A mighty cynical-sounding philosophy, and mighty adolescent-sounding, too. Adolescent cynicism is mainly a defense against fear. As I grew older I suppose I found the world less frightening, and I became less cynical. I regained some of the innocence of childhood and accepted, as any child accepts, the concept of causality. Push the baby and the baby falls down. Cause and effect. Let the begonia go a week without water and the begonia starts to shrivel. Cause and effect. Kick the football hard and it sails through the air. Cause and effect, cause and effect. The universe, I conceded, may be without purpose, but certainly not without pattern. Thus I took my first steps on the road that led me to my career and thence into politics and from there to the teachings of the all-seeing Martin Carvajal, that dark and tortured man who now rests in the peace he dreaded. It was Carvajal who brought me to the place in space and time I occupy on this day.
2
My name is Lew Nichols. I have light sandy hair, dark eyes, no significant identifying scars, and I stand exactly two meters tall. I was married — two-group — to Sundara Shastri. We had no children and now we are separated, no decree. My current age is not quite thirty-five years. I was born in New York City on 1 January 1966 at 0216 hours. Earlier that evening two simultaneous events of historic magnitude were recorded in New York: the inauguration of the glamorous and famous Mayor John Lindsay and the onset of the great, catastrophic first New York subway strike. Do you believe in simultaneity? I do. There’s no stochasticity without simultaneity, and no sanity either. If we try to see the universe as an aggregation of unrelated happenings, a sparkling pointillist canvas of noncausality, we’re lost.
My mother was due to deliver in mid-January, but I arrived two weeks ahead of time, most inconveniently for my parents, who had to get to the hospital in the small hours of New Year’s Eve in a city suddenly deprived of public transport.