“I know,” I said. “You mean the ETI one? Yes, the Russians blew that up; I saw that on TV.”
“You’re by yourself now.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You understand what I mean.”
“I don’t,” I managed to say; it was an effort to lie, a dreadful effort, an offense against myself. I could hardly do it. “I thought the official US position on that satellite was that it – what crap did I hear? „A discarded satellite of our own?“ or something like that. Not from outer space; worthless. Our own obsolete signals coming back to us.”
“That was before the Soviet Union photographed it.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. “So now the line has changed.”
“We know what that satellite was,” Vivian Kaplan said.
“Then how could you destroy it? What kind of demented mind could give the signal to destroy it? I don’t understand you. You don’t understand me and I don’t understand you. To me you are insane.” I ceased; I had said too much.
“You want an alien entity ruling your mind? Telling you what to do? You want to be a slave to -”
“What the hell do you think you are, Ms Kaplan?” I said. That’s what FAP is, a bunch of robots receiving their orders blindly and going out blindly to coerce everyone else who isn’t already in the net into becoming a robot like them, all following the will of the leader. And what a leader!”
“Goodbye, Mr Brady,” Vivian Kaplan said, and my office door shut after her; she had gone.
I just put my head in the noose, I said to myself. Like Phil did with her; she seems to have an ability to get you to do it one way or another. Phil did it one way, I did it another. I hope they pay her a good salary, I said to myself. She deserves it. She could entrap anybody.
They have enough on me now, I realized, to execute a warrant any time they want. But they have always had enough. It makes no difference. They taped our conversation at the La Paz Bar; they have all they need. And due process, the constitutional guarantees, are no longer observed anyhow; the national security issue is always invoked in matters like this. So the hell with it. I’m glad I said it. I lost nothing I hadn’t already lost.
There isn’t much, I said to myself, that has not been lost. Now that the satellite is gone.
Within my mind, firebright stirred; I felt his presence. He was still alive, still there within me. Tucked away out of harm’s way: safe.
I was not completely alone. Vivian was wrong.
I met Sadassa in the middle of an orange grove in Placentia; we walked together, holding hands, speaking in low voices. Perhaps they were picking up what we said, perhaps not. In any case we had to confer. I had to keep her informed.
First there was something I wanted to ask her about.
“The satellite is gone,” I said as we walked, “but every now and then I still see something, superimposed and in color, as if it’s a further satellite transmission to me.” Everything I had ever been shown before had been comprehensible, at least with sufficient analysis; this, however, I could not fathom. “It has to do with – “ I broke off; I. had been about to mention Pinky.
What I was seeing now was a door, proportioned by the measure which the Greeks had called the Golden Rectangle, which they had considered the perfect geometric form. I repeatedly saw this door, marked with letters of the Greek alphabet, projected onto natural formations that resembled it: a dictionary stand, a basalt block, a speaker cabinet. And one time, astonishingly, I had seen Pinky pressing outward from beyond the door into our world, only not as he had been: much larger, more fierce, like a tiger, and, most of all, filled to bursting with life and health.
I now told Sadassa about my witnessing the outline of the door, and she listened silently, nodding. At the end I told her what I glimpsed beyond the door: a static landscape, nocturnal, a quiet black sea, sky, the edge of an island, and, surprisingly, the unmoving figure of a nude woman standing on the sand at the edge of the water. I had recognized the woman; it was Aphrodite. I had seen photographs of Greek and Roman statues of her. The proportions, the beauty and sensuality, could not be mistaken.
“You are seeing,” Sadassa said somberly, “the last receding image of love, moving away from you now that the satellite is gone. A kind of afterimage.”
“My dead cat,” I said, “is over there.”
“It is the far shore,” Sadassa said. “The other land, which we are now cut off from. You’ll see it a few days longer and then it will be gone, and that will be the last; you won’t see anything again.” She laughed, but not happily. “It’s like when you shut off your TV set; the picture dwindles before it fades out entirely. A residual charge.”
“It’s very beautiful,” I said. “Perfect balance.” I remembered, then, the original abstract graphics, the phosphene activity that had initiated the satellite’s overwhelming of my human mind with its superior view. “I keep thinking there ought to be a way to cross over there.”
“There is a way.”
“What way?” I said, and then I remembered Pinky. “Oh,” I said. “I see what you mean.”
“Aphrodite was the goddess of the generation of life,” Sadassa said, “as well as love. I see it too, Nicholas; I see the door through which we can’t go. I see the static landscape we can’t reach. There, the source of life exists; it once orbited our sky. This is a residual message already placed in us by the satellite, before its destruction, a goodbye to each of us. To remember – to keep with us. A goodbye and a promise.”
I said, “I have never seen anything so beautiful.”
Changing the subject, Sadassa said, “What are you going to do about Vivian Kaplan? That’s the immediate problem.”
“We’ll give them a tape,” I said, “lacking the subliminal material. That’ll satisfy them for a while. Then we’ll begin to press the records. I’ll have a few records made from a master lacking the subliminal material and turn one over to them. I’ll keep more of the clean pressings around my office, so if they break in and steal them, what they get will confirm their tape. Finally we’ll take the plunge and start shipping the discs with the subliminal material on them. And then sit back and wait for the police. They’ll go from one radio station to the next, and one record store to the next, confiscating the records, but maybe some will survive and some will get played before that happens. And of course when they pick us up, us and our families, they will kill us. There is no doubt of that.”
“Yes,” Sadassa said.
“What I feel bad about,” I said, “is that I know we are in the trap already. They are aware of what we’re doing; they know about the record. At least they know there is this record and we are probably planning some political act in -connection with it. They want to see the record mastered; they want to see it produced, so they can play it and determine its content. We’re doing what they want us to do. Well, maybe not; maybe they’re not sure -they’re guessing and wondering, playing hunches. The police are so full of lies. Maybe there was no sound engineer who phoned in a tip. Maybe they didn’t pick up our conversation at the La Paz Bar. All they may know is that Let’s Play! is our hottest new album, that we’ve got a lot of time and effort invested in it, so the naturally suspicious police mind is alerted to come down hard on us, ask for a tape, ask for a copy before distribution, rather than monitoring it the usual way.”
“I say they’re lying,” Sadassa said. “Bluffing. That is certainly a possibility. We should go on.”
“If we stop now,” I said, “they won’t kill us.”
“Let’s go on,” Sadassa said.
“Knowing we have no chance of escape?”
She nodded silently.
“I’m just thinking of Johnny,” I said. “Valis had me anoint him and everything . . . even give him a secret name. I guess that name will perish with him, one of these days soon.”
“If Valis had you do that, your boy will live on.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“I hope you’re right.”
“Valis may not be here now,” Sadassa said, “but within each of us -”
“I know,” I said. “I felt him stir the other day. The new life within me. The second birth … the birth from above.”