“That’s true,” I said. We stood facing each other. “Why did you pick Progressive Records,” I asked, “to try for a job?”
“You’ve got good artists. Performers I like. I guess it was just a wish-fulfillment fantasy, like all my ideas. It seemed more exciting than working for a lawyer or an oil-company executive.”
I said. “What about your poems? Can I see some of them?”
“Sure,” she said, nodding.
“And you don’t sing when you play your guitar?”
“Just a little. I sort of hum.”
“Can I buy you lunch?”
“It’s three thirty.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I have to drive back to Orange County. My eyesight goes out entirely when I drink. I was totally blind when I was sick; I used to bump into walls.”
“What were you sick with?”
“Cancer. Lymphoma.”
“And you’re okay now?”
Sadassa Silvia said. “I’m in remission. I had cobalt therapy and chemotherapy. I went into remission six months ago, before I finished my course of chemotherapy.”
“That’s very good,” I said.
“They say if I live another year I probably could live five years or even ten; there’re people walking around who’ve been in remission that long.”
It explained why her legs were so spindly and why she gave the impression of fatigue and weakness and ill health. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh, I learned a lot from it. I’d like to go into the priesthood. The Episcopal church may ordain women eventually. Right now it doesn’t look so good, but by the time I finish college and seminary I think they will.”
“I admire you,” I said.
“When I was very sick last year I was deaf and blind. I still take medication to prevent seizures…the cancer reached my spinal column and the fluid of my brain before I went into remission.” After a pause she added in a neutral, contemplative tone, “The doctor says it’s unknown for anyone who had it get into their brain to—survive. He says if I live another year he’ll write me up.”
“You really are quite a person,” I said, impressed by her.
“Medically I am. Otherwise all I can do is type and take dictation.”
“Do you know why you went into remission?”
“They never know that. It was prayer, I think. I used to tell people that God was healing me; that was when I couldn’t see and I couldn’t hear and I was having seizures—from the medication—and I was all bloated up and my hair had”—she hesitated—“fallen out. I wore a wig, I still have it. In case.”
“Please let me buy you something,” I said.
“Want to buy me a fountain pen? I can’t grip a regular ballpoint pen; it’s too small. I only have a little strength for gripping in my right hand; that whole side is still weak. But it’s getting stronger.”
“You can hold a fountain pen okay?”
“Yes, and I can use an electric typewriter.”
“I’ve never met anybody like you before,” I said.
“You’re probably lucky. My boyfriend says I’m boring. He always quotes Chuckles the Chipmunk from A Thousand Clowns in regard to me: ‘Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring.’” She laughed.
“Are you sure he really loves you?” It didn’t sound as if he did.
“Oh, I’m always running errands and making shopping lists and sewing; I spend half my time sewing. I make most of my own clothes. I made this blouse. It’s so much cheaper; I save an awful lot of money.”
“You don’t have much money?”
“Just the Social Security for disability. It just pays my rent. I don’t have very much left over for food.”
“Christ,” I said, “I’ll buy you a ten-course meal.”
“I don’t eat very much. I don’t have much of an appetite.” She could see I was looking her up and down. “I weigh ninety-four pounds. My doctor says he wants me up to one-ten, my normal weight. I was always thin, though. I was premature. One of the smallest babies born in Orange County.”
“You live in Orange County still?”
“In Santa Ana. Near my church, the Church of the Messiah. I’m a lay reader there. The priest there, Father Adams, is the finest person I have ever met. He was with me all the time I was sick.”
It occurred to me that I had found someone with whom I could discuss Valis. But it would take a while to get to know her, especially considering that I was married. I took her to a stationery store, found her the right kind of fountain pen, and then said goodbye to her for the time being.
Actually I could discuss everything with my science fiction author friend, Phil Dick. That evening I told him about the AI teletype printing out ‘Portuguese States of America.’ It seemed to him a very important discovery.
“You know what I think?” he said, in agitation, sniffing reflexively at a tin of Dean Swift snuff. “Your help is reaching you from an alternate universe. Another Earth which took a different line of historical development from ours. It sounds like one in which there was no Protestant revolution, no Reformation; the world probably divided between Portugal and Spain, the first major Catholic powers. Their sciences would evolve as servants of religious goals, instead of secular goals as we have in our universe. You have all the constituents for this: help of an obviously religious sort, from a universe, an America, controlled by the first great Catholic sea power. It fits together.”
“There probably are other alternate worlds then, too,” I said.
“God and science working together,” Phil said excitedly; he dove for more tins of snuff. “No wonder it sounds so far away when it talks to you. No wonder you dream about electronic booster equipment and people who are deaf and mute—they’re distant relatives of ours who’ve evolved that way. It might make a good novel.” This was the first time he had seen anything in my experience which might be used in a book, or anyhow had admitted to that.
“That would explain a dream I had which didn’t make any sense,” I said.
I had dreamed of a row of fish tanks, with the water in each stagnant and silted over. We were gazing down at the first one, only to see the life which lived at the bottom of the tank gasping and dying from the pollution. We—the great figures which looked down—turned to the next tank and found less pollution there; at least the little crustaceans and crabs were visible down in the murk. In the dream I suddenly realized that we were looking down at our own world. I was one of the small crabs living at the bottom, shyly concealed behind a boulder. “Look,” the great but invisible person beside me said; he took a small shining object, a trinket of some sort, and held it down to the small crab in the tank which was me. The crab emerged cautiously, took the trinket in its claws, inspected it, and then retreated behind the boulder. I assumed the crab had made off with our trinket, but no; presently it was back with something to trade for the trinket. The great person beside me explained that this was an honest life form, that it did not take but made exchanges—barter, not theft. We both found ourselves admiring this humble life form, although at the same time I continued to understand that it was me, seen from his high vantage point, the vantage point of a superior life form.
Now we turned to a third tank which was not polluted at all. Creatures like helium-filled balloons waggled their way up to the surface from the mud, escaping the final end which befell the life forms in the previous tanks. This was a better one.
This one was a better universe, I now realized. Each of the fish tanks, with the life at the bottom, on the surface of the bottom in the mud and silt—each was an alternative universe or alternate Earth. We were in the worst.
“I guess,” I said, “we’re the only one in which Ferris F. Fremont came to power.”
“The worst possibility,” Phil agreed. “So those in one of the more advanced universes are assisting us. Breaking through from their world into ours.”
“You see no transcendent religious power at work, then?”
“At work, yes, but in their world; theirs is a religious world, a Roman Catholic world with Christian sciences available to them. Obviously they’ve made a breakthrough in a scientific area we haven’t, the ability to move between parallel worlds. We don’t even admit the existence of parallel worlds, let alone know how to go from one to another.”
“That’s why it keeps seeming religious to me,” I realized, “as well as technological.”
“Sure thing,” Phil said.
“It’s interesting that the science in a religious world would be more advanced than ours.”
“They never fought a Thirty Years War,” Phil said. “That war set Europe back five hundred years…the first great religious war, between Protestants and Catholics. Europe was reduced to barbarism—to cannibalism, in fact. Look what internecine religious warfare has done to us. Look at the deaths, the destruction.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. Maybe Phil was right. His explanation was purely secular, but it would account for the facts. The low-level AI operator had given me the one firm clue; ‘Portuguese States of America’ could be nothing other than an alternate world. It was not the future helping, or the past, or extragalactic entities from another star—it was a parallel Earth, steeped in religiosity, coming to our aid. To assist what to them must have seemed a murked-over hell world where physical force ruled. Force, and the power of the Lie.
I thought, We finally have the explanation. It accounts for all the facts. We finally got the one good solid clue. The equivalent to the shift in the sun’s apparent position during that eclipse, which verified Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Minute but absolutely accurate. The statement of a minor AI network operator, reading from an envelope it found, reading without understanding, merely doing it obligingly. Simply because it had been asked.
I now told Phil about the girl I had met, Sadassa Silvia. He did not react particularly until I came to the Aramchek part.
“Her real name,” Phil said thoughtfully.
“That’s why it was incised into the sidewalk,” I said.
“If you have any more dreams about this girl,” Phil said, “tell me. Anything.”
“This is important, isn’t it?” I said. “Them arranging for me to meet this girl.”
“They just told you it was important.”
I said, “They brought her into Progressive. They maneuvered both of us.”
“You don’t know that. All you know is the precog—”
“I knew you’d say that,” I said. “‘Precog,’ shit—it’s an arranging of both our lives by supernatural forces.”
“By a bunch of Portuguese scientists,” Phil said.
“Bull. They brought us together. They didn’t just tell me something; they did something.” I couldn’t prove it but I was certain of it.
I had not told Phil, or anyone else for that matter, about the shoe ad. All I had told him was that the personality of the telepathic sender had, recently, overpowered me completely for a limited and critical period of time. It did not seem to me a good idea to go into detail; it was a matter between me and my unseen friends. And, evidently, the FAPers. I tended anyhow to think of it as a past issue; Valis had settled it once and for all. Now we could get on to positive issues, such as Miss Silvia, Mrs. Silvia, or Miss Aramchek, whatever it was.
Phil was saying. “I’d like to know more about the sender overpowering you with his personality. What kind of personality was it? Does it fit with the alternate world theory?”
As a matter of fact it certainly did; the sender was highly religious in terms of executing the sacred rites of Christianity. I had, in stealth with Johnny, gone through three or four of the sacraments of the ancient liturgical church. And I had viewed the world, not as I customarily view it but from the eyes of a dedicated Christian. It was a different world entirely. Seeing what he saw, I knew what he knew; I understood the mysteries of the church.
I, who had grown up in Berkeley, singing Spanish Civil War marching songs in its radical streets!
A lot of the recent events remained known only to me; I had not told Phil and did not intend to. Perhaps I had made a mistake in admitting that the telepathic sender had taken possession of me; telling things like that might frighten people… Well, the entire subject was inherently frightening, for that matter, and so I had restricted my audience to people such as Phil and a few professional people. These recent occurrences certainly should not be told, I had decided. They amounted to a description of a godlike power seizing me and turning me into its instrument, a benign power and benign instrument, but nonetheless those were the true dynamics of the situation, for better or worse.
If I accepted Phil’s theory that it was a breaching through from an alternate parallel world, some of the eeriness was removed, but the awesome power remained, tremendous power and knowledge, of a sort unknown to our world. Perhaps ancient accounts of theolepsy—possession by a god, such as Dionysos or Apollo—described the identical event. Even so, it was not something to make public. This theory made it less threatening, but it did not defang it entirely. Nothing would. No words strung together could truly account for an experience of this magnitude, for an experience of such vast force. I would have to live with it to some degree unexplained. I doubted if any human theory, at least by the people I could tell, would completely subsume everything I had gone through and was still going through. For example, the precognition, the fact that they knew Sadassa Silvia was going to approach Progressive Records. Well, if they had covertly motivated her to come there, that would explain it; but it explained away one event by revealing another even more awesome one.
I was evidently not the sole human in their power, acting on their advice and authority. But that comforted me rather than frightened me. And it was to be expected. They would want to bring together those who acted as extensions of them. One could assess this as a ‘safety in numbers’ situation. For one thing, it eased my worries about being wiped out. Suppose I were the only human on this planet they had established contact with. Too much would be riding on my shoulders. This way, with the appearance of Sadassa Silvia, I was relieved of that burden; they could work through any number of other people. And there was the black-haired girl with the fish necklace. I had already gone by the pharmacy to ask about her. They did not remember any such girl working for them; the pharmacist merely smiled. “They come and go,” he told me. “Those delivery girls.” It was what I had more or less expected. But that made three people I knew of.
The tyranny of Ferris Fremont would be toppled by a number of extensions of the intergalactic communications web. It seemed evident that I would meet and get to know only those who would be working directly with me: those few and no more. If I went to FAP I could tell them only so much.
In fact, I had reflected that morning driving to work, what could I tell FAP anyhow—at least that they would believe? My experiences had taken, perhaps by design, a lunatic form; I would appear a religious nut, babbling about the Holy Spirit or a conversion to Christ or being born again, a mixture of ecstatic but irrational contacts with the Deity.… FAP and any other normal group would dismiss my witnessing upon first hearing. As a matter of fact, Phil had already informed FAP that I talked with God—much to their disappointment and disgust; as the FAP girl had said, We can’t do anything with that.
“You going to answer me?” Phil was saying.
I said. “I think I’ve said enough. I don’t really feel like finding all this in one of those dozens of paperback books you write for Ace and Berkley.”
Phil flushed with anger at the jibe. “I’ve got enough already,” he said. “And I can fill in the rest out of my own head. So tell me.”
With reluctance I told him.
“Sufferin’ succotash,” Phil said, when I had finished. “A totally different human personality from yours. Taking over, acting and thinking. You know…” He rubbed the snuff from his nose, reflexively. “There’s that business in the Bible: in Revelation, I think it is. The first fruits of the har
vest, the first Christian dead coming back to life. That’s where they get the figure of 144,000. They return to help create the new order, as the Bible calls it. Long before the others are resurrected.”
We both pondered that.
“How does it say they’ll return?” I asked. I had read it but couldn’t remember; I had read so much.
“They will join the living,” Phil said solemnly.
“Really?”
“Really. In a way not specified. I remember when I read that I wondered where they’d get their bodies from. Do you have a Bible here I can look it up in?”
“Sure.” I gave him a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, and he soon had the passage.
“It doesn’t say what I thought it said,” Phil said. “But the rest is somewhere in the New Testament scattered about in different places. At the end times the first Christian dead will begin to return to life. When you consider how few of them there were in the apostolic age, ten or fifteen, then a hundred, I would think the first appearance of them—assuming this all has some relevance—would be like one here, another there, then maybe a fourth, fifth, and sixth. Scattered around the world… But in what kind of bodies? Their bodies, the original ones, wouldn’t be the ones they’d return in; Paul makes that clear. Those were corruptible bodies. Sarx was the Greek term he used.”
“Well,” I said, “the only other bodies around are ours.”
“Right,” Phil said, nodding. “Let me suggest the following to you. Suppose one of the firstfruits returned to life, not outside in his own body, of whatever sort, but like the Holy Spirit does—manifests itself inside you. Tell me, how would this differ from what you’ve experienced?”
I had nothing to say; I just looked at him as he sat surrounded by his ubiquitous yellow tins and cans of snuff.
“You’d suddenly find an entity talking to you in Koine Greek,” Phil said. “Ancient Greek. From inside your head. And it would view the world the way an early—”
“Okay,” I said irritably. “I see your point.”
“This ‘telepathic sender who overpowered you with his personality’ is in your own head. Broadcasting from the other side of your skull. From previously unused brain tissue.”