Free Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg

threnodies to the traditional martyrs Roosevelt, Kennedy, Kennedy, King, Roswell, and Gottfried, Sundara leaned toward me and whispered. “Have you been watching Friedman?”
    “He has a bad case of horn, I’d say.”
    “I thought geniuses were supposed to be more subtle.”
    “Perhaps he thinks the least subtle approach is the most subtle approach,” I suggested.
    “Well, I think he’s being adolescent.”
    “Too bad for him, then.”
    “Oh, no,” Sundara said. “I find him attractive. Weird but not repellent, you know? Almost fascinating.”
    “Then the direct approach is working for him. See? He is a genius.”
    Sundara laughed. “Yarber’s after you. Is she a genius, too?”
    “I think it’s really you she wants, love. It’s called the indirect approach.”
    “What do you want to do?”
    I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”
    “I’m for it. How do you feel about Yarber?”
    “Much energy there, is my guess.”
    “Mine too. Four-group tonight, then?”
    “Why not,” I said, just as Lombroso sent the audience into deafening merriment with an elaborately polyethnic-perverse climax to his introduction to Paul Quinn.
    We gave the mayor a standing ovation, neatly choreographed by Haig Mardikian from the dais. Resuming my seat, I sent Catalina Yarber a body-language telegram that brought dots of color to her pale cheeks. She grinned. Small sharp even teeth, set close together. Message received. Done and done. Sundara and I would have an adventure with these two tonight, then. We were more monogamous than most couples, hence our two-group basic license: not for us the brawling multiheaded households, the squabbles over private property, the communal broods of kiddies. But monogamy is one thing and chastity is another, and if the former still exists, however metamorphosed by the evolutions of the era, the latter is one with the dodo and the trilobite. I welcomed the prospect of a passage at arms with the vigorous little Ms. Yarber. Yet I found myself envying Friedman, as I always envied Sundara’s partner of the night: for he would have the unique Sundara, who was to me still the most desirable woman in the world, and I must settle for someone I desired but desired less than she. A measure of love, I suppose, is what that was, love within the context of exofidelity. Lucky Friedman! One can come to a woman like Sundara for the first time only once.
    Quinn spoke. He is no comic, and he made only a few perfunctory jokes, to which his listeners tactfully overreacted; then it was down to serious business, the future of New York City, the future of the United States, the future of humanity in the coming century. The year 2000, he told us, holds immense symbolic value: it is literally the coming of the millennium. As the digit shifts, let us wipe clean the slate and begin afresh, remembering but not re-enacting the errors of the past. We have, he said, been through the ordeal by fire in the twentieth century, enduring vast dislocations and transformations and injuries; we have several times come close to the destruction of all life on earth; we have confronted ourselves with the likelihood of universal famine and universal poverty; we have plunged ourselves foolishly and avoidably into decades of political instability; we have been the victims of our own greed, fear, hatred, and ignorance; but now, with the energy of the solar reaction itself in our; control, with population growth stable, with a workable balance reached between economic expansion and protection of the environment, the time has come to build the ultimate society, a world in which reason prevails and right is triumphant, a world in which the full flowing of human potential can be realized.
    And so on, a splendid vision of the era ahead. Noble rhetoric, especially from a mayor of New York, traditionally more concerned with the problems of the school system and the agitation of the civil-service unions than with the destiny of mankind. It would have