Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “I don’t think that’s going to be a popular—”

  “If I cared more for personal popularity, Major Vear, than for a reputation as a no-nonsense ass-kicker, I’d’ve never been elected to four straight terms as President of the United States.”

  Don’t open your mouth again, Vear cautions himself. This guy will eat you alive and spit you out like a Macintosh pip somewhere south of the Sea of Fertility.

  “Major—may I call you Gordon? You’re entirely welcome to call me Mr. President. Great. Well, Gordon, the reason I’ve invaded your room like this is to ask you to show both your gumption and your national spirit commanding, as it were, our historic Mining the Moons of Mars Mission, which I’ve personally dubbed, in all our top-secret memos, the 4-M Agenda.”

  Vear’s stomach flip-flops. This is the barb that he has been waiting to feel, the hook that the President has set with a glib but painful yank. Vear fears that soon he will overload and go thrashing about Von Braunville in uncontrollable spasms of protest and self-pity.

  “Sir, this is my second tour at Censorinus. The Mars flight, round-trip, will have to take—well, what?—at least two years, especially if NASA’s going to use a minimum-energy trajectory, and I’m not sure I can handle a fourth full year away from home. You can’t know how much I’d like to see Kentucky again.”

  “As much as I’d like to pay a secret visit to my childhood home in Fullerton, California, I suppose. But you’ll be able to do that before the 4-M launch. Accept this assignment, Gordon, and you’ll be taking the t-ship back to Earth with Ingham and me. You’re a bachelor, right? Well, a man without a family is just the sort to lead this expedition. If disaster—God forbid—should strike, you won’t regret your passing quite so much as a family man.”

  Vear finds that he is hyperventilating and struggling to keep the President from noticing. Help me, God. Give me words to say to this august bonehead.

  “Sir, I’d hoped to finish out my second tour and then to resign my commission. For a long time now, it’s been in the back of my mind to become a religious in a holy order.”

  “A religious?”

  “A monk. Like St Francis of Assisi. Like Thomas Merton. A religious, sir.”

  “But it’s my understanding—feel free to contradict me, but I often consult on such issues with Secretary Graham—that you’d be in a monastery—monkeyhouses, I affectionately called them when I was a Quaker—much longer than you’d even be in an Interplanetary Vehicle System, or IVS, carrying you to Mars. How can you compare the two or more years of the 4-M Agenda to the lifetime that your Catholic zealots will unquestionably demand of you?”

  “But I don’t compare them, sir! Traveling in a spaceship for however long isn’t anything like taking vows!”

  King Richard holds up his hand and waves it consolingly. “Hey now, calm yourself, Gordon. Take it easy, son.”

  Vear grabs a solenoid from Dahlquist’s desk and brandishes it at the President. “Take it easy yourself, dad! Roland Nyby did himself in because of you! Because your fucking administration has every one of us in a merciless squeeze!”

  “Every society has its weaklings, Gordon. Its crybabies, its losers, its bleeding hearts. You can’t expect the President of the United States to take personal responsibility for the shortcomings of the fuckups.”

  Mr. Nixon is ballsier than Vear has supposed. He is standing firm, wearily eyeing the major. Well, naturally, Vear thinks, you don’t become the most powerful man in the West—hell, on the entire planet—by bowing to unsupported threats and empty gestures. Let him know that you intend to turn his ski-slope nose into a bloody little flap and then go over there and do it.

  Thus encouraging himself, Vear advances. Mr. Nixon glances at the room’s irising portal and coolly nods his bodyguard in.

  Ingham pounces on Vear, slapping the solenoid from his hand and shoving him backward over Dolly’s workstand. Silicon chips, vacuum tubes, strands of copper wire, pliers, potentiometers, capacitors, computer boards, and sundry other bits of hard and soft clamjamfry go flying. Vear falls backward into it, while Ingham comes down on him with his linebacker’s face either grinning or grimacing and his forearm falling on Vear’s Adam’s apple and pressing down harder and harder as if to utterly crush it.

  For Ingham, this is the Hinckley business all over again, and he is enjoying another chance to empathize with the sufferings of others (an ability he learned in Vietnam) not by refusing to hurt Vear but by declining to kill him outright.

  “Gaaaah!” the major protests. But Ingham continues throttling him; and after seeing the President’s indifferent face from the corner of one bulging eye, Vear disappears into the dark. Into the midnight, he hopes, or at least temporary reprieve.

  “Here’s the auxiliary air. See if you can rouse the idiot.”

  “Gordon! My God, Gordon, get to your feet!”

  Vear opened his eyes. Two men in spacesuits—their NASA name strips identified them as Franciscus and Stanfield—hovered over him on the ledge above Von Braunville. A lovely slice of planet Earth floated overhead, filling the rugged bowl of the crater with cobalt shadows and an ice-blue luminosity.

  “He told me he was going out for a little ‘fresh vacuum’. He said he didn’t intend to pull a Nyby.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe the fucker—I beg your pardon, Major—lied to you.”

  Stanfield was trying to hook up an auxiliary air supply, and Franciscus was slapping him on the helmet with his enormous white gloves. Vear blinked, struggled to rise. Stanfield held him down and continued carrying out the PLSS attachment procedure.

  The two men’s voices, when they spoke, bumbled around in the box behind Vear’s faceplate like a pair of angry bees. Relaxing, he let his colleagues do what they had to do to recall him to … well, to what? Reality, he supposed. The mind-numbing reality of life on the Moon. The eerily beautiful reality of the satellite’s monochrome surfaces and changing purple shadows.

  Alternately cursing and joking, they walked him down the crater ledge and into the headquarters hemisphere, where, as nearly fully recovered as he was going to get today, Vear listened to Commander Logan call him a nincompoop and a threat to moonbase morale and a thoughtless spendthrift of resources necessary for the survival of every person—not just Gordon Vear, but every person!—assigned to their facility. The characterization nincompoop offended Vear more than any of the others; and as soon as Logan had spoken it, he let all the other crap blow past him like day-old newspapers on a windy city street.

  When you had just approached the High Mucky-Muck of the United States with an intent to kill, listening to a nonentity like Logan rave on was an insufferable anticlimax.

  Later, Vear had a long session with Dr. Erica Zola, a cognitive psychotherapist, who tried hard to determine if he had gone outside to commune with God, as he insisted, or to do a Roland Nyby, which, greatly peeved, he heatedly denied. He told Dr. Zola that he had seen a black dwarf in blue jeans on the near rim of Censorinus and that Richard Nixon had come to his and Dolly’s room to ask him to head up NASA’s Mining the Moons of Mars Mission. He understood that the Nixon episode was the consequence of “lunar rapture”, if you wanted a term for it, because he had let himself get fatigued and had never even come inside. But the appearance of the dwarf, well, that episode may have actually occurred. After all, he had seen the homunculus early in his outing, wondering even then if he were hallucinating but discounting the possibility because he had seen the crippled figure etched so distinctly above him.

  “You realize that it had to be an illusion, too,” Dr. Zola told the major. “Nobody—giant or dwarf, peon or president—can survive in their street clothes on the surface of the Moon.”

  “That’s the popular wisdom.”

  A small woman with large eyes and worrisomely discolored teeth, Dr. Zola laughed. She had a big laugh for so small a woman. It got Vear laughing, too, and he liked laughing along with her even though their laughter inevitably seemed to sabotage the credibility of
the nanophany, as she facetiously called it, explaining that she had based her word on theophany— “a visible manifestation of a deity”—but that nanophany meant “the visible manifestation of an impossible dwarf”. Which set them both a-giggling again, and the session wound down into a mild joke fest and some comforting small talk.

  “Okay,” Vear finally asked her, “what’re you going to tell the boss?”

  “I can’t divulge the gist of your latest psychological profile, Major. You know that.”

  “Come on, ma’am. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “You’re not a hopeless neurotic, if that helps you. You’ve had a bad experience. You’re still mourning Nyby. You’ve got a lot of unexorcized guilt over your handling of that matter. I’m not going to recommend that you be sent home, though.”

  “I’ll give you my next paycheck.”

  And they laughed again, because Vear had no desire to return to Earth until his full tour was up, no matter what he had told the President during his oxygen-starved dream on the crater ledge. He was a NASA man, by way of the US Air Force, and not a Carthusian or a Cistercian monk, and he took pride in doing his duty, even if a son of a bitch like Commander Logan or King Richard was trying to dictate to him the questionable elements constituting that duty. He had a lot of anger to exorcize, as well as guilt, but he was sane, damn it! Sane, sane, sane!

  Still later, back in his pie wedge, confined to quarters until Commander Logan had studied Dr. Zola’s latest profile of him, Vear found—to his relief—that the jumble atop his roommate’s desk was the same jumble that he remembered from earlier. A scuffle with a Secret Service man had not imparted new chaos to the hodgepodge.

  The major sat down on his bunk, precisely where the President had perched during their dream colloquy. My subconscious viciously maligned the man, he thought. But a person in power had to be able to stand the heat. With power comes responsibility, and abuses of this responsibility deserve our contempt more than do the venial sins of the powerless. Thank God my fantasy—at least until I met with Dr. Zola—was a private one. They can’t court-martial a guy for dreaming he’s punched the boss in the nose, can they?

  Dahlquist came in. He told Vear that he looked pretty good for somebody who’d nearly hallucinated himself into heaven.

  I must’ve mumbled deliriously, thought Vear, about that goddamn homunculus—maybe even King Richard’s “visit”—on my way downslope with Franciscus and Stanfield. Now those two turkeys are running around Von Braunville telling my loony fantasies to everyone with the time to listen and the gall to try to figure out what caused them. Half the base thinks I’m suffering a metabolic imbalance. The other half thinks that, like Nyby, I blew a gasket because of isolation and overwork. They believe that, like Nyby, I tried to check into the Hotel Thanatos. Forever.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill myself!” Vear shouted.

  “I know you weren’t,” Dahlquist said. “You’d never give me the satisfaction of inheriting the other half of this room.”

  “Dolly, you’ve got three quarters of it already!”

  Dahlquist shrugged and raked a place to sit down on the chair next to his workstand. A moment later, he was assembling a toy bird like the one he’d thrown at Vear … when? But he hadn’t. That was simply a part of your dream, Gordon. Nevertheless, your roommate’s putting a mock mockingbird together, and that wasn’t a project he’d started before your great outdoor adventure—not, at least, that you can recall. Up until yesterday, he’d been building globelike stereo speakers to hang in the dining room for piped-in Earl Klugh and Spyrogyra concerts.

  A shiver fishtailed down Vear’s spine; its coldness seized him like the chill of Censorinus itself.

  That sleep period, dozing, the major saw a small black figure, his body powerful but pain-racked, doing cartwheels and dancing jigs on the crater floor. The dwarf’s face was businesslike rather than joyful. Whenever Vear approached him, he dematerialized, only to crop up an instant later on another stretch of moonbed or an outcropping of black feldspar high above the flats. Vantages from which he would also soon disappear…

  The next “morning”, Vear awakened to find Dahlquist sitting at their room’s microfiche reader, alternately reading and worrying a pencil across a yellow legal pad.

  “What gives?”

  Dahlquist turned about, knocking a coil of wire to the floor. “I found out yesterday—during your dream quest for the solace of extinction—that a writer I used to like a lot died earlier this year. The library here’s got only one of his books on microfiche, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, and I was just giving it a quick perusal for old times’ sake.”

  “Philip K. Dick,” Vear said.

  “You know him?”

  “My brother Frank bought me a copy of Valis before the Board of Media Censorship seized its second printing. I couldn’t bring it up here, of course, but I read it.”

  “Valis was his last book, Gordon. Cranky, impenetrable stuff. Atypical. He went off the rails mentally a few years after Kennedy was shot and got nothing else into print—if you overlook Valis— after a semidisaster called Nicholas and the Higs. This one here”—he tapped the microfiche reader—“well, it’s Dick pretty much at the height of his powers. He was a favorite of mine when I was a teenager. William Golding, J. D. Slazenger, and Philip K. Dick, young Peter Dahlquist’s personal Big Three.”

  “I can’t believe you were reading anything other than physics texts and math books, Dolly.”

  “Believe it. I was ahead of my time, Gordon. Or behind it, maybe. A dyed-in-the-tapestry Renaissance man.”

  Vear was oddly touched by his roommate’s nostalgic recollection of a writer who had been important to him as a high-school kid. He wondered aloud if Dolly were taking notes from the microfiche card of The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.

  “No, no,” Dahlquist hurried to reply. “Nothing like that.”

  “What, then?”

  “Well, I didn’t sleep too well last night—I kept thinking that Dick had died awfully young: fifty-three.”

  The same age that Thomas Merton died, Vear thought.

  “What I wanted to think about was making a flock of toy birds—in my spare time—so that everyone at Von Braunville could have one, but what I kept thinking about instead was Philip K. Dick and the unfairness of the way his life turned out. The unfairness of his early death.”

  “Yeah?” Vear prompted.

  “So I thought I’d write something that expressed those things, or tried to express them. I labored as if to give birth to Pikes Peak, Gordon, and what I squeezed out instead was a couple of silly lines of poetry. And that’s what I finally got up and wrote down on my pad.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  “You’ll either laugh or get mad. When you’re not being a mean bastard, Gordon, you’re being the quintessential Catholic.”

  “I won’t laugh. I won’t get mad.”

  They volleyed the matter for a while, Vear feeling that it was crucial that Dolly read him the lines he had composed, and at last the major’s pie-wedge partner surrendered and read them: “ ‘Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. / Let’s all queue up and kick God’s ass.’ ”

  13

  LIA DEPRESSES the key on her intercom unit: “Shawanda, is he here yet?”

  “No, ma’am. Nobody’s here. Nobody but me, anyway.”

  “Let me know as soon as he arrives.”

  “If he do, ma’am, would it be all right if I cut over to the Victorian Tea Room and buy me a breakfast roll?”

  “What for? You’ve had breakfast, and it’s still a couple of hours till lunch.”

  “I don’t want to watch that spooky white man do his ghost-away again. Had me ‘bout nine bad dreams on it since it happen, and I ain’t lookin’ to set up another week’s worth.”

  Lia sighs. “I pay you to stay in the office, Shawanda.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Our luck, he won’t be back, anyway. It’s just that, yo
u know, the way things’re going, it’d be nice to have someone— even a dead amnesiac in a resurrection body—come staggering in.”

  “ ‘Specially, he got that fat wallet in his hip pocket.”

  “Just let me know if he shows up.”

  “Maybe he’ll jus’ up and appear in there beside you ‘thout even usin’ the door.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  But, imagining Kai opting for that kind of melodramatic advent, Lia laughs. Then she releases the talk key and leans back in her chair to wait for the day to begin. So far this morning, she’s simply been reviewing old cases and fiddling with the notion of making a grant application.

  Kai, Lia figures, won’t be back. Since last week’s session, he had appeared—if appeared is the word—twice more, but only to Cal, first as a talkative nimbus around her mother in the nursing home and then as the voice of My Main Squeeze in the pet shop.

  Speaking through the snake, Kai had hinted that he was taking a ghostly holiday and that Cal and Lia could best help him by waging war on entropy. However the hell you did that.

  I wage war on entropy, Lia thinks, by counseling people and by receiving payment for my services. I can’t do either, though, if I don’t have any clients.

  She wants Kai to come back up the stairs and into her office. She will settle even for his smug materialization in her lounger. So long as he comes, she won’t try to stipulate the manner of his arrival. Beggars can’t be choosers, and sometimes she thinks her practice in Warm Springs will reduce her to beggary.

  In the six days since Kai’s last appearance, the world has returned to normal. Locally, normal means that Lia is averaging little better than two clients and a referral a day.