THE DIVINE INVASION

Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 8:55 am

Chapter 10

When Herb Asher awoke he was told perplexing facts. He had spent -- not weeks -- but years in cryonic suspension. The doctors could not explain why it had taken so long to obtain replacement organs. Circumstances, they told him, beyond our control. Procedural problems.

He said, "What about Emmanuel?"

Dr. Pope, who looked older and grayer and more distinguished than before, said, "Someone broke into the hospital and removed your son from the synthowomb."

"When?"

"Almost at once. The fetus was in the synthowomb for only a day, according to our records."

"Do you know who did it?"

"According to our video tapes -- we monitor our syntho wombs constantly -- it was an elderly bearded man." After a pause Dr. Pope added, "Deranged in appearance. You must face the very high probability factor that your son is dead, has in fact been dead for ten years, either from natural causes, which is to say from being taken out of his synthowomb -- or due to the actions of the elderly bearded man. Either deliberate or accidental. The police could not locate either of them. I'm sorry."

Elias Tate, Herb said to himself. Spiriting Emmanuel away, to safety. He shut his eyes and felt overwhelming gratitude.

"How do you feel?" Dr. Pope inquired.

"I dreamed. I didn't know that people in cryonic suspension were conscious."

"You weren't."

"I dreamed again and again about my wife." He felt bitter grief hover over him and then descend on him, filling him; the grief was too much. "Always I found myself back there with her. When we met, before we met. The trip to Earth. Little things. Dishes of spoiled food -- she was sloppy."

"But you do have your son."

"Yes," he said. He wondered how he would be able to find Elias and Emmanuel. They will have to find me, he realized.

For a month he remained at the hospital, undergoing remedial therapy to build up his strength, and then, on a cool morning in mid- March, the hospital discharged him. Suitcase in hand he walked down the front steps, shaky and afraid but happy to be free. Every day during his therapy he had expected the authorities to come swooping down on him. They did not. He wondered why.

As he stood with a throng of people trying to flag down a flycar Yellow cab he noticed a blind beggar standing off to one side, an ancient, white-haired, very large man wearing soiled clothing; the old man held a cup.

"Elias," Herb Asher said.

Going over to him he regarded his old friend. Neither of them spoke for a time and then Elias Tate said, "Hello, Herbert."

"Rybys told me you often take the form of a beggar," Herb Asher said. He reached out to put his arms around the old man, but Elias shook his head.

"It is Passover," Elias said. "And I am here. The power of my spirit is too great; you should not touch me. It is all my spirit, now, at this moment."

"You are not a man," Herb Asher said, awed.

"I am many men," Elias said. "It's good to see you again. Emmanuel said you would be released today."

"The boy is all right?"

"He is beautiful."

"I saw him," Herb Asher said. "Once, a while ago. In a vision that --" He paused. "Jehovah sent to me. To help me."

"Did you dream?" Elias asked.

"About Rybys. And about you as well. About everything that happened. I lived it over and over again."

"But now you are alive again," Elias said. "Welcome back, Herbert Asher. We have much to do."

"Do we have a chance? Do we have any real chance?"

"The boy is ten years old," Elias said. "He has confused their wits, scrambled up their thinking. He has made them forget. But --" Elias was silent a moment. "He, too, has forgotten. You will see. A few years ago he began to remember; he heard a song and some of his memories came back. Enough, perhaps, or maybe not enough. You may bring back more. He programmed himself, originally, before the accident."

With extreme difficulty Herb Asher said, "He was injured, then? In the accident?"

Elias nodded. Somberly.

"Brain damage," Herb Asher said; he saw the expression on his friend's face.

Again the old man nodded, the elderly beggar with the cup. The immortal Elijah, here at Passover. As always. The eternal, helping friend of man. Tattered and shabby, and very wise.

***

Zina said, "Your father is coming, isn't he?"

Together they sat on a bench in Rock Creek Park, near the frozen-over water. Trees shaded them with bare, stark branches. The air had turned cold, and both children wore heavy clothing. But the sky overhead was clear. Emmanuel gazed up for a time.

"What does your slate say?" Zina asked.

"I don't have to consult my slate."

"He isn't your father."

Emmanuel said, "He's a good person. It's not his fault that my mother died. I'll be happy to see him once more. I've missed him." He thought, It's been a long time. According to the scale by which they reckon here in the Lower Realm.

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means. This is a prison, and few men have guessed. But I know, he said to himself. Because that is why I am here, to burst the walls, to tear down the metal gates, to break each chain. Thou shalt not muzzle the ox as he treadeth out the corn, he thought, remembering the Torah. You will not imprison a free creature; you will not bind it. Thus says the Lord your God. Thus I say.

They do not know whom they serve. This is the heart of their misfortune: service in error, to a wrong thing. They are poisoned as if with metal, he thought. Metal confining them and metal in their blood; this is a metal world. Driven by cogs, a machine that grinds along, dealing out suffering and death. They are so accustomed to death, he realized, as if death, too, were natural. How long it has been since they knew the Garden. The place of resting animals and flowers. When can I find for them that place again?

There are two realities, he said to himself. The Black Iron Prison, which is called the Cave of Treasures, in which they now live, and the Palm Tree Garden with its enormous spaces, its light, where they originally dwelt. Now they are literally blind, he thought. Literally unable to see more than a short distance; faraway objects are invisible to them now. Once in a while one of them guesses that formerly they had faculties now gone; once in a while one of them discerns the truth, that they are not now what they were and not now where they were. But they forget again, exactly as I forgot. And I still forget somewhat, he realized. I still have only a partial vision. I am occluded, too.

But I will not be, soon.

"You want a Pepsi?" Zina said.

"It's too cold. I just want to sit."

"Don't be unhappy." She put her mittened hand on his arm. "Be joyful."

Emmanuel said, "I'm tired, I'll be okay. There's a lot that has to be done. I'm sorry. It weighs on me."

"You're not afraid, are you?"

"Not any more," Emmanuel said.

"You are sad."

He nodded,

Zina said, "You'll feel better when you see Mr. Asher again."

"I see him now," Emmanuel said.

"Very good," she said, pleased, "And even without your slate."

"I use it less and less," he said, "because the knowledge is progressively more and more in me. As you know. And you know why."

To that, Zina said nothing.

"We are close, you and I," Emmanuel said. "I have always loved you the most. I always will. You are going to stay on with me and advise me, aren't you?" He knew the answer: he knew that she would. She had been with him from the beginning -- as she said, his darling and delight. And her delight, as Scripture said, was in mankind. So, through her, he himself loved mankind: it was his delight as well.

"We could get something hot to drink," Zina said.

He murmured, "I just want to sit." I shall sit here until it is time to go to meet Herb Asher, he said to himself. He can tell me about Rybys; his many memories of her will give me joy, the joy that, right now, I lack.

I love him, he realized. I love my mother's husband, my legal father. Like other men he is a good human being. He is a man of merit, and to be cherished.

But, unlike other men, Herb Asher knows who I am. Thus I can talk openly with him. as I do with Elias. And with Zina. It will help, he thought. I will be less weary. No longer as I am now, pinned by my cares; weighed down. The burden, to some extent, will lift. Because it will be shared.

And, he thought, there is still so much that I do not remember. I am not as I was. Like them, like the people, I have fallen. The bright morning star which fell did not fall alone, it tore down everything else with it, including me. Part of my own being fell with it, and I am that fallen being now.

But then, as he sat there on the bench with Zina, in the park, on this cold day so near the vernal equinox, he thought, But Herbert Asher lay dreaming in his bunk, dreaming of a phantom life with Linda Fox, while my mother struggled to survive. Not once did he try to help her; not once did he inquire into her trouble and seek remedy, Not until I, I myself, forced him to go to her, not until then did he do anything. I do not love the man, he said to himself, I know the man and he forfeited his right to my love -- he lost my love because he did not care.

I cannot, thereupon, care about him, in response.

Why should I help any of them? he asked himself. They do what is right only when forced to, when there is no alternative. They fell of their own accord and are fallen now, of their own accord, by what they have voluntarily done. My mother is dead because of them; they murdered her. They would murder me if they could figure out where I am; only because I have confused their wits do they leave me alone. High and low they seek my life, just as Ahab sought Elijah's life, so long ago, They are a worthless race, and I do not care if they fall, I do not care at all. To save them I must fight what they themselves are. And have always been.

"You look so downcast," Zina said.

"What is this for?" he said. "They are what they are. I grow more and more weary. And I care less and less, as I begin to remember, For ten years I have lived on this world, now, and for ten years they have hunted me. Let them die. Did I not say to them the talion law: 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'? Is that not in the Torah? They drove me off this world two thousand years ago; I return; they wish me dead. Under the talion law I should wish them dead. It is the sacred law of Israel. It is my law, my word,"

Zina was silent.

"Advise me," Emmanuel said. "I have always listened to your advice," Zina said:

One day Elijah the prophet appeared to Rabbi Baruka in the market of Lapet. Rabbi Baruka asked him, "Is there anyone among the people of this market who is destined to share in the world to come?" ... Two men appeared on the scene and Elijah said, "These two will share in the world to come," Rabbi Baruka asked them, "What is your occupation?" They said, "We are merrymakers. When we see a man who is downcast, we cheer him up. When we see two people quarreling with one another, we endeavor to make peace between them."


"You make me less sad," Emmanuel said, "And less weary, As you always have. As Scripture says of you:

Then I was at his side every day,
his darling and delight,
playing in his presence continually,
playing on the earth, when he had finished it,
while my delight was in mankind,


And Scripture says:

Wisdom I loved; I sought her out when I was young and longed to win her for my bride, and I fell in love with her beauty.


But that was Solomon, not me.

So I determined to bring her home to live with me, knowing that she would be my counselor in prosperity and my comfort in anxiety and grief.


Solomon was a wise man, to love you so."

Beside him the girl smiled. She said nothing, but her dark eyes shone.

"Why are you smiling?" he asked.

"Because you have shown the truth of Scripture when it says:

I will betroth you to Me forever. I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, in love and in mercy. I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, and you shall love the Lord.


Remember that you made the Covenant with man. And you made man in your own image. You cannot break the Covenant; you have made man that promise, that you will never break it."

Emmanuel said, "That is so. You advise me well." He thought, And you cheer my heart. You above all else, you who came before creation. Like the two merrymakers, he thought, who Elijah said would be saved. Your dancing, your singing, and the sound of bells. "I know," he said, "what your name means."

"Zina?" she said. "It's just a name."

"It is the Roumanian word for --" He ceased speaking; the girl had trembled visibly, and her eyes were now wide.

"How long have you known it?" she said.

"Years. Listen:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
Weed wide enough


I will finish; listen:

To wrap a fairy in.


And I have known this," he finished, "all this time."

Staring at him, Zina said, "Yes, Zina means fairy."

"You are not Holy Wisdom," he said, "you are Diana, the fairy queen."

Cold wind rustled the branches of the trees. And, across the frozen creek, a few dry leaves scuttled.

"I see," Zina said.

About the two of them the wind rustled, as if speaking. He could hear the wind as words. And the wind said:

BEWARE!

He wondered if she heard it, too.

***

But they were still friends. Zina told Emmanuel about an early identity that she had once had. Thousands of years ago, she said, she had been Ma'at, the Egyptian goddess who represented the cosmic order and justice. When someone died his heart was weighed against Ma'at's ostrich feather. By this the person's burden of sins was determined.

The principle by which the sinfulness of the person was determined consisted of the degree of his truthfulness. To the extent that he was truthful the judgment went in his favor. This judgment was presided over by Osiris, but since Ma'at was the goddess of truthfulness, then it followed that the determination was hers to make.

"After that," Zina said, "the idea of the judgment of human souls passed over into Persia. In the ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, a shifting bridge had to be crossed by the newly dead person. If he was evil the bridge got narrower and narrower until he toppled off and plunged into the fiery pit of hell. Judaism in its later stages and Christianity had gotten their ideas of the Final Days from this.

The good person, who managed to cross the shifting bridge, was met by the spirit of his religion: a beautiful young woman with superb, large breasts. However, if the person was evil the spirit of his religion consisted of a dried-up old hag with sagging paps. You could tell at a glance, therefore, which category you belonged to.

"Were you the spirit of religion for the good persons?" Emmanuel asked.

Zina did not answer the question; she passed on to another matter which she was more anxious to communicate to him. In these judgments of the dead, stemming from Egypt and Persia, the scrutiny was pitiless and the sinful soul was de facto doomed. Upon your death the books listing your good deeds and bad deeds closed, and no one, even the gods, could alter the tabulation. In a sense the procedure of judgment was mechanical. A bill of particulars, in essence, had been drawn up against you, compiled during your lifetime, and now this bill of particulars was fed into a mechanism of retribution. Once the mechanism received the list, it was all over for you. The mechanism ground you to shreds, and the gods merely watched, impassively.

But one day (Zina said) a new figure made its appearance at the path leading to the shifting bridge. This was an enigmatic figure who seemed to consist of a shifting succession of aspects or roles. Sometimes he was called Comforter. Sometimes Advocate. Sometimes Beside-Helper. Sometimes Support. Sometimes Advisor. No one knew where he had come from. For thousands of years he had not been there, and then one day he had appeared. He stood at the edge of the busy path, and as the souls made their way to the shifting bridge this complex figure -- who sometimes, but rarely, seemed to be a woman -- signaled to the persons, each in turn, to attract their attention. It was essential that the Beside-Helper got their attention before they stepped onto the shifting bridge, because after that it was too late.

"Too late for what?" Emmanuel said.

Zina said, "The Beside-Helper upon stopping a person approaching the shifting bridge asked him if he wished to be represented in the testing which was to come."

"By the Beside-Helper?"

The Beside-Helper, she explained, assumed his role of Advocate; he offered to speak on the person's behalf. But the Beside-Helper offered something more. He offered to present his own bill of particulars to the retribution mechanism in place of the bill of particulars of the person. If the person were innocent this would make no difference, but, for the guilty, it would yield up a sentence of exculpation rather than guilt.

"That's not fair," Emmanuel said. "The guilty should be punished."

"Why?" Zina said.

"Because it is the law," Emmanuel said.

"Then there is no hope for the guilty."

Emmanuel said, "They deserve no hope."

"What if everyone is guilty?"

He had not thought of that. "What does the Beside-Helper's bill of particulars list?" he asked.

"It is blank," Zina said. "A perfectly white piece of paper. A document on which nothing is inscribed."

"The retributive machinery could not process that."

Zina said, "It would process it. It would imagine that it had received a compilation of a totally spotless person."

"But it couldn't act. It would have no input data."

"That's the whole point."

"Then the machinery of justice has been bilked."

"Bilked out of a victim," Zina said. "Is that not to be desired? Should there be victims? What is gained if there is an unending procession of victims? Does that right the wrongs they have committed?"

"No," he said.

"The idea," Zina said, "is to feed mercy into the circuit. The Beside-Helper is an amicus curiae, a friend of the court. He advises the court, by its permission, that the case before it constitutes an exception. The general rule of punishment does not apply."

"And he does this for everyone? Every guilty person?"

"For every guilty person who accepts his offer of advocacy and help."

"But then you'd have an endless procession of exceptions. Because no guilty person in his right mind would reject such an offer: every single guilty person would wish to be judged as an exception, as a case involving mitigating circumstances."

Zina said, "But the person would have to accept the fact that he was, on his own, guilty. He could of course wager that he was innocent, in which case he would not need the advocacy of the Beside Helper."

After a moment of pondering. Emmanuel said, "That would be a foolish choice. He might be wrong. And he loses nothing by accepting the assistance of the Beside-Helper."

"In practice, however," Zina said, "most souls about to be judged reject the offer of advocacy by the Beside-Helper."

"On what basis?" He could not fathom their reasoning.

Zina said, "On the basis that they are sure they are innocent. To receive this help the person must go with the pessimistic assumption that he is guilty, even though his own assessment of himself is one of innocence. The truly innocent need no Beside-Helper. just as the physically healthy need no physician. In a situation of this kind the optimistic assumption is perilous. It's the bail-out theorem that little creatures employ when they construct a burrow. If they are wise they build a second exit to their burrow, operating on the pessimistic assumption that the first one will be found by a predator. All creatures who did not use their theorem are no longer with us."

Emmanuel said, "It is degrading to a man that he must consider himself sinful."

"It's degrading to a gopher to have to admit that his burrow may not be perfectly built, that a predator may find it."

"You are talking about an adversary situation. Is divine justice an adversary situation? Is there a prosecutor?"

"Yes, there is a prosecutor of man in the divine court: it is Satan. There is the Advocate who defends the accused human, and Satan who impugns and indicts him. The Advocate, standing beside the man, defends him and speaks for him: Satan, confronting the man, accuses him. Would you wish man to have an accuser and not a defender? Would that seem just?"

"But innocence must be presumed."

The girl's eyes gleamed. "Precisely the point made by the Advocate in each trial that takes place. Hence he substitutes his own blameless record for that of his client, and justifies the man by surrogation."

"Are you this Beside-Helper?" Emmanuel asked.

"No," she said. "He is a far more puzzling figure than I. If you are having difficulty with me in determining --"

"I am," Emmanuel said.

"He is a latecomer into this world," Zina said, "Not found in earlier aeons, He represents an evolution in the divine strategy. One by which the primordial damage is repaired. One of many, but a main one."

"Will I ever encounter him?"

"You will not be judged," Zina said, "So perhaps not. But all humans will see him standing by the busy road, offering his help. Offering it in time -- before the person starts across the shifting bridge and is judged, The Beside-Helper's intervention always comes in time. It is part of his nature to be there soon enough."

Emmanuel said, "I would like to meet him."

"Follow the travel pattern of any human," Zina said, "and you will arrive at the point where that human encounters him. That is how I know about him. I, too, am not judged," She pointed to the slate that she had given him. "Ask it for more information about the Beside-Helper."

The slate read:

TO CALL

"Is that all you can tell me?" Emmanuel asked it.

A new word formed, a Greek word:

PARAKALEIN

He wondered about this, wondered greatly, at this new entity who had come into the world, who could be called on by those in need, those who stood in danger of negative judgment. It was one more of the mysteries presented to him by Zina. There had been so many, now. He enjoyed them. But he was puzzled.

To call to aid: parakalein, Strange, he thought. The world evolves even as it falls more and more. There are two distinct movements: the falling, and then, at the same time, the upward-rising work of repair. Antithetical movements, in the form of a dialectic of all creation and the powers contending behind it. Suppose Zina beckoned to the parts that fell? Beckoned them, seductively, to fall farther. About this he could not yet tell.
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 8:57 am

Chapter 11

Reaching out, Herb Asher took the boy in his arms. He hugged him tight.

"And this is Zina," Elias Tate said. "Emmanuel's friend." He took the girl by the hand and led her to Herb Asher. "She's a little older than Manny."

"Hello," Herb Asher said. But he did not care about her; he wanted to look at Rybys's son.

Ten years, he thought. This child has grown while I dreamed and dreamed, thinking I was alive when in fact I was not.

Elias said, "She helps him. She teaches him. More than the school does. More than I do."

Looking toward the girl Herb Asher saw a beautiful pale heart-shaped face with eyes that danced with light. What a pretty child, he thought, and turned back to Rybys's son. But then, struck by something, he looked once more at the girl.

Mischief showed on her face. Especially in her eyes, Yes, he thought; there is something in her eyes. A kind of knowledge.

"They've been together four years now," Elias said. "She gave him a high-technology slate. It's some kind of advanced computer terminal. It asks him questions -- poses questions to him and gives him hints. Right, Manny?"

Emmanuel said, "Hello, Herb Asher." He seemed solemn and subdued, in contrast to the girl.

"Hello," he said to Emmanuel. "How much you look like your mother."

"In that crucible we grow," Emmanuel said, cryptically. He did not amplify.

"Are --" Herb did not know what to say. "Is everything all right?"

"Yes." The boy nodded.

"You have a heavy burden on you," Herb said.

"The slate plays tricks," Emmanuel said.

There was silence.

"What's wrong?" Herb said to Elias.

To the boy, Elias said, "Something is wrong, isn't it?"

"While my mother died," Emmanuel said, gazing fixedly at Herb Asher, "you listened to an illusion. She does not exist, that image. Your Fox is a phantasm, nothing else."

"That was a long time ago," Herb said.

"The phantasm is with us in the world," Emmanuel said.

"That's not my problem," Herb said.

Emmanuel said, "But it is mine. I mean to solve it. Not now but at the proper time. You fell asleep, Herb Asher, because a voice told you to fall asleep. This world here, this planet, all of it, all its people -- everything here sleeps. I have watched it for ten years and there is nothing good I can say about it. What you did it does; what you were it is. Maybe you still sleep. Do you sleep, Herb Asher? You dreamed about my mother while you lay in cryonic suspension. I tapped your dreams. From them I learned a lot about her. I am as much her as I am myself. As I told her, she lives on in me and as me; I have made her deathless -- your wife is here, not back in that littered dome. Do you realize that? Look at me and you see Rybys whom you ignored."

Herb Asher said, "I --"

"There is nothing for you to tell me," Emmanuel said. "I read your heart, not your words. I knew you then and I know you now. 'Herbert, Herbert,' I called to you. I summoned you back to life, for your sake and for hers, and, because it was for her sake, it was for my sake. When you helped her you helped me. And when you ignored her you ignored me. Thus says your God."

Reaching out, Elias put his arm around Herb Asher, to reassure him.

"I will always speak the truth to you, Herb Asher," the boy continued. "There is no deceit in God. I want you to live. I made you live once before, when you lay in psychological death. God does not desire any living thing's death; God takes no delight in nonexistence. Do you know what God is, Herb Asher? God is He Who causes to be. Put another way, if you seek the basis of being that underlies everything you will surely find God. You can work back to God from the phenomenal universe, or you can move from the Creator to the phenomenal universe. Each implies the other. The Creator would not be the Creator if there were no universe, and the universe would cease to be if the Creator did not sustain it. The Creator does not exist prior to the universe in time; he does not exist in time at all. God creates the universe constantly; he is with it, not above or behind it. This is impossible to understand for you because you are a created thing and exist in time. But eventually you will return to your Creator and then you will again no longer exist in time. You are the breath of your Creator, and as he breathes in and out, you live. Remember that, for that sums up everything that you need to know about your God. There is first an exhalation from God, on the part of all creation; and then, at a certain point, it starts its journey back, its inhalation. This cycle never ceases. You leave me; you are away from me; you start back; you rejoin me. You and everything else. It is a process, an event. It is an activity -- my activity. It is the rhythm of my own being, and it sustains you all."

Amazing, Herb Asher thought. A ten-year-old boy. Her son speaking this.

"Emmanuel," the girl Zina said, "you are ponderous."

Smiling at her the boy said, "Games, then? Would that be better? There are events ahead that I must shape. I must arouse fire that burns, that sears. Scripture says:

For He is like a refiner's fire.


And Scripture also says:

And who can abide the day of His coming?


I say, however, that it will be more than this; I say:

The day comes, glowing like a furnace; all the arrogant and the evil-doers shall be chaff, and that day when it comes shall set them ablaze; it shall leave them neither root nor branch.


What do you say to that, Herb Asher?" Emmanuel gazed at him intently, awaiting his response.

Zina said:

But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in his wings.


"That is true," Emmanuel said.

In a low voice Elias said:

And you shall break loose like calves released from the stall.


"Yes," Emmanuel said. He nodded.

Herb Asher, returning the boy's gaze, said, "I am afraid. I really am." He was glad of the arm around him, the reassuring arm of Elias.

In a reasonable tone of voice, a mild tone, Zina said, "He won't do all those terrible things. That's to scare people."

"Zina!" Elias said.

Laughing, she said, "It's true. Ask him."

"You will not put the Lord your God to the test," Emmanuel said.

"I'm not afraid," Zina said quietly.

Emmanuel, to her, said:

I will break you, like a rod of iron.
I shall dash you, in pieces,
Like a potter's vessel.


"No," Zina said. To Herb Asher she said, "There is nothing to fear. It's a manner of talking, no more. Come to me if you get scared and I will converse with you."

"That is true," Emmanuel said. "If you are seized and taken down into the prison she will go with you. She will never leave you." An unhappy expression crossed his face; suddenly he was, again, a ten-year-old boy. "But --"

"What is it?" Elias said.

"I will not say now," Emmanuel said, speaking with difficulty. Herb Asher, to his disbelief, saw tears in the boy's eyes. "Perhaps I will never say it. She knows what I mean."

"Yes," Zina said, and she smiled. Mischief lay in her smile, or so it seemed to Herb Asher. It puzzled him. He did not understand the invisible transaction taking place between Rybys's son and the girl. It troubled him, and his fear became greater. His sense of deep unease.

***

The four of them had dinner together that night.

"Where do you live?" Herb Asher asked the girl. "Do you have a family? Parents?"

"Technically I'm a ward of the government school we go to," Zina said. "But for all intents and purposes I'm in Elias's custody now. He's in the process of becoming my guardian."

Elias, eating, paying attention to his plate of food, said, "We are a family, the three of us. And now you also, Herb."

"I may go back to my dome," Herb said. "In the CY30 CY30B system."

Staring at him, Elias halted in his eating, forkful of food raised. "Why?"

"I'm uncomfortable here," Herb said. He had not worked it out; his feelings remained vague. But they were intense feelings. "It's oppressive here. There's more of a sense of freedom out there."

"Freedom to lie in your bunk listening to Linda Fox?" Elias said.

"No." He shook his head.

Zina said, "Emmanuel, you scare him with your talk about afflicting the Earth with fire. He remembers the plagues in the Bible. What happened with Egypt."

"I want to go home," Herb said, simply.

Emmanuel said, "You miss Rybys."

"Yes." That was true.

"She isn't there," Emmanuel reminded him. He ate slowly, somberly, bite after bite. As if, Herb thought, eating was for him a solemn ritual. A matter of consuming something sanctified.

"Can't you bring her back?" he said to Emmanuel.

The boy did not respond. He continued to eat.

"No answer?" Herb said, with bitterness.

"I am not here for that," Emmanuel said. "She understood. It is not important that you understand, but it was important that she know. And I caused her to know. You remember; you were there on that day, the day I told her what lay ahead."

"Okay," Herb said.

"She lives elsewhere now," Emmanuel said. "You --"

"Okay," he repeated, with anger, enormous anger.

To him, Emmanuel said, speaking slowly and quietly, his face calm, "You do not grasp the situation, Herbert. It is not a good universe that I strive for, nor a just one, nor a pretty one; the existence of the universe itself is at stake. Final victory for Belial does not mean imprisonment for the human race, continued slavery, but nonexistence; without me, there is nothing, not even Belial, whom I created."

"Eat your dinner," Zina said in a gentle voice.

"The power of evil," Emmanuel continued, "is the ceasing of reality, the ceasing of existence itself. It is the slow slipping away of everything that is, until it becomes, like Linda Fox, a phantasm. That process has begun. It began with the primal fall. Part of the cosmos fell away. The Godhead itself suffered a crisis; can you fathom that, Herb Asher? A crisis in the Ground of Being? What does that convey to you? The possibility of the Godhead ceasing -- does it convey that to you? Because the Godhead is all that stands between --" He broke off. "You can't even imagine it. No creature can imagine nonbeing, especially its own nonbeing. I must guarantee being, all being. Including yours."

Herb Asher said nothing.

"A war is coming," Emmanuel said. "We will choose our ground. It will be for us, the two of us, Belial and me, a table, on which we play. Over which we wager the universe, the being of being as such. I initiate this final part of the ages of war; I have advanced into Belial's territory, his home. I have moved forward to meet him, not the other way around. Time will tell if it was a wise idea."

"Can't you foresee the results?" Herb said.

Emmanuel regarded him. Silently.

"You can," Herb said. You know what the outcome will be, he realized. You know now; you knew when you entered Rybys's womb. You knew from the beginning of creation -- before creation, in fact; before a universe existed.

"They will play by rules," Zina said. "Rules agreed on."

"Then," Herb said, "that's why Belial has not attacked you. That's why you've been able to live here and grow up -- for ten years. He knows you're here --"

"Does he know?" Emmanuel said.

Silence.

"I haven't told him," Emmanuel said. "It is not my burden. He must find out for himself. I do not mean the government. I mean the power that truly rules, in comparison to which the government, all governments, are shadows."

"He'll tell him when he's ready," Zina said. "Good and ready."

Herb said, "Are you good and ready, Emmanuel?"

The boy smiled. A child's smile, a shift away from the stern countenance of a moment before. He said nothing. A game, Herb Asher realized. A child's game!

Seeing this he trembled.

Zina said:

Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom.


"What is that?" Elias said,

"It is not from Judaism," Zina said obscurely. She did not amplify.

The part of him that derives from his mother, Herb Asher realized, is ten years old, And the part of him that is Yah has no age: it is infinity itself. A compound of the very young and the timeless: precisely what Zina in her arcane quote had stated.

Perhaps this was not unique, this mixture. Someone had noted it before: noted it and declared it in words.

"You venture into Belial's realm," Zina said to Emmanuel as she ate, "but would you have the courage to venture into my realm?"

"What realm is that?" Emmanuel said. Elias Tale stared at the girl, and, equally puzzled, Herb Asher regarded her. But Emmanuel seemed to understand her; he showed no surprise. Despite his question, Herb Asher thought, he knows -- knows already.

Zina said, "Where I am not as you see me now."

An interval of silence passed, as Emmanuel pondered. He did not answer: he sat as if withdrawn, as if his mind had moved far away. Skimming countless worlds, Herb Asher thought. How strange this is. What are they talking about?

Emmanuel said slowly and carefully, "I have a dreadful land to deal with, Zina, I have no time."

"I think you are apprehensive," Zina said, She turned to her slice of apple pie and mound of ice cream.

"No," Emmanuel said.

"Come, then," she said, and, all at once, the color and fire, the mischief and delight, showed in her dark eyes. "I challenge you," she said. "Here." She reached out her hand to the boy.

"My psychopomp," Emmanuel said somberly.

"Yes; I'll be your guide."

"You would lead the Lord your God?"

"I would like to show you where the bells come from, The land out of which their sounds come. What do you say?"

He said, "I will go."

"What are you two talking about?" Elias said, with apprehension, "Manny, what is this? What does she mean? She's not taking you anywhere that I don't know about."

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 nature betwixt man and angel,'" she quoted.

"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 Secret Commonwealth,'" Elias said. "I never believed 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. "1:.618034. The ancient Greeks knew it as the Golden Section and as the Golden Rectangle. 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 microcosms 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?"

"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 understand."

"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.
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 8:58 am

Chapter 12

"You dance and sing all night," Emmanuel said. He thought, And it is beautiful. "Show me," he said.

"Then we shall begin," Zina said.

***

He sat under palm trees and knew that he had entered the Garden, but it was the garden he himself had fashioned at the beginning of creation; she had not brought him to her realm. This was his own realm restored.

Buildings and vehicles, but the people did not hurry. They sat here and there enjoying the sun. One young woman had unbuttoned her blouse, and her breasts shone with perspiration; the sun radiated down hot and bright.

"No," he said, "this is not the Commonwealth."

"I took you the wrong way," Zina said. "But it doesn't matter. There is nothing wrong with this place, is there? Does it lack? You know it doesn't lack; it is Paradise."

"I made it so," he said.

"All right," Zina said. "This is the Paradise that you created and I will show you something better. Come." She reached out and took him by the hand. "That savings and loan building has the Golden Rectangle doorway. We can enter there; it is as good as any." Holding him by the hand she led him to the corner, waited for the light to change, and then, together, they made their way down the sidewalk, past the resting people, to the savings and loan office.

Pausing on the steps Emmanuel said, "I --"

"This is the doorway," she said, and led him up the steps. "Your realm ends here and mine begins. From now on the laws are mine." Her grip on his hand tightened.

"So be it," he said, and continued on.

***

The robot teller said, "Do you have your passbook, Ms. Pallas?"

"In my purse." Beside Emmanuel the young woman opened her mail-pouch leather purse, fumbled among keys, cosmetics, letters, assorted valuables, until her quick fingers found the passbook. "I want to draw out -- well, how much do I have?"

"Your balance appears in your passbook," the robot teller said in its dispassionate voice.

"Yes," she agreed. Opening the passbook she scrutinized the figures, then took a withdrawal slip and filled it out.

"You are closing your account?" the robot teller said, as she presented it with the passbook and slip.

"That's right."

"Has our service not been --"

"It's none of your damn business why I'm closing my account," she said. Resting her sharp elbows on the counter she rocked back and forth. Emmanuel saw that she wore high heels. Now she had become older. She wore a cotton print top and jeans, and her hair pulled back with a comb. Also, he saw, she wore sunglasses. She smiled at him.

He said to himself, She has already changed.

Presently they stood on the roof parking lot of the savings and loan building; Zina fumbled in her purse for her flycar keys.

"It's a nice day," she said. "Get in; I'll unlock the door for you." She slipped in behind the wheel of the flycar and reached for the far door's handle.

"This is a nice car," he said, and he thought, She reveals her domain by degrees. As she took me to my own garden-world first she now takes me stage by stage through the levels, the ascending levels, of her own realm. She will strip the accretions away one by one as we penetrate deeper. This, now, is the surface only.

This, he thought, is enchantment. Beware!

"You like my car? It gets me to work --"

He said, breaking in harshly, "You lie, Zina!"

"What do you mean?" The flycar rose up into the warm midday sky, joining the normal traffic. But her smile gave her away. "It's a beginning," she said. "I don't want to startle you."

"Here," he said, "in this world you are not a child. That was a form you took, a pose."

"This is my real shape. Honest."

"Zina; you have no real shape. I know you. For you any shape is possible. Whichever shape appeals to you at the moment. You go from moment to moment, like a soap bubble."

Turning toward him, but still watching where she drove, Zina said, "You are in my world now, Yah. Take care."

"I can burst your world."

"It will simply return. It is everywhere always. We have not gone away from where we were -- back there a few miles is the school that you and I attend; back there in the house Elias and Herb Asher are discussing what to do. Spacially this is not another place and you know that."

"But," he said, "you make the laws here."

"Belial is not here," she said.

That surprised him. He had not foreseen that, and, realizing that he had not foreseen it he knew that he had not truly foreseen the total situation. To miss a single part was to miss it all.

"He never penetrated my realm," Zina said as she negotiated her way through the sky traffic over Washington, D.C. "He does not even know about it. Let's go over to the Tidal Basin and look at the Japanese cherry trees; they're in bloom."

"Are they?" he said; it seemed to him too early in the year.

"They are blooming now," Zina said, and steered her flycar toward the downtown center of the city.

"In your world," he said. He understood. "This is the spring," he said. He could see the leaves and blossoms on the trees below them. The expanses of bright green.

"Roll your window down," she said. "It's not cold."

He said, "The warmth in the Palm Tree Garden --"

"Blasting, withering dry heat," she said, "Scorching the world and turning it into a desert. You were always partial to arid land. Listen to me, Yahweh. I will show you things you know nothing about. You have gone from the wastelands to a frozen landscape -- methane crystals, with little domes here and there, and stupid natives. You know nothing!" Her eyes blazed. "You skulk in the badlands and promise your people a refuge they never found. All your promises have failed -- which is good, because what you have promised them most is that you will curse them and afflict them and destroy them. Now shut up. My time and my realm have come; this is my world and it is springtime and the air does not wither the plants, nor do you. You will hurt no one here in my realm. Do you understand?"

He said, "Who are you?"

Laughing, she said, "My name is Zina. Fairy."

"I think --" Confused, he said, "You --"

"Yahweh," the woman said, "you do not know who I am and you do not know where you are. Is this the Secret Commonwealth? Or have you been tricked?"

"You have tricked me," he said.

"I am your guide," she said. I. As the Sepher Yezirah says:

Comprehend this great wisdom, understand this knowledge, inquire into it and ponder it, render it evident and lead the Creator back to His throne again.


"And that," she finished, "is what I will do. But it is by a route that you will not believe. It is a route that you do not know. You will have to trust me; you will trust your guide as Dante trusted his guide, through the realms, up and up."

He said, "You are the Adversary."

"Yes," Zina said. "I am."

***

But, he thought, that is not all. It is not that simple. You are complex, he realized, you who drive this car. Paradox and contradictions, and, most of all, your love of games. Your desire to play. I must think of it that way, he realized, as play.

"I'll play," he agreed. "I am willing."

"Good." She nodded. "Could you get my cigarettes for me out of my purse? The traffic's getting heavy; I'm going to have trouble finding a parking spot."

He rummaged in her purse. Futilely.

"Can't you find them? Keep looking; they're there."

"You keep so many things in your purse." He found the pack of Salems and held it toward her.

"God doesn't light a woman's cigarette?" She took the cigarette and pressed in the dashboard lighter.

"What does a ten-year-old boy know about that?" he said.

"Strange," she said. "I'm old enough to be your mother. And yet you are older than I am. There is a paradox; you knew you would find paradoxes here. My realm abounds with them, as you were just thinking. Do you want to go back, Yahweh? To the Palm Tree Garden? It is irreal and you know it. Until you inflict decisive defeat on your Adversary it will remain irreal. That world is gone, and is now a memory."

"You are the Adversary," he said, puzzled, "but you are not Belial."

"Belial is in a cage at the Washington, D.C. zoo," Zina said. In my realm. As an example of extraterrestrial life -- a deplorable example. A thing from Sirius, from the fourth planet in the Sirius System. People stand around gaping at him in wonder."

He laughed.

"You think I'm joking. I'll take you to the zoo. I'll show you."

"I think you're serious." Again he laughed; it delighted him. "The Evil One in a cage at the zoo -- what, with his own temperature and gravity and atmosphere, and imported food? An exotic life form?"

"He's angry as hell about it," Zina said.

"I'm sure he is. What do you have planned for me, Zina?"

She said, soberly, "The truth, Yahweh. I will show you the truth before you leave here. I would not cage the Lord our God. You are free to roam my land; you are free here, Yahweh, entirely. I give you my word."

"Vapors," he said. "The bond of a zina."

After some difficulty she found a slot in which to park her flycar. "Okay," she said. "Let's stroll around looking at the cherry blossoms. Yahweh; their color is mine, their pink. That is my hallmark. When that pink light is seen, I am near."

"I know that pink," he said. "It is the human phosphene response to full-spectrum white, to pure sunlight."

As she locked up the flycar she said, "See the people."

He looked about him. And saw no one. The trees, heavy with blossoms, lined the Tidal Basin in a great semicircle. But, despite the parked cars, no persons walked anywhere.

"Then this is a fraud," he said.

Zina said, "You are here, Yahweh, so that I can postpone your great and terrible day. I do not want to see the world scourged. I want you to see what you do not see. Only the two of us are here; we are alone. Gradually 1 will unfold my realm to you, and, when I am done, you will withdraw your curse on the world, I have watched you for years, now. I have seen your dislike of the human race and your sense of its worthlessness. I say to you, It is not worthless; it is not worthy to die -- as you phrase it in your pompous fashion. The world is beautiful and I am beautiful and the cherry blossoms are beautiful, The robot teller at the savings and loan -- even it is beautiful. The power of Belial is mere occlusion, hiding the real world, and if you attack the real world, as you have come to Earth to do, then you will destroy beauty and kindness and charm. Remember the crushed dog dying in the ditch at the side of the road? Remember what you felt about him; remember what you knew him to be. Remember the inscription that Elias composed for that dog and that dog's death. Remember the dignity of that dog, and at the same time remember that the dog was innocent. His death was mandated by cruel necessity. A wrong and cruel necessity. The dog --"

"I know," he said.

"You know what? That the dog was wrongly treated? That he was born to suffer unjust pain? It is not Belial that slew the dog, it is you, Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts. Belial did not bring death into the world because there has always been death; death goes back a billion years on this planet, and what became of that dog -- that is the fate of every creature you have made. You cried over that dog, did you not? I think at that point you understood, but now you have forgotten. If I were to remind you of anything I would remind you of that dog and of how you felt; I would want you to remember how that dog showed you the Way. It is the way of compassion, the most noble way of all, and I do not think you genuinely have that compassion, I really don't. You are here to destroy Belial, your adversary, not to emancipate mankind; you are here to wage war. Is that a fit thing for you to do? I wonder. Where is the peace that you promised man? You have come with a sword and millions will die; it will be the dying dog multiplied millions of times. You cried for the dog, you cried for your mother and even Belial, but I say, if you want to wipe away all the tears, as it says in Scripture, go away and leave this world because the evil of this world, what you call 'Belial' and your 'Adversary' is a form of illusion. These are not bad people. This is not a bad world. Do not make war on it but bring it flowers." Reaching, she broke off a sprig of cherry blossoms; she extended it to him, and, reflexively, he accepted it.

"You are very persuasive," he said.

"It is my job," she said. "I say these things because I know these things. There is no deceit in you and there is no deceit in me, but just as you curse, I play. Which of us has found the Way? For two thousand years you have bided your time until you could slip back into Belial's fortress to overthrow him. I suggest that you find something else to do. Walk with me and we will see flowers. It is better. And the world will prosper as it always has. This is the springtime. It is now that flowers grow, and with me there is dancing also, and the sound of bells. You heard the bells and you know that their beauty is greater than the power of evil. In some ways their beauty is greater than your own power, Yahweh, Lord of Hosts. Do you not agree?"

"Magic," he said. "A spell."

"Beauty is a spell," she said, "and war is reality. Do you want the sobriety of war or the intoxication of what you see now, here in my world? We are alone now, but later on people will appear; I will repopulate my realm. But I want this moment to speak to you plainly. Do you know who I am? You do not know who I am, but finally I will lead you step by step back to your throne, you the Creator, and then you will know who I am. You have guessed but you have not guessed right. There are many guesses left for you -- you who know everything. I am not Holy Wisdom and I am not Diana; I am not a zina; I am not Pallas Athena. I am something else. I am the spring queen and yet I am not that either; these are, as you put it, vapors. What I am, what I truly am, you will have to ferret out on your own. Now let's walk."

They walked along the path, by the water and the trees.

"We are friends, you and I," Emmanuel said. "I tend to listen to you."

"Then postpone your great and terrible day. There is nothing good in death by fire; it is the worst death of all. You are the solar heat that destroys the crops. For four years we have been together, you and I. I have watched as your memory returned and I have regretted its return. You afflicted that miserable woman who was your mother; you sickened your own mother whom you say you love, whom you cried over. Instead of making war against evil, cure the dying dog in the ditch and wipe away thereby your own tears. I hated to see you cry. You cried because you regained your own nature and comprehended that nature. You cried because you realized what you are."

He said nothing.

"The air smells good," Zina said.

"Yes," he said.

"I will bring the people back," she said. "One by one, until they are all around us. Look at them and when you see one whom you would slay, tell me and I will banish that person once more. But you must look at the person whom you would slay -- you must see in that person the crushed and dying dog. Only then do you have the right to slay that person; only when you cry are you entitled to destroy. You understand?"

"Enough," he said.

"Why didn't you cry over the dog before the car crushed him? Why did you wait until it was too late? The dog accepted his situation but I do not. I advise you; I am your guide. I say, It is wrong what you do. Listen to me. Stop it!"

He said, "I have come to lift their oppression."

"You are impaired. I know that; I know what happened in the Godhead, the original crisis. It is no secret to me. In this condition you seek to lift their oppression through a great and terrible day. Is that reasonable? Is that how you free the prisoners?"

"I must break the power of --"

"Where is that power? The government? Bulkowsky and Harms? They are idiots; they are a joke. Would you kill them? The talion law that you laid down; I say:

You have learnt how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance.


"You must live by your own words; you must offer your Adversary Belial no resistance. In my realm his power is not here; he is not here. What is here is a sport in a cage at a public zoo. We feed it and give it water and atmosphere and the right temperature; we try to make the thing as comfortable as possible. In my realm we do not kill. There is, here, no great and terrible day, nor will there ever be. Stay in my realm or make my realm your realm, but spare Belial; spare everyone. And then you will not have to cry, and the tears will, as you promised, be wiped away."

Emmanuel said, "You are Christ."

Laughing, Zina said, "No, I am not."

"You quote him."

"'Even the devil can cite Scripture.'"


Around them groups of people appeared, in light, summery clothing. Men in their shirtsleeves, women in frocks. And, he saw, all the children.

"The fairy queen," he said. "You beguile me. You lead me from the path with sparks of light, dancing, singing, and the sound of bells; always the sound of bells."

"The bells are blown by the wind," Zina said. "And the wind speaks the truth. Always. The desert wind. You know that; I have watched you listen to the wind. The bells are the music of the wind; listen to them."

He heard, then, the fairy bells. They echoed distantly; many bells, small ones, not church bells but the bells of magic.

It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

"I cannot, myself, produce that sound," he said to Zina. "How is it done?"

"By wakefulness," Zina said. "The bell-sounds wake you up. They rouse you from sleep. You roused Herb Asher from his sleep by a crude introjection; I awaken by means of beauty."

Gentle spring wind blew about them, the vapors of her realm.
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:01 am

Chapter 13

To himself Emmanuel said, I am being poisoned. The vapors of her realm poison me and vitiate my will.

"You are wrong," Zina said.

"I feel less strong."

"You feel less indignation. Let's go and get Herb Asher. I want him with us. I will narrow down the area of our game; I will arrange it especially for him."

"In what way?"

"We will contest for him," Zina said. "Come." She beckoned to the boy to follow her.

***

In the cocktail lounge Herb Asher sat with a glass of Scotch and water in front of him. He had been waiting an hour but the evening entertainment had not begun. The cocktail lounge was filled with people. Constant noise assailed his ears. But, for him, this was worth it, despite the rather large cover charge.

Rybys, across from him, said, "I just don't understand what you see in her."

"She's going to go a long way," Herb said, "if she gets any kind of a break at all." He wondered if record company scouts came here to the Golden Hind. I hope so, he said to himself.

"I'd like to leave. I don't feel well. Could we go?"

"I'd prefer not to."

Rybys sipped at her tall mixed drink fitfully. "So much noise," she said, her voice virtually inaudible.

He looked at his watch. "It's almost nine. Her first set is at nine."

"Who is she?" Rybys said.

"She's a new young singer," Herb Asher said. "She's adapted the lute books of John Dowland for --"

"Who's John Dowland? I never heard of him."

"Late-sixteenth-century England. Linda Fox has modernized his lute songs; he was the first composer to write for solo voice; before that four or more people sang ... the old madrigal form. I can't explain it; you have to hear her."

"If she's so good, why isn't she on TV?" Rybys said.

Herb said, "She will be."

Lights on the stage began to glow. Three musicians leaped up onto it and began fussing with the audio system. Each had in his possession a vibrolute.

A hand touched Herb Asher on the shoulder. "Hi."

Glancing up he saw a young woman whom he did not know. But, he thought, she seems to know me. "I'm sorry --" he began.

"May we sit down?" The woman, pretty, wearing a floral print top and jeans, a mail-pouch purse over her shoulder, drew a chair back and seated herself beside Herb Asher. "Sit down, Manny," she said to a small boy who stood awkwardly near the table. What a beautiful child, Herb Asher thought. How did he get in here? There aren't supposed to be any minors in here.

"Are these friends of yours?" Rybys said.

The pretty, dark-haired young woman said, "Herb hasn't seen me since college. How are you, Herb? Don't you recognize me?" She held out her hand to him, and, reflexively, he took it. And then, as he shook her hand, he remembered her. They had been in school together, in a poly-sci course.

"Zina," he said, delighted. "Zina Pallas."

"This is my little brother," Zina said, motioning the boy to sit down. "Manny. Manny Pallas." To Rybys she said. "Herb hasn't changed a bit. I knew it was him when I saw him. You're here to see Linda Fox? I've never heard her; they say she's real good."

"Very good," Herb said, pleased at her support.

"Hello, Mr. Asher," the boy said.

"Glad to meet you, Manny." He shook hands with the boy. "This is my wife, Rybys."

"So you two are married," Zina said. "Mind if I smoke?" She lit a cigarette. "I keep trying to quit but when I quit I start eating a lot and get as fat as a pig."

"Is your purse genuine leather?" Rybys said, interested.

"Yes." Zina passed it over to her.

"I've never seen a leather purse before," Rybys said.

"There she is," Herb Asher said. Linda Fox had appeared on the stage; the audience clapped.

"She looks like a pizza waitress," Rybys said.

Zina, taking her purse back, said, "If she's going to make it big she's going to have to lose some weight. I mean, she looks all right, but --

"What is this thing you have about weight?" Herb Asher said, irritated.

The boy, Manny, spoke up. "Herbert, Herbert."

"Yes?" He bent to hear.

"Remember," the boy said.

Puzzled, he started to say Remember what? but then Linda Fox took hold of the microphone, half shut her eyes, and began to sing. She had a round face, and almost a double chin, but her skin was fair, and, most important to him of all, she had long eyelashes that flickered as she sang -- they fascinated him and he at spellbound. Linda wore an extremely low-cut gown and even from where he sat he could see the outline of her nipples; she had on no bra.

Shall I sue? shall I seek for grace?
Shall I pray? shall I prove?
Shall I strive to a heavenly joy
With an earthly love?


Audibly, Rybys said, "I hate that song. I have heard her before."

Several people hissed at her to be quiet.

"Not by her, though," Rybys said. "She isn't even original. That song --" She piped down, but she was not happy.

When the song ended, and the audience had begun to clap, Herb Asher said to his wife, "You never heard 'Shall I Sue' before. Nobody else sings it but Linda Fox."

"You just like to gape at her nipples," Rybys said.

To Herb Asher the little boy said, "Would you take me to the men's room, Mr. Asher?"

"Now?" he said, dismayed. "Can't you wait until she's through singing?"

The boy said, "Now, Mr. Asher."

With reluctance he led Manny through the maze of tables to the doors at the rear of the lounge. But before they had entered the men's room Manny stopped him.

"You can see her better from here," Manny said.

It was true. He was now much closer to the stage. He and the boy stood together in silence as Linda Fox sang "Weep You No More Sad Fountains."

When the song ended, Manny said, "You don't remember, do you? She has enchanted you. Wake up, Herbert Asher. You know me well, and I know you. Linda Fox does not sing her songs at an obscure cocktail lounge in Hollywood; she is famous throughout the galaxy. She is the most important entertainer of this decade. The chief prelate and the procurator maximus invite her to --"

"She's going to sing again," Herb Asher interrupted. He barely heard the boy's words and they made no sense to him. A babbling boy, he thought, making it hard for me to hear Linda Fox. Just what I need.

After the song had ended, Manny said, "Herbert, Herbert; do you want to meet her? Is that what you want?"

"What?" he murmured, his eyes -- his attention -- fixed on Linda Fox. God, he thought; what a figure she has. She's practically falling out of her dress. He thought, I wish my wife was built like that.

"She will come this way," Manny said, "when she finishes. Stand here, Herb Asher, and she will pass directly by you."

"You're joking," he said.

"No," Manny said. "You will have what you want most in the world, that which you dreamed of as you lay on your bunk in your dome."

"What dome?" he said.

Manny said, "'How you have fallen from heaven, bright morning star, felled --'"

"You mean one of those colony-planet domes?" Herb Asher said.

"I can't make you listen, can I?" Manny said. "If I could say to you --"

"She is coming this way," Herb Asher said. "How did you know?" He moved a few steps toward her. Linda Fox walked rapidly, with small steps, a gentle expression on her face.

"Thank you," she was saying to people who spoke to her. For a moment she stopped to give her autograph to a black youth nattily dressed.

Tapping Herb Asher on the shoulder a waitress said, "You're going to have to take that boy out of here, sir; we can't have minors in here."

"Sorry," Herb Asher said.

"Right now," the waitress said.

"Okay," he said; he took Manny by the shoulder and, with unhappy reluctance, led him back toward their table. And, as he turned away, he saw out of the comer of his eye the Fox pass by the spot at which he and the boy had stood. Manny had been right. A few more seconds and he would have been able to speak a few words to her. And, perhaps, she would have answered.

Manny said, "It is her desire to trick you, Herb Asher. She offered it to you and took it away again. If you want to meet Linda Fox I will see that you do; I promise you. Remember this, because it will come to pass. I will not see you cheated."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Herb said, "but if I could meet her --"

"You will," Manny said.

"You're a strange kid," Herb Asher said. As they passed below a light fixture he noticed something that startled him; he halted and, taking hold of Manny, he moved him directly under the light. You look like Rybys, he thought. For an instant a flash of memory jarred him; his mind seemed to open up, as if vast spaces, open spaces, a universe of stars, had flooded into it.

"Herbert," the boy said, "she is not real. Linda Fox -- she is a phantasm of yours. But I can make her real; I confer being -- it is I who makes the irreal into the real, and I can do it for you, with her."

"What happened?" Rybys said, when they reached the table.

"Manny has to leave," Herb said to Zina Pallas. "The waitress said so. I guess you'll have to go. Sorry."

Taking her purse and cigarettes, Zina rose. "I'm sorry; I guess I kept you from seeing the Fox."

"Let's go with them," Rybys said, also rising. "My head hurts, Herb; I'd like to get out of here."

Resigned, he said, "All right." Cheated, he thought. That was what Manny had said. I will not see you cheated. That is exactly what happened, he realized; I have been cheated this evening. Well, some other time. It would be interesting to talk to her, maybe get her autograph. He thought, close up I could see that her eyelashes are fake. Christ, he thought; how depressing. Maybe her breasts are fake, too. There're those pads they slip in. He felt disappointed and unhappy and now he, too, wanted to leave.

This evening didn't work out, he thought as he escorted Rybys, Zina and Manny from the club onto the dark Hollywood street. I expected so much, and then he remembered what the boy had said, the strange things, and the nanosecond of jarred memory: scenes that appeared in his mind so briefly and yet so convincingly. This is not an ordinary child, he realized. And his resemblance to my wife -- I can see it now, as they stand together. He could be her son. Eerie. He shivered, even though the air was warm.

Zina said, "I fulfilled his wishes; I gave him what he dreamed of. All those months as he lay on his bunk. With his 3-D posters of her, his tapes."

"You gave him nothing," Emmanuel said. "You robbed him, in fact. You took something away."

"She is a media product," Zina said. The two of them walked slowly along the nocturnal Hollywood sidewalk, back to her flycar. "That is no fault of mine. I can't be blamed if Linda Fox is not real."

"Here in your realm that distinction means nothing."

"What can you give him?" Zina said. "Only illness -- his wife's illness. And her death in your service. Is your gift better than mine?"

Emmanuel said, "I made him a promise and I do not lie." I shall fulfill that promise, he said to himself. In this realm or in my own realm; it doesn't matter because in either case I will make Linda Fox real. That is the power I have, and it is not the power of enchantment; it is the most precious gift of all: reality.

"What are you thinking?" Zina said.

"'Better a live dog than a dead prince,'" Manny said.

"Who said that?"

"It is simply common sense."

Zina said, "What is your meaning?"

"I mean that your enchantment gave him nothing and the real world --"

"The real world," Zina said, "put him in cryonic suspension for ten years. Isn't a beautiful dream better than a cruel reality? Would you rather suffer in actuality than enjoy yourself in the domain of --" She paused.

"Intoxication," he said. "That is what your domain consists of; it is a drunken world. Drunken with dancing and with joy. I say that the quality of realness is more important than any other quality, because once realness departs, there is nothing. A dream is nothing. I disagree with you; I say you cheated Herbert Asher. I say you did a cruel thing to him. I saw his reaction; I measured his dejection. And I will make it up to him."

"You will make the Fox real."

"Is it your wager that I can't?"

"My wager," Zina said, "is that it doesn't matter. Real or not she is worthless; you will have achieved nothing."

"I accept the wager," he said.

"Shake my hand on it." She extended her hand.

They shook, standing there on the Hollywood sidewalk under the glaring artificial light.

***

As they flew back to Washington, D.C. Zina said, "In my realm many things are different. Perhaps you would like to meet Party Chairman Nicholas Bulkowsky."

Emmanuel said, "Is he not the procurator?"

"The Communist Party has not the world power that you are accustomed to. The term 'Scientific Legate' is not known. Nor is Fulton Statler Harms the chief prelate of the C.I.C., inasmuch as no Christian-Islamic Church exists. He is a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church; he does not control the lives of millions."

"That is good," Emmanuel said.

"Then I have done well in my domain," Zina said. "Do you agree? Because if you agree --"

"These are good things," Emmanuel said.

"Tell me your objection."

"It is an illusion. In the real world both men hold world power; they jointly control the planet."

Zina said, "I will tell you something you do not understand. We have made changes in the past. We saw to it that the C.I.C. and the S.L. did not come into existence. The world you see here, my world, is an alternate world to your own, and equally real."

"I don't believe you," Emmanuel said.

"There are many worlds."

He said, "I am the generator of world, I and I alone. No one else can create world. I am He Who causes to be. You are not."

"Nonetheless --"

"You do not understand," Emmanuel said. "There are many potentialities that do not become actualized. I select from among the potentialities the ones I prefer and I bestow actuality onto them."

"Then you have made poor choices. It would have been far better if the C.I.C. and the S.L. never came into being."

"You admit, then, that your world is not real? That it is a forgery?"

Zina hesitated. "It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology; in any case we can enter retrotime and overrule mistakes in history. We have done that. In this alternate world Bulkowsky and Harms are minor figures -- they exist, but not as they do in your world. It is a choice of worlds, equally real."

"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 possible: 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 proposition. 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, 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.
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:01 am

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, overfilled 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 IS 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 component, 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; rate 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?"

"If Rybys could collect her goddam scattered wits for one second she could have noticed, She just can't goddam concentrate. 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."

Elias ceased working, "Describe it."

"You were older. And not black. You were a very old man in a robe. I wasn't on Earth; I glimpsed a frozen landscape and it wasn't Terra. Elias -- could I be from another planet, and some powerful agency laid down false memories in my mind, over the real ones? And the boy -- seeing the boy -- caused the real memories to begin to return? And I had the idea that Rybys was very ill, In fact, about to die. And something about Immigration officials with guns."

"Immigration officers don't carry guns."

"And a ship, A long trip at very high speed. Urgency. And most of all -- a presence, An uncanny presence. Not human. Maybe it was an extraterrestrial, the race I'm really a part of. From my home planet."

"Herb," Elias said, "you are full of shit."

"I know. But just for a second I experienced all that. And listen to this." He gestured excitedly, "An accident. Our ship crashing into another ship. My body remembered; it remembered the concussion, the trauma."

"Go to a hypnotherapist," Elias said, "get him to put you under, and remember. You're obviously a weird alien programmed to blow up the world. You probably have a bomb inside you."

Herb said, "That's not funny."

"Okay; you're from some wise, super-advanced noble spiritual race and you were sent here to enlighten mankind. To save us."

Instantly, in Herb Asher's mind, memories flicked on, and then flicked off again. Almost at once.

"What is it?" Elias asked, regarding him acutely.

"More memories. When you said that."

After an interval of silence Elias said, "I wish you would read the Bible sometime."

"It had something to do with the Bible," Herb said. "My mission."

"Maybe you're a messenger," Elias said. "Maybe you have a message to deliver to the world. From God."

"Stop kidding me."

Elias said, "I'm not kidding. Not now." And apparently that was so; his dark face had turned grim.

"What's wrong?" Herb said.

"Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell," Elias said. "We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim."

"Strange," Herb Asher said.

His business partner said, "Yes. Very strange."

***

At the end of the work day, as Herb Asher and his partner were preparing to close up the store a young woman wearing a suede leather jacket, jeans, moccasins and a red silk scarf tied over her hair came in. "Hi," she said to Herb, her hands thrust into the pockets of her jacket. "How are you?"

"Zina," he said, pleased. And a voice inside his head said, How did she find you? This is three thousand miles away from Hollywood. Through an index of locations computer, probably. Still, he sensed something not right. But it did not pertain to his nature to turn down a visit by a pretty girl.

'"Do you have time for a cup of coffee?" she asked.

"Sure," he said.

Shortly, they sat facing each other across a table in a nearby restaurant.

Zina, stirring cream and sugar into her coffee, said, "I want to talk to you about Manny."

"Why does he resemble my wife?" he said.

"Does he? I didn't notice. Manny feels very badly that he prevented you from meeting Linda Fox."

"I'm not sure he did."

"She was coming right at you."

"She was walking our way, but that doesn't prove I would have met her."

"He wants you to meet her. Herb, he feels terrible guilt; he couldn't sleep all right."

Puzzled, he said, "What does he propose?"

"That you write her a fan letter. Explaining the situation. He's convinced she'd answer."

"It's not likely."

Zina said quietly, "You'd be doing Manny a favor. Even if she doesn't answer."

"I'd just as soon meet you," he said. And his words were weighed out carefully; weighed out and measured.

"Oh?" She glanced up. What black eyes she had!

"Both of you," he said. "You and your little brother."

"Manny has suffered brain damage. His mother was injured in a sky accident while she was pregnant with him. He spent several months in a synthowomb, but they didn't get him in the synthowomb in time. So ..." She tapped her fingers against the table. "He is impaired. He's been attending a special school. Because of the neurological damage he comes up with really nuts deas. As an example --" She hesitated. "Well, what the hell. He says he's God."

"My partner should meet him, then," Herb Asher said.

"Oh no," she said, vigorously shaking her head. "I don't want him to meet Elias."

"How did you know about Elias?" he said, and again the peculiar warning sensation drifted through him.

"I stopped at your apartment first and talked to Rybys. We spent several hours together; she mentioned the store and Elias. How else could I have found your store? It's not listed under your name."

"Elias is into religion," he said.

"That's what she told me; that's why I don't want Manny to meet him. They'd just jack each other up higher and higher into theological moonshine."

He answered, "I find Elias very levelheaded."

"Yes, and in many ways Manny is levelheaded. But you get two religious people together and they just sort of -- you know. Endless talk about Jesus and the world coming to an end. The Battle of Armageddon, the conflagration." She shivered. "It gives me the creeps. Hellfire and damnation."

"Elias is into that, all right," Herb said. It almost seemed to him that she knew. Probably Rybys had told her; that was it.

"Herb," Zina said, "will you do Manny the favor he wants? Will you write the Fox --" Her expression changed.

"'The Fox,'" he said. "I wonder if that'll catch on, It's a natural."

Continuing, Zina said, "Will you write Linda Fox and say you'd like to meet her? Ask her where she'll be appearing; they set up those club dates well in advance. Tell her you own an audio store. She's not well known; it isn't like some nationally famous star who gets bales of fan mail. Manny is sure she'll answer."

"Of course I will," he said.

She smiled. And her dark eyes danced.

"No problem," he said. "I'll go back to the store and type it there. We can mail it off together."

From her mail-pouch purse, Zina brought out an envelope. "Manny wrote out the letter for you. This is what he wants you to say, Change it if you want, but -- don't change it too much. Manny worked real hard on it."

"Okay." He accepted the envelope from her. Rising, he said, "Let's go back to the shop."

As he sat at his office typewriter transcribing Manny's letter to the Fox -- as Zina had called her -- Zina paced about the closed-up shop, smoking vigorously.

"Is there something I don't know?" he said. He sensed more to this; she seemed unusually tense.

"Manny and I have a bet going," Zina said. "It has to do with -- well, basically, it has to do with whether Linda Fox will answer or not. The bet is a little more complicated, but that's the thrust of it. Does that bother you?"

"No," he said. "Which of you put down your money which way?"

She did not answer.

"Let it go," he said. He wondered why she had not responded, and why she was so tense about it. What do they think will come of this? he asked himself. "Don't say anything to my wife," he said, then, thinking some thoughts of his own.

He had, then, an intense intuition: that something rested on this, something important, with dimensions that he could not fathom.

"Am I being set up?" he said.

"In what way?"

"I don't know." He had finished typing; he pressed the key for print and the machine -- a smart typewriter -- instantly printed out his letter and dropped it in the receiving bin.

"My signature goes on it," he said.

"Yes. It's from you."

He signed the letter, typed out an envelope, from the address on Manny's copy, and wondered, abruptly, how Zina and Manny had gotten hold of Linda Fox's home address. There it was, on the boy's carefully written holographic letter. Not the Golden Hind but a residence. In Sherman Oaks.

Odd, he thought. Wouldn't her address be unlisted?

Maybe not. She wasn't well known, as had been repeatedly pointed out to him.

"I don't think she'll answer," he said.

"Well, then some silver pennies will change hands."

Instantly he said, "Fairy land."

"What?" she said, startled

"A children's book. Silver Pennies. An old classic. In it there's the statement, 'You need a silver penny to get into fairy land.'" He had owned the book as a child.

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; spellbound, 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 physical 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.

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 entity 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. 1 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 CY30-CY30B; 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 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 existence 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 nothing; 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 rate walked up to Herb's car. "You're totally pale."

"Get in the car," Herb said.

Elias got in.
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:02 am

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 anybody else what you've told me."

"Do you believe me?"

"I believe you've had a very unusual and inexplicable experience, but I don't believe this is an ersatz world. It seems perfectly substantial." He rapped on the plastic surface of the table between them. "No, I don't believe that; I don't believe in unreal 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 occluded 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 sophisticated 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?"

"I just know," Herb said, "that I was caused to remember, made to remember, the real world. My knowledge that this world here" -- he tapped the table -- "is based on that memory, not on my experience of this forgery. I am comparing; I have something to compare this world with. That is it."

"Couldn't the memories be false?"

"I know they are not."

"How do you know?"

"I trust the beam of pink light."

"Why?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Because it said it was God? The agency of enchantment can say that. The demonic power."

"We'll see," Herb Asher said. He wondered once more what the wager was, what they expected him to do.

***

Five days later at his home he received a long-distance person-to-person fone call. On the screen a slightly chubby female face appeared, and a shy, breathless voice said, "Mr. Asher? This is Linda Fox, I'm calling you from California. I got your letter."

His heart ceased to beat; it stilled within him. "Hello, Linda," he said. "Ms. Fox. I guess." He felt numbed.

"I'll tell you why I'm calling." She had a gentle voice, a rushing, excited voice; it was as if she panted, timidly. "First I want to thank you for your letter; I'm glad you like me -- I mean my singing. Do you like the Dowland? Is that a good idea?"

He said, "Very good. I especially like 'Weep You No More Sad Fountains.' That's my favorite."

"What I want to ask you -- your letterhead; you're in the retail home audio system business. I'm moving to an apartment in Manhattan in a month and I must get an audio system set up right away; we have tapes we made out here on the West Coast that my producer will be sending me -- I have to be able to listen to them as they really sound, on a really good system." Her long lashes fluttered apprehensively. "Could you fly to New York next week and give me an idea of what sort of sound system you could install? I don't care how much it costs; I won't be paying for it -- 1 signed with Superba Records and they're going to pay for everything."

"Sure," he said.

"Or would it be better if I flew to Washington, D.C.?" she continued. "Whichever is better. It has to be done quickly; they told me to stress that. This is so exciting for me; I just signed, and I have a new manager. I'm going to be making video discs later on, but we're starting with audio tapes now -- can you do it? I really don't know who to ask. There're a lot of retail electronics places out here on the West Coast but I don't know anyone on the East Coast. I suppose I should be going to somebody in New York, but Washington, D.C. isn't very far, is it? I mean, you could get up there, couldn't you? Superba and my producer -- he's with them -- will cover all your expenses."

"No problem," he said.

"Okay. Well, here's my number in Sherman Oaks and I'll give you my Manhattan number; both fone numbers. How did you know my Sherman Oaks address? The letter came directly to me. I'm not supposed to be listed."

"A friend. Somebody in the industry. Connections; you know. I'm in the business."

"You caught me at the Hind? The acoustics are peculiar there. Could you hear me all right? You look familiar; I think I saw you in the audience. You were standing in the corner."

"I had a little boy with me."

Linda Fox said, "I did see you; you were looking at me -- you had the most unusual expression. Is he your son?"

"No," he said.

"Are you ready to write down these numbers?"

She gave him her two fone numbers; he wrote them down shakily. "I'll put in a hell of an audio system for you," he managed to say. "It's been a terrific treat talking to you. I'm convinced you're going all the way, all the way to the top, to the top of the charts. You're going to be listened to and looked at all over the galaxy. I know it. Believe me."

"You are so sweet," Linda Fox said. "I have to go, now. Thank you. OK? Goodbye. I'll be expecting to hear from you. Don't forget. This is urgent; it has to be done. So many problems but -- it's exciting. Goodbye." She hung up.

As he hung up the fone Herb Asher said aloud, "I'll be god damned. I don't believe it."

From behind him Rybys said, "She called you. She actually foned you. That's quite something. Are you going to put in a system for her? It means --"

"I don't mind flying to New York. I'll acquire the components up there; no need to transport them from down here."

"Do you think you should take Elias with you?"

"We'll see," he said, his mind clouded, buzzing with awe.

"Congratulations," Rybys said. "I have a hunch I should go with you, but if you promise not to --"

"It's OK," he said, barely listening to her. "The Fox," he said. "I talked to her. She called me. Me. "

"Didn't you tell me something about Zina and her little brother having some kind of bet? They bet -- one of them bet -- she wouldn't answer your letter, and the other bet she would?"

"Yeah," he said. "There's a bet." He did not care about the bet. I will see her, he said to himself. I will visit her new Manhattan apartment, spend an evening with her. Clothes; I need new clothes. Christ, I have to look good.

"How much gear do you think you can unload on her?" Rybys said.

Savagely, he said, "It isn't a question of that."

Shrinking back, Rybys said, "I'm sorry. I just meant -- you know. How extensive a system; that's all I meant."

"She will be getting the best system money can buy," he said. "Only the finest. What I would want for myself. Better than what I'd get for myself."

"Maybe this will be good publicity for the store."

He glared at her.

"What is it?" Rybys said.

"The Fox," he said, simply. "It was the Fox calling me on the fone. I can't believe it."

"Better call Zina and Emmanuel and tell them. I have their number."

He thought, No. This is my business. Not theirs.

***

To Zina, Emmanuel said, "The time is here. Now we will see which way it goes. He'll be flying to New York shortly. It won't be long."

"Do you already know what will happen?" Zina asked.

"What I want to know," Emmanuel said, "is this. Will you withdraw your world of empty dreams if he finds her --"

"He will find her worthless," Zina said. "She is an empty fool, without wit, without wisdom; she has no sense, and he will walk away from her because you cannot make something like that into reality."

Emmanuel said, "We will see."

"Yes, we shall," Zina said. " A nonentity awaits Herb Asher. She looks up to him. "

There, precisely, Emmanuel declared in the recesses of his secret mind, you have made your mistake. Herb Asher does not thrive on his adoration of her; it is mutuality that is needed, and you have handed me that. When you debased her here in your domain you accidentally imparted substance into her.

And this, he thought, because you do not know what substance is; it lies beyond you. But not, he thought, beyond me. It is my domain.

"I think," he said, "you have already lost."

With delight, Zina said, "You do not know what I play for! You know neither me nor my goals!"

That may be so, he reflected.

But I know myself; and -- I know my goals.

***

Wearing a fashionable suit, purchased at some considerable expense, Herb Asher boarded a luxury-class commercial rocket for New York City. Briefcase in hand -- it contained specs on all the latest home audio systems finding their way onto the market -- he sat gazing out the window as the three-minute trip unrolled. The rocket began to descend almost at once.

This is the most wonderful moment in my life, he declared inwardly as the retrojets fired. Look at me; I am right out of the pages of Style magazine.

Thank God Rybys didn't come along.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the overhead speakers announced, "we have now landed at Kennedy Spaceport. Please remain in your seats until the tone sounds; then you may exit at the front end of the ship. Thank you for taking Delta Spacelines."

"Enjoy your day," the robot steward said to Herb Asher as he jauntily exited from the ship.

"You, too," Herb said. "And plenty more besides."

By Yellow cab he flew directly to the Essex House where he had his reservation -- the hell with the cost -- for the next two days. Very soon he unpacked, surveyed the grand appointments of his room, and then, after taking a Valzine (the best of the latest generations of cortical stimulants) picked up the fone and dialed Linda Fox's Manhattan number.

"How exciting to know you're in town," she said when he identified himself. "Can you come over now? I have some people here but they're just leaving. This decision about my equipment, this is something I want to do slowly and carefully. What time is it now? I just got here from California."

"It's 7 P.M. New York time," he said.

"Have you had dinner?"

"No," he said. It was like a fantasy; he felt as if he was in a dream world, a kingdom of the divine. He felt -- like a child, he thought. Reading my Silver Pennies book of poems. Apparently I found a silver penny, and made my way there. Where I have always yearned to be. Home is the sailor home from the sea, he thought. And the hunter ... He could not remember how the verse went. Well, in any case it was appropriate; he was home at last.

And there is no one here to tell me she looks like a pizza waitress, he informed himself. So I can forget that.

"I've got some food here in my apartment; I'm into health foods. If you want some ... I have actual orange juice, soybean curd, organic foods. I don't believe in slaughtering animals."

"Fine," he said. "Sure; anything. You name it."

When he reached her apartment -- in an outstandingly lovely building -- he found her wearing a cap, a turtleneck sweater and white duck shorts; barefoot, she welcomed him into the living room. No furniture at all; she hadn't moved in yet. In the bedroom a sleeping bag and an open suitcase. The rooms were large and the picture window gave her a view of Central Park.

"Hello," she said. "I'm Linda." She extended her hand. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Asher."

"Call me Herb," he said.

"On the Coast, the West Coast, everyone introduces people by their first names only; I'm trying to train myself away from that, but I can't. I was raised in Southern California, in Riverside." She shut the door after him. "It's ghastly without any furniture, isn't it? My manager is picking it out; it'll be here the day after tomorrow. Well, he's not picking it out alone; I'm helping him. Let's see your brochures." She had noticed his briefcase and her eyes sparkled with anticipation.

She does look a little like a pizza waitress, he thought. But that's okay. Her complexion, up close, in the glare of the overhead lighting, was not as clear as he had thought; in fact, he noticed, she had a little acne.

"We can sit on the floor," she said; she threw herself down, bare knees raised, her back against the wall. "Let's see. I'm relying on you entirely."

He began, "I assume you want studio quality items. What we call professional components. Not what the ordinary person has in his home."

"What's that?" She pointed to a picture of huge speakers. "They look like refrigerators."

"That's an old design," he said, turning to the next page. "Those work by means of a plasma. Derived from helium. You have to keep buying tanks of helium, They look good, though, because the helium plasma glows. It's produced by extremely high voltage. Here, let me show you something more recent; helium plasma transduction is obsolete or soon will be."

Why do I have the feeling I'm imagining all this? he asked himself, Maybe because it's so wonderful. But still ...

For a couple of hours the two of them sat together leaning against the wall going through his literature. Her enthusiasm was enormous, but, eventually, she began to tire.

"I am hungry," she said. "I don't really have the right clothes with me to go to a restaurant; you have to dress up back here -- it's not like Southern California where you can wear anything. Where are you staying?"

"The Essex House."

Standing, stretching, Linda Fox said, "Let's go back to your suite and order room service. Okay?"

"Outstanding," he said, getting up.

***

After they had eaten dinner together in his room at the hotel Linda Fox paced about, her arms folded. "You know something?" she said. "I keep having this recurring dream that I'm the most famous singer in the galaxy. It's exactly like what you said on the fone. My fantasy life in my subconscious, I guess. But I keep dreaming these production scenes where I'm recording tape after tape and giving concerts, and I have all this money. Do you believe in astrology?"

"I guess I do," he said.

"And places I've never been to; I dream about that. And people I've never seen before, important people. People big in the entertainment field. And we're always rushing around from place to place. Order some wine, would you? I don't know anything about French wine; you decide. But don't make it too dry."

He knew nothing about French wine either, but he got the wine list from the hotel's main restaurant and, with the help of the wine steward, ordered a bottle of expensive burgundy.

"This tastes great," Linda Fox said, curled up on the couch, her bare legs tucked under her. "Tell me about yourself. How long have you been in retail audio components?"

"A number of years," he said.

"How did you beat the draft?"

That puzzled him. He had the idea that the draft had been abolished years ago.

"It has?" Linda said when he told her. Puzzled, the trace of a frown on her face, she said, "That's funny. I was sure there was a draft, and a lot of men have migrated out to colony worlds to escape it. Have you ever been off Earth?"

"No," he said. "But I'd like to try interplanetary travel just for the experience of it." Seating himself on the couch beside her he casually put his arm behind her; she did not pull away. "And to touch down on another planet. That must be some sensation."

"I'm perfectly happy here." She leaned her head back against his arm and shut her eyes. "Rub my back," she said. "I'm stiff from leaning against the wall; it hurts here." She touched a midpoint in her spine, leaning forward. He began to massage her neck. "That feels good," she murmured.

"Lie down on the bed," he said. "So I can get more pressure; I can't do it very well this way."

"Okay." Linda Fox hopped from the couch and padded barefoot across the room. "What a nice bedroom. I've never stayed at the Essex House. Are you married?"

"No," he said. No point telling her about Rybys. .'1 was once but I got divorced."

"Isn't divorce awful?" She lay on the bed, prone, her arms stretched out.

Bending over her he kissed the back of her head.

"Don't," she said.

"Why not?"

"I can't."

"Can't what?" he said.

"Make love. I'm having my period."

Period? Linda Fox has periods? He was incredulous. He drew back from her, sitting bolt upright.

"I'm sorry," she said. She seemed relaxed. "Start up around my shoulders," she said. "It's stiff there. I'm sleepy. The wine, I guess. Such ..." She yawned. "Good wine."

"Yes," he said, still sitting away from her.

All at once she burped; her hand, then, flew to her mouth. "Pardon me," she said.

***

He flew back to Washington, D.C. the next morning. She had returned to her barren apartment that night, but the matter was moot anyhow because of her period. A couple of times she mentioned -- he thought unnecessarily -- that she always had severe cramps during her period and had them now. On the return trip he felt weary, but he had closed a deal for a rather large sum; Linda Fox had signed the papers ordering a top-of-the-line stereo system, and, later, he would return and supervise the installation of video recording and playback components. All in all it had been a profitable trip.

And yet -- his ultimate move had fallen through because Linda Fox ... it had been the wrong time. Her menstrual cycle, he thought. Linda Fox has periods and cramps? he asked himself. I don't believe it. But I guess it's true. Could it have been a pretext? No, it was not a pretext. It was real.

When he arrived back home his wife greeted him with a single question. "Did you two fool around?"

"No," he said. Worse luck.

"You look tired," Rybys said.

"Tired but happy." It had been a satisfying and rewarding experience; he and the Fox had sat together talking for hours. An easy person to get to know, he thought. Relaxed, enthusiastic; a good person. Substantial. Not at all affected. I like her, he said to himself. It'll be good to see her again.

And, he thought, I know she'll go far.

It was odd how strong that intuition was inside him, his sense about the Fox's future success. Well, the explanation was that Linda Fox was just plain good.

"What kind of person is she?" Rybys said. "Nothing but talk about her career, probably."

"She is tender and gentle and modest," he said, "and totally informal. We talked about a lot of things."

"Could I meet her sometime?"

"I don't see why not," he said. "I'll be flying up there again. And she said something about flying down here and visiting the store. She goes all over the place; her career is taking off at this point -- she's beginning to get the big breaks she needs and deserves and I'm glad for her, really glad."

If she only hadn't been having her period ... but I guess those are the facts of life, he said to himself. That's what makes up reality. Linda is the same as any other woman in that regard; it comes with the territory.

I like her anyhow, he said to himself. Even if we didn't go to bed. The enjoyment of her company: that was enough.

***

To Zina Pallas, the boy said, "You have lost."

"Yes, I have lost." She nodded. "You made her real and he still cares for her. The dream for him is no longer a dream; it is true down to the level of disappointments."

"Which is the stamp of authenticity."

"Yes," she said. "Congratulations." Zina extended her hand to Emmanuel and they shook.

"And now," the boy said, "you will tell me who you are."
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:03 am

Chapter 16

Zina said, "Yes, I will tell you who I am, Emmanuel, but I will not let your world return. Mine is better. Herb Asher leads a much happier life; Rybys is alive ... Linda Fox is real --"

"But you did not make her real," he said. "I did."

"Do you want back again the world you gave them? With the winter, its ice and snow, over everything? It is I who burst the prison; I brought in the springtime. I deposed the procurator maximus and the chief prelate. Let it stay as it is."

"I will transmute your world into the real," he said. "I have already begun. I manifested myself to Herb Asher when you kissed him; I penetrate your world in my true form. I am making it my world, step by step. What the people must do, however, is remember. They may live in your world but they must know that a worse one existed and they were forced to live in it. I restored Herb Asher's memories, and the others dream dreams."

"That's fine with me."

"Tell me, now," he said, "who you are."

"Let us go," she said, "hand in hand. Like Beethoven and Goethe: two friends. Take us to Stanley Park in British Columbia and we will observe the animals there, the wolves, the great white wolves. It is a beautiful park, and Lionsgate Bridge is beautiful; Vancouver, British Columbia is the most beautiful city on Earth."

"That is true," he said. "I had forgotten."

"And after you view it I want you to ask yourself if you would destroy it or change it in any way. I want you to inquire of yourself if you would, upon seeing such earthly beauty, bring into existence your great and terrible day in which all the arrogant and evil-doers shall be chaff, set ablaze, leaving them neither root nor branch. OK?"

"OK," Emmanuel said.

Zina said:

We are spirits of the air
Who of human beings take care.


"Are you?" he said. Because, he thought, if that is so then you are an atmospheric spirit, which is to say -- an angel.

Zina said:

Come, all ye songsters of the sky,
Wake and assemble in this wood;
But no ill-boding bird be nigh,
None but the harmless and the good.


"What are you saying?" Emmanuel said.

"Take us to Stanley Park first," Zina said. "Because if you take us there, we shall actually be there; it will be no dream."

He did so.

***

Together they walked across the verdant ground, among the vast trees. These stands, he knew, had never been logged; this was the primeval forest. "It is exceedingly beautiful," he said to her.

"It is the world," she said.

"Tell me who you are."

Zina said, "I am the Torah."

***

After a moment Emmanuel said, "Then I can do nothing regarding the universe without consulting you."

"And you can do nothing regarding the universe that is contrary to what I say," Zina said, "as you yourself decided, in the beginning, when you created me. You made me alive; I am a living being that thinks. I am the plan of the universe, its blue print. That is the way you intended it and that is the way it is."

"Hence the slate you gave me," he said.

"Look at me," Zina said.

He looked at her -- and saw a young woman, wearing a crown, and sitting on a throne. "Malkuth," he said. "The lowest of the ten sefiroth."

"And you are the Eternal Infinite En Sof," Malkuth said. "The first and highest of the sefiroth of the Tree of Life."

"But you said that you are the Torah."

"In the Zohar." Malkuth said, "the Torah is depicted as a beautiful maiden living alone, secluded in a great castle. Her secret lover comes to the castle to see her, but all he can do is wait futilely outside hoping for a glimpse of her. Finally she appears at the window and he is able to catch sight of her, but only for an instant. Later on she lingers at the window and he is able, therefore, to speak with her; yet, still, she hides her face behind a veil ... and her answers to his questions are evasive. Finally, after a long time, when her lover has become despairing that he will ever get to know her, she permits him to see her face at last."

Emmanuel said, "Thus revealing to her lover all the secrets which she has up to now, throughout the long courtship, kept buried in her heart. I know the Zohar. You are right."

"So you know me now, En Sof," Malkuth said. "Does it please you?"

"It does not," he said, "because although what you say is true, there is one more veil to be removed from your face. There is one more step."

"True." Malkuth, the lovely young woman seated on the throne, wearing a crown, said, "but you will have to find it."

"I will," he said. "I am so close now; only a step, one single step, away."

"You have guessed," she said. "But you must do better than that. Guessing is not enough; you must know."

"How beautiful you are, Malkuth," he said. "And of course you are here in the world and love the world; you are the sefira that represents the Earth. You are the womb containing everything, all the other sefiroth that constitute the Tree itself; those other forces, nine of them, are generated by you."

"Even Kether," Malkuth said, calmly. "Who is highest."

"You are Diana, the fairy queen," he said. "You are Pallas Athena, the spirit of righteous war; you are the spring queen, you are Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom; you are the Torah which is the formula and blueprint of the universe; you are Malkuth of the Kabala, the lowest of the ten sefiroth of the Tree of Life; and you are my companion and friend, my guide. But what are you actually? Under all the disguises? I know what you are and --" He put his hand on hers. "I am beginning to remember. The Fall, when the Godhead was torn apart."

"Yes," she said, nodding. "You are remembering back to that, now. To the beginning."

"Give me time," he said. "Just a little more time. It is hard. It hurts."

She said, "I will wait." Seated on her throne she waited. She had waited for thousands of years, and, in her face, he could see the patient and placid willingness to wait longer, as long as was necessary. Both of them had known from the beginning that this moment would come, when they would be back together. They were together now, again, as it had been originally. All he had to do was name her. To name is to know, he thought. To know and to summon; to call.

"Shall I tell you your name?" he said to her.

She smiled, the lovely dancing smile, but no mischief shone in her eyes; instead, love glimmered at him, vast extents of love.

***

Nicholas Bulkowsky, wearing his red army uniform, prepared to address a crowd of the Party faithful at the main square of Bogota, Colombia, where recruiting efforts had of late been highly successful. If the Party could swing Colombia into the anti-fascist camp the disastrous loss of Cuba would be somewhat offset.

However, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church had recently put in an appearance -- not a local person, but an American, dispatched by the Vatican to interfere with CP activities. Why must they meddle? Bulkowsky asked himself. Bulkowsky. He had discarded that name; now he was known as General Gomez.

To his Colombian advisor he said, "Give me the psychological profile on this Cardinal Harms."

"Yes, Comrade General." Ms. Reiz passed him the file on the American troublemaker.

Studying the file, Bulkowsky said, "His head is up his ass. He's a spinner of theology. The Vatican picked the wrong person." We will tie Harms into knots, he said to himself, pleased.

"Sir," Ms. Reiz said, "Cardinal Harms is said to have charisma. He attracts crowds wherever he goes."

"He will attract a lead pipe to the head," Bulkowsky said, "if he shows up in Colombia."

***

As a distinguished guest of an afternoon TV talkshow, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms had lapsed into his usual sententious prose. The moderator, hoping to interrupt at some point, in order to achieve a much-needed commercial information dump, looked ill at ease.

"Their policies," Harms declared, "inspire disorder, which they capitalize on. Social unrest is the cornerstone of atheistic communism. Let me give you an example."

"We'll be back in just a moment," the moderator said, as the camera panned up on his bland features. "But first these messages." Cut to a spray can of Yardguard.

To the moderator -- since for a moment they were off camera -- Fulton Harms said, "What's the real estate market like, here in Detroit? I have some funds I want to invest, and office buildings, I've discovered, are about the soundest investments of all."

"You had better consult --" The moderator received a visual signal from the show's producer; immediately he composed his face into its normal look of sagacity and said, in his informal but professional tone, "We're talking today with Cardinal Fulton Harmer --"

"Harms," Harms said.

"-- Harms of the Diocese of --"

"Archdiocese," Harms said, miffed.

"-- of Detroit," the moderator continued. "Cardinal, isn't it a fact that in most Catholic countries, especially those in the Third World, no substantial middle class exists? That you tend to find a very wealthy elite and a poverty-stricken population with little or no education and little or no hope of bettering themselves? Is there some kind of correlation between the Church and this deplorable situation?"

"Well," Harms said, at a loss.

"Let me put it to you this way," the moderator continued; he was perfectly relaxed, perfectly in control of the situation. "Hasn't the Church held back economic and social progress for centuries upon centuries? Isn't the Church in fact a reactionary institution devoted to the betterment of a few and the exploitation of the many, trading on human credulity? Would that be a fair statement, Cardinal, sir?"

"The Church," Harms said feebly, "looks after the spiritual welfare of man; it is responsible for his soul."

"But not his body."

"The communists enslave man's body and man's soul," Harms said. "The Church --"

"I'm sorry, Cardinal Fulton Harms," the moderator broke in, "but that's all the time we have. We've been talking with --"

"Frees man from original sin," Harms said.

The moderator glanced at him.

"Man is born in sin," Harms said, totally unable to gather his train of thought together.

"Thank you Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms," the moderator said. "And now this."

More commercials. Harms, within himself, groaned. Somehow, he ruminated as he rose from the luxurious chair in which they had seated him, somehow I feel as if I've known better days.

He could not put his finger on it, but the feeling was there. And now I have to go to that little rat's ass country Colombia, he reflected. Again; I've been there once, as briefly as possible, and now I have to fly back this afternoon. They have me on a string and they just plain jerk me around this way and that. Off to Colombia, back home to Detroit, over to Baltimore, then back to Colombia; I'm a cardinal and I have to put up with this? 1 feel like stepping down.

This is not the best of all possible worlds, he said to himself as he made his way to the elevator. And TV hosts of daytime talk shows abuse me.

Libera me Domine. he declared to himself, and it was a mute appeal; save me, God. Why doesn't he listen to me? Harms wondered as he stood waiting for the elevator. Maybe there is no God; maybe the communists are right. If there is a God he certainly doesn't do anything for me.

Before I leave Detroit, he decided, I'll check with my investment broker about office buildings. If I have the time.

***

Rybys Rommey-Asher, plodding listlessly into the living room of their apartment, said, "I'm back." She shut the front door and took off her coat. "The doctor says it's an ulcer. A pyloric ulcer, it's called. I have to take phenobarb for it and drink Maalox."

"Does it still hurt?" Herb Asher said; he had been going through his tape collection, searching for the Mahler Second Symphony.

"Could you pour me some milk?" Rybys threw herself down on the couch. "I'm exhausted." Her face, puffy and dark, seemed to him to be swollen. "And don't play any loud music. I can't take any noise right now. Why aren't you at the shop?"

"It's my day off." He found the tape of the Mahler Second. "I'll put on the earspeakers," he said. "So it won't bother you."

Rybys said, "I want to tell you about my ulcer. I learned some interesting facts about ulcers -- I stopped off at the library. Here." She held out a manila folder. "I got a printout of a recent article. There's this theory that --"

"I'm going to listen to the Mahler Second," he said.

"Fine." Her tone was bitter and sardonic. "You go ahead."

"There's nothing I can do about your ulcer," he said.

"You can listen to me."

Herb Asher said, "I'll bring you the milk." He walked into the kitchen and he thought, Must it be like this?

If I could hear the Second, he thought, I'd feel okay. The only symphony scored for many pieces of rattan, he mused. A Ruthe, which looks like a small broom; they use it to play the bass drum. Too bad Mahler never saw a Morley wah-wah pedal, he thought, or he would have scored it into one of his longer works.

Returning to the living room he handed his wife her glass of milk.

"What have you been doing?" she said. "I notice you haven't picked up or cleaned up or anything."

"I've been on the fone to New York," he said.

"Linda Fox," Rybys said.

"Yes. Ordering her audio components."

"When are you going back to see her?"

"I'll be supervising the installation. I want to check the system over when it's all set up."

"You really like her," Rybys said.

"It's a good sale."

"No, I mean personally. You like her." She paused and then said, "I think, Herb, I'm going to divorce you."

He said, "Are you serious?"

"Very."

"Because of Linda Fox?"

"Because I'm sick and tired of this place being a sty. I'm sick and tired of doing dishes for you and your friends. I'm especially sick and tired of Elias; he's always showing up unexpectedly; he never fones before he comes over. He acts like he lives here. Half the money we spend on food goes for him and his needs. He's like some kind of beggar. He looks like a beggar. And that nutty religious crap of his, that 'The world is coming to an end' stuff ... I can't take any more of it." She fell silent and then, in pain, she grimaced.

"Your ulcer?" he asked.

"My ulcer, yes. The ulcer I got worrying about --"

"I'm going to the shop," he said; he made his way to the door. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Herb Asher," Rybys said. "Leave me here and go stand around talking to pretty lady customers and listening to high- performance new audio components that'll knock your socks off, for half a million dollars."

He shut the door after him, and, a moment later, rose up into the sky in his flycar.

***

Later in the day, when no customers wandered around the store checking out the new equipment, he seated himself in the listening room with his business partner. "Elias," he said, "I think Rybys and I have come to the end."

Elias said, "What are you going to do instead? You're used to living with her; it's a basic part of you, taking care of her. Satisfying her wants."

"Psychologically," Herb said, "she is very sick."

"You knew that when you married her."

"She can't focus her attention. She's scattered. That's the technical term for it. That's what the tests showed. That's why she's so messy; she can't think and she can't act and she can't concentrate." The Spirit of Futile Effort, he said to himself.

"What you need," Elias said, "is a son. I saw how much affection you have for Manny, that woman's little brother. Why =don't you --" He broke off. "It's none of my business."

"If I got mixed up with anybody else," Herb said, "I know who it would be. But she'd never give me a tumble."

"That singer?"

"Yes," he said.

"Try," Elias said.

"It's beyond my reach."

"Nobody knows what's beyond his reach. God decides what's beyond a person's reach."

Elias said, "But she isn't yet. If you're going to make a move toward her, do it now."

"The Fox," Herb Asher said. "That's how I think of her." A phrase popped into his mind:

You are with the Fox, and the Fox is with you!


Not Linda Fox singing but Linda Fox speaking. He wondered where the notion came from, that she would be saying that. Again vague memories, compounded of -- he did not know what. A more aggressive Linda Fox; more professional and dynamic. And yet remote. As if from millions of miles off. A signal from a star. In both senses of the word.

From the distant stars, he thought. Music and the sound of bells.

"Maybe," he said, "I'll emigrate to a colony world."

"Rybys is too ill for that."

"I'll go alone," Herb said.

Elias said, "You'd be better off dating Linda Fox. If you can swing it. You'll be seeing her again. Don't give up yet. Make a try. The basis of life is trying."

"OK," Herb Asher said. "I will try."
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:03 am

Chapter 17

Hand in hand, Emmanuel walked with Zina through the dark woods of Stanley Park. "You are myself," he said. "You are the Shekhina, the immanent Presence who never left the world." He thought, The female side of God. Known to the Jews and only to the Jews. When the primordial fall took place, the Godhead split into a transcendent part separated from the world; that was En Sof. But the other part, the female immanent part, remained with the fallen world, remained with Israel.

These two portions of the Godhead, he thought, have been detached from each other for millennia. But now we have come together again, the male half of the Godhead and the female half. While I was away the Shekhina intervened in the lives of human beings, to assist them. Here and there, sporadically, the Shekhina remained. So God never truly left mankind.

"We are each other," Zina said, "and we have found each other again, and again are one. The split is healed."

"Through all your veils," Emmanuel said, "beneath all your forms, there lay this ... my own self. And I did not recognize you, until you reminded me."

"How did I accomplish that?" Zina said, and then she said, "But I know. My love of games. That is your love, your secret joy: to play like a child. To be not serious. I appealed to that; I woke you up and you remembered: you recognized me."

"Such a difficult process," he said. "For me to remember. I thank you," She had abased herself in the fallen world all this time, while he had left; the greater heroism was hers. Staying with man in all man's inglorious conditions ... down into the prison with him, Emmanuel thought. Man's beautiful companion. At his side as she is now at mine.

"But you are back," Zina said. "You have returned."

"That is so," he said. "Returned to you, I had forgotten that you existed. I only recalled the world." You the kind side, he thought; the compassionate side. And I the terrible side that arouses fear and trembling. Together we form a unity. Separated, we are not whole; we are not, individually, enough.

"Clues," Zina said. "I kept giving you clues. But it was up to you to recognize me."

Emmanuel said, "I did not know who I was for a time, and I did not know who you were. Two mysteries confronted me, and they had a single answer."

"Let's go look at the wolves," Zina said. "They are such beautiful animals. And we can ride the little train. We can visit all the animals."

"And let them free," Emmanuel said.

"Yes," she said. "And let them, all of them, free."

"Will Egypt always exist?" he said. "Will slavery always exist?"

"Yes," Zina said. "And so will we."

As they approached the Stanley Park Zoo, Emmanuel said, "The animals will be surprised by their freedom. At first they won't know what to do."

"Then we will teach them," Zina said. "As we always have. What they know they have learned from us; we are their guide."

"So be it," lie said, and placed his hand on the first metal cage. Within it a small animal peered at him hesitantly. Emmanuel said, "Come out of your cage."

The animal, trembling, came to him, and he took it in his arms.

From his audio store Herb Asher called Linda at her Sherman Oaks home. It took a little while -- two robot secretaries held him up temporarily -- but at last he got through.

"Hello," he said when he had her on the line.

"How's my sound system coming?" She blinked rapidly and put her finger to her eye. "My contact lens is slipping; just a second." Her face disappeared from the screen. "I'm back," she said. "I owe you a dinner, Right? Do you want to fly out to California? I'm still at the Golden Hind; I will be for another week. We're getting good audiences; I'm trying out a whole lot of new material. I want your reaction to it."

"Fine," he said, enormously pleased.

"So can we get together, then?" Linda said. "Out here?"

"Sure," he said. "You name a time."

"What about tomorrow night? It'll have to be before I go to work, if we're going to have dinner."

"Fine," he said. "Around 6 P.M. California time?"

She nodded. "Herb," she said, "you can stay at my place if you want; I've got a big house. Plenty of room."

"I'd love to," he said.

"I'll serve you some very good California wine. A Mondavi red. I want you to like California wines; that French burgundy we had in New York was very nice, but -- we have excellent wines out here."

"Is there a particular place you want to have dinner?"

"Sachiko's," Linda said. "Japanese food."

"You've got yourself a deal," he said.

"Is my sound system coming along okay?" she asked.

"Doing fine," he said.

"I don't want you to work too hard," Linda Fox said. "I have a feeling you work too hard. I want you to relax and enjoy life. There's so much to enjoy: good wine, friends."

Herb said, "Laphroaig Scotch."

In amazement, Linda Fox exclaimed, "Don't tell me you know about Laphroaig Scotch? I thought I was the only person in the world who drinks Laphroaig!"

"It's been made in the traditional copper stills for over two hundred and fifty years," Herb Asher said. "It requires two distillations and the skill of an expert stillman."

"Yes; that's what it says on the package." She began to laugh. "You got that off the package, Herb."

"Yeah," he said.

"Isn't my Manhattan apartment going to be great?" she said enthusiastically. "That sound system you're putting in is what will make it. Herb --" She scrutinized him. "Do you honestly believe my music is good?"

"Yes," he said. "I know. What I say is true."

"You are so sweet," she said. "You see so much ahead for me. It's like you're my good luck person. You know, Herb, no one has ever really had confidence in me. I never did well in school ... my family didn't think I could make it as a singer. I had skin trouble, too; really bad. Of course I actually haven't made it yet -- I'm just beginning. And yet to you I'm --" She gestured.

"Someone important," he said.

"And that means so much to me. I need it so bad. Herb, I have such a low opinion of myself; I'm so sure I'm going to fail. Or I used to be so sure," she collected herself. "But you give me -- Well, when I see myself through your eyes I don't see a struggling new artist; I see something that ..." She tried to go on; her lashes fluttered and she smiled at him apprehensively but hopefully, wanting him to finish for her.

"I know about you," he said, "as no one else does." And, indeed, that was true; because he remembered her, and no one else did. The world, collectively, had forgotten; it had fallen asleep. It would have to be reminded. And it would be.

"Come on out to the West Coast, Herb," Linda said. "Please. We'll have a lot of fun. Do you know California very well? You don't, do you?"

"I don't," he admitted. "I flew out to catch you at the Golden Hind. And I always dreamed of living in California. But I never did."

"I'll take you all around. It'll be terrific. And you can cheer me up when I'm depressed and reassure me when I'm scared. OK?"

"OK," he said, and felt, for her, great love.

"When you get out here, tell me what I do right in my music and what I'm doing wrong. But tell me most of all that I'm going to make it. Tell me I'm not going to fail, like I think I am. Tell me that the Dowland is a good idea. Dowland's lute music is so beautiful, the most beautiful music ever written. You really believe, then, you're sure that my music, the kind of things I sing will take me to the top?"

"I'm positive," he said.

"How do you know these things? It's as if you have a gift. A gift that you in turn give to me."

"It is from God," Herb Asher said. "My present to you. My confidence in you. Accept what I say; it is true."

Gravely, she said, "I sense magic around us, Herb. A magic spell. I know that sounds silly, but I do. A beauty to everything."

"A beauty," he said, "that I find in you."

"In my music?"

"In you both."

"You're not making this up?"

"No," he said. "I swear by God's own name. By the Father that created us."

"From God," she echoed. "Herb, it scares me. You scare me. There is something about you."

Herb Asher said, "Your music will take you all the way." He knew because he remembered. He knew because, for him, it had already happened.

"Really?" Linda said.

"Yes," he said. "It will carry you to the stars."
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:03 am

Chapter 18

The small animal, released from its cage, crept into Emmanuel's arms. He and Zina held it and it thanked them. Both of them felt its gratitude.

"It's a little goat," Zina said, examining its hooves. "A kid."

"How kind of you," the kid said to them. "I have waited a long time to be released from my cage, the cage you put me in, Zina PaIlas."

"You know me?" she said, surprised.

"Yes, I know you," the kid said, as it pressed itself against her. "I know both of you, although you two are really one. You have reunited your sundered selves, but the battle is not over; the battle begins now."

Emmanuel said, "I know this creature."

The little goat, in Zina's arms, said, "I am Belial. Whom you imprisoned. And whom you now release."

"Belial," Emmanuel said, "My adversary."

"Welcome to my world," Belial said.

"It is my world," Zina said.

"Not anymore." The goat's voice gained strength and authority. "In your rush to free the prisoners you have freed the greatest prisoner of all. I will contend against you, deity of light. I will take you down into the caves where there is no light. Nothing of your radiance will shine, now; the light has gone out, or soon will. Your game up to now has been a mock game in which you played against your own self. How could the deity of light lose when both sides were portions of him? Now you face a true adversary, you who drew order out of chaos and now draw me out of that order. I will test the powers that you have. Already you have made a mistake; you freed me without knowing who I am. I had to tell you. Your knowledge is not perfect; you can be surprised. Have I not surprised you?

Zina and Emmanuel were silent.

"You made me helpless," Belial said, "placed in a cage, and then you felt sorry for me. You are sentimental, deity of light. It will be your downfall. I accuse you of weakness, the inability to be strong. I am he who accuses and I accuse my own creator. To rule you must be strong. It is the strong who rule; they rule the weak. You have, instead, protected the weak; you have offered help to me, your enemy. Let us see if that was wise."

"The strong should protect the weak," Zina said. "The Torah says so. It is a basic idea of the Torah; it is basic to God's law. As God protects man, so man should protect the disadvantaged, even down to animals and the nobler trees."

Belial said, "This runs contrary to the nature of life, the nature you implanted in it. This is how life evolves. I accuse you of violating your own biological foundations, the order of the world. Yes, by all means, free every prisoner; loose a tide of murderers on the world. You have begun with me. Again I thank you. But now I leave you; I have as much to do as you have -- perhaps more. Let me down." The goat leaped from their arms and ran off; Zina and Emmanuel watched it go. And as it ran it grew.

"It will undo our world," Zina said.

Emmanuel said, "We will kill it first." He raised his hand; the goat vanished.

"It is not gone," Zina said. "It has concealed itself in the world. Camouflaged itself. We cannot now even find it. You know that it won't die. Like us it is eternal."

In the other cages the remaining imprisoned animals clamored to be released. Zina and Emmanuel ignored them; instead, they looked this way and that for the goat whom they had let out-let out to do as it wished.

"I sense its presence," Zina said.

"I, too," Emmanuel said somberly. "Our work is undone already."

"But the battle is not over," Zina said. "As it said itself, 'The battle now begins.'"

"So be it," Emmanuel said. "We will fight it together, the two of us. As we did in the beginning, before the fall."

Leaning toward him, Zina kissed him.

He felt her fear. Her intense dread. And that dread lay within him, too.

What will become of them now? he asked himself. The people whom he wished to free. What kind of prison will Belial contrive for them with his endless ability to contrive prisons? Subtle ones and gross ones, prisons within prisons; prisons for the body, and, worse by far, prisons for the mind.

The Cave of Treasures under the Garden: dark and small, without air and without light, without real time and real space- walls that shrink and, caught tight, minds that shrink. And we have allowed this, Zina and I; we have colluded with the goat- thing to bring this about.

Its release is their constraint, he realized. A paradox; we have given freedom to the builder of dungeons. In our desire to emancipate we have crushed the souls of all the living.

It will affect everyone of them in this world, from the highest to the lowest. Until we can return the goat-thing to its box; until we can place it back within its container.

And now it is everywhere; it is not contained. The atoms of the air are now its abode; it is inhaled like vapor. And each creature, breathing it in, will die. Not completely and not physically, but nonetheless death will come. We have released death, the death of the spirit. For all that now lives and wishes to live. This is our gift to them, done out of kindness.

"Motive does not count," Zina said, aware of his thoughts.

Emmanuel said, "The road to hell." Literally, he thought, in this case. That is the only door we have opened: the door to the tomb.

I pity the small creatures the most, he thought. Those who have done the least harm. They above all do not deserve this. The goat-thing will single them out for the greatest suffering; it will afflict them in proportion to their innocence ... this is its method by which the great balance is tilted from rectitude, and the Plan undone. It will accuse the weak and destroy the helpless. it will use its power against those least able to defend themselves: And, most of all, it will devour the little hopes, the meager dreams of the small.

Here we must intervene, he said to himself. To protect the small. This is our first task and the first line of our defense.

***

Lifting off from his abode in Washington, D.C., Herb Asher joyfully began the flight to California and Linda Fox. This is going to be the happiest period of my life, he said to himself. He had his suitcases in the back seat and they were filled with everything that he might need; he would not be returning to Washington, D.C. and Rybys for some time -- if ever. A new life, he thought as he guided his car through the vividly marked transcontinental traffic lanes. It's like a dream, he thought. A dream fulfilled.

He realized, suddenly, that soupy string music filled his car . Shocked, he ceased thinking and listened. South Pacific, he realized. The song "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair." Eight hundred and nine strings, and not even divided strings. Was his car stereo on? He glanced at its indicator light and dial. No, it was not.

I am in cryonic suspension! he thought. It's that huge FM transmitter next door. Fifty thousand watts of audio drizzle messing up everyone at Cry Labs, Incorporated. Son of a bitch!

He slowed his car, stunned and afraid. I don't get it, he thought in panic. I remember being released from suspension; I was ten years frozen and then they found the organs for me and brought me back to life. Didn't they? Or was that a cryonic fantasy of my dead mind? Which this is, too ... oh, my God. No wonder it has seemed like a dream; it is a dream.

The Fox, he thought, is a dream. My dream. I invented her as I lay in suspension; I am inventing her now. And my only clue is this dull music seeping in everywhere. Without the music I would never have known.

It is diabolic, he thought, to play such games with a human being, with his hopes. With his expectations.

A red light on his dashboard lit up, and simultaneously a bleep-bleep-bleep sounded. He had, in addition to everything else, become the target of a cop car.

The cop car came up beside him and grappled onto his car. Their mutual doors slid back and the cop confronted him. "Hand me your license," the cop said. His face, behind its plastic mask, could not be seen; he looked like some kind of World War I fortification, something that had been built at Verdun.

"Here it is." Herb Asher passed his license to the cop as their two cars, now joined, moved slowly forward as one.

"Are there any warrants out on you, Mr. Asher?" the cop said as he punched information into his console.

"No," Herb Asher said.

"You're mistaken." Lines of illuminated letters appeared on the cop's display. "According to our records, you're here on Earth illegally. Did you know that?"

"It's not true," he said.

"This is an old warrant. They've been trying to find you for some time. I am going to take you into custody."

Herb Asher said, "You can't. I'm in cryonic suspension. Watch and I'll put my hand through you." He reached out and touched the cop. His hand met solid armored flesh. "That's strange," Herb Asher said. He pressed harder, and then realized, all at once, that the cop held a gun pointed at him.

"You want to bet?" the cop said. "About the cryonic suspension?"

"No," Herb Asher said.

"Because if you fool around anymore I will kill you. You are a wanted felon. I can kill you any time I wish. Take your hand off me. Get it away."

Herb Asher withdrew his hand. And yet he could still hear South Pacific. The soupy sound still oozed at him from every side.

"If you could put your hand through me," the cop said, "you'd fall through the floor of your car. Think the logic through. It isn't a question of my being real; it's a question of everything being real. For you, I mean. It's your problem. Or you think it's your problem. Were you in cryonic suspension at one time?"

"Yes."

"You're having a flashback. It's common. Under pressure your brain abreacts. Cryonic suspension provides a womblike sense of security that your brain tapes and later on retrieves. Is this the first time it's happened to you, this flashback? I've come across people who've been in cryonic suspension who never could be convinced by any evidence, by what anyone said or whatsoever happened, that they were finally out of it."

"You're talking to one of them now," Herb Asher said.

"Why do you think you're in cryonic suspension?"

"The soupy music."

"I don't --"

"Of course you don't. That's the point."

"You're hallucinating."

"Right." Herb Asher nodded. "That's my point." He reached out for the cop's gun. "Go ahead and shoot," he said. "It won't hurt me. The beam will go right through me."

"I think you belong in a mental hospital, not a jail."

"Maybe so."

The cop said, "Where were you going?"

"To California. To visit the Fox."

"As in the Fox and the Cat?"

"The greatest living singer."

"I never heard of him."

"Her," Herb Asher said. "She's not well known in this world. In this world she's just beginning her career. I'm going to help make her famous throughout the galaxy. I promised her."

"What's the other world compared to this?"

"The real world," Herb Asher said. "God caused me to remember it. I'm one of the few people who remembers it. He appeared to me in the bamboo bushes and there were words in red fire telling me the truth and restoring my memories."

"You are a very sick man. You think you're in cryonic suspension and you remember another universe. I wonder what would have happened to you if I hadn't grappled onto you."

"I'd have had a good time," Herb Asher said, "out on the West Coast. A hell of a lot better time than I'm having now."

"What else did God tell you?"

"Different things."

"God talks to you frequently?"

"Rarely. I'm his legal father."

The cop stared at him. "What?"

"I'm God's legal father. Not his actual father; just his legal father. My wife is his mother."

The cop continued to stare at him. The laser pistol wavered.

"God caused me to marry his mother so that --"

"Hold out both your hands."

Herb Asher held out both his hands. Immediately cuffs closed around his wrists.

"Continue," the cop said. "But I should tell you that anything you say may be held against you in a court of law."

"The plan was to smuggle God back to Earth," Herb Asher said. "In my wife's womb. It succeeded. That's why there's a warrant out for me. The crime I committed was smuggling God back to Earth, where the Evil One rules. The Evil One secretly controls everyone and everything here. For example, you are working for the Evil One."

"I'm --"

"But you don't realize it. You have never heard of Belial."

"True," the cop said.

"That proves my point," Herb Asher said.

"Everything you have said since I grappled onto you has been recorded," the cop said. "It will be analyzed. So you're God's father."

"Legal father."

"And that's why you're wanted. I wonder what the statute violation is, technically. I've never seen it listed. Posing as God's father."

"Legal father."

"Who's his real father?"

"He is," Herb Asher said. "He impregnated his mother."

"This is disgusting."

"It's the truth. He impregnated her with himself, and thereby replicated himself in microform by which method he was able to --"

"Should you be telling me this?"

"The battle is over. God has won. The power of Belial has been destroyed."

"Then why are you sitting here with the cuffs on and why am I pointing a laser gun at you?"

"I'm not sure. I'm having trouble figuring that out. That and South Pacific. There are a few bits and pieces I can't seem to get to go in place. But I'm working on it. What I am positive about is Yah's victory."

"'Yah.' I guess that's God."

"Yes; his actual name. His original name. When he was living on the top of the mountain."

The cop said, "I don't mean to compound your troubles, but you are the most fucked-up human being I have ever met. And I see a lot of different kinds of people. They must have slushed your brain when they put you in cryonic suspension. They must not have gotten to you in time. I'd say that about a sixth of your brain is working and that sixth isn't working right, not at all. I'm taking you to a far, far better place than you have ever been, and they will do far, far better things to you than you can possibly imagine. In my opinion --"

"I'll tell you something else," Herb Asher said. "You know who my business partner is? The prophet Elijah."

Into his microphone the cop said, "This is 356 Kansas. I am bringing an individual in for psychiatric evaluation, a white male about --" To Herb Asher he said, "Did I give you your license back?" The cop put his gun back in its holster and rummaged beside him for Herb Asher's license.

Herb Asher lifted the gun from the cop's holster and pointed it at him; he had to hold both hands together because of the cuffs, but nonetheless he was able to do it.

"He has my gun," the cop said.

The intercom speaker sputtered, "You let a slusher get your gun?"

"Well, he was running off at the mouth about God; I thought he was ..." The cop's voice trailed off lamely.

"What is the individual's name?" the speaker sputtered.

"Asher. Herbert Asher."

"Mr. Asher," the speaker sputtered, "please return the officer's gun."

"I can't," Herb Asher said. "I'm frozen in cryonic suspension. And there's a fifty-thousand-watt PM transmitter next door playing South Pacific. It's driving me crazy."

The speaker sputtered, "Suppose we instruct the station to shut down its transmitter. Then will you return the officer's gun?"

"I'm paralyzed," Herb Asher said. "I'm dead."

"If you're dead," the speaker sputtered, "you have no need of a gun. In fact, if you're dead, how are you going to fire the gun? You said yourself that you're frozen. People in cryonic suspension can't move; they're like Lincoln Logs."

"Then tell the officer to take the gun away from me," Herb Asher said.

The speaker sputtered, "Take the --"

"The gun is real," the cop said, "and Asher is real. He's crazy. He's not frozen. Would I arrest a dead man? Would a dead man be flying to California? There's a warrant out on this man; he is a wanted felon."

"What are you wanted for?" the speaker sputtered. "I'm talking to you, Mr. Asher. I'm talking to a dead man who's frozen stiff at zero degrees."

"Much colder than that," Herb Asher said. "Ask them to play the Mahler Second Symphony. And play it the way it was originally written; not an all-string version. I can't stand any more of this all-string music, this easy-listening music. It's not easy for me. At one time I had to listen to Fiddler on the Roof for months. 'Matchmaker, Matchmaker' lasted for days. And it was at a very critical time in my cycle; I was --"

"All right," the speaker sputtered reasonably. "What do you say to this? We'll have the FM station play the Mahler Second Symphony and in exchange you'll return the officer's gun. What is the -- Wait a minute." Silence.

"There's a lapse of logic here," the cop beside Herb Asher said. "You're falling into his idee fixe. You know what I'm hearing? I'm hearing folie a deux. This has got to stop. There is no FM transmitter broadcasting South Pacific. If there were, I would hear it. You can't call the station -- any station -- and have them play the Mahler Second; it won't work."

The speaker sputtered, "But he'll think so, you stupid son of a bitch."

"Oh," the cop said.

"Give me a few minutes, Mr. Asher," the speaker sputtered, "to get hold --"

"No," Herb Asher said, "It's a trick. I won't give up the gun." To the cop beside him he said, "Release my car."

"Better release his car," the speaker sputtered.

"And take off the cuffs," Herb Asher said.

"You'll really like the Mahler Second Symphony," the cop said. "It's got a choir in it."

"Do you know what the Mahler Second has in it?" Herb Asher said. "Do you know what it's scored for? I'll tell you what it's scored for. Four flutes, all alternating with piccolos, four oboes, the third and fourth alternating with English horns, an E-flat clarinet, four clarinets, the third alternating with bass clarinet, the fourth with second E-flat clarinet, four bassoons, the third and fourth alternating with contrabassoon, ten horns, ten trumpets, four trombones --"

"Four trombones.?" the cop said.

"Jesus Christ," the speaker sputtered.

"-- a tuba," Herb Asher continued. "Organ, two sets of timpani, plus an additional single drum off-stage, two bass drums, one off-stage, two pairs of cymbals, one off-stage, two gongs, one of relatively high pitch, the other low, two triangles, one off- stage, a snare drum, preferably more than one, glockenspiel, bells, a Ruthe --"

"What is a 'Ruthe'?" the cop beside Herb Asher asked.

'Ruthe' literally means 'rod,'" Herb Asher said. "It's made of a lot of pieces of rattan; it looks like a large clothes-brush or a small broom. It's used to play the bass drum. Mozart wrote for the Ruthe. Two harps, with two or more players to each part if possible --" He pondered. "Plus the regular orchestra, naturally, including a full string section. Have them use their mixing board to downplay the strings; I've heard enough strings. And be sure the two soloists, the soprano and alto, are good."

"That's it?" the radio sputtered.

"You've fallen back into his delusion," the cop beside Herb Asher said.

"You know," the radio said, "he sounds rational enough. Are you sure he's got your gun? Mr. Asher, how does it happen that you know so much about music? You seem to be quite an authority."

'"There are two reasons," Herb Asher said. "One is due to my living on a planet in the star system CY30-CY30B; I operate a sophisticated bank of electronic equipment, both video and audio; I receive transmissions from the mother ship and record them and then beam them to the other domes both on my planet and on nearby planets, and I handle traffic from Fomalhaut, as well as domestic emergency traffic. And the other reason is that the prophet Elijah and I own a retail audio components store in Washington, D.C."

"Plus the fact," the cop beside Herb Asher said, "that you're in cryonic suspension."

"All three," Herb Asher said. "Yes."

"And God tells you things," the cop said.

"Not about music," Herb Asher said. "He doesn't have to. He did erase all my Linda Fox tapes, however. And he cooked my Linda Fox incoming --"

"There is another universe," the cop seated beside Herb Asher explained, "where this Linda Fox is incredibly famous, Mr. Asher is flying out to California to be with her. How he can manage to do that while frozen in cryonic suspension beats the hell out of me, but those are his plans, or were his plans until I grappled him."

"I am still going there," Herb Asher said, and then realized that he had made a mistake to tell them this; now they could track him down, even if he escaped. He had done a foolish thing; he had said too much.

Regarding him intently, the cop said, "I do believe that his self-monitoring circuit has notified him that he has spoken injudiciously."

"I wondered when it would cut in," the speaker sputtered.

"Now I can't go to the Fox," Herb Asher said. "I'm not going there. I'm going back to my dome in the CY30-CY30B System, You lack jurisdiction there. Also, Belial does not rule there. Yah rules there."

The cop said, "I thought you said Yah came back here and, I would presume, if he did come back here, he now rules."

"It has become obvious to me during the course of this conversation," Herb Asher said, "that he does not rule here, at least not completely. Something is wrong. I knew it when I started hearing the sappy, soupy string music. I especially knew it when you grappled me and when you told me there's a warrant out for me. Maybe Belial has won; maybe that's it. You are all servants of Belial. Take the cuffs off me or I'll kill you."

The cop, reluctantly, removed the cuffs.

"It would seem to me, Mr. Asher," the speaker sputtered, "that there are internal contradictions in what you say. If you will concentrate on them you will see why you give the impression of being brain-slushed. First you say one thing and then you say another. The only lucid interval in your discourse came when you discussed the Mahler Second Symphony, and that is probably due, as you say, to the fact that you're in the retail audio components business. It is a last remnant of a once intact psyche. Understand that if you go in with the officer you will not be punished; you will be treated as the lunatic that you obviously are. No judge would convict a man who says what you say."

"That's true," the cop beside Herb Asher agreed. "All you have to do is tell the judge about God speaking to you from the bamboo bushes and you're home free. And especially when you tell him that you're God's father --"

"Legal father," Herb Asher corrected.

"That will make a big impression on the court," the cop said.

Herb Asher said, "There is a great war being fought at this moment between God and Belial. The fate of the universe is at stake, its actual physical existence. When I took off for the West Coast I assumed -- I had reason to assume -- that everything was okay, Now I am not sure; now I think that something dark and awful has gone wrong. You police are the paradigm of it, the epitome. I would not have been grappled if Yah had in fact won. I will not go on to California because that would jeopardize Linda Fox. You'll find her, of course, but she doesn't know anything; she is -- in this world, anyhow -- a struggling new talent whom I was trying to help. Leave her alone. Leave me alone, too; leave us all alone. You do not know whom you serve. Do you understand what I'm saying? You are in the service of evil, whatever else you may think. You are machines processing an old warrant. You do not know what I've done, or been accused of doing ... you can make no sense of what I say because you do not understand the situation. You are going by rules that don't apply. This is a unique time. Unique events are taking place; unique forces are squared off against one another. I will not go to Linda Fox but on the other hand I do not know where I will go instead. Maybe Elias will know; maybe he can tell me what to do. My dream was shot down when you grappled me, and maybe her dream, too; Linda Fox's dream. Maybe I can't now help her become a star, as I promised. Time will tell. The outcome will determine it, the outcome of the great battle. I pity you because whatever the outcome you are destroyed; your souls are gone now."

Silence.

"You are an unusual man, Mr. Asher," the cop beside him said. "Crazy or not, whatever it is that has gone wrong with you, you are one of a kind." He nodded slowly, as if deep in thought. "This is not an ordinary kind of insanity. This is not like anything I have ever seen or heard before. You talk about the whole universe -- more than the universe, if that is possible. You impress me and in a way you frighten me. I am sorry I grappled you, now that I have listened to you. Don't shoot me. I'll release your vehicle and you can fly off; I won't pursue you. I'd like to forget what I've heard in the last few minutes. You talk about God and a counter-God and a terrible battle that seems to be lost, lost to the power of the counter-God, I mean. This does not fit with anything I know of or understand. Go away. I'll forget you and you can forget about me." Wearily, the cop plucked at his metal mask.

"You can't let him go," the speaker sputtered.

"Oh, yes I can," the cop said. "I can let him go and I can forget everything he's said, everything I've heard."

"Except that it's recorded," the speaker sputtered.

The cop reached down and pressed a button. "I just erased it," he said.

"I thought the battle was over," Herb Asher said. "I thought God had won. God has not won. I know that even though you are letting me go. But maybe it is a sign, your releasing me. I see some response in you, some amount of human warmth.'"

"I am not a machine," the cop said.

"But will that continue to be true?" Herb Asher said. "I wonder. What will you be a week from now? A month? What will we all become? And what power do we have to affect it?"

The cop said, "I just want to get away from you, a long distance away."

"Good," Herb Asher said. "It can be arranged. Someone must tell the world the truth," he added. "The truth you know, that I told you: that God is in combat and losing. Who can do it?"

"You can," the cop said.

"No," Herb Asher said. But he knew who could. "Elijah can," he said. "It is his task; this is what he has come for, that the world will know."

"Then get him to do it," the cop said.

"I will," Herb Asher said. "That's where I will go; back to my partner, back to Washington, D.C."

I will forego the Fox, he said to himself; that is the loss I must accept. Bitter sorrow filled him as he realized this. But it was a fact; he could not be with her now, not until later.

Not until the battle had been won.

As the cop ungrappled his vehicle from Herb Asher's he sai a strange thing. "Pray for me, Mr. Asher," he said.

"I will," Herb Asher said.

His vehicle released, he swung it in a great looping arc, and headed back toward Washington, D.C. The police car did not follow. The cop had kept his word.
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Re: THE DIVINE INVASION

Postby admin » Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:04 am

Chapter 19

From their audio shop he called Elias Tate, waking him up from deepest sleep. "Elijah," he said. "The time has come."

"What?" Elias muttered. "Is the store on fire? What are you talking about? Was there a break-in? What did we lose?"

"Unreality is coming back," Herb Asher said. "The universe has begun to dissolve. It is not the store; it is everything."

"You're hearing the music again," Elias said.

"Yes."

"That is the sign. You are right. Something has happened, something he -- they -- did not expect. Herb, there has been another fall. And I slept. Thank God you woke me. Probably it is not in time. The accident -- they allowed an accident to occur, as in the beginning. Well, thus the cycles fulfill themselves and the prophecies are complete. My own time to act has now come. Because of you I have emerged from my own forgetfulness. Our store must become a center of holiness, the temple of the world. We must patch into that PM station whose sound you hear; we must use it as it has in its own time made use of you. It will be our voice."

"What will it say?"

Elias said, "It will say, sleepers awake. That is our message to the listening world. Wake up! Yahweh is here and the battle has begun, and all your lives are in the balance; all of you now are weighed, this way or that, for better, for worse. No one escapes, even God himself, in all his manifestations. Beyond this there is no more. So rise up from the dust, you creatures, and begin; begin to live. You will live only insofar as you will fight; what you will have, if anything, you must earn, each for himself, and each now, not later. Come! This will be the tune that we will play over and over. And the world will hear, for we shall reach it all, first a little part, then the rest. For this my voice was fashioned at the beginning; for this I have come back to the world again and again. My voice will sound now, at this final time. Let us go. Let us begin. And hope it is not too late, that I did not sleep too long. We must be the world's information source, speaking in all the tongues. We will be the tower that originally failed. And if we fail now, then it ends here, and sleep returns. The insipid noise that assails your ears will follow a whole world to its grave, and rust will rule and dust will rule -- not for a little time but for all time and all men, even their machines; for all that lies ahead."

"Gosh," Herb Asher said.

"Observe our pitiful condition at this moment. We, you and I, know the truth but have no way to bring it to the world. With the station we will have a way; we will have the way. What are the call letters of that station? I will fone them and offer to buy them."

"It's WORP PM," Herb Asher said.

"Hang up, then," Elias said. "So that I can call."

"Where will we get the money?"

"I have the money," Elias said. "Hang up. Time is of the essence."

Herb Asher hung up.

Maybe if Linda Fox will make a tape for us, he thought, we can play it on our station. I mean, it shouldn't all be limited to warning the world. There are other things than Belial. His fone rang; it was Elias. "We can buy the station for thirty million dollars," Elias said.

"Do you have that much?"

"Not immediately," Elias said. "But I can raise it. We will sell the store and our inventory for openers."

"Jesus Christ," Herb Asher protested weakly. "That's how we make our living."

Elias glared at him.

"Okay," Herb said.

"We will have a baptismal sale," Elias said, "to liquidate our inventory. I will baptize everyone who buys something from us. I will call on them to repent at the same time."

"Then you fully remember your identity," Herb Asher said.

"I do now," Elias said. "But for a time I had forgotten."

"If Linda Fox will let you interview her --"

"Only religious music will be played on the station," Elias said.

"That's as bad as the soupy strings. Worse. I'll say to you what I said to the cop; play the Mahler Second -- play something interesting, something that stimulates the mind."

"We'll see," Elias said.

"I know what that means," Herb Asher said. "I had a wife who used to say 'We'll see.' Every child knows that means --"

"Perhaps she could sing spirituals," Elias said.

Herb Asher said, "This whole business is beginning to get me down. We have to sell the store; we have to raise thirty million dollars. I can't cope with South Pacific and I don't expect to be able to cope any better with 'Amazing Grace.' Amazing Grace always sounded to me like some bimbo at a massage parlor. If I'm offending you I'm sorry, but that cop almost hauled me off to jail. He said I'm here illegally; I'm a wanted man. That means you're probably wanted, too. What if Belial kills Emmanuel? What happens to us? There's no way we can survive without him. I mean, Belial pushed him off Earth; he defeated him before. I think he's going to defeat him this time. Buying one PM statio in Washington, D.C. isn't going to change the tide of battle."

"I'm a very persuasive talker," Elias said.

"Yeah, well Belial isn't going to be listening to you and neither will be the ones he controls. You're a voice --" He paused. "I was going to say, 'A voice crying in the wilderness.' I guess you've heard that before."

Elias said, "We could very well both wind up with our heads on silver platters. As happened to me once before. What has happened is that Belial is out of his cage, the cage Zina put himin; he is unchained. He is released onto this world. But what I say to you is, 'Oh ye of little faith!' But everything that can be said has been said centuries ago. I will concede Linda Fox a small amount of air time on our station. You can tell her that. She may sing whatever she wishes."

"I'm hanging up," Herb Asher said. "I have to call her and tell her I'm not coming out to the West Coast for a while. I don't want her involved in my troubles. I --"

"I'll talk to you later," Elias said. "But I suggest you call Rybys; when I last saw her she was crying. She thinks she may have a pyloric ulcer. And it may be malignant."

"Pyloric ulcers aren't malignant," Herb Asher said. "This is where I came in, hearing that Rybys Rommey is sitting around crying over her illness; this is what got me involved. She is ill for illness's sake, for its own sake. I thought I was going to escape from this, finally. I'll call Linda Fox first." He hung up the fone.

Christ, he thought. All I want to do is fly to California and begin my happy life. But the macrocosm has swallowed me and my happy life up. Where is Elias going to get thirty million dollars? Not by selling our store and inventory. God probably gav him a bar of gold or will rain down bits of gold, flakes of gold, on him like that manna in the wilderness that kept the ancient Jews alive. As Elias says, everything was said centuries ago and everything happened centuries ago. My life with the Fox would have been new. And here I am once more subjected to sappy, soupy string music which will soon give way to gospel songs.

He dialed Linda Fox's private number, that of her home in Sherman Oaks. And got a recording. Her face appeared on the little fone screen, but it was a mechanical and distorted face; and, he saw, her skin was broken out and her features seemed pudgy, almost fat. Shocked, he said, "No, I don't want to leave a message. I'll call back." He hung up without identifying himself. Probably she'll call me in a while, he decided. When I don't show up. After all, she is expecting me. But how strange she looked. Maybe it's an old recording. I hope so.

To calm himself he turned on one of the audio systems there at the store; he used a reliable preamp component that involved an audio hologram. The station he selected was a classical music station, one he enjoyed. But --

Only a voice issued from the transducers of the system. No music. A whispering voice almost inaudible; he could barely understand the words. What the hell is this? he asked himself. What is it saying?

"... weary," the voice whispered in its dry, slither tone. "... and afraid. There is no possibility ... weighed down. Born to lose; you are born to lose. You are no good."

And then the sound of an ancient classic: Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good." Over and over again Ronstadt repeated the words; they seemed to go on forever. Monotonous, hypnotic; fascinated, he stood listening. The hell with this, he decided finally. He shut down the system. But the words continued to circulate and recirculate in his brain. You are worthless, his thoughts came. You are a worthless person. Jesus! he thought. This is far worse than the sappy, soupy all-strings easy-listening garbage; this is lethal.

He foned his home. After a long pause Rybys answered. "I thought you were in California," she murmured. "You woke me up. Do you realize what time it is?"

"I had to turn back," he said. "I'm wanted by the police."

Rybys said, "I'm going back to sleep." The screen darkened; its light went out and he found himself facing nothing, confronted by nothingness.

They are all asleep or on tape, he thought. And when you manage to get them to say something they tell you you're no good. The domain of Belial insinuates the paucity of value in everything. Great. Just what we need. The only bright spot was the cop asking me to pray for him. Even Elias is acting erratically, suggesting that we buy an PM radio station for thirty million dollars so that we can tell people -- well, whatever he's going to tell people. On a par with selling them a home audio system and baptizing them as a bonus. Like giving them a free stuffed animal.

Animal, he thought. Belial is an animal; it was an animal voice that I heard on the radio just now. Lower than human, not greater. Animal is the worst sense: subhuman and gross. He shi ered. And meanwhile Rybys sleeps, dreaming of malignancy. Her perpetual cloud of illness, whether she is conscious or not; it is always with her, always there. She is her own pathogen, infecting herself.

He shut off the lights, left the store, locked up the front door and made his way to his parked car, wondering to himself where to go. Back to his ailing, complaining wife? To California and the mechanical, pudgy image he had seen on the fone screen?

On the sidewalk, near his parked car, something small moved. Something that hesitantly retreated from him, as if in fear. An animal, larger than a cat. Yet it didn't seem to be a dog.

Herb Asher halted, bent down, holding out his hand. The animal came uncertainly toward him, and then all at once he heard its thoughts in his mind. It was communicating with him telepathically. I am from the planet in the CY30-CY30B star system, it thought to him. I am one of the autochthonic goats that in former times was sacrificed to Yah.

Staggered, he said, "What are you doing here?" Something was wrong; this was impossible.

Help me, the goat-creature thought. I followed you here; I traveled after you to Earth.

"You're lying," he said, but he opened his car and got out his flashlight; bending down he turned the yellow light on the animal.

Indeed he had a goat before him, and not a very large one; and yet it could not be an ordinary Terran goat -- he could discern the difference.

Please take me in and care for me, the goat-creature thought to him. I am lost. I have strayed away from my mother.

"Sure," Herb Asher said. He reached out and the goat came hesitantly toward him. What a strange little wizened face, and such sharp little hooves. Just a baby, he thought; see how it trembles. It must be starving. Out here it'll get run over.

Thank you, the goat-creature thought to him.

"I'll take care of you," Herb Asher said.

The goat-creature thought, I am afraid of Yah. Yah is terrible in his wrath.

Thoughts of fire, and the cutting of the goat's throat. Herb Asher shivered. The primal sacrifice, that of an innocent animal. To quell the anger of the deity.

"You're safe with me," he said, and picked up the goat-creature. Its view of Yah shocked him; he envisioned Yah, now, as the goat-creature did, and it was a dreadful entity, this vast and angry mountain deity who demanded the sacrifice of tiny lives.

Will you save me from Yah? the goat-creature quavered; its thoughts were limpid with apprehension.

"Of course I will," Herb Asher said. And he tenderly placed the goat-creature in the back of his car.

You won't tell Yah where I am, will you? the goat-creature begged.

"I swear," Herb Asher said.

Thank you, the goat-creature thought, and Herb Asher felt its joy. And, strangely, its sense of triumph. He wondered about that as he got in behind the wheel and started up the engine. Is this some kind of a victory for it? he asked himself.

I am merely glad to be safe, the goat-creature explained. And to have found a protector. Here on this planet where there is so much death.

Death, Herb Asher thought. It fears death as I fear death; it is a living organism like me. Even though in many ways it is quite different from me.

The goat-creature thought to him, I have been abused by children. Two children, a boy and a girl.

Picture, then, in Herb Asher's mind: a cruel pair of children, with savage faces and hostile, blazing eyes. This boy and girl had tormented the goat-creature and it was terrified of falling back into their hands once more.

"That will never happen," Herb Asher said. "I promise. Children can be dreadfully cruel to animals."

In its mind the goat-creature laughed; Herb Asher experienced its glee. Puzzled, he turned to look at the goat-creature, but in the darkness behind him it seemed invisible; he sensed it, there in the back of his car, but he could not make it out.

"I'm not sure where to go," Herb Asher said.

Where you originally were going, the goat-creature thought. To California, to Linda.

"Okay," he said, "but I don't --"

The police won't stop you this time, the goat-creature thought to him. I will see to that.

"But you are just a little animal," Herb Asher said.

The goat-creature laughed. You can give me to Linda as a present, it thought.

Uneasily, he turned his car in the direction of California, and rose up into the sky.

The children are here in Washington, D.C., now, the goat-creature thought to him. They were in Canada, in British Columbia, but now they have come here. I want to be far away from them.

"I don't blame you," Herb Asher said.

As he drove he noticed a smell in his car, the smell of the goat. The goat stank, and this made him uneasy, What a stench, he thought, considering how small it is. I guess it's normal for the species. But still ... the odor was beginning to make him sick. Do I really want to give this smelly thing to Linda Fox? he asked himself.

Of course you do, the goat-creature thought to him, aware of what was going on in his mind. She will be pleased.

And then Herb Asher caught a really dreadful mental impression from the goat-creature's mind, one that horrified him and made him drive erratically for a moment. A sexual lust on the part of the creature for Linda Fox.

I must be imagining it! Herb Asher thought.

The goat-creature thought, I want her. It was contemplating her breasts and her loins, her whole body, made naked and available. Jesus, Herb Asher thought. This is dreadful, What have I gotten myself into? He started to steer his car back toward Washington, D.C.

And he found that he could not control the steering wheel. The goat-creature had taken over; it was in power within Herb Asher, at the center of his mind.

She will love me, the goat-creature thought, and I will love her. And, then, its thoughts passed beyond the limits of Herb Asher's comprehension. Something to do with making Linda Fox into a thing like the goat-creature, dragging her down into its domain.

She will be a sacrifice in my place, the goat-creature thought. Her throat -- I will see it cut as mine has been.

"No," Herb Asher said.

Yes, the goat-creature thought.

And it compelled him to drive on, toward California and Linda Fox. And, as it compelled and controlled him, it exulted in its glee; within the darkness of his car it danced its own kind of dance, a drumming sound that its hooves made: made in triumph. And anticipation. And intoxicated joy.

It was thinking of death, and the thought of death made it celebrate with rapture and an awful song.

***

He drove as erratically as possible, hoping that once again a police car would grapple him. But as the goat-creature had promised none did.

The image of Linda Fox in Herb Asher's mind continued to undergo a dismal transformation; he envisioned her as gross and bad-complexioned, a flabby thing that ate too much and wandered about aimlessly, and he realized, then, that this was the view of the accuser; the goat-creature was Linda Fox's accuser who showed her -- who showed everything in creation -- under the worst light possible, under the aspect of the ugly.

This thing in my back seat is doing it, he said to himself. This is how the goat-creature sees God's total artifact, the world that God pronounced as good. It is the pessimism of evil itself. The nature of evil is to see in this fashion, to pronounce this verdict of negation. Thus, he thought, it unmakes creation; it undoes what the Creator has brought into being. This also is a form of unreality, this verdict, this dreary aspect. Creation is not like this and Linda Fox is not like this. But the goat-creature would tell me that --

I am only showing you the truth, the goat-creature thought to him. About your pizza waitress.

"You are out of the cage that Zina put you in," Herb Asher said. "Elias was right."

Nothing should be caged, the goat-creature thought to him. Especially me. I will roam the world, expanding into it until I fill it; that is my right.

"Belial," Herb Asher said.

I hear you, the goat-creature thought back.

"And I'm taking you to Linda Fox," Herb Asher said. "Whom I love most in all the world." Again he tried to take his hands from the steering wheel and again they remained locked in place.

Let us reason, the goat-creature thought to him. This is my view of the world and I will make it your view and the view of everyone. It is the truth. The light that shone originally was a spurious light. That light is going out and the true nature of reality is disclosed in its absence. That light blinded men to the real state of things. It is my job to reveal that real state.

Gray truth, the goat-creature continued, is better than what you have imagined. You wanted to wake up. Now you are awake; I show you things as they are, pitilessly; but that is how it should be. How do you suppose I defeated Yahweh in times past? By revealing his creation for what it is, a wretched thing to be despised. This is his defeat, what you see -- see through my mind and eyes, my vision of the world: my correct vision. Recall Rybys Rommey's dome, the way it was when you first saw it; remember what she was like; consider what she is like now. Do you suppose that Linda Fox is any different? Or that you are any different? You are all the same, and when you saw the debris and spoiled food and rotting matter of Rybys's dome you saw how reality really is. You saw life. You saw the truth.

I will soon show you that truth about the Fox, the goat-creature continued. That is what you will find at the end of this trip: exactly what you found in Rybys Rommey's deteriorated dome that day, years ago. Nothing has changed and nothing is different. You could not escape it then and you cannot escape it now.

What do you say to that? the goat-creature asked him.

"The future need not resemble the past," Herb Asher said.

Nothing changes, the goat-creature answered. Scripture itself tells us that.

"Even a goat can cite Scripture," Herb Asher said.

They entered the heavy stream of air traffic routed toward the Los Angeles area; cars and commercial vehicles moved on all sides of them, above them, below them. Herb Asher could discern police cars but none paid him any attention.

I will guide you to her house, the goat-creature informed him.

"Creature of dirt," Herb Asher said, with fury.

A floating signal pointed the way ahead. They had almost reached California.

"I will wager with you that --" Herb Asher began, but the goat-creature cut him off.

I do not wager, it thought to him. I do not play. I am the strong and I prey on the weak. You are the weak, and Linda Fox is weaker yet. Forget the idea of games; that is for children.

"You must be like a little child," Herb Asher said, "to enter the Kingdom of God."

I have no interest in that kingdom, the goat-thing thought to him. This is my kingdom here. Lock the auto-pilot computer of your car into the coordinates for her house.

His hands did so, without his volition. There was no way he could hold back; the goat-creature had control of his motor centers.

Call her on your car fone, the goat-creature told him. Inform her that you are arriving.

"No," he said. But his fingers placed the card with her fone number into the slot.

"Hello." Linda Fox's voice came from the little speaker.

"This is Herb," he said. "I'm sorry I'm late. I got stopped by a cop. Is it too late?"

"No," she said. "I was out anyhow for a while. It'll be nice to see you again. You're going to stay, aren't you? I mean, you're not going back tonight."

"I'll stay," he said.

Tell her, the goat-creature thought to him, that you have me with you. A pet for her, a little kid.

"I have a pet for you," Herb Asher said. "A baby goat."

"Oh, really? Are you going to leave it?"

"Yes," he said, without volition; the goat-creature controlled his words, even the intonation.

"Well, that is so thoughtful of you. I have a whole bunch of animals already, but I don't have a goat. I guess I'll put it in with my sheep, Herman W. Mudgett."

"What a strange name for a sheep," Herb Asher said.

"Herman W. Mudgett was the greatest mass-murderer in English history," Linda Fox said.

"Well," he said, "I guess it's okay."

"I'll see you in a minute. Land carefully. You don't want to hurt the goat." She broke the connection.

A few minutes later his car settled gently down on the roof of her house. He shut the engine off.

Open the door, the goat-creature thought to him.

He opened the car door.

Coming toward the car, lit by pale lights, Linda Fox smiled at him, her eyes sparkling; she waved in greeting. She wore a tank top and cutoffs, and, as before, her feet were bare. Her hair bounced as she hurried and her breasts rose and fell.

Within the car the stench of the goat-creature grew.

"Hi," she said breathlessly. "Where's the little goat?" She looked into the car. "Oh," she said. "I see. Get out of the car, little goat. Come here."

The goat-creature leaped out, into the pale light of the California evening.

"Belial," Linda Fox said. She bent to touch the goat; hastily, the goat scrambled back but her fingers grazed its flanks.

The goat-creature died.
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