Collected Short Fiction, page 959
The timing was perfect. Two days later the Japanese supertanker Exxon Maru was rammed off California and broke apart in a really spectacular way; the gelling system malfunctioned, and millions of barrels of crude oil fouled the shoreline from Mendocino to Big Sur. That evening a Venezuelan tanker heading for Port Arthur, Texas, experienced some mysterious calamity in the Gulf of Mexico that spilled a load of ungelled oil on the shores of the whooping crane wildlife refuge near Corpus Christi. The next day there was a bad spill somewhere off Alaska; and, just as though these three awful spills were the first the world had ever known, suddenly everybody in Congress was deploring pollution and talking about mandatory gellation—with Paul Quinn’s brand-new New York City legislation frequently being mentioned as the prototype for the proposed federal law.
Gilmartin.
Gellation.
One tip remained: Socorro for Leydecker before summer. Get to him early.
Cryptic and opaque, like most oracular pronouncements. I was entirely stopped by it. No stochastic technique at my command yielded a useful projection. I doodled a dozen scenarios and they all came out bewildering and meaningless. What kind of professional prophet was I, when I was handed three solid clues to future events and I could turn a trick on but one out of the three?
I began to think I ought to pay a call on Carvajal.
Before I could do anything, though, stunning news rolled out of the west. Richard Leydecker, Governor of California, titular leader of the New Democratic Party, front-running candidate for the next presidential nomination, dropped dead on a Palm Springs golf course on Memorial Day at the age of 57, and his office and power descended to Lieutenant Governor Carlos Socorro, who thereby became a mighty political force in the land by virtue of his control of the country’s wealthiest and most influential state.
Socorro, who now would command the huge California delegation at next year’s national New Democratic convention, began making king-making noises at his very first press conferences, two days after Leydecker’s death. He managed to suggest, apropos of practically nothing, that he regarded Senator Eli Kane of Illinois as the most promising choice for next year’s New Democratic nomination—thereby setting instantly into motion a Kane-for-President boom that would become overwhelming in the next few weeks.
I had been thinking about Kane myself. When the news of Leydecker’s death came in, my immediate calculation was that Quinn should now make a play for the top nomination instead of the vice-presidency—why not grab the extra publicity, now that we no longer needed to fear a murderous struggle with Leydecker?—but that we still should contrive things so that Quinn lost out on the convention floor to some older and less glamorous man, who then would go on to be trounced by President Mortonson in November. Quinn thus would inherit the fragments of the party to rebuild for 2004. Somebody like Kane, a distinguished-looking but hollow party-line politican, would be an ideal man for the role of the villain who deprives the dashing young mayor of the nomination.
For Quinn to move into serious contention against Kane, though, we would need Socorro’s support. Quinn was still an obscure figure to much of the country, and Kane was famous and beloved in the vast mid-American heartland. Backing from California would enable him to make a decent losing fight against Kane. I figured that we would let a tasteful interval go by, perhaps a week, and then start making overtures to Governor Socorro. But Socorro’s instant endorsement of Kane changed everything overnight and undercut Quinn completely. Suddenly there was Senator Kane touring California at the side of the new governor and emitting orotund bleats of praise for Socorro’s administrative skills.
The fix was in and Quinn was out. A Kane-Socorro ticket was obviously in the making, and they would steamroller into next year’s convention with a first-ballot nomination locked up. Quinn would merely look quixotic and ingenuous, or, worse, disingenuous, if he tried to mount a floor fight. We had failed to get to Socorro in time, despite Carvajal’s tip, and Quinn had lost a chance to acquire a potent ally. No fatal damage had been done to Quinn’s 2004 presidential chances, but our tardiness had been costly all the same.
Oh, the chagrin, the shame, the obloquy! Here, says the strange little man, here is a piece of paper with three pieces of the future written on it. Take such action as your own prophetic skills tell you is desirable. Fine, you say, thanks a million, and your skills tell you nothing, and nothing is what you do. And the future slides down around your ears to become the present, and you see quite clearly the things you should have done, and you look foolish in your own eyes.
I felt humble. I felt worthless.
I felt that I had failed some sort of test.
I needed guidance. I went to Carvajal.
(to be continued next month)
The Stochastic Man
Part two of Robert Silverberg’s compelling new novel about politics and prophecy in the year 2000. If you missed part one, the author’s synopsis will bring you up to date (or, send us $1.00 and we’ll rush you a copy of the April issue).
(2nd of 3 parts]
Synopsis of Part I
Lew Nichols is nearly 35 years old as the twentieth century enters its final months. He has been, until recently, a key administrative assistant to Paul Quinn, the dynamic young mayor of New York City. He has been, until recently, the husband of Sundara Shastri, a strikingly beautiful woman of East Indian ancestry. He has been, until recently, a disciple of Martin Carvajal, an odd, parched little man who is capable of seeing the future. But now, as he looks back over the past few years during the closing days of the year 2000, Nichols finds himself alone; Quinn is his enemy, his marriage has come apart, Carvajal is dead.
Before becoming involved in politics Nichols had been in the business of stochastic prediction—essentially, high-powered guesswork. An innate knack for considering probabilities and extracting likely patterns had made him a successful short-range prophet, much consulted by businessmen and politicans. In 1995, his friend Haig Mardikian, a lawyer with political connections, had introduced Nichols to Paul Quinn, then an obscure state legislator but already seen by a few close friends as a potential Presidential candidate. Reluctantly at first, Nichols lets himself be drawn into the Quinn camp. With Nichols’ almost infallible suggestions guiding campaign strategy, Quinn sweeps easily to victory in the 1997 election for Mayor of New York—first stop on his way to the White House. Nichols accepts an appointment on Mayor Quinn’s staff.
The Presidency is still a distant dream, for the incumbent President Mortons on is unlikely to be defeated in the 2000 election and Nichols does not want his man prematurely exposed in a losing cause. The plan, therefore—proposed by Nichols and seconded by Quinn’s other two main advisers, Deputy Mayor Haig Mardikian and City Finance Administrator Bob Lombroso—is to bring Quinn gradually into the center of national political life so that he can make a plausible try for the nomination in 2004. Drawing on all his stochastic skills, Nichols attempts to design a program of action that will catapult Quinn to power.
One day in March of 1999 Nichols meets a curious person at an office of Bob Lombroso. He is Mari® Carvajal, a small, faded-looking man of about sixty, who has made millions speculating on Wall Street and was one of the most generous contributors to Quinn’s campaign fund the year before. Carvajal too thinks Quinn is destined to become President, and wants to offer aid—not merely financial aid but suggestions of strategy. Nichols and Lombroso listen politely to him, for they have no wish to offend the millionaire, but Nichols in particular takes a patronizing attitude, regarding Carvajal as a well-meaning but ignorant political amateur seeking to meddle in things he does not understand. When he leaves Lombroso’s office, Carvajal hands Nichols a cryptic memorandum bearing three predictions—none of them comprehensible to Nichols. He puts the memo away and dismisses Carvajal from his mind.
He is preoccupied, now, with designing the role Quinn is to play in the 2000 national election campaign; the idea is for him to make a game but unsuccessful bid for the vice-presidential nomination, thereby setting the stage for his Presidential bid four years later. Nichols is also troubled by events at home, for his wife Sundara has become affiliated with the Transit Creed, a new religion out of California that advocates irrational, unpredictable behavior, and the strains caused by Sundara’s new way of life are pulling their marriage apart. Then, in May of 1999, State Controller Gilmartin is indicted in a bribery scandal—which startles Nichols, for one of Carvajal’s three predictions had involved Gilmartin. Nichols investigates Carvajal’s background, discovers that he has had an almost infallible record of success in the stock market, and—acting on a hunch—persuades Mayor Quinn to take a public stand on a measure controlling oil spills, something else Carvajal had suggested. Quinn has a tough oil-control law put through the City Council just a few days before several severe spills touch off a national outcry; Quinn benefits politically from the timing. Nichols now is convinced that Carvajal has some method for predicting the future that goes far beyond Nichols’ own stochastic system of guesswork.
Then Carvajal’s third prediction comes true: Governor Leydecker of California, the most powerful figure in the New Democratic Party, dies unexpectedly. Nichols is stunned and humbled by this unanswerable proof of Carvajal’s gift.
He feels worthless and confused. He needs guidance.
He goes to Carvajal.
16.
This is a place where a millionaire gifted with second sight lives? A small grimy flat in a squat dilapidated ninety-year-old apartment house just off Flatbush Avenue in deepest Godforsaken Brooklyn? Going there was an experiment in foolhardiness. I knew—anybody in the municipal administration quickly gets to know—which areas of the city had been written off as out of bounds, beyond hope of redemption, outside the rule of law. This was one of them. Beneath the veil of time and decay I could see the bones of old residential respectability here; it had been a district of lower-middle-class Jews once, a neighborhood of kosher butchers and unsuccessful lawyers, and then lower-middle-class black, and then slum black, probably with Puerto enclaves, and now it was just a jungle, a corroding wasteland of crumbling little red-brick semidetached two-family houses and soot-filmed six-story apartment buildings, inhabited by drifters, sniffers, muggers, muggers, muggers of muggers, feral cat-packs, short-pants gangs, elephant rats, and Martin Carvajal. “There?” I blurted when, having suggested a meeting to Carvajal, he suggested we hold it at his home. I suppose it was tactless to be so astonished at where he lived. He replied mildly that no harm would come to me. “I think I’ll arrange for a police escort anyway,” I said, and he laughed and said that was the surest way to invite trouble, and he told me again, firmly, to have no fear, that I would be in no peril if I came alone.
The inner voice whose promptings I always obey told me to have faith, and so I went to Carvajal without a police escort, though not without fear.
No cab would go into that part of Brooklyn, and pod service, of course, does not reach places like that; I borrowed an unmarked car from the municipal pool and drove it myself, not having the gall to risk a chauffeur’s life out there. But in time I came, undented if not undaunted, to Carvajal’s street. Filth I had expected, yes, and rotting mounds of garbage in the street, and the rubble-strewn sites of demolished buildings looking like the gaps left by knocked-out teeth; but not the dry blackened corpses of beasts in the streets—dogs, goats, pigs?—and not the woody-stemmed weeds cracking through the pavement as if this were some ghost town, and not the reek of human dung and urine, and not the ankle-deep swirls of sand. A blast of oven heat hit me when I emerged, timidly and with misgivings, from the coolness of my car. Though this was only early June, a terrible late-August heat baked these miserable ruins.
I left the car set on full alarm. Myself, I was carrying a top-strength antipersonnel baton and wearing a hip-hugging security cone warranted to knock any malefactor a dozen meters. Still, I felt hideously exposed as I crossed the dreary pavement, knowing I had no defense against a casual sniper pot-shotting from above. But though a few sallow-faced inhabitants of this horrendous village eyed me sourly from the darkness behind their cracked and jagged windows, though a few lean-hipped street cowboys gave me long bleak glances, there were no fourth-floor fusillades. Later I learned I would never have lasted sixty seconds outside my automobile if Carvajal hadn’t given orders insuring my safety. In this parched jungle he had immense authority; to his fierce neighbors he was a sort of warlock, a sacred totem, a holy fool, respected and feared and obeyed. His gift of vision, no doubt, used judiciously and with overwhelming impact, had made him invulnerable here—in the jungle no one trifles with a shaman—and today he had spread his mantle over me.
His apartment was on the fifth floor. There was no elevator. Each flight of stairs was a grim adventure. I heard the scurrying of giant rats; I choked and retched at foul unfamiliar odors; I imagined seven-year-old murderers lurking in every pool of shadow. Without incident I reached his door. He opened before I could find the bell. Even in this heat he wore a white shirt with buttoned collar, a gray tweed jacket, a brown necktie. He looked like a schoolmaster waiting to hear me recite my Latin conjugations and declensions. “You see?” he said. “Safe and sound. No harm.”
Carvajal lived in three rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen. The ceilings were low, the plaster was cracking, the faded green walls looked as if they had last been painted in the days of Tricky Dick Nixon. The furniture was even older, with a Truman-era look to it, floppy and overstuffed, floral slipcovers and sturdy rhinoceros legs. The air was unconditioned and stifling; the illumination was incandescent and dim; the TV was an archaic table model; the kitchen sink had running water, not ultrasonics. When I was growing up in the mid-1970’s, one of my closest friends was a boy whose father had died in Vietnam. He lived with his grandparents, and their place looked exactly like this one. Carvajal’s apartment eerily recaptured the texture of midcentury America; it was like a movie set, or a period room at the Smithsonian.
With remote, absent-minded hospitality he settled me on the battered living room sofa and apologized for having neither drink nor drug to offer me. He was not an indulger, he explained, and very little was sold in this neighborhood. “It doesn’t matter,” I said grandly. “A glass of water will be fine.”
The water was tepid and faintly rusty. I sat upright, spine rigid, legs tense. Carvajal, perching on the cushion of the armchair to my right, observed. “You look uncomfortable, Mr. Nichols.”
“I’ll unwind in a minute or two. The trip out here—”
“Of course.”
“But no one bothered me in the street. I have to confess I was expecting trouble, but—”
“I told you no harm would come.”
“Still—”
“But I told you,” he said mildly. “Didn’t you believe me? You should have believed me, Mr. Nichols. You know that.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, thinking, Gilmartin, gellation, Leydecker. Carvajal offered me more water. I smiled mechanically and shook my head. There was a sticky silence. After a moment I said, “This is a strange part of town for a person like you to choose.”
“Strange? Why?”
“A man of your means could live anywhere in the city.”
“I know.”
“Why here, then?”
“I’ve always lived here,” he said softly. “This is the only home I’ve ever known. These furnishings belonged to my mother, and some to her mother. I hear the echoes of familiar voices in these rooms, Mr. Nichols. I feel the living presence of the past. Is that so odd, to go on living where one has always lived?”
“But the neighborhood—”
“Has deteriorated, yes. Sixty years bring great changes. But the changes haven’t been perceptible to me in any important way. A gentle decline, year by year, then perhaps a steeper decline, but I make allowances, I make adjustments, I grow accustomed to what is new and make it part of what has always been. And everything is so familiar to me, Mr. Nichols—the names written in the wet cement when the pavement was new long ago, the great ailanthus tree in the schoolyard, the weatherbeaten gargoyles over the doorway of the building across the street. Do you understand what I’m saying? Why should I leave these things for a sleek Staten Island condo?”
“The danger, for one.”
“There’s no danger. Not for me. These people regard me as the little man who’s always been here, the symbol of stability, the one constant in a universe of entropic flow. I have a ritualistic value for them. I’m some sort of good-luck token., perhaps. At any rate no one who lives here has ever molested me. No one ever will.”
“Can you be sure of that?”
“Yes,” he said, with monolithic assurance, looking straight into my eyes, and I felt that chill again, that sense of standing on the rim of an abyss beyond my fathoming. There was another long silence. There was force flowing from him, a power altogether at odds with his drab appearance, his mild manner, his numb, burned-out expression. At length he said, “You wanted to ask me some questions, Mr. Nichols.”
I nodded. Taking a deep breath, I plunged in. “You knew Leydecker was going to die this spring, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t just guess he’d die. You knew.”
“Yes.” That same final, uncontestablejes.
“You knew that Gilmartin would get into trouble. You knew that oil tankers would spill ungelled oil.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“You know what the stock market is going to do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and you’ve made millions of dollars by using that knowledge.”
“That’s also true.”
“Therefore it’s fair to say that you see future events with extraordinary clarity, with supernatural clarity, Mr. Carvajal.”
