She laughed. Nervously, or so it seemed to him.
“Zina,” he said, “I feel that something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong as far as I know.” She deftly took the envelope from him. “I’ll mail it,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Will I see you again?”
“Of course you will.” Leaning toward him she pursed her lips and kissed him on the mouth.
———————————-
He looked around him and saw bamboo. But color moved through it, like St. Elmo’s fire. The color, a shiny, glistening red, seemed alive. It collected here and there, and where it gathered it formed words, or rather something like words. As if the world had become language.
What am I doing here? he wondered wildly. What happened’? A minute ago I wasn’t here!
The red, glistening fire, like visible electricity, spelled out a message to him, distributed through the bamboo and children’s swings and dry, stubby grass.
YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR
HEART, WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL
“Yes,” he said. He felt fright, but, because the liquid tongues of fire were so beautiful he felt awed more than afraid; spell- bound, he gazed about him. The fire moved; it came and it passed on; it flowed this way and that; pools of it formed, and he knew he was seeing a living creature. Or rather the blood of a living creature. The fire was living blood, but a magical blood, not phys- ical blood but blood transformed.
Reaching down, trembling, he touched the blood and felt a shock pass through him; and he knew that the living blood had entered him. Immediately words formed in his mind.
174 Philip K. Dick The Divine Invasion 175 BEWARE!
“Help me,” he said feebly.
Lifting his head he saw into infinite space; he saw reaches so vast that he could not comprehend them-space stretching out forever, and himself expanding with that space.
Oh my God, he said to himself; he shook violently. Blood and living words, and something intelligent close by, simulating the world, or the world simulating it; something camouflaged, an en- tity that was aware of him. A beam of pink light blinded him; he felt dreadful pain in his head, and clapped his hands to his eyes. I am blind! he realized. With the pain and the pink light came understanding, an acute knowledge; he knew that Zina was not a human woman, and he knew, further, that the boy Manny was not a human boy. This was not a real world he was in; he understood that because the beam of pink light had told him that. This world was a simulation, and something living and intelligent and sympathetic wanted him to know. Something cares about me and it has penetrated this world to warn me, he realized, and it is camouflaged as this world so that the master of this world, the lord of this unreal realm, will not know; not know it is here and not know it has told me. This is a terrible secret to know, he thought. I could be killed for knowing this. I am in a- FEAR NOT
“Okay,” he said, and still trembled. Words inside his head, knowledge inside his head. But he remained blind, and the pain also remained. “Who are you?” he said. “Tell me your name.
VALIS
“Who is ‘Valis’?” he said.
THE LORD YOUR GOD
He said, “Don’t hurt me.”
BE NOT AFRAID, MAN
His sight began to clear. He removed his hands from before his eyes. Zina stood there, in her suede leather jacket and jeans; only a second had passed. She was moving back, after having kissed him. Did she know? How could she know? Only he and Valis knew.
He said, “You are a fairy.”
“A what?” She began to laugh.
“That information was transferred to me. I know. I know everything. I remember CY3O-CY3OB; I remember my dome. I remember Rybys’s illness and the trip to Earth. The accident. I remember that whole other world, the real world. It penetrated into this world and woke me up.” He stared at her, and, in return, Zina stared, fixedly, back.
“My name means fairy,” Zina said, “but that doesn’t make me a fairy. Emmanuel means ‘God with us’ but that doesn’t make him God.”
Herb Asher said, “I remember Yah.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well. Goodness.”
“Emmanuel is Yah,” Herb Asher said.
“I’m leaving,” Zina said. Hands in her jacket pockets she walked rapidly to the front door of the store, turned the key in the lock and disappeared outside; in an instant she was gone.
She has the letter, he realized. My letter to the Fox.
Hurriedly he followed after her.
No sign of her. He peered in all directions. Cars and people, but not Zina. She had gotten away.
She will mail it, he said to himself. The bet between her and Emmanuel; it involves me. They are wagering over me, and the universe itself is at stake. Impossible. But the beam of pink light had told him; it had conveyed all that, instantly, without the passage of any time at all.
Trembling, his head still aching, he returned to the store; he seated himself and rubbed his aching forehead.
She will involve me with the Fox, he realized. And out of that involvement, depending on which way it goes, the structure of
176 Philip K. Dick
reality will- He was not sure what it would do. But that was the issue: the structure of reality itself, the universe and every living creature in it.
It has to do with being, he thought to himself, knowing this because, and only because, of the beam of pink light, which was a living, electrical blood, the blood of some immense meta-entity. Sein, he thought. A German word; what does it mean? Das Nichts. The opposite of Sein. Sein equaled being equaled exis- tence equaled a genuine universe. Das Nichts equally nothing equaled the simulation of the universe, the dream-which I am in now, he knew. The pink beam told me that.
I need a drink, he said to himself. Picking up the fone he dropped in the punchcard and was immediately connected with his home. “Rybys,” he said huskily, “I’ll be late.”
“You’re taking her out? That girl?” His wife’s voice was brittle.
“No, goddam it,” he said, and hung up the fone.
God is the Guarantor of the universe, he realized. That is the foundation of what I have been told. Without God there is noth- ing; it all flows away and is gone.
Locking up the store he got into his flycar and turned on the motor.
Standing on the sidewalk-a man. A familiar man, a black. Middle-aged, well dressed.
“Elias!” Herb called. “What are you doing? What is it?”
“I came back to see if you were all right.” Elias Tate walked up to Herb’s car. “You’re totally pale.”
“Get in the car,” Herb said.
Elias got in.
CHAPTER 15
At the bar both men sat as they often sat; Elias, as always, had a Coke with ice. He never drank.
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “There’s nothing you can do to stop the letter. It’s probably already mailed.”
“I’m a poker chip,” Herb Asher said. “Between Zina and Emmanuel.”
“They’re not betting as to whether Linda Fox will answer,” Elias said. “They’re betting on something else.” He wadded up a bit of cardboard and dropped it into his Coke. “There is no way in the world that you’re going to be able to figure out what their wager is. The bamboo and the children’s swings. The stubble growing . . . I have a residual memory of that myself; I dream about it. It’s a school. For kids. A special school. I go there in my sleep again and again.
“The real world,” Herb said.
“Apparently. You’ve reconstructed a lot. Don’t go around saying God told you this is a fake universe, Herb. Don’ tell any- body else what you’ve told me.”
“Do you believe me?” “I believe you’ve had a very unusual and inexplicable expe- rience, but I don’t believe this is an ersatz world. It seems per- fectly substantial.” He rapped on the plastic surface of the table between them. “No, I don’t believe that; I don’t believe in un-
178 Philip K. Dick The Divine Invasion 179
real worlds. There is only one cosmos and Jehovah God created it.
“I don’t think anyone creates a fake universe,” Herb said, “since it isn’t there.”
“But you’re saying someone is causing us to see a universe that doesn’t exist. Who is this someone?”
He said, “Satan.”
Cocking his head, Elias eyed him.
“It’s a way of seeing the real world,” Herb said. “An oc- cluded way. A dreamlike way. A hypnotized, asleep way. The nature of world undergoes a perceptual change; actually it is the perceptions that change, not the world. The change is in us.”
‘The Ape of God,’ “Elias said. “A Medieval theory about the Devil. That he apes God’s legitimate creation with spurious interpolations of his own. That’s really an exceedingly sophisti- cated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?”