“I thought you favored the alternate universe theory,” I said, surprised.
“That was fifteen minutes ago,” Phil said. “You know how I am with theories. Theories are like planes at LA International: a new one along every minute. Instead of another parallel universe, more likely it’s a parallel hemisphere in your head.”
“In any case,” I said, “it’s not me.”
“Not unless you somehow learned ancient Greek as a child and have forgotten it consciously. And all the rest, like the information you suddenly had about Johnny’s birth defect.”
“I’m going to look up Sadassa Silvia,” I told him. Rachel was not around to hear, fortunately.
“You mean look her up again.”
“Yeah, well, I did buy her a fountain pen.”
“Something to write with,” Phil said meditatively. “An odd thing to buy a girl the first time. Not flowers or candy or theater tickets.”
“I explained why—”
“Yes, you explained why. You buy someone a fountain pen so they can write. That’s why. That’s called final or Ideological cause—the purpose of something. All this that you’re involved with ultimately has to be judged in terms of its goal or purpose, not its origin. If a flock of philanthropic baboons decided to oust Ferris F. Fremont we should rejoice. Whereas if angels and archangels decided tyranny was nice we should groan our hearts out. Right?”
“Fortunately,” I said, “we don’t have that dichotomy to worry about.”
“I’m just saying,” Phil said, “that we shouldn’t become too embroiled as to the identity of your mysterious friends; it’s what they intend we should concern ourselves with.”
I had to agree. The only thing I had to go on was the statement about the conspirators by the Roman sibyl, which is to say, the embodiment of the intergalactic communications network—I still saw it as that. For now, that had to be enough.
20THAT night I received, in my sleep, further information about Sadassa Silvia. In the dream, which shone in vivid sparkling lit-up colors, a great leather-bound book was held up to me. I saw its cover clearly. In gold leaf was stamped:
ARAMCHEK
The book was opened by invisible hands and then laid on a table. All at once, who should show up but Ferris F. Fremont, with his sullen face and heavy jowls; scowling, Ferris Fremont took a large red fountain pen and wrote his name in the book, which, I could see, was a lined ledger.
Now came an old lady with white hair tied up in a bun; she wore a white uniform such as nurses wear, and she peered through thick glasses, like Sadassa’s. Smiling in a busy, efficient way, the old lady shut the ledger and hurried off with it under her arm. She resembled Sadassa. And as I witnessed all this, a voice spoke, the familiar quasi-human AI voice I had come to recognize.
“Her mother.”
That was all. One printed word, two spoken words—just three words in all. But, instantly awake, I sat up in bed, then got up and left the bedroom, to fix myself a cup of coffee.
Aramchek was of course her mother’s name. Aramchek—Sadassa’s mother. Her mother signing up none other than Ferris F. Fremont, but signing him up to what? Aramchek, the ledger had said. Her name, the name of a covert subversive organization. A red fountain pen much like that I had bought Sadassa.
Red, subversive, signed up, Sadassa’s old mother.
Jesus Christ! I said to myself as I sat in the living room waiting for the coffee water to boil.
It was not a dream; it was an information printout, clear, economical, and direct. It had pulled no punches; like a political cartoon, it had conveyed its message by graphic and verbal means: word and picture combined.
And in conjunction with the literal printout came a flood of auxiliary information, supplied by the same source. This was why my meeting Sadassa was so important: not Sadassa but her mother, who was now dead; I knew that, understood that. The scene I had witnessed happened years ago, when Ferris Fremont was young. He had been in his late teens; it was during World War II, before America got in. Mrs. Aramchek was an organizer for the Communist Party, and she had recruited the teenage boy Ferris Fremont; they both lived on the same block in Placentia. The Party had been active among the Mexican-Americans who picked crops in Orange County. Signing up the Fremont boy was an accidental spinoff.
It had not been a one-shot deal, a mere interlude in Ferris Fremont’s youth. Because of his personality traits—unscrupulousness and deathless ambition to rise to power over other humans, lack of any fixed value system, an underlying nihilism—Ferris had proved to be exactly what Mrs. Aramchek was looking for. She had buried the facts of his Party membership and put him in a special category. Ferris Fremont would be her sleeper, to grow unannounced until the day came, if it could be manipulated into coming, when he held office on the American political scene.
This was grave and frightening, this awareness I now had. Sadassa knew that her mother had been an organizer for the California branch of the CP-USA. She had been a child, then, and automatically recruited—she had seen Ferris Fremont, and later, when he entered politics, after her mother’s death, she had recognized him. She had never told anyone, however. She was afraid to.
No wonder she had changed her name.
I wished fervently that my invisible friends had not conferred this knowledge on me; it was too much. And not only this knowledge but acquaintanceship with Mrs. Aramchek’s still-living daughter. What the hell was next?
Sadassa Aramchek, as she herself knew—as perhaps only she knew—was a living witness to the fact that the President of the United States was a sleeper for the Communist Party. That in fact, as the communications network continued to draw my thinking along the lines of truth, the CP in conjunction with Soviet political assassins, no doubt trained by the KGB, had taken over the United States in the name of anticommunism.
Sadassa Aramchek, who was in remission from lymphatic cancer, knew this; I knew this; the Party in the U.S.S.R. or at least members of it knew this; and Ferris Fremont knew this.
The shoe ad would have wiped me out; one less who knew it. A poisoned arrow from God knew who aimed at my heart a few days before I met Sadassa. Coincidence? Maybe. But no wonder Valis and his AI web operators had emerged to protect me overtly; I had been only hours away from falling victim to FAP on the eve of encountering the girl I was to link up with.
The antagonist had almost aborted us, powerful as my friends were. Only the omniscience of Valis had warded it off. How close, I thought, it had been.
And what was I supposed to do? Why had Valis selected me out of hundreds of millions of people? Why not an editor of a large newspaper, or a TV newsman, or a famous writer, or one of Ferris’s political foes?
I remembered an earlier dream, then, starkly, and my heart slowed almost to a halt, thudding with discomfort. The dream of a record album of Sadassa Silvia. Which meant, graphically and obviously:
SADASSA SILVIA SINGS
That had been the title of the album; I remembered now; although at the time it seemed self-evident that the first LP by Sadassa Silvia should be called that. The other meaning of the verb ‘sing’: to spill her story out.
As an executive of Progressive Records I could sign her up. And now I looked back, impressed and awed, at how I had been maneuvered to this valuable point, this position in a successful Burbank recording firm with many top folk artists under contract. Starting back years ago, the prevision of what I took to be Mexico. I would have been worth nothing as a record clerk in Berkeley; what could I have done then? Now I could do something. Sadassa played a guitar; she was good enough, despite what she said, to own and play a Gibson, the most expensive—and professional—acoustic guitar in the business. And she wrote lyrics. The fact that she could not or would not sing was not important; any singer could sing her lyrics. Progressive supplied material to its singers routinely. There were singers who couldn’t write and writers who couldn’t sing. We matched them up, when necessary; we were the master brokers. We were where it all came
together.
And there was less FAP supervision of folk music than there was of the news media: TV, radio, news programs, and magazines. They looked only for songs protesting the Vietnam War. It was simple-minded censorship in the medium of pop music, because the messages were invariably simpleminded.
Sadassa Silvia was a smart, educated girl. I had a deep intuition that her lyrics were not obvious, at least not on . the first go-round. Maybe on reflection, as the implications gradually sank in…
Through our distributors we were in a position to market a new folk artist on radio stations, in record stores and drugstores and supermarkets, with ads, even concerts…across the entire United States simultaneously. And Progressive had a good reputation for keeping its nose clean. We had never gotten into trouble with FAP, as had some offbeat record firms. The closest FAP had come, to my knowledge, was their pitch to me to report on novice artists, and I had had the clout to throw that off,
Novice artists. Had the two fat-necked middle-aged FAPers who’d approached me been thinking specifically of Sadassa? Was she being watched? Surely Ferris Fremont would have her watched. But perhaps he didn’t know she existed.
It showed how risky this all was, the visit by the two FAPers so recently. With Sadassa coming just now. First the two FAPers, then the shoe ad in the mail, now Sadassa. Valis had timed his intervention precisely; it could not have been delayed. Things were in motion, for me and for Phil; consider his visitors too. We were both being watched constantly…or at least I had been until I phoned FAP and gave them my pitch—Valis’s pitch.
Perhaps I was temporarily free of supervision, Valis having arranged it with this in mind: my meeting with Sadassa.
Her lyrics, I reflected, set to sure-fire ballads, when repeated over and over again on AM rock stations would certainly get across to a large audience. And if her information were put in subliminal form the authorities might not—
Subliminal form. Now, for the first time, I comprehended the purpose of my nasty experience with the gross subliminal messages I had managed to transliminate. That, regrettably, had been necessary; I had to become consciously aware—in a manner I could never forget—of what could be done with subliminal cueing in popular music. People listening while half asleep, absorbing by night what they would soon think and believe the next day!
Okay, I said to Valis in my head. I forgive you for putting me through that ordeal. You made your point, all right. So it’s fine. I guess there was no way to inform me of everything at once; it had to unfold in successive stages.
A further insight came to me, sharp and lucid. My friendship with Phil, him and his dozens of popular science fiction thrillers bought in drugstores and Greyhound bus stations, is a false lead. That is what the authorities are looking for: something showing up in those pulp novels. Those are winnowed thoroughly by the intelligence community, every single one. We, too, in the recording industry, are winnowed, but more for pro-dope subtracks, pro-dope and sexually suggestive stuff. It is in the field of science fiction that they look for political material.
At least, I thought, I hope so. I don’t think we could get away with this as material stuck into a book, even subliminally. I think in pop tunes we have a better chance. And evidently that is what Valis feels too.
Of course, I realized, if we’re caught they’ll kill us. How will Sadassa feel about that? She’s so young…and then I remembered the sad fact that she was in temporary remission from cancer; she could only expect to live a little while. It was a deeply sobering thought, but Sadassa did not have that much to lose. And probably she would see it that way. Before they could get her, the lymphoma would.
Perhaps this was the underlying reason why Sadassa had approached a recording firm for a job. An unconscious awareness that at a recording firm her story might be—but I was speculating now. The AI operators had not coached my thinking along these lines. Nor had they led me to wonder if Sadassa had been afflicted with cancer in order to push her to make public what she knew; it was my own individual mind conjecturing about that. I doubted it; more likely that was coincidence. And yet, I had heard it said that God brought good out of evil. The cancer was evil and Sadassa had it; wasn’t this something good which Valis had managed to extricate from it?
21THE next day at work I stepped into the personnel office and had a chat with Allen Sheib, who had told Mrs. Silvia that we were overstaffed.
“Hire her,” I told him.
“Doing what?”
“I need an assistant.”
“I’ll have to check with payroll and with Fleming and Tycher.”
“Do it,” I said. “And if you do, I owe you one. A favor.”
“Business is business,” Sheib said. “I’ll do what I can. As a matter of fact, I think I owe you a favor. Anyhow, I’ll try to swing it. What sort of wages?”
“That isn’t important,” I said. I could, after all, help finance her out of the funds I controlled—our under-the-table funds, so to speak: payoffs we did not report. In our confidential bookkeeping, Sadassa would be listed with a variety of local DJs. No one would be the wiser.
“You want me to interview her, see what she can do, so she thinks the job is legitimate?” Sheib asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“You have her number?”
I did. I gave it to Sheib with instructions to say there was now a job opening and to come in to be interviewed. Just to make sure there was no foul-up I telephoned her myself.
“This is Nicholas Brady,” I said when she answered. “At Progressive Records.”
“Oh, did I leave something behind? I can’t find my—”
“I think we have a job for you,” I said.
“Oh. Well, I’ve decided I really don’t want a job. I put in an application for a scholarship at Chapman College and since I talked to you they accepted my application, so I can now go back to school.”
I was at a loss. “You won’t come in?” I said. “And be interviewed?”
“Tell me what kind of job it is. Filing and typing?”
“As my assistant.”
“What would I do?”
I said. “Go with me to audition new performers.”
“Oh.” She sounded interested.
“And possibly we could use your lyrics.”
“Oh, really?” She perked up. “Maybe I could do both: go to school and that too.”
I had a strange feeling that in her guileless, innocent say she had bumped us up ten notches in the kind of job she could expect from us. This interchange gave me a different impression of her. Perhaps coping with—and surviving—cancer had taught her lessons. A certain kind of grit, a certain tenacity. And she had, probably, only a short time left to fulfill her needs, to extract whatever she was going to extract from life.
“Please come in and talk to us about it,” I said.
“Well, I could do that, I guess. I really should… I had a dream about your record company.”
“Tell me.” I listened intently.
Sadassa said. “I dreamed I was watching a recording session through the soundproof glass. I was thinking how wonderful the singer was, and I was impressed by all the professional mixers and mikes. And then I saw the album jacket and it was me. Sadassa Silvia Sings, it was called. Honest.” She laughed.
There wasn’t much I could say.
“And I got the strong impression,” Sadassa continued, “when I woke up, that I’d be working for you. That the dream was a good omen.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Most likely so.”
“When should I come in?”
I told her at four o’clock today. That way, I figured, I could take her to dinner afterward.
“Have you had any other unusual dreams?” I asked, on impulse.
“That wasn’t really unusual. What do you mean by unusual?”
“We can talk about it when you get here,” I said.
Sadassa Silvia showed up at four o’clock wearing a light brown jumpsuit, a yellow sweater, hooped
earrings to match her Afro-natural hair. She had a solemn expression on her face, as before.
Seated across from me in my office she said. “As I drove up here I asked myself why you might be interested in any unusual dreams I have had. I keep a notebook for my shrink in which every morning I’m supposed to write down my dreams-before I forget them. I’ve been doing that as long as I’ve been seeing Ed, which is almost two years.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Do you want to know? Do you really want to? All right, I’ve had the feeling for three weeks now—it began on a Thursday—that someone is talking to me in my sleep.”
“Man? Or woman?”
Sadassa said. “In between. It’s a very calm voice, modulated. I only retain an impression of it when I wake up…but it’s a favorable impression. The voice is very lulling. I always feel better after I’ve heard it.”
“You can’t remember anything it says.”
“Something about my cancer. That it won’t come back.”
“What time of night—”
“Exactly three thirty,” Sadassa said. “I know because my boyfriend says I try to talk back to it; I mean, converse with it. I wake him up trying to talk, and he says it’s always the same time of night.”
I had forgotten about her boyfriend. Oh, well, I said to myself; I have a wife and family.
“It’s as if I’d left the radio on very low,” Sadassa continued. “To a faraway station. Like you get on shortwave late at night.”
“Amazing,” I said.
Sadassa said calmly. “I came to Progressive Records in the first place because of a dream, very much like the one I had last night. I was in a lovely green valley with very high grass, out in the country, fresh and nice, and there was a mountain. I floated along, not on the ground but weightlessly floating, and as I came toward the mountain it turned into a building. On the building they had put words, on a plaque over the entrance. Well, one word: PROGRESSIVE. But in the dream I could tell it was Progressive Records because I could hear the most incredibly dulcet music. Not like any music I have ever heard in actuality.”