Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  Going independent will be a fine idea a decade or so up ahead, Charlie knows, but not now. Especially when he’s wrapped up in his rocky personal life, which is leading . . . where? He realizes suddenly that he has no idea. . . .

  To cover his sudden confusion, he begins, “Phil . . . I . . . really—”

  Phil waves this away and says, “Look, what I’m getting at is kinda like something where I live, just a few miles from Disneyland. For years they had the Lincoln simulacrum running there. Like Lincoln himself, pretty good robot. So that Lincoln was only a temporary form, which matter and energy take”—he spread his arms wide—“and then lose.”

  Charlie wonders if Phil is onto something or just daft.

  “See, the same is true of each of us, like it or not. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans—turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland, see? You can have the pirate ride or the Lincoln simulacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride—you can have all of them, but none is true. But a movie can be! See?”

  Phil has succumbed to the American faith that if a novel is good enough, important enough, it will be made into a movie, and so become immortal.

  “Ahhhh . . . ,” he begins, pauses. Charlie knows now that Phil has an odd tap into the reality Charlie sees all too well. But how to now get the man off this tirade, not let it disturb the movie script they are trying to hatch?

  Phil says, “Y’know, people think we science fiction writers predict the future. I remember that the US Department of the Interior made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and they missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War Two. Yet they all kept on with this simpleminded, linear extrapolation that was merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion.”

  “Uh, so—”

  “See, I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. I can see now that the universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. We’re something like computers, really, compiling our reality as we go. Charlie, I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.”

  “I think High Castle will make that clear to the public,” Charlie says to mollify the man, and get him to move on.

  Phil shrugs off the idea and sits, his face knotting. “See, I’ve been having . . . visits. Visions.”

  “Like?”

  “Like I’ve lived other lives. I’m sure of it now. Like I’m remembering something that was real, solid—recalling it at last.”

  “You remember being where?”

  “The visions continue to get more real, specific, recovered memories. Scenes of ancient Rome—jammed streets beneath those temples, torches, riots. All superimposed over my boring Santa Ana neighborhood. I’ll look at a local playground and see a Roman prison. Behind a chain-link fence I saw iron bars peeking through. Children playing, laughing—but I saw overlaid on them Christian martyrs, sobbing, about to be fed to lions or the gladiators. People on the street, they had Roman military uniforms or tunics. Stone walls, brass doors, right beside Trader Joe’s.”

  Could this be some error in Phil’s transition from an earlier life? Static blocking his memories, until now, in his fifties?

  “I didn’t go back in time, see, but in a sense Rome came forward. To me. My past self was getting through by insidious and sly degrees, under new names, hidden by the flak talk and phony obscurations, at last into our world again.”

  Charlie thinks, A clue?

  “Suppose that time stopped in A.D. seventy, the year the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Roman siege. Everything that happened afterward was an illusion, see? So our world is still under Rome’s dominion.”

  Definitely woo-woo. But Charlie lets the man ramble on, hoping for some nugget of truth. Could Phil be some scrambled, reincarnated self?

  “I believe the Roman Empire is active, not just images I can see. It was embodied in the tyrannical Nixon administration, for sure. They’re responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I—”

  “What’s your role in this, then, Phil?”

  “I’m an undercover Christian revolutionary, fighting to overthrow the empire. That’s why I react so much when I see a passing pretty blonde wearing the fish emblem, the Christian sign.”

  “What’s all this mean?”

  Phil leans back and peers at the ceiling, eyes veiled, breath shallow and fast. “Here I’m going to call on your faith in me. I’m telling truth here. I got this through revelations that start with a portal of pink light. These memories, they always start with that pink. It’s a spiritual force that unlocks my consciousness. It’s divine, see? It grants me access to esoteric knowledge. So I’ve fictionalized these experiences in a novel, VALIS. Stands for ‘Vast Active Living Intelligence System’—which is what’s telling me this. It’s a transcendental, mystical mind, see?”

  Charlie doesn’t know what to say, but Phil is on a roll anyway. The man leans forward and words fly from his mouth at machine-gun pace, a hoarse fusillade.

  “I’m forming up a trilogy, all constellating around a basic theme. In the novel a guy I named Horselover Fat—who’s really me, my name translated from Greek and German—comes across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, which we all live in, but set in the far future. If you superimpose the past—say, ancient Rome, where I lived and rebelled—over the present California in the twentieth century, then superimpose the far future world. In the future, y’see, drug use is widespread, and the age of consent has been lowered to fifteen—more fun for all, I guess. So you got the empire, as the supra- or transtemporal constant. Everyone who has ever lived is literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they are all inside it and none of them know it. Except those of us who can see the past, lived there.”

  Charlie doesn’t know how to respond. Phil throws out his arms as if to an audience, and bursts into rasping song.

  “Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!

  Exiled for ever, let me mourn;

  Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,

  There let me live forlorn.”

  Phil sits down, grinning. “That’s from the sixteenth century. I learned it as a boy—in that century.”

  “You mean you can recall yourself in multiple past lives?”

  “Yes! I doubt my previous selves ever knew their past, but now I do. God pointed it out to me with the pink light.” He leans back and sighs, contented. “Y’know, the technical term for this is ‘theophany’—self-disclosure by the divine.”

  Charlie recalls that when he first woke up as Charlie Two, he toyed with the idea that he was being divinely reincarnated. That phase lasted maybe a month. Then he started looking into physics.

  “Why does it have to be from God?”

  Phil seems startled by this. He considers, face furrowed with passing emotions, and then says abruptly, “Okay, take a science fiction approach, then. I’ll put it this way. We appear to be memory coils—that is, DNA carriers capable of experience—in a big, computer-like thinking system. See? So all of humanity, through time, has correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information—lives lived, stored. We’re in this system now, see? And each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life-forms, data stacked up. Sometimes, like my past in ancient Rome, there’s a malfunction—a failure—of storage. Some info comes right into our experience. We feel it, see it, again.”

  “How much of the life do you recall?” Nearly all of it, like me? But then, I was a historian, not a pulp writer on speed.

  Phil waves this away. “Snatches, mostly fights. Plus boring manual labor—we have no idea how easy we have it tod
ay!”

  “So is this VALIS thing useful?” Like telling you what movies will be hits?

  Phil brightens. “Yeah, once when I was with VALIS, I got an insight. The system, VALIS, it told me my infant son was in danger of perishing from some unnamed malady. So I take him to the doc, who does routine a checkup—no trouble or illness, the doc says. But I insisted that he run thorough tests, paid extra for ’em. The doc fussed and argued, but I stood firm and he eventually complied, though there were no apparent symptoms. They discovered a hernia! It would’ve killed my boy if I’d let it go. An operation made him survive. I attribute that to the intervention of VALIS, the network.”

  Charlie sits back and thinks while Phil relates another event. He had an incident of “xenoglossy”—which Phil says was the sudden ability to speak Koine, a common Greek dialect during the high point of the civilization. His wife transcribed some, and a linguist identified it. “I had it for days, then gone. But it came back when I took Sandoz.”

  “Sandoz?”

  “LSD-25. I took it to test if I was mentally ill. I passed.”

  “Speaking Greek on LSD.”

  “Yeah, what else? Look, I know my kinda divine madness sounds like somethin’ mental, but it wasn’t. Sharp, clear memories—from two thousand years ago.”

  Charlie wonders if these were psychotic breaks or a religious experience, and how would one tell the difference? And if not psychosis, is Dick’s mental universe rooted in the same weirdness as his own?

  Once he started actively working with Dick after coming back from Illinois, he noticed that Dick still used amphetamines to write fast, even now, with movie money coming in. His refrigerator was stuffed with bottles of amphetamine pills jammed in next to premade milk shakes. Phil gulped the pills by the handful and washed them down with the milk shakes, calling them his “happiness pills” and “nightmare tabs.”

  Phil seems to read Charlie’s mind. “I know, I know—I admit it, I’m a flipped-out freak—”

  “Have you ever had, uh, anything happen to you that was . . . uh, like reliving history? Your own personal history?”

  Phil looks suspiciously at him. “Maybe . . .”

  Ding-ding goes his doorbell. With relief he holds up a hand to stop Phil and bounds across his living room to answer it himself.

  “Ah!” Charlie cries in relief as he takes a script from a studio messenger. “Sorry, Phil, I promised I’d read this—it’s in an auction, last day.”

  Phil fidgets, eyes dancing, and in a burst of energy says, “Hey, good idea, go to those script guys, but get that new Hitler ending in the script, right?”

  Charlie can but nod. Phil does not know that screenwriters regard original authors as pests.

  Within a moment Phil goes out the door like a man fleeing devils, slamming it. But then, that is his style, yes, the whole massive bulk of fearful demons half seen.

  Could poor Phil be a degenerated example of multiple rebirths? Or reincarnations, maybe a better term? Has Phil ratcheted down through millennia, somehow passing through different bodies? Then others who claim to have past lives are plausible candidates. Could weird double lives be muddled in the minds of people farther down the pipeline of time?

  23 On a dusky corner Charlie comes across a bar he hasn’t noticed before, the Sandpiper Lounge on South Coast Highway. A departing drunken beach couple throw open the bar’s door, and ringing reggae crossed with Jimi Hendrix floods out, tight Caribbean offbeat thump-thump accents married to long, distorted notes from a warpo guitar. Was there music like this the first time around? he wonders. Worth a closer inspection, he says to himself, and goes inside.

  An attractive young black girl with shiny dreadlocks and Rastafarian rag clothes sings sulky notes into a microphone. The music is slow, methodical, but she bounces through it all, springing off the balls of her feet, rocking her shoulders backward and forward. Her verve captivates Charlie, standing just a few yards away from the bandstand.

  Her lyrics are about time, magical time, precious time, just enough long liquid time to be with a lover. Time, Charlie thinks, the mystery in my life. Am I a time traveler, or is this all a complicated illusion? Is life nothing more than an illusion, a distraction impairing our awareness, our spiritual evolution? Can’t hire a detective to find that out . . .

  Charlie notices an improbably pallid guitarist throttling the neck of a Stratocaster. The melodic line is laced with feedback, both mechanical and alive, so striking that the singer stops bouncing to look at the guitarist creating the wash of sound.

  With a twinge of guilt Charlie realizes that the blond guitarist reminds him of James. Charlie gropes for a stool to sit on.

  The music is so good, complete and enveloping, Charlie loses all sense of time and place. At least, he does until a taciturn beach blonde wearing a tight pink body shirt drops a cocktail napkin on the stained wood of his table.

  “What’ll it be?” she yells at him, barely audible over the music.

  “Scotch. Double.”

  The band finishes its song with an abrupt crashing chord. They confer briefly, then leave the small stage. It looks like a break, because they leave their instruments behind. Charlie’s eyes follow the blond guitarist with a morbid curiosity.

  “Good, huh?”

  Charlie looks around to find a slightly plump girl with curly brown hair sitting next to him, in clothes far too good for the beach bar.

  “Sorry, I didn’t notice you.”

  She pushes his arm slightly. “You sure know how to hurt a girl’s feelings.” Her smile is warm but her jaw is set at an angle.

  Charlie smiles back at her tentatively.

  “You look familiar,” she says.

  “You might have seen me before.”

  “In here? I don’t come to the Sandpiper that often.”

  “It’s my first time.”

  “How do you like the Rebel Rockers?”

  “Amazing!”

  Her eyes flicker, appraising him. “You down here from LA?”

  “That easy to tell?” He must have a city hardness now.

  “Just a feeling.” A bold, assessing gaze. “Going through a divorce?”

  So this woman has him in her sights. And something about her attracts him.

  “I’ll admit it.”

  “Good. I hate guys who act like they’re single, even if they have two kids and a wife back home in Irvine.”

  Ouch, thinks Charlie.

  “You look pretty young to be going through a divorce.” Her eyes are saucers of curiosity.

  “I got married when I was twenty-one.”

  “Wow, that was dumb.”

  Charlie smiles to himself. But then, you have no idea what I’ve been through, do you, so young and self-confident?

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Don’t you think that’s kind of a personal question?” She tosses her head back, somehow moving closer to him at the same time, lowers her eyes, and turns her shoulders toward him.

  “I guess.”

  “Twenty-nine. Think I’m too old for you?”

  “Could be.”

  “You’re what, thirty?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Are you an attorney?”

  Charlie laughs out loud and shakes his head. “I don’t stoop that low.”

  “Okay—doctor? Just out of your residency?”

  He has to smile. “Not even close.”

  “Yeah, I guess you are a little too alive to be an MD.” She pushes an attractive silk scarf to one side, creamy white décolletage coming into Charlie’s view. He notices that her perfume must be expensive because it is subtle, but he doesn’t recognize it.

  “No, I work for Action Pictures.”

  “Do you know Steven Spielberg?”

  “A bit.”

  “Wow.” A dazzled-fan expression flits across her face, and she quickly replaces it with a hip smile. “I love his movies. Such great ideas.”

  “Thank you.” Charlie thinks Spielb
erg isn’t so much an idea type as a genius at choosing the right shot and cadence, but that’s too much to convey in a bar.

  A grin spreads across her face. “Are you one of his assistant directors or photographers, like that?”

  “No. I’m more of a management guy.”

  “Oh. You seemed more like a creative person.”

  “Sometimes I am.”

  * * *

  When Charlie wakes up, a seagull is tapping on his floor-height bedroom window with a yellow beak, its head cocked to one side. Charlie opens an eye, wincing from the sunlight, catching the tang of the salty air, and gets an appraising look from the dusty gray seagull. The gray-and-white bird wobbles alongside the window, marching on the balcony like it owns the place.

  Charlie grows tired of ornithology and sits up in bed. The girl from the night before is snoring slightly, her light-olive flesh oddly striking against the white sheets. Charlie searches his mind for her name, draws a blank. She was all agog at his movie creds, a cheap shot on his part, though he kept them vague. He even used some stale insider jokes (“What’s your movie about?” “It’s about to make me rich”) and she laughed merrily. The sex was mechanical, and her chuckling, crooning pleasure felt like an audition.

  He goes to the bathroom to pee, and when he gets back, the woman is slowly shaking the night out of her brown curls.

  “Nice place”—she yawns—“oooof! . . . you have here.”

  “Belongs to a friend of mine.”

  “Some friend. It’s not Steven Spielberg, is it?” A glow rises in her voice.

  “No. My CEO.”

  “Cool.” She lifts her knees up, hugging herself. “What’s it like in Hollywood?”

  “Pretty much the same as everywhere else. Envy, jealousy, greed, vanity—”

  “Thank you. I was in a sorority—I don’t need life lessons.”

  “USC?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I figured.”

  “Humph. And you?”

  “I didn’t go to college.” He enjoys the lie, partly because the woman would never understand the truth.