Collected Short Fiction, page 885
Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. An orange sea under a lemon sun. Looking out from the top deck of the terminal, an hour after landing, Skein sees a row of towering hotels rising along the nearby beach. At once he feels the wrongness: there should be no hotels. The right planet has no such towers; therefore this is another of the wrong ones.
He suffers from complete disorientation as he attempts to place himself in sequence. Where am I? Aboard a liner heading toward Abbondanza VI. What do I see? A world I have previously visited. Which one? The one with the hotels. The third out of seven, isn’t it?
He has seen this planet before, in flashforwards. Long before he left Earth to begin his quest he glimpsed those hotels, that beach. Now he views it in flashback. That perplexes him. He must try to see himself as a moving point travelling through time, viewing the scenery now from this perspective, now from that.
He watches his earlier self at the terminal. Once it was his future self. How confusing, how needlessly muddling! “I’m looking for an old Earthman,” he says. “He must be a hundred, hundred-twenty years old. A face like a skull—no flesh at all, really. A brittle man. No? Well, can you tell me, does this planet have a life-form about this big, a kind of blob of golden jelly, that lives in pits down by the seashore, and—no? No? Ask someone else, you say? Of course. And perhaps a hotel room? As long as I’ve come all this way.”
He is getting tired of finding the wrong planets. What folly this is, squandering his last savings on a quest for a world seen in a dream! He would have expected planets with purple sand and blue-leaved trees to be uncommon, but no, in an infinite universe one can find a dozen of everything, and now he has wasted almost half his money and close to a year, visiting two planets and this one and not finding what he seeks.
He goes to the hotel they arrange for him.
The beach is packed with sunbathers, most of them from Earth. Skein walks among them. “Look,” he wants to say, “I have this trouble with my brain, an old injury, and it gives me these visions of myself in the past and future, and one of the visions I see is a place where there’s a skull-faced man who takes me to a kind of amoeba in a pit that can heal me, do you follow? And it’s a planet with purple sand and blue-leaved trees, just like this one, and I figure if I keep going long enough I’m bound to find it and the skull-face and the amoeba, do you follow me? And maybe this is the planet after all, only I’m in the wrong part of it. What should I do? What hope do you think I really have?” This is the third world. He knows that he must visit a number of wrong ones before he finds the right one. But how many? How many? And when will he know that he has the right one?
Standing silent on the beach, he feels confusion come over him, and drops into fugue, and is hurled to another world. Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. A fat, friendly Pingalorian consul. “A skull-faced man? No, I can’t say I know of any.” Which world is this, Skein wonders? One that I have already visited, or one that I have not yet come to? The manifold layers of illusion dazzle him. Past and future and present lie like a knot around his throat. Shifting planes of reality; intersecting films of event. Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. Which planet is this? Which one? Which one? He is back on the crowded beach. A lemon sun. An orange sea. He is back in his cabin on the spaceliner. He sees a note in his own handwriting: You are a passenger aboard a ship heading for Abbondanza VI, and will be landing in a few days. So everything was a vision. Flashback? Flashforward? He is no longer able to tell. He is baffled by these identical worlds. Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. He wishes he knew how to cry.
Instead of a client and a consultant for today’s communion, Skein has a client and a client. A man and a woman, Michaels and Miss Schumpeter. The communion is of an unusually intimate kind. Michaels has been married six times, and several of the marriages apparently have been dissolved under bitter circumstances. Miss Schumpeter, a woman of some wealth, loves Michaels but doesn’t entirely trust him; she wants a peep into his mind before she’ll put her thumb to the marital cube. Skein will oblige. The fee has already been credited to his account. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. If she does not like what she finds in her beloved’s soul, there may not be any marriage, but Skein will have been paid.
A tendril of his mind goes to Michaels, now. A tendril to Miss Schumpeter. Skein opens his filters. “Now you’ll meet for the first time,” he tells them. Michaels flows to her. Miss Schumpeter flows to him. Skein is merely the conduit. Through him pass the ambitions, betrayals, failures, vanities, deteriorations, disputes, treacheries, lusts, generosities, shames, and follies of these two human beings. If he wishes, he can examine the most private sins of Miss Schumpeter and the darkest yearnings of her future husband. But he does not care. He sees such things every day. He takes no pleasure in spying on the psyches of these two. Would a surgeon grow excited over the sight of Miss Schumpeter’s Fallopian tubes or Michaels’s pancreas? Skein is merely doing his job. He is no voyeur, simply a Communicator. He looks upon himself as a public utility.
When he severs the contact, Miss Schumpeter and Michaels both are weeping.
“I love you!” she wails.
“Get away from me!” he mutters.
Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. Oily orange sea.
The skull-faced man says, “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!”
“Half a million?”
“Half a million.”
“You know I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Let’s not waste time, Mr. Coustakis. You have assets. Pledge them as collateral. Credit is easily obtained.” Skein waits for the inventor to clear his loan. “Now we can proceed,” he says, and tells his desk, “Get Nissenson into a receptive state.”
Coustakis says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”
“No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will came come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”
“And if he doesn’t have the answer?”
“He will.”
“And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?”
“He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”
“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”
The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Skein clambers from the pit and lies by its rim, breathing hard. The skull-faced man helps him get up.
Skein has seen this series of images hundreds of times. “How do you feel?” the skull-faced man asks.
“Strange. Good. My head seems so clear!”
“You had communion down there?”
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
“And?”
“I think I’m healed,” Skein says in wonder. “My strength is back. Before, you know, I felt cut down to the bone, a minimum version of myself. And now. And now.” He lets a tendril of consciousness slip forth. It meets the mind of the skull-faced man. Skein is aware of a glassy interface; he can touch the other mind, but he cannot enter it. “Are you a Communicator too?” Skein asks, awed.
“In a sense. I feel you touching me. You’re better, aren’t you?”
“Much. Much. Much.”
“As I told you. Now you have your second chance, Skein. Your gift has been restored. Courtesy of our friend in the pit. They love being helpful.”
“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”
We conceive of time either as flowing or as enduring. The problem is how to reconcile these concepts. From a purely formalistic point of view there exists no difficulty, as these properties can be reconciled by means of the concept of a duratio successiva. Every unit of time measure has this characteristic of a flowing permanence: an hour streams by while it lasts and so long as it lasts. Its flowing is thus identical with its duration. Time, from this point of view, is transitory; but its passing away lasts.
In the early months of his affliction he experienced a great many scenes of flashforward while in fugue. He saw himself outside the nineteenth-century mansion, he saw himself in a dozen lawyers’ offices, he saw himself in hotels, terminals, spaceliners, he saw himself discussing the nature of time with the skull-faced man, he saw himself trembling on the edge of the pit, he saw himself emerging healed, he saw himself wandering from world to world, looking for the right one with purple sand and blue-leaved trees. As time unfolded most of these flash-forwards duly entered the flow of the present; he did come to the mansion, he did go to those hotels and terminals, he did wander those useless worlds. Now, as he approaches Abbondanza VI, he goes through a great many flashbacks and a relatively few flashforwards, and the flashforwards seem to be limited to a fairly narrow span of time, covering his landing on Abbondanza VI, his first meeting with the skull-faced man, his journey to the pit, and his emergence, healed, from the amoeba’s lair. Never anything beyond that final scene. He wonders if time is going to run out for him on Abbondanza VI.
The ship lands on Abbondanza VI half a day ahead of schedule. There are the usual decontamination procedures to endure, and while they are going on Skein rests in his cabin, counting minutes to liberty. He is curiously confident that this will be the world on which he finds the skull-faced man and the benign amoeba. Of course, he has felt that way before, looking out from other spaceliners at other planets of the proper coloration, and he has been wrong. But the intensity of his confidence is something new. He is sure that the end of his quest lies here.
“Debarkation beginning now,” the loudspeakers say.
He joins the line of outgoing passengers. The others smile, embrace, whisper; they have found friends or even mates on this voyage. He remains apart. No one says goodbye to him. He emerges into a brightly lit terminal, a great cube of glass that looks like all the other terminals scattered across the thousands of worlds that man has reached. He could be in Chicago or Johannesburg or Beirut: the scene is one of porters, reservations clerks, customs officials, hotel agents, taxi drivers, guides. A blight of sameness spreading across the universe. Stumbling through the customs gate, Skein finds himself set upon. Does he want a taxi, a hotel room, a woman, a man, a guide, a homestead plot, a servant, a ticket to Abbondanza VII, a private car, an interpreter, a bank, a telephone? The hubbub jolts Skein into three consecutive ten-second fugues, all flashbacks; he sees a rainy day in Tierra del Fuego, he conducts a communion to help a maker of sky-spectacles perfect the plot of his latest extravaganza, and he puts his palm to a cube in order to dictate contract terms to Nicholas Coustakis. Then Coustakis fades, the terminal reappears, and Skein realizes that someone has seized him by the left arm just above the elbow. Bony fingers dig painfully into his flesh. It is the skull-faced man. “Come with me,” he says. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”
“This isn’t just another flashforward, is it?” Skein asks, as he has watched himself ask so many times in the past. “I mean you’re really here to get me.”
The skull-faced man says, as Skein has heard him say so many times in the past, “No, this time it’s no flashforward. I’m really here to get you.”
“Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.”
“Follow along this way. You have your passport handy?”
The familiar words. Skein is prepared to discover he is merely in fugue, and expects to drop back into frustrating reality at any moment. But no. The scene does not waver. It holds firm. It holds. At last he has caught up with this particular scene, overtaking it and enclosing it, pearl-like, in the folds of the present. He is on the way out of the terminal. The skull-faced man helps him through the formalities. How withered he is! How fiery the eyes, how gaunt the face! Those frightening orbits of bone jutting through the skin of the forehead. That parched cheek. Skein listens for a dry rattle of ribs. One sturdy punch and there would be nothing left but a cloud of white dust, slowly settling.
“I know your difficulty,” the skull-faced man says. “You’ve been caught in entropy’s jaws. You’re being devoured. The injury to your mind—it’s tipped you into a situation you aren’t able to handle. You could handle it, if you’d only learn to adapt to the nature of the perceptions you’re getting now. But you won’t do that, will you? And you want to be healed. Well, you can be healed here, all right. More or less healed. I’ll take you to the place.”
“What do you mean, I could handle it, if I’d only learn to adapt?”
“Your injury has liberated you. It’s shown you the truth about time. But you refuse to see it.”
“What truth?” Skein asks flatly.
“You still try to think that time flows neatly from alpha to omega, from yesterday through today to tomorrow,” the skull-faced man says, as they walk slowly through the terminal. “But it doesn’t. The idea of the forward flow of time is a deception we impose on ourselves in childhood. An abstraction, agreed upon by common convention, to make it easier for us to cope with phenomena. The truth is that events are random, that chronological flow is only our joint hallucination, that if time can be said to flow at all, it flows in all ‘directions’ at once. Therefore—”
“Wait,” Skein says. “How do you explain the laws of thermodynamics? Entropy increases, available energy constantly diminishes, the universe heads toward ultimate stasis.”
“Does it?”
“The second law of thermodynamics—”
“Is an abstraction,” the skull-faced man says, “which unfortunately fails to correspond with the situation in the true universe. It isn’t a divine law. It’s a mathematical hypothesis developed by men who weren’t able to perceive the real situation. They did their best to account for the data within a framework they could understand. Their laws are formulations of probability, based on conditions that hold within closed systems, and given the right closed system the second law is useful and illuminating. But in the universe as a whole it simply isn’t true. There is no arrow of time. Entropy does not necessarily increase. Natural processes can be reversible. Causes do not invariably precede effects. In fact, the concepts of cause and effect are empty. There are neither causes nor effects, but only events, spontaneously generated, which we arrange in our minds in comprehensible patterns of sequence.”
“No,” Skein mutters. “This is insanity!”
“There are no patterns. Everything is random.”
“No.”
“Why not admit it? Your brain has been injured. What was destroyed was the centre center of temporal perception, the node that humans use to impose this unreal order on events. Your time filter has burned out. The past and the future are as accessible to you as the present, Skein: you can go where you like, you can watch events drifting past as they really do. Only you haven’t been able to break up your old habits of thought. You still try to impose the conventional entropic order on things, even though you lack the mechanism to do it, now, and the conflict between what you perceive and what you think you perceive is driving you crazy. Eh?”
“How do you know so much about me?”
The skull-faced man chuckles. “I was injured in the same way as you. I was cut free from the timeline long ago, through the kind of overload you suffered. And I’ve had years to come to terms with the new reality. I was as terrified as you were, at first. But now I understand. I move about freely. I know things, Skein.” A rasping laugh. “You need rest, though. A room, a bed. Time to think things over. Come. There’s no rush now. You’re on the right planet; you’ll be all right soon.”
Further, the association of entropy increase with time’s arrow is in no sense circular; rather, it both tells us something about what will happen to natural systems in time, and about what the time order must be for a series of states of a system. Thus, we may often establish a time order among a set of events by use of the time-entropy association, free from any reference to clocks and magnitudes of time intervals from the present. In actual judgments of before-after we frequently do this on the basis of our experience (even though without any explicit knowledge of the law of entropy increase): we know, for example, that for iron in air the state of pure metal must have been before that of a rusted surface, or that the clothes will be dry after, not before, they have hung in the hot sun.
A tense, humid night of thunder and temporal storms. Lying alone in his oversize hotel room, five kilometers from the purple shore, Skein suffers fiercely from fugue.
