Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg Page A

there?”
    “She’s unique,” I told him. “So am I, so are you, so is Catalina. People don’t come in standard models, Friedman. Are you interested in breakfast yet?”
    He yawned. “If we want to be reborn on the proper level we must learn to purify ourselves of the needs of the meat. That’s Transit. I’ll mortify my meat by renouncing breakfast as a start.” His eyes closed and he went away.
    I had breakfast alone and watched morning come rushing out of the Atlantic at us. I took the morning Times out of its door slot and was pleased to see that Quinn’s speech had made the front page, below the fold but with a two-column photo,MAYOR CALLS FOR FULLHUMAN POTENTIAL. That was the headline, a bit below the Times’ usual standard of incisiveness. The story used his Ultimate Society tag as its lead and quoted half a dozen glittering phrases in the first twenty lines. The story then jumped to page 21, and the complete text was in a box accompanying the jump. I found myself reading it, and as I read I found myself wondering why I had been so stirred, for the printed speech seemed to lack any real content; it was purely a verbal object, a collection of catchy lines, offering no program, making no concrete suggestions. And to me last night it had sounded like a blueprint for Utopia. I shivered. Quinn had provided nothing more than an armature; I myself had hung the trimmings on, all my vague fantasies of social reform and millennial transformation. Quinn’s performance had been pure charisma in action, an elemental force working us over from the dais. So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.
    The phone began ringing a little after eight. Mardikian wanted to distribute a thousand videotapes of the speech to New Democratic organizations all over the country; what did I think? Lombroso reported pledges of half a million to the as yet nonexistent Quinn-for-President campaign kitty in the aftermath of the speech. Missakian... Ephrikian... Sarkisian...
    When I finally had a quiet moment, I came out and found Catalina Yarber, wearing her blouse and her thigh chain, prodding Lamont Friedman into wakefulness. She gave me a foxy grin. “We’ll be seeing more of each other, I know,” she said throatily.
    They left. Sundara slept on. There were no more phone calls. Quinn’s speech was making waves everywhere. Eventually she emerged, naked, delicious, sleepy, but perfect in her beauty, not even puffy-eyed.
    “I think I want to know more about Transit,” she said.
     
     

 
    14
     
     
    Three days later I came home and was startled to find Sundara and Catalina, both nude, kneeling side by side on the living-room carpet. How beautiful they looked, the pale body beside the chocolate one, the short yellow hair and the long black cascade, the dark nipples and the pink. It was not the prelude to a pasha’s orgy, though. The air was rich with incense and they were running through litanies. “Everything passes,” Yarber intoned, and Sundara repeated, “Everything passes.” A golden chain constricted the dusky satin of my wife’s left thigh and the Transit Creed medallion was mounted on it.
    She and Catalina displayed a courteous don’t-mind-us attitude toward me and went on with what they were doing, which evidently was an extended catechism. I thought they would rise at some point and disappear into the bedroom, but no, the nudity was purely ritual, and when they were done with the teachings they donned their clothes and brewed tea and gossiped like old friends. That night, when I reached for Sundara, she said gently that she couldn’t make love just now. Not wouldn’t, not didn’t want to, but couldn’t. As if she had entered into a state of purity that must not at the moment be defiled by lust.
    So it began, Sundara’s passage into Transit. At first there was only the morning meditation, ten minutes in silence; then there were the evening