Radio Free Albemuth

  “And not for the same ends,” I said.

  “You want to see the manuscript for your next book?”

  “No,” I said.

  Vivian said, “I’ll have it brought to you. It has to do with an invasion of Earth by alien beings who rape people’s minds. The Mind-Screwers it’s called.”

  “Christ,” I said.

  “Do you like the title? As they say, if you like the title you’ll love the book. These hideous things come here from across space and work their way into people’s heads like worms. They’re really horrible. They come from a planet where it’s night all the time, but because they have no eyes they think it’s daylight all the time. They eat dirt. They really are worms.”

  “What’s the moral of the book?” I said.

  “It’s just entertainment. It has no moral. Well, it—never mind.”

  I foresaw the moral. People should not trust creatures different from themselves: anything alien, from another planet, was vile and disgusting. Man was the one pure species. He stood alone against a hostile universe…probably led by his glorious Führer.

  “Is mankind saved from these blind worms?” I asked.

  “Yes. By their Supreme Council, who are genetically higher humans, cloned from one aristocratic—”

  “I hate to tell you,” I said, “but it’s been done. Back in the thirties and forties.”

  Vivian said. “It shows the virtues of humanity. Despite some of its glaring luridness, it’s a good novel; it teaches a valuable message.”

  “Confidence in leadership,” I said. “Is the one aristocrat the Supreme Council is cloned from named Ferris Fremont?”

  After a pause Vivian said. “In certain ways they resemble President Fremont, yes.”

  “This is a nightmare,” I said, feeling dizzy. “Is this what you came here to tell me?”

  “I came to tell you I’m sorry Nicholas died before you could talk to him. You can talk to the other one, the woman he was conspiring with, Sadassa Aramchek. Do you know her?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know her.”

  “Do you want to talk to her?”

  “No,” I said. Why would I want to talk with her? I wondered.

  “You can tell her how he died,” Vivian said.

  “Are you going to shoot her?” I said.

  Vivian nodded.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  Signaling to a guard, Vivian Kaplan said. “Good. You can tell her better than we can that Nicholas is dead. We haven’t told her. And also you can tell her—”

  “I’ll say what I want to say,” I said.

  “You can tell her that after you’re through talking to her,” Vivian continued, unperturbed, “we will shoot her too.”

  After the passage of ten or fifteen minutes—I couldn’t be sure; they had taken my watch—the door of the cell opened and the guards let in a small girl with heavy glasses and an Afro-natural hairstyle. She looked solemn and unhappy as the door locked after her.

  I rose unsteadily. “You’re Ms Aramchek?” I said.

  The girl said. “How is Nicholas?”

  “Nicholas,” I said, “has been killed.” I put my hands on her shoulders and felt her sway. But she did not faint and she did not cry; she merely nodded.

  “I see,” she said faintly.

  “Here,” I assisted her to the cot and helped her sit down.

  “And you’re sure it’s true.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I saw him. It’s true. Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re the science fiction writer, Phil, Nicholas’s longtime friend. He talked about you. Well, I guess I’m next. To be shot. They invariably shoot or poison members of Aramchek. No trial, not even an interrogation any more. They’re afraid of us because they know what’s inside us. I’m not scared, not after what I’ve gone through already. I don’t think they’ll shoot you, Phil. They’ll want you alive to write crappy books for them full of government propaganda.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Are you going to cooperate with them?”

  “I’m not going to be allowed to write the crappy books,” I said. “They’ve got them written already. It’ll just be my name on them.”

  “Good,” Sadassa said, nodding. “It means they don’t trust you. It’s when they trust you that it’s bad—bad for you, for your soul. You never want to be on that side. I’m proud of you.” She smiled at me then, her eyes alive and warm behind her glasses. Reaching out, she patted my hand. Reassuringly. I took her hand and held it. How small it was, the fingers so thin. Incredibly thin. And lovely.

  “The Mind-Screwers,” I said. “That’s the first title.”

  Sadassa stared at me, and then, astonishingly, she laughed, a rich, hearty laugh. “No kidding. Well, leave it to a committee. Art in America. Like art in the U.S.S.R. How neat, how really neat. The Mind-Screwers. All right.”

  “There won’t be many books by me after that,” I said. “Not from the description Vivian Kaplan gave me of it. You should hear the plot. This blind worm, see, migrates from—”

  “Clark Ashton Smith,” Sadassa said instantly.

  “Of course,” I said. “His kind of thing. Mixed up with Heinlein’s politics.”

  We were both laughing, now. “A mixture of Clark Ash ton Smith and Robert Heinlein,” Sadassa said, gasping. “Too much. What a winner! And the next one…let me see. I’ve got it, Phil; it’ll be called The Underground City of the Mind-Screwers, only this time it’ll be in the style of—”

  “A series,” I broke in. “In the first one, the mind-screwers arrive from outer space; in the next one they bore up from below the surface of Earth; in the third one—”

  “Return to the Underground City of the Mind-Screwers,” Sadassa said.

  I continued. “They slip through from between dimensions, from another time period. In the fourth one the mind-screwers arrive from an alternate universe. And so forth.”

  “Maybe there could be a fifth one where some archaeologist finds this ancient tomb and opens a great casket, and all these horrible mind-screwers tumble out and right away gang-bang all the native workmen and then fan out and screw every mind in Cairo, and from there the world.” She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m scared, very scared. I hate the slammer. I was in the slammer for two days one time, because I didn’t show up for a traffic ticket. They put out an APB on me. I had mono then; I was just out of the hospital. This time I just went into remission from lymphoma. Oh, well; I’m not going into the slammer this time, evidently.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say or what to do.

  “It’s okay,” Sadassa said. “We are immortal, all of us. Valis conferred that on us, and he will on everyone, someday; we just have it now…the first-fruits, as it’s said. So I don’t feel too bad. We put up a good fight; we did a good job. We were always doomed, Phil; we never had a chance, but that’s not our fault. All we had was some information that should have done it. But they had us before—you know. Before we could act. And without the satellite…” She shrugged, unhappily. “No one to protect us, as in the past.”

  “Nicholas said—” I began, and then I shut up, because of course the jail cell was bugged, and I didn’t want the authorities to know that another satellite, as Nicholas had told me, was on the way. But then I remembered that he had told me at the ball park, so they knew. Still, they might have missed it. So I said nothing.

  A guard came to the door. “All right, Miss Aramchek. Time to go.”

  She smiled at me. “Don’t tell them how lousy their books are,” she said. “Let them find out the hard way.”

  I kissed her on the mouth, and she held onto me warmly and tightly for a moment. Then she was gone; the cell door rattled and clanged shut.

  30AFTER that there is a lot I do not remember. I think Vivian Kaplan stopped by to inform me that Sadassa Aramchek had been sho
t, as Nicholas had been, but I’m not sure; if so, I repressed it and forgot it and did not know it had happened. But sometimes in the later nights I woke up and saw a FAPer standing pointing a pistol at a small figure, and in those lucid moments I knew she was dead, that I had been told and could not remember.

  Why would I want to remember that? Why would I want to know it? Enough is enough, I sometimes say, as a sort of cry of misery, of having entered regions exceeding my capacity to endure, and this was one of them. I had withstood the death of my friend Nicholas Brady, whom I had known and loved most of my life, but I could not adjust to the death of a girl I didn’t even know.

  The mind is strange, but it has its reasons. The mind sees in a single glimpse life unlived, hopes unrewarded, emptiness and silence where there should have been noise and love… Nicholas and I had lived a long time and done much, but Sadassa Aramchek had been sacrificed before any good luck came to her, any opportunity to live and become. They had taken away part of Nicholas’s life, and part of mine, but they had stolen all of hers. It was my job now to forget I had met her, to recall that I said no to Vivian Kaplan instead of yes when she asked if I’d talk with Sadassa; my mind had the solemn task of rearranging past reality in order that I could go on, and it was not doing a good job.

  Sometime later in the month, I was taken from my cell, brought before a magistrate, and asked how I pled to fifteen charges of treason. I had a court-appointed attorney, who advised me to plead guilty.

  I said. “Innocent.”

  The trial lasted only two days. They had tape recordings in vast boxes, some of them genuine, most of them fake. I sat without protesting, thinking of spring and the slow growth of trees, as Spinoza had put it: the most beautiful thing on earth. At the conclusion of the trial I was found guilty and sentenced to fifty years in prison without possibility of parole. That would mean I would be released after I had been dead some good time.

  I was given a choice between imprisonment in a solitary confinement situation or what they called ‘work therapy.’ The work therapy consisted of joining a gang of other political prisoners to do manual labor. Our specific job lay in razing old buildings in the slums of Los Angeles. For this we were paid three cents a day. But at least we stayed out in the sun. I chose that; it was better than being cooped up like an animal.

  As I worked clearing broken concrete away, I thought, Nicholas and Sadassa are dead and immortal; I am not dead and I would not be immortal. I am different from them. When I die or am killed, nothing eternal in me will live on. I was not granted the privilege of hearing the AI operator’s voice, that voice Nicholas spoke of so often, which meant so much to him.

  “Phil,” a voice called to me suddenly, breaking my reverie. “Knock off work and have lunch; we got half an hour.” It was Leon, my buddy who worked beside me, a former plumber who’d been arrested for passing out some kind of mimeographed handbills he had created himself, a sort of one-man rebellion. In my opinion he was braver than any of us, a plumber working by himself in his basement at a mimeograph machine, with no divine voices to instruct or guide him, only his human heart.

  Seated together, we shared sandwiches provided for us. They were not bad.

  “You used to be a writer,” Leon said, his mouth full of bologna and bread and mustard.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Did you belong to Aramchek?” Leon asked, leaning close to me.

  “No,” I said.

  “You know anything about it?”

  “Two friends of mine belonged to it.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s Aramchek teach?”

  “I don’t know if it teaches,” I said. “I know a little about what it believes.”

  “Tell me,” Leon said, eating his sandwich.

  “They believe,” I said, “that we shouldn’t give our loyalty to human rulers. That there is a supreme father in the sky, above the stars, who guides us. Our loyalty should be to him and him alone.”

  “That’s not a political idea,” Leon said with disgust. “I thought Aramchek was a political organization, subversive.”

  “It is.”

  “But that’s a religious idea. That’s the basis of religion. They been talking about that for five thousand years.”

  I had to admit he was right. “Well,” I said, “that’s Aramchek, an organization guided by the supreme heavenly father.”

  “You think it’s true? You believe that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What church do you belong to?”

  “None,” I said.

  “You’re a strange guy,” Leon said. “Do the Aramchek people hear this supreme father?”

  “They did,” I said. “They will again, someday.”

  “Did you ever hear him?”

  “No,” I said. “I wish I had.”

  “The man says they’re subversive. They’re trying to overthrow Fremont.”

  I nodded. “That is true,” I said.

  “I wish them luck,” Leon said. “I might even be willing to run off some mimeographed flyers for them.” Speaking in a hoarse, confidential voice, he muttered in my ear. “I got some of my flyers hidden away in my backyard, where I lived. Under a big rhododendron plant, in a coffee can. I espoused justice, truth, and freedom.” He eyed me. “You interested?”

  “Very much,” I said.

  “Of course,” Leon said, “we got to get out of here first. That’s the hard part. But I’m working on that. I’ll figure it out. You think Aramchek would take me?”

  I said to him. “Yes. I think they have already.”

  “Because,” Leon said. “I really can’t get anywhere alone. I need help. You say you think they’ve taken me already? But I never heard any voice.”

  “Your own voice,” I said, “is that voice. Which they have heard through the ages. And are waiting to hear again.”

  “Well,” Leon said, pleased. “How about that. Nobody ever said that to me before. Thank you.”

  We ate together in silence for a time.

  “Did believing that, about a heavenly father, get them anywhere?” Leon asked presently.

  “Not in this world, maybe,” I said.

  “Then I’m going to tell you something you maybe don’t want to hear. If your Aramchek friends were here I’d tell them too. It’s not worth it, Phil. It has to be in this world.” Leon nodded firmly, his lined face hard. Hard with experience.

  “They gained immortality,” I said. “It was conferred on them, for what they did or even for what they tried to do and failed to do. They exist now, my friends do. They always will.”

  “Even though you can’t see them.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Right.”

  Leon said. “There has to be something here first, Phil. The other world is not enough.”

  I could think of nothing to say; I felt broken and feeble, my arguments used up during all that had happened to me. I was unable to answer.

  “Because,” Leon continued, “this is where the suffering is. This is where the injustice and imprisonment is. Like us, the two of us. We need it here. Now.”

  I had no answer.

  “It may be fine for them,” Leon said, “but what about us?”

  “I—”I began. He was right and I knew it.

  “I’m sorry,” Leon said. “I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they’re flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it won’t be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and that’s the truth. If you believe in the truth—well, Phil, that’s the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.”

  I sat staring down mutely.

  “What’s this,” Leon said, “about the Aramchek people having something resembling a beautiful silver egg placed with care very secretly in each of them? I can even tell you how
it enters—along the optic conduit to the pineal body. By means of radiation, beamed down during the time of the vernal equinox.” He chuckled. “The person feels as if he’s pregnant, even if it’s a man.”

  Surprised that he knew this, I said. “The egg hatches when they die. It opens and becomes a living plasmatic entity in the atmosphere that never—”

  “I know all that,” Leon broke in. “And I know it’s not really an egg; that’s a metaphor. I know more about Aramchek than I admitted. See, Phil, I used to be a preacher.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That about the beautiful silver egg that’s put into each of them that grows and hatches and guarantees immortality—that’s in the Bible, Phil. Jesus speaks about it several times in different ways. See, the Master was talking so as to bewilder the multitude; it was only supposed to make sense to his disciples. Or rather, it made sense to everyone, but the real meaning was known only to his disciples. They guarded the secret carefully because of the Romans. The Master himself feared and hated the Romans. Despite their efforts the Romans killed them all anyhow, and the real meaning was lost. In fact, they killed the Master…but you know that, I guess. The secret was lost for almost two thousand years. But now it’s coming back. The young men now, see, are having visions, and the old men, Phil, are dreaming dreams.”

  “There’s nothing about silver eggs in the New Testament,” I said.

  “The pearl,” Leon said emphatically, “of great price. And the treasure which is buried in the field. The man sells everything he has to buy the field. Pearl, treasure, egg, the yeast that leavens the mass all through—code words for what happened to your two friends. And the mustard seed that’s so tiny but it grows to become a great tree that birds land on—birds, Phil, in the sky. And in Matthew, the parable about the sower going out to sow…some seeds fell on the edge of the path, some fell on patches of rock, some on thorns, but listen to this: Some fell in rich soil and produced their crop. In every case the Master says that’s how the kingdom is, the kingdom which is not of this world.”

  I was interested. “Tell me more, preacher Leon,” I said, half kiddingly, half in fascination.