Who wrote these short stories? One concerns a prison built 2 billion years into the past, another is about a "psychic" mediator

Question

I'm trying to remember the name of an author and the title of a book of his or hers, containing short stories. Two of these stories stand out from the collection as I remember it.

• One story details a prison which is established 2 billion years in the past and holds political prisoners and anarchists. There is a one-way travel system that prevents any prisoner from returning to the present.

• Another is about a guy whose job is to act as a mediator between minds. He is hired to establish a connection between two people who can not communicate their ideas competently enough through language, but can achieve a merging of ideas on a "psychic" (in absence of a better word) level. His story recounts the events which effectively broke his mind and disrupted his perception of the linear passage of time, allowing him to experience past present and future somewhat simultaneously.

I cannot find the author's name in my brain, but maybe someone else has read this book or heard of these stories and can help me out. :)

Answer 1

The first story is "Hawksbill Station", a novella by Robert Silverberg; the text is available at Escape Pod. The novella was expanded into a novel of the same title, Hawksbill Station, which was the answer to this old question. Here is the beginning of the plot summary from the Wikipedia page for the novel:

Hawksbill Station is a penal colony in the Precambrian era created by the authoritarian United States government, using time travel as a means to exile rebels and political dissidents into the past. The colony houses only male exiles (a female settlement supposedly exists later in the Silurian Period), who are sent there as a "humane" alternative to execution. The machine only works one way, so the prisoners are hopelessly marooned in the past.

According to a comment by the OP, he read the story in the Silverberg collection The Reality Trip, and the second story is the novelette "In Entropy's Jaws", also by Silverberg. Here is a description of "In Entropy's Jaws" from the Silverberg web site Majipoor.com:

A good story about a telepathic man whose consciousness has become unstuck in time so that he does not experience things in order. His quest is to cure the disorienting condition. As befits the subject, the story is told in a very fragmented manner. The setting is pretty far future, with thousands of planets colonized and FTL canals connecting them.