-garde, of thefin-de-siècle 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 bedecked 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 clothing, 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 preassigned fixed position and efficiently

offering smokes and drinks, making introductions, directing people toward 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 perhaps 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 conversational partners, during the course of which I

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

—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 Nole MacIver of the Ganymede Expedition, Claude Parks of the

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

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

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

Museum's curator 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 toward 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 political technique, and I had seen it 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 northwest of the main room. Pre-Columbian clay figurines,

African masks, pulsar screens, splash stands—a nice mixture of old and new decorative notions. The

wallpaper wasNew York 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?”

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

nugget of microcircuitry 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 outrageous

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 picking 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 profession, 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 Neighborhood 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 trying 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 began making more grandiose comparisons, between Quinn and the likes of Napoleon,

Alexander the Great, even Jesus, and if such talk makes you snicker, please remember that I am a master

of the stochastic arts and my vision is clearer than yours.

Quinn said nothing to me then about running for higher office. As we returned to the party he simply

remarked, “It's too early for me to be setting up a staff. But when I do, I'll want you. Haig will be in

touch.”

“What did you think of him?” Mardikian asked me five minutes later.

“He'll be mayor of New York City in 1998.”

“And then?”

“You want to know more, man, you get in touch with my office and make an appointment. Fifty an hour

and I'll give you the whole crystal-balling.”

He jabbed my arm lightly and strode away laughing.

Ten minutes after that I was sharing a pipe with the golden-haired lady named Autumn. Autumn

Hawkes, she was, the much-hailed new Met soprano. Quickly we negotiated an agreement, eyes only,

the silent language of the body, concerning the rest of the night. She told me she had come to the party

with Victor Schott—gaunt gigantic youngish Prussian type in somber medal-studded military outfit—who

was due to conduct her inLulu that winter, but Schott had apparently arranged a deal to go home with

Councilman Holbrecht, leaving Autumn to shift for herself. Autumn shifted. I was undeceived about her

real preference, though, for I saw her looking hungrily at Paul Quinn far across the room, and her eyes

glowed. Quinn was here on business: no woman could bag him. (No man either!) “I wonder if he sings,”

Autumn said wistfully.

“You'd like to try some duets with him?”

“Isolde to his Tristan. Turandot to his Calaf. Aïda to his Radames.”

“Salome to his Jokanaan?” I suggested.

“Don't tease.”

“You admire his political ideas?”

“I could, if I knew what they were.”

I said, “He's liberal and sane.”

“Then I admire his political ideas. I also think he's overpoweringly masculine and superbly beautiful.”

“Politicians on the make are said to be inadequate lovers.”

She shrugged. “Hearsay evidence never impresses me. I can look at a man—one glance will do—and

know instantly whether he's adequate.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Save the compliments. Sometimes I'm wrong, of course,” she said, poisonously sweet. “Not always,

but sometimes.”

“Sometimes I am, too.”

“About women?”

“About anything. I have second sight, you know. The future is an open book to me.”

“You sound serious,” she said.

“I am. It's the way I earn my living. Projections.”

“What do you see in my future?” she asked, half coy, half in earnest.

“Immediate or long range?”

“Either.”

“Immediate,” I said, “a night of wild revelry and a peaceful morning stroll in a light drizzle. Long range,

triumph upon triumph, fame, a villa in Majorca, two divorces, happiness late in life.”

“Are you a Gypsy fortuneteller, then?”

I shook my head. “Merely a stochastic technician, milady.”

She glanced toward Quinn. “What do you see ahead for him?”

“Him? He's going to be President. At the very least.”

In the morning, when we strolled hand in hand through the misty wooded groves of Security Channel Six,

it was drizzling. A cheap triumph: I tune in weather reports like anyone else. Autumn went off to rehearse,

summer ended, Sundara came home exhausted and happy from Oregon, new clients picked my mind for

lavish fees, and life went on.

There was no immediate follow-up to my meeting with Paul Quinn, but I hadn't expected one. New

York City's political life was in wild flux just then. Only a few weeks before Sarkisian's party a

disgruntled jobseeker had approached Mayor Gottfried at a Liberal Party banquet and, removing the

half-eaten grapefruit from the astounded mayor's plate, had clapped a gram of Ascenseur, the new

French political explosive, in its place. Exeunt His Honor, the assassin, four county chairmen, and a

waiter, in one glorious boom. Which created a power vacuum in the city, for everyone had assumed the

formidable mayor would be elected to another four or five terms, this being only his second, and

suddenly the invincible Gottfried wasn't there, as though God had died one Sunday morning just as the

cardinal was starting to serve the bread and wine. The new mayor, former City Council President

DiLaurenzio, was a nonentity: Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland

obliging ciphers. It was taken for granted that DiLaurenzio was an interim figure who could be pushed

aside in the ‘97 mayoralty election by any reasonably strong candidate. And Quinn was waiting in the

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ThisebookispublishedbyFictionwisePublicationswww.fictionwise.comExcellenceinEbooksVisitwww.fictionwise.comtofindmoretitlesbythisandothertopauthorsinScienceFiction,Fantasy,Horror,Mystery,andothergenres.Copyright©1975byAgberg,Ltd.FirstpublishedinTheStochasticMan,1975Fictionwisewww.fictionwise.comCopyr...

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Robert Silverberg - Stochastic Man

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