‘Her voice is heard in human courts,’ David murmured.
‘And she destroyed the tyrant?’ Kevin said.
‘Yes,’ Mini said. ‘As we called him in the film, Ferris F. Fremount. But you know who she toppled and brought to ruin.’
‘Yes,’ Kevin said. He looked somber; I knew he was thinking of a man wearing a suit and tie wandering along a beach in southern California, an aimless man wondering what had happened, what had gone wrong, a man who still planned stratagems.
In the last days of those kingdoms,
When their sin is at its height,
A king shall appear, harsh and grim, a master of stratagem ...
The king of tears who had brought tears to everyone eventually; against him something had acted which he, in his occlusion, could not discern. We had just now talked to that person, that child.
That child who had always been.
As we ate dinner that night – at a Mexican restaurant just off the park in the center of Sonoma – I realized that I would never see my friend Horselover Fat again, and I felt grief inside me, the grief of loss. Intellectually, I knew that I had re-incorporated him, reversing the original process of projection. But still it made me sad. I had enjoyed his company, his endless tale-spinning, his account of his intellectual and spiritual and emotional quest. A quest – not for the Grail – but to be healed of his wound, the deep injury which Gloria had done to him by means of her death game.
It felt strange not to have Fat to phone up or visit. He had been so much a regular part of my life, and of the lives of our mutual friends. I wondered what Beth would think when the child support checks stopped coming in. Well, I realized, I could assume the economic liability; I could take care of Christopher. I had the funds to do it, and in many ways I loved Christopher as much as his father had.
‘Feeling down, Phil?’ Kevin said to me. We could talk freely now, since the three of us were alone; the Lamptons lad dropped us off, telling us to call them when we had finished dinner and were ready to return to their large louse.
‘No,’ I said. And then I said, ‘I’m thinking about Horselover Fat.’
Kevin said, after a pause, ‘You’re waking up, then.’
‘Yes.’ I nodded.
‘You’ll be okay,’ David said, awkwardly. Expression of emotions came with difficulty to David.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Kevin said, ‘Do you think the Lamptons are nuts?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘What about the little girl?’ Kevin said.
I said, ‘She is not nuts. She is as not nuts as they are. It’s a paradox: two totally whacked out people – three, if you count Mini – have created a totally sane offspring.’
‘If I say –’ David began.
‘Don’t say God brings good out of evil,’ I said. ‘Okay? will you do us that one favor?’
Half to himself, Kevin said, ‘That is the most beautiful child I have ever seen. But that stuff about her being a computer terminal –’ He gestured.
‘You’re the one who said it,’ I said.
‘At the time,’ Kevin said, ‘it made sense. But not when ‘. look back. When I have perspective.’
‘You know what I think?’ David said. ‘I think we should get back on the Air Cal plane and fly back to Santa Ana. As soon as we can.’
I said, “The Lamptons won’t hurt us.’ I was certain of hat, now. Odd, that the sick man, the dying man, Mini, lad restored my confidence in the power of life. Logically, it should have worked the other way, I suppose. I had liked him very much. But, as is well known, I have a proclivity or helping sick or injured people; I gravitate to them. As my psychiatrist told me years ago, I’ve got to stop doing that. That, and one other thing.
Kevin said, ‘I can’t scope it out.’
‘I know,’ I agreed. Did we really see the Savior? Or did we see just a very bright little girl who, possibly, had been coached to give lofty-sounding answers by three very shrewd professionals who had a master hype going in connection with their film and music?
‘It’s a strange form for him to take,’ Kevin said. ‘As a girl. That’s going to encounter resistance. Christ as a female; that made David here pissed as hell.’
‘She didn’t say she was Christ,’ David said.
I said, ‘But she is.’
Both Kevin and David stopped eating and gazed at me.
‘She is St Sophia,’ I said, ‘and St Sophia is a hypostasis of Christ. Whether she admitted it or not. She’s being careful. After all, she knows everything; she knows what people will accept and what they won’t.’
‘You have all your weirded-out experiences of March 1974 to go on,’ Kevin said. ‘That proves something; that proves it’s real. VALIS exists. You already knew that. You encountered him.’
‘I guess so,’ I said.
‘And what Mini knew and said collated with what you knew,’ David said.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Kevin said, ‘But you’re not certain.’
‘We’re dealing with a high order of sophisticated technology,’ I said. ‘Which Mini may have put together.’
‘Meaning microwave transmissions and such like,’ Kevin said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘A purely technological phenomenon,’ Kevin said. ‘A major technological breakthrough.’
‘Using the human mind as the transducer,’ I said. ‘Without an electronic interface.’
‘Could be,’ Kevin admitted. ‘The movie showed that. There is no way to tell what they’re into.’
‘You know,’ David said slowly, if they have high-yield energy available to them that they can beam over long distances, along the lines of laser beams –’
‘They can kill us dead,’ Kevin said.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘If,’ Kevin said, ‘we started quacking about not believing them.’
‘We can just say we have to be back in Santa Ana,’ David said.
‘Or we can leave from here,’ I said. “This restaurant.’
‘Our things – clothes, everything we brought – are there at their house,’ Kevin said.
‘Fuck the clothes,’ I said.
‘Are you afraid’ David said, ‘of something happening?’
I thought about it. ‘No,’ I said finally. I trusted the child. And I trusted Mini. You always have to go on that, your instinctive trust or – your lack of trust. In the final analysis, there is really nothing else you can go on.
‘I’d like to talk to Sophia again,’ Kevin said.
‘So would I,’ I said. ‘The answer is there.’
Kevin put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry to say this like this, Phil, but we really have the big clue already. In one instant that child cleared up your mind. You stopped believing you were two people. You stopped believing in Horselover Fat as a separate person. And no therapist and no therapy over the years, since Gloria’s death, has ever been able to accomplish that.’
‘He’s right,’ David said in a gentle voice. ‘We all kept hoping, but it seemed as if – you know. As if you’d never heal.’
‘ “Heal”,’ I said. ‘She healed me. Not Horselover Fat but me.’ They were right; the healing miracle had happened and we all know what that pointed to; we all three of us understood.
I said, ‘Eight years.’
‘Right,’ Kevin said. ‘Before we even knew you. Eight long fucking goddam years of occlusion and pain and searching and roaming about.’
I nodded.
In my mind a voice said, What else do you need to know?
It was my own thoughts, the ratiocination of what had been Horselover Fat, who had rejoined me.
‘You realize,’ Kevin said, ‘that Ferris F. Fremount is going to try to come back. He was toppled by that child – or by what that child speaks for – but he is returning; he will never give up. The battle was won but the struggle goes on.’
David said, ‘Without that child –’
‘We wil
l lose,’ I said.
‘Right,’ Kevin said.
‘Let’s stay another day,’ I said, ‘and try to talk with Sophia again. One more time.’
‘That sounds like a plan,’ Kevin said, pleased.
The little group, The Rhipidon Society, had come to an agreement. All three members.
The next day, Sunday, the three of us got permission to sit with the child Sophia alone, without anyone else present, although Eric and Linda did request that we tape our encounter. We agreed readily, not having any choice.
Warm sunlight illuminated the earth that day, giving to the animals gathered around us the quality of a spiritual following; I had the impression that the animals heard, listened and understood.
‘I want to talk to you about Eric and Linda Lampton,’ I said to the little girl, who sat with a book open in front of her.
‘You shall not interrogate me,’ she said.
‘Can’t I ask you about them?’ I said.
‘They are ill,’ Sophia said. ‘But they can’t harm anyone because I override them’ She looked up at me with her huge, dark eyes. ‘Sit down.’
We obediently seated ourselves in front of her.
‘I gave you your motto,’ she said. ‘For your society; I gave you its name. Now I give you your commission. You will go out into the world and you will tell the kerygma which I charge you with. Listen to me; I tell you in truth, in very truth, that the days of the wicked will end and the son of man will sit on the judgment seat. This will come as surely as the sun itself rises. The grim king will strive and lose, despite his cunning; he loses; he lost; he will always lose, and those with him will go into the pit of darkness and there they will linger forever.
‘What you teach is the word of man. Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves; the days in which you believed in other gods end now, they end forever.
‘The goal of your lives has been reached. I am here to tell you this. Do not fear; I will protect you. You are to follow one rule: you are to love one another as you love me and as I love you, for this love proceeds from the true god, which is yourselves.
‘A time of trial and delusion and wailing lies ahead because the grim king, the king of tears, will not surrender his power. But you will take his power from him; I grant you that authority in my name, exactly as I granted it to you once before, when that grim king ruled and destroyed and challenged the humble people of the world.
‘The battle which you fought before has not ended, although the day of the healing sun has come. Evil does not die of its own self because it imagines that it speaks for god. Many claim to speak for god, but there is only one god and that god is man himself.
‘Therefore only those leaders who protect and shelter will live; the others will die. The oppression lifted four years ago, and it will for a little while return. Be patient during this time; it will be a time of trials for you, but I will be with you, and when the time of trials is over I shall sit down on the judgment seat, and some will fall and some will not fall, according to my will, my will which comes to me from the father, back to whom we all go, all of us together.
‘I am not a god; I am a human. I am a child, the child of my father, which is Wisdom Himself. You carry in you now the voice and authority of Wisdom; you are, therefore, Wisdom, even when you forget it. You will not forget it for long. I will be there and I will remind you.
“The day of Wisdom and the rule of Wisdom has come. The day of power, which is the enemy of Wisdom, ends. Power and Wisdom are the two principles in the world. Power has had its rule and now it goes into the darkness from which it came, and Wisdom alone rules.
‘Those who obey Power will succumb as Power succumbs.
‘Those who love Wisdom and follow her will thrive under the sun. Remember, I will be with you. I will be in each of you from now on. I will accompany you down into the prison if necessary; I will speak in the courts of law to defend you; my voice will be heard in the land, whatever the oppression.
‘Do not fear; speak out and Wisdom will guide you. Fall silent out of fear and Wisdom will depart you. But you will not feel fear because Wisdom herself is in you, and you and she are one.
‘Formerly you were alone within yourselves; formerly you were solitary men. Now you have a companion who never sickens or fails or dies; you are bonded to the eternal and will shine like the healing sun itself.
‘As you go back into the world I will guide you from day to day. And when you die I will notice and come to pick you up; I will carry you in my arms back to your home, out of which you came and back to which you go.
‘You are strangers here, but you are hardly strangers to me: I have known you since the start. This has not been your world, but I will make it your world; I will change it for you. Fear not. What assails you will perish and you will thrive.
‘These are things which shall be because I speak with the authority given me by my father. You are the true god and you will prevail’
There was silence, then. Sophia had ceased speaking to us.
‘What are you reading?’ Kevin said, pointing to the book.
The girl said, ‘SEPHER YEZIRAH. I will read to you; listen.’ She set the book down, closing it. ‘ “God has also set the one over against the other; the good against the evil, and the evil against the good; the good proceeds from the good, and the evil from the evil; the good purifies the bad, and the bad the good; the good is preserved for the good, and the evil for the bad ones”.’ Sophia paused a moment and then said, ‘This means that good will make evil into what evil does not wish to be; but evil will not be able to make good into what good does not wish to be. Evil serves good, despite its cunning.’ Then she said nothing; she sat silently, with her animals and with us.
‘Could you tell us about your parents?’ I said. ‘I mean, if we are to know what to do –’
Sophia said, ‘Go wherever I send you and you will know what to do. There is no place where I am not. When you leave here you will not see me, but later you will see me again.
‘You will not see me but I will always see you; I am mindful of you continually. So I am with you whether you know it or not; but I say to you, Know that I accompany you, even down into the prison, if the tyrant puts you there.
‘There is no more. Go back home, and I will instruct you as the time requires.’ She smiled at us.
‘You’re how old?’ I said.
‘I am two years old.’
‘And you’re reading that book?’ Kevin said.
Sophia said, ‘I tell you in truth, in very truth, none of you will forget me. And I tell you that all of you will see me again. You did not choose me; I chose you. I called you here. I sent for you four years ago.’
‘Okay,’ I said. That placed her call at 1974.
‘If the Lamptons ask you what I said, say that we talked about the commune to be built,’ Sophia said. ‘Do not tell them that I sent you away from them. But you are to go away from them; this is your answer: you will have nothing further to do with them.’
Kevin pointed to the tape recorder, its drums turning.
‘What they will hear on it,’ Sophia said, ‘when they play it back, will be only the SEPHER YEZIRAH, nothing more.’
Wow, I thought.
I believed her.
‘I will not fail you,’ Sophia repeated, smiling at the three of us.
I believed that, too.
As the three of us walked back to the house, Kevin said, ‘Was all that just quotations from the Bible?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘No,’ David agreed. ‘There was something new; that part about us being our own gods, now. That the time had come where we no longer had to believe in any deity other than ourselves.’
‘What a beautiful child,’ I said, thinking to myself how much she reminded me of my own son Christopher.
‘We’re very lucky,’ David said huskily. ‘To have met her.’ Turning to me he said, ‘She’ll be with us; she
said so. I believe it. She’ll be inside us; we won’t be alone. I never realized it before but we are alone. Everybody is alone – has been alone, I mean. Up until now. She’s going to spread out all over the world, isn’t she? Into everyone, eventually. Starting with us.’
‘The Rhipidon Society,’ I said, ‘has four members. Sophia and the three of us.’
‘That’s still not very many,’ Kevin said.
‘The mustard seed,’ I said. ‘That grows into a tree so large that birds can roost in it.’
‘Come off it,’ Kevin said.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
Kevin said, ‘We have to get our stuff together and get out of here; she said so. The Lamptons are whacked out flipped-out freaks. They could zap us any time.’
‘Sophia will protect us,’ David said.
‘A two-year-old child?’ Kevin said.
We both gazed at him.
‘Okay, two-thousand-year-old child,’ Kevin said.
‘The only person who could make jokes about the Savior,’ David said. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t ask her about your dead cat.’
Kevin halted; a look of genuine baffled anger appeared on his face; obviously he had forgotten to: he had missed his chance.
‘I’m going back,’ he said.
Together, David and I propelled him along with us.
‘I’m not kidding!’ he said, with fury.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said; we halted.
‘I want to talk to her some more. I’m not going to walk off out of here; goddam it, I’m going back – let me the fuck go!’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘She told us to leave.’
‘And she’ll be inside us talking to us,’ David said.
‘We’ll hear what I call the AI voice,’ I said.
Kevin said savagely, ‘And there’ll be lemonade fountains and gumdrop trees. I’m going back.’
Ahead of us, Eric and Linda Lampton emerged from the big house and walked toward us.
‘Confrontation time,’ I said.
‘Aw shit,’ Kevin said, in desperation. ‘I’m still going back.’ He pulled away from us and hurried in the direction from which we had come.
‘Did it work out well?’ Linda Lampton said, when she and her husband reached David and me.