Emmanuel glanced at him.
“You have much to do,” Elias said.
“There is no realm,” Emmanuel said, “where I am not. If it is a genuine place and not fancy. Is your realm fancy, Zina?” “No,” she said. “It is real.” “Where is it?” Elias said. Zina said, “It is here.”
‘Here’?” Elias said. “What do you mean? I see what’s here; here is here.”
“She is right,” Emmanuel said. “The soul of God,” he said to Zina, “follows you.”
“And trusts me?”
“This is a game,” Emmanuel said. “Everything is a game for you. I will play the game. I can do that. I will play and come back. Back to this realm.”
Zina said, “Do you find this realm so valuable to you?”
“It is a dreadful place,” Emmanuel said. “But it is here that I must act on that great and terrible day.”
“Postpone that day,” Zina said. “I will postpone it; I will show you the bells that you hear, and as a result that day will-” She broke off.
“It will still come,” Emmanuel said. “It is foreordained.”
“Then we shall play now,” Zina said cryptically. Both Herb and Elias remained puzzled; Herb Asher thought, Each of them knows what the other means, but I don’t. Where is she taking him if it is here? We are here now.
Emmanuel said, “The Secret Commonwealth.”
“Damn it, no!” Elias exclaimed, and hurled his cup across the room; it shattered against the far wall, in many little pieces. “Manny-I have heard of that place!”
“What is it?” Herb Asher said, astonished at the old man’s fury.
Zina said calmly, “That’s the correct term. ‘Of a middle na- ture betwixt man and angel,’ ” she quoted.
Philip K. Dick 140
“You are being piped away!” Elias said furiously; leaning forward he seized hold of the boy with his great hands.
“That is so,” Emmanuel said.
“You know where she is taking you?” Elias said. “You do know. You have no fear, Manny; that is a mistake. You should be afraid.” To Zina he said, “Get out of here! I did not know what you are.” With violence and dismay he regarded her, his lips working. “I did not know you; I didn’t understand.”
“He did,” Zina said. “Emmanuel knew. The slate told him.”
“Let us finish our meal,” Emmanuel said, “and then, Zina, I will go with you.” He resumed eating in his methodical way, his face impassive. “I have a surprise for you, Zina,” he said.
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
“Something that you do not know.” Emmanuel paused in his eating. “This was foreordained, from the start. I saw it before the universe was. My journey into your land.”
“Then you know how it will end,” Zina said. For the first time she seemed hesitant; she faltered. “I forget sometimes that you know everything.”
“Not everything. Because of my brain damage, the accident. It has become a random variable, introducing chance.”
“God plays at dice?” Zina said; she raised an eyebrow.
“If necessary,” Emmanuel said. “If there is no other way.”
“You planned this,” Zina said. “Or did you? I can’t make it out. You are impaired; you may not have known… You are using a tactic on me, Emmanuel.” She laughed. “Very good. I can’t be sure. Extremely good; I congratulate you.”
Emmanuel said, “You must go through with it not knowing if I planned it out or not. So I have the advantage.”
She shrugged. But it seemed to Herb Asher that she had not regained her poise. Emmanuel had shaken her. He thought, And that is good.
“Don’t abandon me, Lord,” Elias said in a trembling voice. “Take me with you.”
“Okay.” The boy nodded.
“What am I supposed to do?” Herb Asher said.
“Come,” Zina said. The Divine Invasion 14!
‘The Secret Commonwealth,’ ” Elias said. “I never be- lieved it existed.” He glowered at the girl, baffled. “It doesn’t exist; that’s the whole point!”
“It exists,” she said. “And here. Come with us, Mr. Asher. You are welcome. But there I am not as I am now. None of us is. Except you, Emmanuel.”
To the boy, Elias said, “Lord-”
“There is a doorway,” Emmanuel said, “to her land. It can be found anywhere that the Golden Proportion exists. Is that not true, Zina?”
“True,” she said.
“Based on the Fibonacci Constant,” Emmanuel said. “A ratio,” he explained to Herb Asher. “l:.618034. The ancient Greeks knew it as the Golden Section and as the Golden Rectan- gle. Their architecture utilized it . . . for instance, the Parthenon. For them it was a geometric model, but Fibonacci of Pisa, in the Middle Ages, developed it in terms of pure number.”
“In this room alone,” Zina said, “I count several doors. The ratio,” she said to Herb Asher, “is that used in playing cards: three to five. It is found in snail shells and extragalactic nebulae, from the pattern formation of the hair on your head to-”
“It pervades the universe,” Emmanuel said, “from the micro- cosms to the macrocosm. It has been called one of the names of God.”
—————
In a small spare room of Elias’s house Herb Asher prepared to bed down for the night. Standing at the doorway in a heavy, somewhat rumpled robe, with great slippers on his feet, Elias said, “May I talk with you?”
Herb nodded.
“She is taking him away,” Elias said. He came into the room and seated himself. “You realize that? It did not come from the direction we expected. I expected,” he corrected himself. His face dark he sat clasping and unclasping his hands. “The enemy has taken a strange form.”
Chilled, Herb said, “Belial?”
The Divine Invasion 143 Philip K. Dick 142
“I don’t know, Herb. I’ve known the girl four years. I think a great deal of her. In some ways I love her. Even as much as I do Manny. She’s been a good friend to him. Apparently he knew, maybe not right off. . . but somewhere along the line he figured it out. I checked; I used my computer terminal to research the word zina. It’s Roumanian for fairy. Another world has found out Emmanuel. She approached him the first day at school. I see why, now. She was waiting. Expecting him. You see?”
“Hence the mischief I see in her,” Herb Asher said. He felt weary. It had been a long day.
Elias said, “She will lead and lead, and he will follow. Follow knowingly, I think. He does foresee. It’s what’s called a priori knowledge about the universe. Once, he foresaw everything. Not anymore. It’s strange, when you think about it, that he could foresee his own inability to foresee, his forgetfulness. I’ll have to trust in him, Herb; there is no way-” He gestured. “You under- stand.”
“No one can tell him what to do.”
“Herb, I don’t want to lose him.”
“How can he be lost?”
“There was a rupturing of the Godhead. A primordial schism. That’s the basis of it all, the trouble, these conditions here, Belial and the rest of it. A crisis that caused part of the Godhead to fall; the Godhead split and some remained transcendent and some
became abased. Fell with creation, fell along with the world. The Godhead has lost touch with a part of itself.”
“And it could fragment further?”
“Yes,” Elias said. “There could be another crisis. This may be that crisis. I don’t know. I don’t even know if he knows. The human part of him, the part derived from Rybys, knows fear, but the other half-that half knows no fear. For obvious reasons. Maybe that’s not good.”
——————–
That night as he slept, Herb Asher dreamed that a woman was singing to him. She seemed to be Linda Fox and yet she was not; he could see her and he saw terrible beauty, a wildness and light and a sweet glowing face with eyes that shone at him lovingly. He and the woman were in a car and the woman drove; he simply watched her, marveling at her beauty. She sang:
You have to put your slippers on
To walk toward the dawn.
But he did not have to walk, because the lovely woman was taking him there. She wore a white gown and in her tumbled hair he saw a crown. She was a very young woman, but a woman nonetheless-not, like Zina, a child.
When he awoke the next morning the beauty of the woman and her singing haunted him; he could not forget it. He thought, She is more attractive than the Fox. I wouldn’t have believed it. I would prefer her. Who is she?
“Good morning,” Zina said, on her way to the bathroom to
brush her teeth. He noticed that she wore slippers. But so, too, did Elias when he appeared. What does it mean? Herb asked himself.
He did not know the answer.
The Divine invasion