“And Belial,” he said. “Belial sits in a cage in a zoo and throngs of people, vast hordes of them, gape at him.”
“Correct.”
“Lies,” he said. “It is wish fulfillment. You cannot build a world on wishes. The basis of reality is bleak because you cannot serve up obliging mock vistas; you must adhere to what is pos- sible: the law of necessity. That is the underpinning of reality: necessity. Whatever is, is because it must be; because it can be no other way. It is not what it is because someone wishes it but because it has to be-that and specifically that, down to the most meager detail. I know this because I do this. You have your job and I have mine, and I understand mine; I understand the law of necessity.”
Zina, after a moment, said:
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head.
That is the first poem by Yeats,” she finished.
‘I know that poem,” Emmanuel said. “It ends:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
‘Sooth’ meaning ‘truth,’ “he explained.
“You don’t have to explain,” Zina said. “And you disagree with the poem.”
“Gray truth is better than the dream,” he said. “That, too, is sooth. It is the final truth of all, that truth is better than any lie however blissful. I distrust this world because it is too sweet. Your world is too nice to be real. Your world is a whim. When Herb Asher saw the Fox he saw deception, and that deception lies at the heart of your world.” And that deception, he said to himself, is what I shall undo.
I shall replace it, he said to himself, with the veridical. Which you do not understand.
The Fox as reality will be more acceptable to Herb Asher than any dream of the Fox. I know it; I stake everything on this prop- osition. Here I stand or fall.
“That is correct,” Zina said.
“Any seeming reality that is obliging,” Emmanuel said, “is something to suspect. The hallmark of the fraudulent is that it becomes what you would like it to be. I see that here. You would like Nicholas Bulkowsky not to be a vastly influential man; you would like Fulton Harms to be a minor figure, not part of history. Your world obliges you, and that gives it away for what it is. My world is stubborn. It will not yield. A recalcitrant and implacable world is a real world.”
“A world that murders those forced to live in it.”
“That is not the whole of it. My world is not that bad; there is much besides death and pain in it. On Earth, the real Earth, there is beauty and joy and-” He broke off. He had been tricked. She had won again.
“Then Earth is not so bad,” she said. “It should not be scourged by fire. There is beauty and joy and love and good people. Despite Belial’s rule. I told you that and you disputed it,
164 Philip K. Dick The Divine Invasion 165
as we walked among the Japanese cherry trees. What do you say now, Lord of Hosts, God of Abraham? Have you not proved me right?”
He admitted, “You are clever, Zina.”
Her eyes sparkled and she smiled. “Then hold back the great and terrible day that you speak of in Scripture. As I begged you to.”
For the first time he sensed defeat. Enticed into speaking foolishly, he realized. How clever she is; how shrewd.
“As it says in Scripture,” Zina said.
I am Wisdom, I bestow shrewdness and show the way to knowledge and prudence.
“But,” he said, “you told me you are not Holy Wisdom. That you only pretended to be.”
“It is up to you to discern who I am. You yourself must decipher my identity; I will not do it for you.”
“And in the meantime-tricks.”
“Yes” Zina said, “because it is through tricks that you will learn.”
Staring at her he said, “You are tricking me so that I wake! As I woke Herb Asher!”
“Perhaps.”
“Are you my disinhibiting stimulus?” Staring fixedly at her he said in a low stern voice, “I think I created you to bring back my memory, to restore me to myself.”
“To lead you back to your throne,” Zina said. “Did I?”
Zina, steering the flycar, said nothing.
“Answer me,” he said.
“Perhaps,” Zina said.
“If I created you I can-”
“You created all things,” Zina said.
“I do not understand you. I cannot follow you. You dance toward me and then away.”
“But as I do so, you awaken,” Zina said.
“Yes,” he said. “And I reason back from that that you are the disinhibiting stimulus which I set up long ago, knowing as I did that my brain would be damaged and I would forget. You are systematically giving me back my identity, Zina. Then- I think I know who you are.”
Turning her head she said, “Who?”
“I will not say. And you can’t read it in my mind because I have suppressed it. I did so as soon as I thought it.” Because, he realized, it is too much for me; even me. I can’t believe it.
They drove on, toward the Atlantic and Washington, D.C. 4
The Divine Invasion 167
CHAPTER 14
Herb Asher felt himself engulfed by the profound impression that he had known the boy Manny Pallas at some other time, perhaps in another life. How many lives do we lead? he asked himself. Are we on tape? Is this some kind of a replay?
To Rybys he said, “The kid looked like you.”
“Did he? I didn’t notice.” Rybys, as usual, was attempting to make a dress from a pattern, and screwing it up; pieces of fabric lay everywhere in the living room, along with dirty dishes, over- filled ashtrays and crumpled, stained magazines.
Herb decided to consult with his business partner, a middle- aged black named Elias Tate. Together he and Tate had operated a retail audio sales store for several years. Tate, however, viewed their store, Electronic Audio, as a sideline: his central interest in life was his missionary work. Tate preached at a small, out-of- the-way church, engaging a mostly black audience. His message, always, consisted of:
REPENT! THE KINGDOM OF GOD 15 AT HAND!
It seemed to Herb Asher a strange preoccupation for a man so intelligent, but, in the final analysis, it was Tate’s problem. They rarely discussed it.
Seated in the listening room of the store, Herb said to his partner, “I met a striking and very peculiar little boy last night, at a cocktail lounge in Hollywood.”
Involved in assembling a new laser-tracking phono compo- nent, Tate murmured, “What were you doing in Hollywood? Trying to get into pictures?”
“Listening to a new singer named Linda Fox.”
“Never heard of her.”
Herb said, “She’s sexy as hell and very good. She-”
“You’re married.”
“I can dream,” Herb said.
“Maybe you’d like to invite her to an autograph party at the store.”
“We’re the wrong kind of store.”
“It’s an audio store; she sings. That’s audio. Or isn’t she audible?”
“As far as I know she hasn’t made any tapes or cut any records or been on TV. I happened to hear her last month when I was at the Anaheim Trade Center audio exhibit. I told you you should have come along.”
“Sexuality is the malady of this world,” Tate said. “This is a lustful and demented planet.”
“And we’re all going to hell.”
Tate said, “I certainly hope so.
“You know you’re out of step? You really are. You have an ethical code that dates back to the Dark Ages.”
“Oh, long before that,” Tate said. He placed a disc on the turntable and started up the component. On his ‘scope the pattern appeared to be adequate but not perfect; Tate frowned.
“I almost met her. I was so close; a matter of seconds. She’s better looking up close than anyone else I ever saw. You should see her. I know-I’ve got this intuition-that she’s going to soar all the way to the top.”
“Okay,” Tate said, reasonably. “That’s fine with me. Write her a fan letter. Tell her.”
“Elias,” Herb said, “the boy I met last night-he looked like Rybys.”
The black man glanced up at him. “Really?” 166
168 Philip K. DUk The Divine Invasion 169
“If Rybys could collect her goddam scattered wits for one second she could have noticed. She just can’t goddam concen- trate. She never looked at the boy. He could have been her son.”
“Maybe there’s something you don’t know.”
“Lay off,” Herb said.
Elias said, “I’d like to see the boy.”
“I felt I’d known him before, in some other life. For a second it started to come back to me and then-” He gestured. “I lost it. I couldn’t pin it down. And there was more . . . as if I was remembering a whole other world. Another life entirely.”