“Vivian is a rather far-out person,” Agent Townsend said with a half smile. “She reported about you recently, Mr Brady, that you hold prolonged conversations with God. Is that true?”
“No,”I said.
“She got it from his friend,” Agent Snow pointed out to Agent Townsend.
“What,” Agent Townsend continued, “would possibly give rise to such an idea in her head? Can you think of anything?” „
I said, “I never met the girl.”
“She is reporting on you,” Agent Townsend said.
“I know that,” I said.
“What would your feelings toward her be,” Agent Townsend said, “if evaluation of this shoe ad document showed that it emanated from her?”
“I would want nothing to do with her,” I said.
“Well, we are not really sure,” Agent Townsend said, “and in all likelihood it emanated from the KGB in New York, but until we are positive we have to consider the outside possibility that one of our own posts mailed it off to you.”
I said nothing.
“What we’d like you to do,” Agent Snow said, “is pass on to us any further documents of this sort which you may receive, or any contacts with suspicious persons coming in any form whatever, phone or mail, or at your door. You realize, of course, that the Party may have decided to destroy you for your unwillingness to cooperate with them.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“I mean physically destroy. Kill.”
I felt cold, hearing that, terribly cold.
“There is not much we can do to help you,” Agent Snow said, “in that regard. If someone wants to kill a person they usually can.”
“Could you assign anyone to stay with me?” I said.
The two FAP agents exchanged glances. “Afraid not,” Agent Townsend said. “It exceeds our authority. And we don’t have the manpower. You can if you wish buy a handgun. That might be a good idea, especially in view of ihe fact that you have a wife and small child.”
Til do that,” I said.
“We will okay it,” Agent Townsend said.
Then you don’t think one of your own posts sent this,” I said.
“Frankly, I doubt it very much,” Agent Townsend said. “We’ll conduct a routine inquiry. It would certainly simplify everything, from our standpoint. May I take this ad and the envelope?”
“Certainly,” I said. I was glad to have it out of my hands.
That night I sat out alone on the patio of our apartment, gazing up at the stars. By now I knew what had happened to me; for reasons I did not understand, I had become plugged into an intergalactic communications network, operating on a telepathic basis. Sitting there in the dark by myself I experienced the stars overhead and the enormous amount of traffic flowing between them. I was in touch with one station in the network, and I gazed up trying to locate it, although most likely locating it was impossible.
A star system with a name out of our own devising; I knew the star’s name. It was Albemuth. But I could find no such star listed in our reference works, although the prefix Al was common to stars, since it signified the word “the” in Arabic.
There I sat, and there overhead twinkled and glowed the star Albemuth, and from its network came an infinitude of messages, in assorted unknown tongues. What had happened was that the AI operator of Albemuth’s station, an artificial intelligence unit, had raised me at some prior time and was holding the contact open. Therefore information reached me from the communications network whether I liked it or not.
It was the voice of the AI unit which I saw in dreams as the “Roman sibyl.” In point of fact it was not the Roman sibyl, not at all, and really not a woman; it was a totally synthetic entity. But I loved the sound of her voice – I still thought of the entity as her – since whenever I beard it, either in my head during a hypnagogic or hypnopompic state or in dreams, it meant that I would soon be informed of something. Beyond the AI voice, the synthetic female voice, lay Valis himself, the ultimate constituent link to the universe-wide communications network. Now that I had peaked in my rapport with it, enormous amounts of material were flooding across; ever since the phosphene activity they were evidently jamming it to me, feeding me as much as possible, in case, perhaps, the contact was broken.
They had never visited Earth – no actual extraterrestrials had landed ships and walked around here – but they had informed certain humans now and then throughout the ages, especially in ancient times. Since my contact came in most strangely between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., I realized that probably a booster satellite, of alien origin, orbited Earth, a slave communications satellite that had been sent here thousands of years ago.
“What are you doing sitting out on the patio?” Rachel asked me.
“Listening,” I said.
“To what?”
To the voices of the stars,” I said, although more accurately I meant the voices from the stars. But it was as if the stars themselves spoke, as I sat there in the chilly dark, alone except for my cat, who was out there out of custom anyhow; each night Pinky sat on the railing of the patio, communing as I was but over a longer period of time, over his entire adult life. Seeing him now I understood that he was picking up information in the night, from the night, from the pattern of blinks that came by starlight. He was hooked up with the universe as he sat here now, like myself, gazing upward silently.
The Fall of man, I further realized, represented a falling away from contact with this vast communications network and from the AI unit expressing the voice of Valis, which to the ancients would be the same as God. Originally, like the animal beside me, we had been integrated into this network and had been expressions of its identity and will operating through us. Something had gone wrong; the lights had gone out on Earth.
These realizations came to me not as speculation or even as logical deduction, but as insights presented me by the sympathetic AI operator at work at my station. She was making me aware of that which man had ceased to understand: his role and place in the system of things. I saw on the inner screen of my mind an inferior agency creeping into our world, combating the wisdom of God; I saw it take over this planet with its own dreary plans and will, supplanting the benign will of God . . . or Valis, as I still preferred to call him. Over the ages God had played a great game for the relief of this planet, but lifting the siege had still not been accomplished. Earth was still an unlit button on the exchange board of the intergalactic communications network. We had not yet begun to function as our first ancestors had, in communion with our creator and the lord of the universe. Such examples as me were random flukes – I had not achieved it; it had happened to me, due to a combination of circumstances. One of the deformed progeny had lifted the receiver of the long-abandoned telephone, so to speak, and was now hearing the sympathetic, informative voice that he and all his kind should have known by heart.
The new personality in me had not awakened from a sleep of two millennia; it had, more accurately speaking, been printed out by the alien satellite, impressed on me afresh from outside. It was an addition, not a substitution in place of me but a kind of package identity based on the total knowledge of the satellite. It was to raise me to the highest level possible in my ability to cope. The satellite, itself linked to higher life forms, was concerned with my capacity to live; it or they, the totality of them, had seen me faltering under the oppression, and their response was reflexive. It amounted to a rational attempt to give aid to whoever was in touch with them, who was capable of assimilating their printout. I had been selected for that reason alone. Their concern was universal. They would have assisted anyone they could reach.
The tragedy lay in their inability to reach the people of our planet. It went back to the original invasion of our world by the malign entity that did not wish to hear. It had contaminated our world with its presence; it was not merely around us, it was also in us. We bore its mark. Probably the maximum harm it had done us was to sever us from the communications network. Due to its opaqueness it probably was not even aware of what it had done. Or if it understood, it did not consider it a toss.