“You’re the father?” the doctor asked him.
“Yes,” Herb Asher said.
The doctor grinned and noted that on his chart.
“We felt we had to get married,” Herb said.
“It’s a good attitude.” The doctor was elderly and well
92 Philip K. Dick The Divine Invasion
groomed, and totally impersonal. “Are you aware that it’s a boy?”
“Yes,” he said. He certainly was.
“There is one thing I do not understand,” the doctor said. “Was this impregnation natural? It wasn’t artificial insemination. by any chance? Because the hymen is intact.”
“Really,” Herb Asher said.
“It’s rare but it can happen. So technically your wife is still a virgin.”
“Really,” Herb Asher said.
The doctor said, “She is quite ill, you know. From the multi- ple sclerosis.”
“I know,” he answered stoically.
“There is no guarantee of a cure. You realize that. I think it’s an excellent idea to return her to Earth, and I heartily approve of your going along with her. But it may be for nothing. M.S. is a peculiar ailment. The myelin sheath of the nerve fibers develops hard patches and this eventually results in permanent paralysis. We have finally isolated two causal factors, after decades of in- tensive effort. There is a microorganism, but, and this is a major factor, a form of allergy is involved. Much of the treatment in- volves transforming the immune system so that-” The doctor continued on, and Herb Asher listened as well as he could. He knew it all already; Rybys had told him several times, and had shown him texts that she had obtained from M.E.D. Like her, he had become an authority on the disease.
“Could I have some water?” Rybys murmured, lifting her head; her face was blotched and swollen, and Herb Asher could understand her only with difficulty.
A stewardess brought Rybys a paper cup of water; Elias and Herb lifted her to a sitting position and she took the cup in her hands. Her arms, her body, trembled.
“It won’t be much longer,” Herb Asher said.
“Christ,” Rybys murmured. “I don’t think I’m going to make it. Tell the stewardess I’m going to throw up again; make her bring back that bowl. Jesus.” She sat up fully, her face stricken ‘with pain.
The stewardess, bending down beside her, said, “We’ll be firing the retrojets in two hours, so if you can just hold on-”
“Hold on?” Rybys said. “I can’t even hold on to what I drank. Are you sure that Coke wasn’t tainted or something? I think it made me worse. Don’t you have any ginger ale? If I had some ginger ale maybe I could keep from-” She cursed with venom and rage. “Damn this,” she said. “Damn all this. It isn’t worth it!” She stared at Herb Asher and then Elias.
Yah, Herb Asher thought. Can’t you do anything? It’s sadistic to let her suffer this way.
Within his mind a voice spoke. He could not at first fathom what it meant; he heard the words but they seemed to make no sense. The voice said, “Take her to the Garden.”
He thought, What Garden?
“Take her by the hand.”
Herb Asher, reaching down, fumbling in the folds of the blan- ket, took his wife’s hand.
“Thank you,” Rybys said. Feebly, she squeezed his hand.
Now, as he sat leaning over her, he saw her eyes shine; he saw spaces beyond her eyes, and if he were looking into some- thing empty, containing huge stretches of space. Where are you? he wondered. It is a universe in there, within your skull; it is a different universe from this: not a mirror reflection but another land. He saw stars, and clusters of stars; he saw nebulae and great clouds of gases that glowed darkly and yet still with a white light, not a ruddy light. He felt wind billow about him and he heard something rustle. Leaves or branches, he thought; I hear plants. The air felt warm. That amazed him. It seemed to be fresh air, not the stale, recirculated air of the spaceship.
The sound of birds, and, when he looked up, blue sky. He saw bamboo, and the rustling sound came from the wind blowing through the canes of bamboo. He saw a fence, and there were children. And yet at the same time he still held his wife’s weak hand. Strange, he thought. The air so dry, as if it comes sweeping off the desert. He saw a boy with brown curly hair; the boy’s hair reminded him of Rybys’s hair before she had lost it, before, from the chemotherapy, it had fallen out and disappeared.
94 Philip K. Dick The Divine Invasion 95
Where am I? he wondered. At a school?
Beside him fussy Mr. Plaudet told him pointless stories having to do with the school’s financial needs, the school’s problems- he wasn’t interested in the school’s problems; he was interested in his son. His son’s brain damage; he wanted to know all about it.
“What I can’t understand,” Plaudet was saying, “is why they kept you in suspension for ten years for a spleen. For heaven’s sake, a splenectomy is a normal and regular type of surgery, and there is frequently a splenolus that can be-”
“Which hemisphere of his brain is damaged?” Herb Asher interrupted.
“Mr. Tate has all the medical reports. But I’ll go to our com- puter and ask for a printout. Manny seems a little afraid of you, but I suppose it’s because he’s never seen his father before.”
“I’ll stay out here with him,” Herb said, “while you get me the printout. I want to know as much as possible about the in- jury.”
“Herb,” Rybys said.
Startled, he realized where he was; aboard the United Space- ways XR4 axial flight from Fomalhaut to the Sol System. In two hours the first Immigration party would board the ship and make their preliminary inspection.
“Herb,” his wife whispered, “I just saw my son.”
“A school,” Herb Asher said, “where he’s going to go.”
“I don’t think I’ll live to be there,” Rybys said. “I have a feeling . . . He was there and you were there, and a noisy little ratlike man who babbled on, but I wasn’t anywhere around. I looked; I kept looking. This really is going to kill me but it won’t kill my son. That’s what he told me, remember? Yah told me I would live on through my son, so I guess I will die; I mean, this body will die, but they’ll save him. Were you there when Yah said that? I don’t remember. That was a garden we were in, wasn’t it? Bamboo. I saw the wind blowing. The wind talked to me; it was like voices.”
“Yes,” he said.
“They used to go out in the desert for forty days and forty nights. Elijah and then Jesus. Elias?” She looked around. “You ate locusts and wild honey and called on men to repent. You told King Ahab there would be no dew nor rain these years . . . thus says the Lord. According to my word.” She shut her eyes.
She is really sick, Herb Asher said to himself. But I saw her son. Beautiful and wild and-something more. Timid. Very human, he thought; that was a human child. Maybe this is all in our minds. Maybe the Clems have occluded our perceptions so that we believe and see and experience but it is not real. I give up, he thought. Ijust don’t know.
Something to do with time. He seems able to transform time. Now I am here in the ship but then I am in the Garden with the child and the other children, her child, years from now. What is the true time? he asked himself. Me here in the ship or back in my dome before I met Rybys or after she is dead and Emmanuel is in school? And I have been in cryonic suspension, for a matter of years. It has to do or had to do or will have to do with my spleen. Did they shoot me? he wondered. Rybys died from her illness but how did I die? And what became or will become of Elias?
Leaning toward him Elias said, “I want to talk to you.” He motioned Herb Asher away from Rybys and away from the other passengers. ‘We are not to mention Yah. We will use the word ‘Jehovah’ from now on. It’s a word coined in 1530; ifs all right to say it. You understand the situation. Immigration will try to tap our minds with psychotronic listening devices, but Jehovah will cloud our minds and they will get little or nothing. But this is the part that is hard to say. Jehovah’s power wanes from here on. The zone of Belial begins soon.”
“OK.” He nodded.
“You know all this.”
“And a lot more.” From what Elias had told him and from what Rybys had told him-and Jehovah had told him much, in his sleep, in vivid dreams. Jehovah had been teaching all of them; they would know what to do.