In Entropy’s Jaws

by Robert Silverberg

Static crackles from the hazy golden cloud of airborne loudspeakers drifting just below the ceiling of the spaceliner cabin. A hiss: communications filters are opening. An impending announcement from the bridge, no doubt. Then the captain’s bland, mechanical voice: “We are approaching the Panama Canal. All passengers into their bottles until the all-clear after insertion. When we come out the far side, we’ll be travelling at eighty lights toward the Perseus relay booster. Thank you.” In John Skein’s cabin the warning globe begins to flash, dousing him with red, yellow, green light, going up and down the visible spectrum, giving him some infra– and ultra– too. Not everybody who books passage on this liner necessarily has human sensory equipment. The signal will not go out until Skein is safely in his bottle. Go on, it tells him. Get in. Get in. Panama Canal coming up.

Obediently he rises and moves across the narrow cabin toward the tapering dull-skinned steel container, two and a half meters high, that will protect him against the dimensional stresses of canal insertion. He is a tall, angular man with thin lips, a strong chin, glossy black hair that clings close to his high-vaulted skull. His skin is deeply tanned but his eyes are those of one who has been in winter for some time. This is the fiftieth year of his second go-round. He is travelling alone toward a world of the Abbondanza system, perhaps the last leg on a journey that has occupied him for several years.

The passenger bottle swings open on its gaudy rhodium-jacketed hinge when its sensors, picking up Skein’s mass and thermal output, tell it that its protectee is within entry range. He gets in. It closes and seals, wrapping him in a seamless magnetic field. “Please be seated,” the bottle tells him softly. “Place your arms through the stasis loops and your feet in the security platens. When you have done this the pressor fields will automatically be activated and you will be fully insulated against injury during the coming period of turbulence.” Skein, who has had plenty of experience with faster-than-light travel, has anticipated the instructions and is already in stasis. The bottle closes. “Do you wish music?” it asks him. “A book? A vision spool? Conversation?”

“Nothing, thanks,” Skein says, and waits.

He understands waiting very well by this time. Once he was an impatient man, but this is a thin season in his life, and it has been teaching him the arts of stoic acceptance. He will sit here with the Buddha’s own complacency until the ship is through the canal. Silent, alone, self-sufficient. If only there will be no fugues this time. Or, at least—he is negotiating the terms of his torment with his demons—at least let them not be flashforwards. If he must break loose again from the matrix of time, he prefers to be cast only into his yesterdays, never into his tomorrows.

“We are almost into the canal now,” the bottle tells him pleasantly.

“It’s all right. You don’t need to look after me. Just let me know when it’s safe to come out.”

He closes his eyes. Trying to envision the ship: a fragile glimmering purple needle squirting through clinging blackness, plunging toward the celestial vortex just ahead, the maelstrom of clashing forces, the soup of contravariant tensors. The Panama Canal, so-called. Through which the liner will shortly rush, acquiring during its passage such a garland of borrowed power that it will rip itself free of the standard fourspace; it will emerge on the far side of the canal into a strange, tranquil pocket of the universe where the speed of light is the downside limiting velocity, and no one knows where the upper limit lies.

Alarms sound in the corridor, heavy, resonant: clang, clang, clang. The dislocation is beginning. Skein is braced. What does it look like out there? Folds of glowing black velvet, furry swatches of the disrupted continuum, wrapping themselves around the ship? Titanic lightnings hammering on the hull? Laughing centaurs flashing across the twisted heavens? Despondent masks, fixed in tragic grimaces, dangling between the blurred stars? Streaks of orange, green, crimson: sick rainbows, limp, askew? In we go. Clang, clang, clang. The next phase of the voyage now begins. He thinks of his destination, holding an image of it rigidly in mind. The picture is vivid, though this is a world he has visited only in spells of temporal fugue. Too often; he has been there again and again in these moments of disorientation in time. The colors are wrong on that world. Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. Too much manganese? Too little copper? He will forgive it its colors if it will grant him his answers. And then. Skein feels the familiar ugly throbbing at the base of his neck, as if the tip of his spine is swelling like a balloon. He curses. He tries to resist. As he feared, not even the bottle can wholly protect him against these stresses. Outside the ship the universe is being wrenched apart; some of that slips in here and throws him into a private epilepsy of the timeline. Spacetime is breaking up for him. He will go into fugue. He clings, fighting, knowing it is futile. The currents of time buffet him, knocking him a short distance into the future, then a reciprocal distance into the past, as if he is a bubble of insect spittle glued loosely to a dry reed. He cannot hold on much longer. Let it not be flashforward, he prays, wondering who it is to whom he prays. Let it not be flashforward. And he loses his grip. And shatters. And is swept in shards across time.

Of course, if x is before y then it remains eternally before y, and nothing in the passage of time can change this. But the peculiar position of the “now” can be easily expressed simply because our language has tenses. The future will be, the present is, and the past was; the light will be red, it is now yellow, and it was green. But do we, in these terms, really describe the “processional” character of time? We sometimes say that an event is future, then it is present, and finally it is past; and by this means we seem to dispense with tenses, yet we portray the passage of time. But this is really not the case; for all that we have done is to translate our tenses into the words “then” and “finally”, and into the order in which we state our clauses. If we were to omit these words or their equivalents, and mix up the clauses, our sentences would no longer be meaningful. To say that the future, the present, and the past are in some sense is to dodge the problem of time by resorting to the tenseless language of logic and mathematics. In such an atemporal language it would be meaningful to say that Socrates is mortal because all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, even though Socrates has been dead many centuries. But if we cannot describe time either by a language containing tenses or by a tenseless language, how shall we symbolize it?

He feels the curious doubleness of self, the sense of having been here before, and knows it is flashback. Some comfort in that. He is a passenger in his own skull, looking out through the eyes of John Skein on an event that he has already experienced, and which he now is powerless to alter.

His office. All its gilded magnificence. A crystal dome at the summit of Kenyatta Tower. With the amplifiers on he can see as far as Serengeti in one direction, Mombasa in another. Count the fleas on an elephant in Tsavo Park. A wall of light on the east-southeast face of the dome, housing his data-access units. No one can stare at that wall more than thirty seconds without suffering intensely from a surfeit of information. Except Skein; he drains nourishment from it, hour after hour.

As he slides into the soul of that earlier Skein he takes a brief joy in the sight of his office, like Aeneas relishing a vision of unfallen Troy, like Adam looking back into Eden. How good it was. That broad sweet desk with its subtle components dedicated to his service. The gentle psychosensitive carpet, so useful and so beautiful. The undulating ribbon-sculpture gliding in and out of the dome’s skin, undergoing molecular displacement each time and forever exhibiting the newest of its infinity of possible patterns. A rich man’s office; he was unabashed in his pursuit of elegance. He had earned the right to luxury through the intelligent use of his innate skills. Returning now to that lost dome of wonders, he quickly seizes his moment of satisfaction, aware that shortly some souring scene of subtraction will be replayed for him, one of the stages of the darkening and withering of his life. But which one?

“Send in Coustakis,” he hears himself say, and his words give him the answer. That one. He will again watch his own destruction. Surely there is no further need to subject him to this particular reenactment. He has been through it at least seven times; he is losing count. An endless spiralling track of torment.

Coustakis is bald, blue-eyed, sharp-nosed, with the desperate look of a man who is near the end of his first go-round and is not yet sure that he will be granted a second. Skein guesses that he is about seventy. The man is unlikable: he dresses coarsely, moves in aggressive blurting little strides, and shows in every gesture and glance that he seethes with envy of the opulence with which Skein surrounds himself. Skein feels no need to like his clients, though. Only to respect. And Coustakis is brilliant; he commands respect.

Skein says, “My staff and I have studied your proposal in great detail. It’s a cunning scheme.”

“You’ll help me?”

“There are risks for me,” Skein points out. “Nissenson has a powerful ego. So do you. I could get hurt. The whole concept of synergy involves risk for the Communicator. My fees are calculated accordingly.”

“Nobody expects a Communicator to be cheap,” Coustakis mutters.

“I’m not. But I think you’ll be able to afford me. The question is whether I can afford you.”

“You’re very cryptic, Mr. Skein. Like all oracles.”

Skein smiles. “I’m not an oracle, I’m afraid. Merely a conduit through whom connections are made. I can’t foresee the future.”

“You can evaluate probabilities.”

“Only concerning my own welfare. And I’m capable of arriving at an incorrect evaluation.”

Coustakis fidgets. “Will you help me or won’t you?”

“The fee,” Skein says, “is half a million down, plus an equity position of fifteen percent in the corporation you’ll establish with the contacts I provide.”

Coustakis gnaws at his lower lip. “So much?”

“Bear in mind that I’ve got to split my fee with Nissenson. Consultants like him aren’t cheap.”

“Even so. Ten percent.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Coustakis. I really thought we were past the point of negotiation in this transaction. It’s going to be a busy day for me, and so—” Skein passes his hand over a black rectangle on his desk and a section of the floor silently opens, uncovering the dropshaft access. He nods toward it. The carpet reveals the colors of Coustakis’s mental processes: black for anger, green for greed, red for anxiety, yellow for fear, blue for temptation, all mixed together in the hashed pattern betraying the calculations now going on in his mind. Coustakis will yield. Nevertheless Skein proceeds with the charade of standing, gesturing toward the exit, trying to usher his visitor out. “All right,” Coustakis says explosively, “fifteen percent!”

Skein instructs his desk to extrude a contract cube. He says, “Place your hand here, please,” and as Coustakis touches the cube he presses his own palm against its opposite face. At once the cube’s sleek crystalline surface darkens and roughens as the double sensory output bombards it. Skein says, “Repeat after me. I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”

“I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”

“—do knowingly and willingly assign to John Skein Enterprises, as payment for professional services to be rendered, an equity interest in Coustakis Transport Ltd or any successor corporation amounting to—”

“—do knowingly and willingly assign—”

They drone on in turns through a description of Coustakis’s corporation and the irrevocable nature of Skein’s part ownership in it. Then Skein files the contract cube and says, “If you’ll phone your bank and put your thumb on the cash part of the transaction, I’ll make contact with Nissenson and you can get started.”

“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.”

Scowling, Coustakis applies for the loan, gets it, transfers the funds to Skein’s account. The process takes eight minutes; Skein uses the time to review Coustakis’s ego profile. It displeases Skein to have to exert such sordid economic pressure; but the service he offers does, after all, expose him to dangers, and he must cushion the risk by high guarantees, in case some mishap should put him out of business.

“Now we can proceed,” Skein says, when the transaction is done.

Coustakis has almost invented a system for the economical instantaneous transportation of matter. It will not, unfortunately, ever be useful for living things, since the process involves the destruction of the material being shipped and its virtually simultaneous reconstitution elsewhere. The fragile entity that is the soul cannot withstand the withering blast of Coustakis’s transmitter’s electron beam. But there is tremendous potential in the freight business; the Coustakis transmitter will be able to send cabbages to Mars, computers to Pluto, and, given the proper linkage facilities, it should be able to reach the inhabited extrasolar planets.

However, Coustakis has not yet perfected his system. For five years he has been stymied by one impassable problem: keeping the beam tight enough between transmitter and receiver. Beamspread has led to chaos in his experiments; marginal straying results in the loss of transmitted information, so that that which is being sent invariably arrives incomplete. Coustakis has depleted his resources in the unsuccessful search for a solution, and thus has been forced to the desperate and costly step of calling in a Communicator.

For a price, Skein will place him in contact with someone who can solve his problem. Skein has a network of consultants on several worlds, experts in technology and finance and philology and nearly everything else. Using his own mind as the focal nexus, Skein will open telepathic communion between Coustakis and a consultant.

“Get Nissenson into a receptive state,” he orders his desk.

Coustakis, blinking rapidly, obviously uneasy, 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 come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”

“And if he doesn’t have the answer?”

“He will.”

Skein gives no refunds in the event of failure, but he has never had a failure. He does not accept jobs that he feels will be inherently impossible to handle. Either Nissenson will see the solution Coustakis has been overlooking, or else he will make some suggestion that will nudge Coustakis toward finding the solution himself. The telepathic communion is the vital element. Mere talking would never get anywhere. Coustakis and Nissenson could stare at blueprints together for months, pound computers side by side for years, debate the difficulty with each other for decades, and still they might not hit on the answer. But the communion creates a synergy of minds that is more than a doubling of the available brainpower. A union of perceptions, a heightening, that always produces that mystic flash of insight, that leap of the intellect.

“And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?” Coustakis asks.

“He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

The desk reports that Nissenson, half the world away in São Paulo, is ready. Skein’s power does not vary with distance. Quickly he throws Coustakis into the receptive condition, and swings around to face the brilliant lights of his data-access units. Those sparkling, shifting little blazes kindle his gift, jabbing at the electrical rhythms of his brain until he is lifted into the energy level that permits the opening of a communion. As he starts to go up, the other Skein who is watching, the time-displaced prisoner behind his forehead, tries frenziedly to prevent him from entering the fatal linkage. Don’t. Don’t. You’ll overload. They’re too strong for you. Easier to halt a planet in its orbit, though. The course of the past is frozen; all this has already happened; the Skein who cries out in silent anguish is merely an observer, necessarily passive, here to view the maiming of his earlier self.

Skein reaches forth one tendril of his mind and engages Nissenson. With another tendril he snares Coustakis. Steadily, now, he draws the two tendrils together.

There is no way to predict the intensity of the forces that will shortly course through his brain. He has done what he could, checking the ego profiles of his client and the consultant, but that really tells him little. What Coustakis and Nissenson may be as individuals hardly matters; it is what they may become in communion that he must fear. Synergistic intensities are unpredictable. He has lived for a lifetime and a half with the possibility of a burnout.

The tendrils meet.

Skein the observer winces and tries to armor himself against the shock. But there is no way to deflect it. Out of Coustakis’s mind flows a description of the matter transmitter and a clear statement of the beam-spread problem; Skein shoves it along to Nissenson, who begins to work on a solution. But when their minds join it is immediately evident that their combined strength will be more than Skein can control. This time the synergy will destroy him. But he cannot disengage; he has no mental circuitbreaker. He is caught, trapped, impaled. The entity that is Coustakis/Nissenson will not let go of him, for that would mean its own destruction. A wave of mental energy goes rippling and dancing along the vector of communion from Coustakis to Nissenson and goes bouncing back, pulsating and gaining strength, from Nissenson to Coustakis. A fiery oscillation is set up. Skein sees what is happening; he has become the amplifier of his own doom. The torrent of energy continues to gather power each time it reverberates from Coustakis to Nissenson, from Nissenson to Coustakis. Powerless, Skein watches the energy-pumping effect building up a mighty charge. The discharge is bound to come soon, and he will be the one who must receive it. How long? How long? The juggernaut fills the corridors of his mind. He ceases to know which end of the circuit is Nissenson, which is Coustakis; he perceives only two shining walls of mental power, between which he is stretched ever thinner, a twanging wire of ego, heating up, heating up, glowing now, emitting a searing blast of heat, particles of identity streaming away from him like so many liberated ions—

Then he lies numb and dazed on the floor of his office, grinding his face into the psychosensitive carpet, while Coustakis barks over and over, “Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

Like any other chronometric device, our inner clocks are subject to their own peculiar disorders and, in spite of the substantial concordance between private and public time, discrepancies may occur as the result of sheer inattention. Mach noted that if a doctor focuses his attention on the patient’s blood, it may seem to him to squirt out before the lancet enters the skin and, for similar reasons, the feebler of two stimuli presented simultaneously is usually perceived later…Normal life requires the capacity to recall experiences in a sequence corresponding, roughly at least, to the order in which they actually occurred. It requires in addition that our potential recollections should be reasonably accessible to consciousness. These potential recollections mean not only a perpetuation within us of representations of the past, but also a ceaseless interplay between such representations and the uninterrupted input of present information from the external world. Just as our past may be at the service of our present, so the present may be remotely controlled by our past: in the words of Shelley, “Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung.”

“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

His bottle is open and they are helping him out. His cabin is full of intruders. Skein recognizes the captain’s robot, the medic, and a couple of passengers, the little swarthy man from Pingalore and the woman from Globe Fifteen. The cabin door is open and more people are coming in. The medic makes a cuff-shooting gesture and a blinding haze of metallic white particles wraps itself about Skein’s head. The little tingling prickling sensations spur him to wakefulness. “You didn’t respond when the bottle told you it was all right,” the medic explains. “We’re through the canal.”

“Was it a good passage? Fine. Fine. I must have dozed.”

“If you’d like to come to the infirmary—routine check, only—put you through the diagnostat—”

“No. No. Will you all please go? I assure you, I’m quite all right.”

Reluctantly, clucking over him, they finally leave. Skein gulps cold water until his head is clear. He plants himself flatfooted in mid-cabin, trying to pick up some sensation of forward motion. The ship now is travelling at something like fifteen million miles a second. How long is fifteen million miles? How long is a second? From Rome to Naples it was a morning’s drive on the autostrada. From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was the time between twilight and darkness. San Francisco to San Diego spanned lunch to dinner by superpod. As I slide my right foot two inches forward we traverse fifteen million miles. From where to where? And why? He has not seen Earth in twenty-six months. At the end of this voyage his remaining funds will be exhausted. Perhaps he will have to make his home in the Abbondanza system; he has no return ticket. But of course he can travel to his heart’s discontent within his own skull, whipping from point to point along the timeline in the grip of the fugues.

He goes quickly from his cabin to the recreation lounge.

The ship is a second-class vessel, neither lavish nor seedy. It carries about twenty passengers, most of them, like him, bound outward on one-way journeys. He has not talked directly to any of them, but he has done considerable eavesdropping in the lounge, and by now can tag each one of them with the proper dull biography. The wife bravely joining her pioneer husband, whom she has not seen for half a decade. The remittance man under orders to place ten thousand light-years, at the very least, between himself and his parents. The glittery-eyed entrepreneur, a Phoenician merchant sixty centuries after his proper era, off to carve an empire as a middleman’s middleman. The tourists. The bureaucrat. The colonel. Among this collection Skein stands out in sharp relief; he is the only one who has not made an effort to know and be known, and the mystery of his reserve tantalizes them.

He carries the fact of his crackup with him like some wrinkled dangling yellowed wen. When his eyes meet those of any of the others he says silently, You see my deformity? I am my own survivor. I have been destroyed and lived to look back on it. Once I was a man of wealth and power, and look at me now. But I ask for no pity. Is that understood?

Hunching at the bar, Skein pushes the node for filtered rum. His drink arrives, and with it comes the remittance man, handsome, young, insinuating. Giving Skein a confidential wink, as if to say, I know. You’re on the run, too.

“From Earth, are you?” he says to Skein.

“Formerly.”

“I’m Pid Rocklin.”

“John Skein.”

“What were you doing there?”

“On Earth?” Skein shrugs. “A Communicator. I retired four years ago.”

“Oh.” Rocklin summons a drink. “That’s good work, if you have the gift.”

“I had the gift,” Skein says. The unstressed past tense is as far into self-pity as he will go. He drinks and pushes for another one. A great gleaming screen over the bar shows the look of space: empty, here beyond the Panama Canal, although yesterday a million suns blazed on that ebony rectangle. Skein imagines he can hear the whoosh of hydrogen molecules scraping past the hull at eighty lights. He sees them as blobs of brightness millions of miles long, going zip! and zip! and zip! as the ship spurts along. Abruptly a purple nimbus envelopes him and he drops into a flashforward fugue so quickly there is not even time for the usual futile resistance. “Hey, what’s the matter?” Pid Rocklin says, reaching for him. “Are you all—” and Skein loses the universe.

He is on the world that he takes to be Abbondanza VI, and his familiar companion, the skull-faced man, stands beside him at the edge of an oily orange sea. They appear to be having the debate about time once again. The skull-faced man must be at least a hundred and twenty years old; his skin lies against his bones with, seemingly, no flesh at all under it, and his face is all nostrils and burning eyes. Bony sockets, sharp shelves for cheekbones, a bald dome of a skull. The neck no more than wrist-thick, rising out of shrivelled shoulders. Saying, “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! Look there. You see what’s drifting on the sea?”

On the orange waves tosses the bloated corpse of a shaggy blue beast. Upturned saucery eyes, drooping snout, thick limbs. Why is it not waterlogged by now? What keeps it afloat?

The skull-faced man says, “Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves. We filter them. We screen out what doesn’t make sense and admit them to our consciousness in what seems to be the right sequence.” He laughs. “The grand delusion! The past is nothing but a series of films slipping unpredictably into the future. And vice versa.”

“I won’t accept that,” Skein says stubbornly. “It’s a demonic, chaotic, nihilistic theory. It’s idiocy. Are we greybeards before we’re children? Do we die before we’re born? Do trees devolve into seeds? Deny linearity all you like. I won’t go along.”

“You can say that after all you’ve experienced?”

Skein shakes his head. “I’ll go on saying it. What I’ve been going through is a mental illness. Maybe I’m deranged, but the universe isn’t.”

“Contrary. You’ve only recently become sane and started to see things as they really are,” the skull-faced man insists. “The trouble is that you don’t want to admit the evidence you’ve begun to perceive. Your filters are down, Skein! You’ve shaken free of the illusion of linearity! Now’s your chance to show your resilience. Learn to live with the real reality. Stop this silly business of imposing an artificial order on the flow of time. Why should effect follow cause? Why shouldn’t the seed follow the tree? Why must you persist in holding tight to a useless, outworn, contemptible system of false evaluations of experience when you’ve managed to break free of the—”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

“—right, Skein?”

“What happened?”

“You started to fall off your stool,” Pid Rocklin says. “You turned absolutely white. I thought you were having some kind of a stroke.”

“How long was I unconscious?”

“Oh, three, four seconds, I suppose. I grabbed you and propped you up, and your eyes opened. Can I help you to your cabin? Or maybe you ought to go to the infirmary.”

“Excuse me,” Skein says hoarsely, and leaves the lounge.

When the hallucinations began, not long after the Coustakis overload, he assumed at first that they were memory disturbances produced by the fearful jolt he had absorbed. Quite clearly most of them involved scenes of his past, which he would relive, during the moments of fugue, with an intensity so brilliant that he felt he had actually been thrust back into time. He did not merely recollect, but rather he experienced the past anew, following a script from which he could not deviate as he spoke and felt and reacted. Such strange excursions into memory could be easily enough explained: his brain had been damaged, and it was heaving old segments of experience into view in some kind of attempt to clear itself of debris and heal the wounds. But while the flashbacks were comprehensible, the flashforwards were not, and he did not recognize them at all for what they actually were. Those scenes of himself wandering alien worlds, those phantom conversations with people he had never met, those views of spaceliner cabins and transit booths and unfamiliar hotels and passenger terminals, seemed merely to be fantasies, random fictions of his injured brain. Even when he started to notice that there was a consistent pattern to these feverish glimpses of the unknown, he still did not catch on. It appeared as though he was seeing himself performing a sort of quest, or perhaps a pilgrimage; the slices of unexperienced experience that he was permitted to see began to fit into a coherent structure of travel and seeking. And certain scenes and conversations recurred, yes, sometimes several times the same day, the script always the same, so that he began to learn a few of the scenes word for word. Despite the solid texture of these episodes, he persisted in thinking of them as mere brief flickering segments of nightmare. He could not imagine why the injury to his brain was causing him to have these waking dreams of long space voyages and unknown planets, so vivid and so momentarily real, but they seemed no more frightening to him than the equally vivid flashbacks.

Only after a while, when many months had passed since the Coustakis incident, did the truth strike him. One day he found himself living through an episode that he considered to be one of his fantasies. It was a minor thing, one that he had experienced, in whole or in part, seven or eight times. What he had seen, in fitful bursts of uninvited delusion, was himself in a public garden on some hot spring morning, standing before an immense baroque building while a grotesque group of nonhuman tourists filed past him in a weird creaking, clanking procession of inhalator suits and breather-wheels and ion-disperser masks. That was all. Then it happened that a harrowing legal snarl brought him to a city in North Carolina about fourteen months after the overload, and, after having put in his appearance at the courthouse, he set out on a long walk through the grimy, decayed metropolis, and came, as if by an enchantment, to a huge metal gate behind which he could see a dark sweep of lavish forest, oaks and rhododendrons and magnolias, laid out in an elegant formal manner. It was, according to a sign posted by the gate, the estate of a nineteenth-century millionaire, now open to all and preserved in its ancient state despite the encroachments of the city on its borders.

Skein bought a ticket and went in, on foot, hiking for what seemed like miles through cool leafy glades, until abruptly the path curved and he emerged into the bright sunlight and saw before him the great grey bulk of a colossal mansion, hundreds of rooms topped by parapets and spires, with a massive portico from which vast columns of stairs descended. In wonder he moved toward it, for this was the building of his frequent fantasy, and as he approached he beheld the red and green and purple figures crossing the portico, those coiled and gnarled and looping shapes he had seen before, the eerie horde of alien travellers here to take in the wonders of Earth. Heads without eyes, eyes without heads, multiplicities of limbs and absences of limbs, bodies like tumors and tumors like bodies, all the universe’s imagination on display in these agglomerated life forms, so strange and yet not at all strange to him. But this time it was no fantasy. It fit smoothly into the sequence of the events of the day, rather than dropping, dreamlike, intrusive, into that sequence. Nor did it fade after a few moments; the scene remained sharp, never leaving him to plunge back into “real” life. This was reality itself, and he had experienced it before.

Twice more in the next few weeks things like that happened to him, until at last he was ready to admit the truth to himself about his fugues, that he was experiencing flashforwards as well as flashbacks, that he was being subjected to glimpses of his own future.

T’ang, the high king of the Shang, asked Hsia Chi saying, “In the beginning, were there already individual things?” Hsia Chi replied, “If there were no things then, how could there be any now? If later generations should pretend that there had been no things in our time, would they be right?” Tang said, “Have things then no before and no after?” To which Hsia Chi replied, “The ends and the origins of things have no limit from which they began. The origin of one thing may be considered the end of another; the end of one may be considered the origin of the next. Who can distinguish accurately between these cycles? What lies beyond all things, and before all events, we cannot know.”

They reach and enter the Perseus relay booster, which is a whirling celestial anomaly structurally similar to the Panama Canal but not nearly so potent, and it kicks the ship’s velocity to just above a hundred lights. That is the voyage’s final acceleration; the ship will maintain this rate for two and a half days, until it clocks in at Scylla, the main deceleration station for this part of the galaxy, where it will be seized by a spongy web of forces twenty light-minutes in diameter and slowed to sublight velocities for the entry into the Abbondanza system.

Skein spends nearly all of this period in his cabin, rarely eating and sleeping very little. He reads, almost constantly, obsessively dredging from the ship’s extensive library a wide and capricious assortment of books. Rilke. Kafka. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World. Lowry, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Elias. Razhuminin. Dickey. Pound. Fraisse, The Psychology of Time. Greene, Dream and Delusion. Poe. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Tourneur. The Waste Land. Ulysses. Heart of Darkness. Bury, The Idea of Progress. Jung. Buechner. Pirandello. The Magic Mountain. Ellis, The Rack. Cervantes. Blenheim. Fierst. Keats. Nietzsche. His mind swims with images and bits of verse, with floating sequences of dialogue, with unscaffolded dialectics. He dips into each work briefly, magpielike, seeking bright scraps. The words form a scaly impasto on the inner surface of his skull. He finds that this heavy verbal overdose helps, to some slight extent, to fight off the fugues; his mind is weighted, perhaps, bound by this leaden clutter of borrowed genius to the moving line of the present, and during his debauch of reading he finds himself shifting off that line less frequently than in the recent past.

His mind whirls. Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—A rope over an abyss. My patience are exhausted. See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul. I had not thought death had undone so many. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hoogspanning. Levensgevaar. Peligro de Muerte. Electricidad. Danger. Give me my spear. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea. There is no “official” theory of time, defined in creeds or universally agreed upon among Christians. Christianity is not concerned with the purely scientific aspects of the subject nor, within wide limits, with its philosophical analysis, except insofar as it is committed to a fundamentally realist view and could not admit, as some Eastern philosophies have done, that temporal existence is mere illusion. A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hieronymo’s mad again. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. It has also lately been postulated that the physical concept of information is identical with a phenomenon of reversal of entropy. The psychologist must add a few remarks here: It does not seem convincing to me that information is eo ipso identical with a pouvoir d’organisation which undoes entropy. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih.

Nevertheless, once the ship is past Scylla and slowing toward the Abbondanza planets, the periods of fugue become frequent once again, so that he lives entrapped, shuttling between the flashing shadows of yesterday and tomorrow.

After the Coustakis overload he tried to go on in the old way, as best he could. He gave Coustakis a refund without even being asked, for he had been of no service, nor could he ever be. Instantaneous transportation of matter would have to wait. But Skein took other clients. He could still make the communion, after a fashion, and when the nature of the task was sufficiently low-level he could even deliver a decent synergetic response.

Often his work was unsatisfactory, however. Contacts would break at awkward moments, or, conversely, his filter mechanism would weaken and he would allow the entire contents of his client’s mind to flow into that of his consultant. The results of such disasters were chaotic, involving him in heavy medical expenses and sometimes in damage suits. He was forced to place his fees on a contingency basis: no synergy, no pay. About half the time he earned nothing for his output of energy. Meanwhile his overhead remained the same as always: the domed office, the network of consultants, the research staff, and the rest. His effort to remain in business was eating rapidly into the bank accounts he had set aside against just such a time of storm.

They could find no organic injury to his brain. Of course, so little was known about a Communicator’s gift that it was impossible to determine much by medical analysis. If they could not locate the centre center from which a Communicator powered his communions, how could they detect the place where he had been hurt? The medical archives were of no value; there had been eleven previous cases of overload, but each instance was physiologically unique. They told him he would eventually heal, and sent him away. Sometimes the doctors gave him silly therapies: counting exercises, rhythmic blinkings, hopping on his left leg and then his right, as if he had a stroke. But he had not had a stroke.

For a time he was able to maintain his business on the momentum of his reputation. Then, as word got around that he had been hurt and was no longer any good, clients stopped coming. Even the contingency basis for fees failed to attract them. Within six months he found that he was lucky to find a client a week. He reduced his rates, and that seemed only to make things worse, so he raised them to something not far below what they had been at the time of the overload. For a while the pace of business increased, as if people were getting the impression that Skein had recovered. He gave such spotty service, though. Blurred and wavering communions, unanticipated positive feedbacks, filtering problems, information deficiencies, redundancy surpluses—”You take your mind in your hands when you go to Skein,” they were saying now.

The fugues added to his professional difficulties.

He never knew when he would snap into hallucination. It might happen during a communion, and often did. Once he dropped back to the moment of the Coustakis-Nissenson hookup and treated a terrified client to a replay of his overload. Once, although he did not understand at the time what was happening, he underwent a flashforward and carried the client with him to a scarlet jungle on a formaldehyde world, and when Skein slipped back to reality the client remained in the scarlet jungle. There was a damage suit over that one, too.

Temporal dislocation plagued him into making poor guesses. He took on clients whom he could not possibly serve and wasted his time on them. He turned away people whom he might have been able to help to his own profit. Since he was no longer anchored firmly to his timeline, but drifted in random oscillations of twenty years or more in either direction, he forfeited the keen sense of perspective on which he had previously founded his professional judgments. He grew haggard and lean, also. He passed through a tempest of spiritual doubts that amounted to total submission and then total rejection of faith within the course of four months. He changed lawyers almost weekly. He liquidated assets with invariably catastrophic timing to pay his cascading bills.

A year and a half after the overload, he formally renounced his registration and closed his office. It took six months more to settle the remaining damage suits. Then, with what was left of his money, he bought a spaceliner ticket and set out to search for a world with purple sand and blue-leaved trees, where, unless his fugues had played him false, he might be able to arrange for the repair of his broken mind.

Now the ship has returned to the conventional fourspace and dawdles planetward at something rather less than half the speed of light. Across the screens there spreads a necklace of stars; space is crowded here. The captain will point out Abbondanza to anyone who asks: a lemon-colored sun, bigger than that of Earth, surrounded by a dozen bright planetary pips. The passengers are excited. They buzz, twitter, speculate, anticipate. No one is silent except Skein. He is aware of many love affairs; he has had to reject several offers just in the past three days. He has given up reading and is trying to purge his mind of all he has stuffed into it. The fugues have grown worse. He has to write notes to himself, saying things like You are a passenger aboard a ship heading for Abbondanza VI, and will be landing in a few days, so that he does not forget which of his three entangled timelines is the true one.

Suddenly he is with Nilla on the island in the Gulf of Mexico, getting aboard the little excursion boat. Time stands still here; it could almost be the twentieth century. The frayed, sagging cords of the rigging. The lumpy engine inefficiently converted from internal combustion to turbines. The mustachioed Mexican bandits who will be their guides today. Nilla, nervously coiling her long blonde hair, saying, “Will I get seasick, John? The boat rides right in the water, doesn’t it? It won’t even hover a little bit?”

“Terribly archaic,” Skein says. “That’s why we’re here.”

The captain gestures them aboard. Juan, Francisco, Sebastián. Brothers. Los hermanos. Yards of white teeth glistening below the drooping moustaches. With a terrible roar the boat moves away from the dock. Soon the little town of crumbling pastel buildings is out of sight and they are heading jaggedly eastward along the coast, green shoreward water on their left, the blue depths on the right. The morning sun coming up hard. “Could I sunbathe?” Nilla asks. Unsure of herself; he has never seen her this way, so hesitant, so abashed. Mexico has robbed her of her New York assurance. “Go ahead,” Skein says. “Why not?” She drops her robe. Underneath she wears only a waist-strap; her heavy breasts look white and vulnerable in the tropic glare, and the small nipples are a faded pink. Skein sprays her with protective sealant and she sprawls out on the deck. Los hermanos stare hungrily and talk to each other in low rumbling tones. Not Spanish. Mayan, perhaps? The natives have never learned to adopt the tourists’ casual nudity here. Nilla, obviously still uneasy, rolls over and lies face down. Her broad smooth back glistens.

Juan and Francisco yell. Skein follows their pointing fingers. Porpoises! A dozen of them, frisking around the bow, keeping just ahead of the boat, leaping high and slicing down into the blue water. Nilla gives a little cry of joy and rushes to the side to get a closer look. Throwing her arm self-consciously across her bare breasts. “You don’t need to do that,” Skein murmurs. She keeps herself covered. “How lovely they are,” she says softly. Sebastián comes up beside them. “Amigos,” he says. “They are. My friends.” The cavorting porpoises eventually disappear. The boat bucks bouncily onward, keeping close to the island’s beautiful empty palmy shore. Later they anchor, and he and Nilla swim masked, spying on the coral gardens. When they haul themselves on deck again it is almost noon. The sun is terrible. “Lunch?” Francisco asks. “We make you good lunch now?” Nilla laughs. She is no longer hiding her body. “I’m starved!” she cries.

“We make you good lunch,” Francisco says, grinning, and he and Juan go over the side. In the shallow water they are clearly visible near the white sand of the bottom. They have spear guns; they hold their breaths and prowl. Too late Skein realizes what they are doing. Francisco hauls a fluttering spiny lobster out from behind a rock. Juan impales a huge pale crab. He grabs three conchs also, surfaces, dumps his prey on the deck. Francisco arrives with the lobster. Juan, below again, spears a second lobster. The animals are not dead; they crawl sadly in circles on the deck as they dry. Appalled, Skein turns to Sebastián and says, “Tell them to stop. We’re not that hungry.” Sebastián, preparing some kind of salad, smiles and shrugs. Francisco has brought up another crab, bigger than the first. “Enough,” Skein says. “Basta! Basta!” Juan, dripping, tosses down three more conchs. “You pay us good,” he says. “We give you good lunch.” Skein shakes his head. The deck is becoming a slaughterhouse for ocean life. Sebastián now energetically slits conch shells, extracts the meat, drops it into a vast bowl to marinate in a yellow-green fluid. “Basta!” Skein yells: Is that the right word in Spanish? He knows it’s right in Italian. Los hermanos look amused. The sea is full of life, they seem to be telling him. We give you good lunch. Suddenly Francisco erupts from the water, bearing something immense. A turtle! Forty, fifty pounds! The joke has gone too far. “No,” Skein says. “Listen, I have to forbid this. Those turtles are almost extinct. Do you understand that? Muerto. Perdido. Desaparecido. I won’t eat a turtle. Throw it back. Throw it back.” Francisco smiles. He shakes his head. Deftly he binds the turtle’s flippers with rope. Juan says, “Not for lunch, señor. For us. For to sell. Mucho dinero.” Skein can do nothing. Francisco and Sebastián have begun to hack up the crabs and lobsters. Juan slices peppers into the bowl where the conchs are marinating. Pieces of dead animals litter the deck. “Oh, I’m starving,” Nilla says. Her waist-strap is off too, now. The turtle watches the whole scene, beady-eyed. Skein shudders. Auschwitz, he thinks. Buchenwald. For the animals it’s Buchenwald every day.

Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. An orange sea gleaming not far to the west under a lemon sun. “It isn’t much farther,” the skull-faced man says. “You can make it. Step by step by step is how.”

“I’m winded,” Skein says. “Those hills—”

“I’m twice your age, and I’m doing fine.”

“You’re in better shape. I’ve been cooped up on spaceships for months and months.”

“Just a short way on,” says the skull-faced man. “About a hundred   meters from the shore.”

Skein struggles on. The heat is frightful. He has trouble getting a footing in the shifting sand. Twice he trips over black vines whose fleshy runners form a mat a few centimeters under the surface; loops of the vines stick up here and there. He even suffers a brief fugue, a seven-second flashback to a day in Jerusalem. Somewhere at the core of his mind he is amused by that: a flashback within a flashforward. Encapsulated concentric hallucinations. When he comes out of it, he finds himself getting to his feet and brushing sand from his clothing. Ten steps onward the skull-faced man halts him and says, “There it is. Look there, in the pit.”

Skein sees a funnel-shaped crater right in front of him, perhaps five meters in diameter at ground level and dwindling to about half that width at its bottom, some six or seven meters down. The pit strikes him as a series of perfect circles making up a truncated cone. Its sides are smooth and firm, almost glazed, and the sand has a brown tinge. In the pit, resting peacefully on the flat floor, is something that looks like a golden amoeba the size of a large cat. A row of round blue-black eyes crosses the hump of its back. From the perimeter of its body comes a soft green radiance.

“Go down to it,” the skull-faced man says. “The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

“And will it heal me? So that I’ll function as I did before the trouble started?”

“If you let it heal you, it will. That’s what it wants to do. It’s a completely benign organism. It thrives on repairing broken souls. Let it into your head, let it find the damaged place. You can trust it. Go down.”

Skein trembles on the edge of the pit. The creature below flows and eddies, becoming first long and narrow, then high and squat, then resuming its basically circular form. Its color deepens almost to scarlet, and its radiance shifts toward yellow. As if preening and stretching itself. It seems to be waiting for him. It seems eager. This is what he has sought so long, going from planet to wearying planet. The skull-faced man, the purple sand, the pit, the creature. Skein slips his sandals off. What have I to lose? He sits for a moment on the pit’s rim; then he shimmies down, sliding part of the way, and lands softly, close beside the being that awaits him. And immediately feels its power.

He enters the huge desolate cavern that is the cathedral of Haghia Sophia. A few Turkish guides lounge hopefully against the vast marble pillars. Tourists shuffle about, reading to each other from cheap plastic guidebooks. A shaft of light enters from some improbable aperture and splinters against the Moslem pulpit. It seems to Skein that he hears the tolling of bells and feels incense prickling at his nostrils. But how can that be? No Christian rites have been performed here in a thousand years. A Turk looms before him. “Show you the mosyics?” he says. Mosyics. “Help you understand this marvelous building? A dollar. No? Maybe change money? A good rate. Dollars, marks, Eurocredits, what? You speak English? Show you the mosyics?” The Turk fades. The bells grow louder. A row of bowed priests in white silk robes files past the altar, chanting in—what? Greek? The ceiling is encrusted with gems. Gold plate gleams everywhere. Skein senses the terrible complexity of the cathedral, teeming now with life, a whole universe engulfed in this gloom, a thousand chapels packed with worshippers, long lines waiting to urinate in the crypts, a marketplace in the balcony, jeweled necklaces changing hands with low murmurs of negotiation, babies being born behind the alabaster sarcophagi, the bells tolling, dukes nodding to one another, clouds of incense swirling toward the dome, the figures in the mosaics alive, making the sign of the Cross, smiling, blowing kisses, the pillars moving now, becoming fat-middled as they bend from side to side, the entire colossal structure shifting and flowing and melting. And a ballet of Turks. “Show you the mosyics?” “Change money?” “Postcards? Souvenir of Istanbul?” A plump, pink American face: “You’re John Skein, aren’t you? The Communicator? We worked together on the big fusion-chamber merger in ‘53.” Skein shakes his head. “It must be that you are mistaken,” he says, speaking in Italian. “I am not he. Pardon. Pardon.” And joins the line of chanting priests.

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.

“Listen, I have to forbid this. Those turtles are almost extinct. Do you understand that? Muerto. Perdido. Desaparecido. I won’t eat a turtle. Throw it back. Throw it back.”

“I’m happy to say your second go-round has been approved, Mr. Skein. Not that there was ever any doubt. A long and happy new life to you, sir.”

“Go down to it. The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

“Show you the mosyics? Help you understand this marvelous building? A dollar. No? Maybe change money? A good rate.”

“First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

“I love you.”

“Get away from me!”

“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.”

Breakfast on a leafy veranda. Morning light out of the west, making the trees glow with an ultramarine glitter. The skull-faced man joins him. Skein secretly searches the parched face. Is everything an illusion? Perhaps he is an illusion.

They walk toward the sea. Well before noon they reach the shore. The skull-faced man points to the south, and they follow the coast; it is often a difficult hike, for in places the sand is washed out and they must detour inland, scrambling over quartzy cliffs. The monstrous old man is indefatigable. When they pause to rest, squatting on a timeless purple strand made smooth by the recent tide, the debate about time resumes, and Skein hears words that have been echoing in his skull for four years and more. It is as though everything up till now has been a rehearsal for a play, and now at last he has taken the stage.

“Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein?”

“I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth.”

“Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves.”

Skein offers all the proper cues.

“I won’t accept that! It’s demonic, chaotic, nihilistic theory.”

“You can say that after all you’ve experienced?”

“I’ll go on saying it. What I’ve been going through is a mental illness. Maybe I’m deranged, but the universe isn’t.”

“Contrary. You’ve only recently become sane and started to see things as they really are. The trouble is that you don’t want to admit the evidence you’ve begun to perceive. Your filters are down, Skein! You’ve shaken free of the illusion of linearity! Now’s your chance to show your resilience. Learn to live with the real reality. Stop this silly business of imposing an artificial order on the flow of time. Why should effect follow cause? Why shouldn’t the seed follow the tree? Why must you persist in holding tight to a useless, outworn, contemptible system of false evaluations of experience when you’ve managed to break free of the—”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

By early afternoon they are many kilometers from the hotel, still keeping as close to the shore as they can. The terrain is uneven and divided, with rugged fingers of rock running almost to the water’s edge, and Skein finds the journey even more exhausting than it had seemed in his visions of it. Several times he stops, panting, and has to be urged to go on.

“It isn’t much farther,” the skull-faced man says. “You can make it. Step by step is how.”

“I’m winded. Those hills—”

“I’m twice your age, and I’m doing fine.”

“You’re in better shape. I’ve been cooped up on spaceships for months and months.”

“Just a short way on,” says the skull-faced man. “About a hundred meters from the shore.”

Skein struggles on. The heat is frightful. He trips in the sand; he is blinded by sweat; he has a momentary flashback fugue. “There it is,” the skull-faced man says finally. “Look there, in the pit.”

Skein beholds the conical crater. He sees the golden amoeba

“Go down to it,” the skull-faced man says. “The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

“And will it heal me? So that I’ll function as I did before the trouble started?”

“If you let it heal you, it will. That’s what it wants to do. It’s a completely benign organism. It thrives on repairing broken souls. Let it into your head; let it find the damaged place. You can trust it. Go down.”

Skein trembles on the edge of the pit. The creature below flows and eddies, becoming first long and narrow, then high and squat, then resuming its basically circular form. Its color deepens almost to scarlet, and its radiance shifts toward yellow. As if preening and stretching itself. It seems to be waiting for him. It seems eager. This is what he has sought so long, going from planet to wearying planet. The skull-faced man, the purple sand, the pit, the creature. Skein slips his sandals off. What have I to lose? He sits for a moment on the pit’s rim; then he shimmies down, sliding part of the way, and lands softly, close beside the being that awaits him. And immediately feels its power. Something brushes against his brain. The sensation reminds him of the training sessions of his first go-round, when the instructors were showing him how to develop his gift. The fingers probing his consciousness. Go on, enter, he tells them. I’m open. And he finds himself in contact with the being of the pit. Wordless. A two-way flow of unintelligible images is the only communion; shapes drift from and into his mind. The universe blurs. He is no longer sure where the center of his ego lies. He has thought of his brain as a sphere with himself at its center, but now it seems extended, elliptical, and an ellipse has no center, only a pair of focuses, here and here, one focus in his own skull and one—where?—within that fleshy amoeba. And suddenly he is looking at himself through the amoeba’s eyes. The large biped with the bony body. How strange, how grotesque! Yet it suffers. Yet it must be helped. It is injured. It is broken. We go to it with all our love. We will heal. And Skein feels something flowing over the bare folds and fissures of his brain. But he can no longer remember whether he is the human or the alien, the bony one or the boneless. Their identities have mingled. He goes through fugues by the scores, seeing yesterdays and tomorrows, and everything is formless and without content; he is unable to recognize himself or to understand the words being spoken. It does not matter. All is random. All is illusion. Release the knot of pain you clutch within you. Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept.

He accepts.

He releases.

He merges.

He casts away the shreds of ego, the constricting exoskeleton of self, and placidly permits the necessary adjustments to be made.

The possibility, however, of genuine thermodynamic entropy decrease for an isolated system—no matter how rare—does raise an objection to the definition of time’s direction in terms of entropy. If a large, isolated system did by chance go through an entropy decrease as one state evolved from another, we would have to say that time “went backward” if our definition of time’s arrow were basically in terms of entropy increase. But with an ultimate definition of the forward direction of time in terms of the actual occurrence of states, and measured time intervals from the present, we can readily accommodate the entropy decrease; it would become merely a rare anomaly in the physical processes of the natural world.

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 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.”

“What shall I do now? Where shall I go?”

“Anything. Anywhere. Anywhen. You’re free to move along the timeline as you please. In a state of controlled, directed fugue, so to speak. After all, if time is random, if there is no rigid sequence of events—”

“Yes.”

“Then why not choose the sequence that appeals to you? Why stick to the set of abstractions your former self has handed you? You’re a free man, Skein. Go. Enjoy. Undo your past. Edit it. Improve on it. It isn’t your past, any more than this is your present. It’s all one, Skein, all one. Pick the segment you prefer.”

He tests the truth of the skull-faced man’s words. Cautiously Skein steps three minutes into the past and sees himself struggling up out of the pit. He slides four minutes into the future and sees the skull-faced man, alone, trudging northward along the shore. Everything flows. All is fluidity. He is free. He is free.

“You see, Skein?”

“Now I do,” Skein says. He is out of entropy’s jaws. He is time’s master, which is to say he is his own master. He can move at will. He can defy the imaginary forces of determinism. Suddenly he realizes what he must do now. He will assert his free will; he will challenge entropy on its home ground. Skein smiles. He cuts free of the timeline and floats easily into what others would call the past.

“Get Nissenson into a receptive state,” he orders his desk.

Coustakis, blinking rapidly, obviously uneasy, 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 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?” Coustakis asks.

“He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

The desk reports that Nissenson, half the world away in São Paulo, is ready. Quickly Skein throws Coustakis into the receptive condition, and swings around to face the brilliant lights of his data-access units. Here is the moment when he can halt the transaction. Turn again, Skein. Face Coustakis, smile sadly, inform him that the communion will be impossible. Give him back his money, send him off to break some other Communicator’s mind. And live on, whole and happy, ever after. It was at this point, visiting this scene endlessly in his fugues, that Skein silently and hopelessly cried out to himself to stop. Now it is within his power, for this is no fugue, no illusion of time-shift. He has shifted. He is here, carrying with him the knowledge of all that is to come, and he is the only Skein on the scene, the operative Skein. Get up, now. Refuse the contract.

He does not. Thus he defies entropy. Thus he breaks the chain.

He peers into the sparkling, shifting little blazes until they kindle his gift, jabbing at the electrical rhythms of his brain until he is lifted into the energy level that permits the opening of a communion. He starts to go up. He reaches forth one tendril of his mind and engages Nissenson. With another tendril he snares Coustakis. Steadily, now, he draws the two tendrils together. He is aware of the risks, but believes he can surmount them.

The tendrils meet.

Out of Coustakis’s mind flows a description of the matter transmitter and a clear statement of the beam-spread problem; Skein shoves it along to Nissenson, who begins to work on a solution. The combined strength of the two minds is great, but Skein deftly lets the excess charge bleed away and maintains the communion with no particular effort, holding Coustakis and Nissenson together while they deal with their technical matters. Skein pays little attention as their excited minds rush toward answers. If you. Yes, and then. But if. I see, yes. I could. And. However, maybe I should. I like that. It leads to. Of course. The inevitable result. Is it feasible, though? I think so. You might have to. I could. Yes. I could. I could.

“I thank you a million times,” Coustakis says to Skein. “It was all so simple, once we saw how we ought to look at it. I don’t begrudge your fee at all. Not at all.”

Coustakis leaves, glowing with delight. Skein, relieved, tells his desk, “I’m going to allow myself a three-day holiday. Fix the schedule to move everybody up accordingly.”

He smiles. He strides across his office, turning up the amplifiers, treating himself to the magnificent view. The nightmare undone. The past revised. The burnout avoided. All it took was confidence. Enlightenment. A proper understanding of the processes involved.

He feels the sudden swooping sensations of incipient temporal fugue. Before he can intervene to regain control, he swings off into darkness and arrives instantaneously on a planet of purple sand and blue-leaved trees. Orange waves lap at the shore. He stands a few meters from a deep conical pit. Peering into it, he sees an amoebalike creature lying beside a human figure; strands of the alien’s jellylike substance are wound around the man’s body. He recognizes the man to be John Skein. The communion in the pit ends; the man begins to clamber from the pit. The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Patiently he watches his younger self struggling up from the pit. Now he understands. The circuit is closed; the knot is tied; the identity loop is complete. He is destined to spend many years on Abbondanza VI, growing ancient and withered. He is the skull-faced man.

Skein reaches the rim of the pit and lies there, breathing hard. He helps Skein get up.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

Content

In Entropy’s Jaws
by Robert Silverberg