Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Get out of this car, Lia urged herself. Get out and walk down the road past the Civilian Conservation Corps swimming pool and on into Pine Mountain. Maybe you can hitch a ride before you’ve worn the soles off your wedgies. But she remained where she was, a dead lump in the actress’s hearselike limousine.

  “What happened to your dog was an accident.”

  Lia’s pulse quickened, and the words that came out of her mouth had so much bitter energy that she and Miss Grace were stunned by them: “You can talk about anything else you feel like, but don’t, for God’s sake, talk about Viking!”

  The other woman looked at her with an odd commingling of awe and amusement. Then she toed off her shoes, pulled her legs up under her on the plush front seat, and gestured a command: Turn on the tape recorder. Emptily, Lia obeyed.

  “When I was little, the most important man in my life was my daddy. He was career Air Force, and, now that I think about it, he was built a little like Hiram, taller by a couple of inches but as solid as a fireplug.

  “I was born in Valdosta, Georgia. Daddy was stationed at Moody Air Force Base, near there, training all these handsome young guys to be fighter pilots. When I was two, he violated regulations and took me up in a trainer for a ride. Nobody knew but him, my mama, and me, and I can still remember sitting on Daddy’s lap watching the nose of that stubby silver plane go angling up into the sky’s terrific blueness and then lickety-split back down at the flat red fields shimmering with heat on every side of Valdosta.

  “My father loved me to death. He must’ve been a little crazy, too, because on some later illicit flights—we did this half a dozen times before I turned five—he let me take the joystick and fling our airplane up and down like one of his shavetail trainees. Me, a mere baby, squeezing the joystick and rocketing us around the south Georgia skies just as if I knew what I was doing. Of course, Daddy was there to take over if I screwed up—if I got us climbing so fast that we stalled out or if I bucked us into the beginnings of a death spiral. That was damn good to know, Lia. I never felt insecure piloting one of Daddy’s trainers. Never.”

  What a story, Lia thought. The Freudian implications of your infant joyrides are as plain as blood on a wedding gown. In spite of herself, Lia found that her self-involved client was involving her, too. Recapturing her attention. Neutralizing the anger that had nearly led her to get out of the car.

  “What’s the point of this reminiscence?” Lia asked. “I mean, what do you think the point of it is?”

  “I don’t know. It was the last time in my life that I remember feeling truly secure. And it happened in circumstances that most little kids—boys and girls alike—would probably find frightening, don’t you think?”

  “Probably.”

  “Daddy was a rock, though. He believed that the United States of America was the City of God on Earth. He volunteered to fly in Korea because he figured the Red Chinese would swamp that peninsula and take Japan and all of Indochina if we didn’t stop them there. He flew F-84s for sixteen months of our so-called police action. Later, he left Mama and me for some top-secret training at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and it wasn’t until he died in a U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union that we found out what Daddy’d been doing. This was in 1961, at the very beginning of Jack Kennedy’s administration, not long after the release of The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, and it never made the news. Kennedy and Khrushchev were meeting in Vienna in June, and neither that Russian pig nor our fair-haired Massachusetts Democrat wanted another U-2 incident to shoot down their talk the way the Francis Gary Powers fuckup had sabotaged Ike’s last scheduled summit with Khrushchev.

  “It was a mockery. Daddy overflew Russia to combat communism, but our playboy president and their plowboy premier both pretended that he hadn’t even been there. Why? So that JFK and Nikita could look like big shots for the home folks. Which was when I realized that this Kennedy jerk—the guy who’d recently withheld air cover from the Bay of Pigs freedom fighters—was no more trustworthy than the fat man who’d had my daddy shot down. Then and there I started looking for a conservative alternative to Kennedy. I found him in Barry Goldwater.”

  Oh, yeah, thought Lia, I remember him. He was the patriot who stood up at the Republican National Convention in ‘64 and declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Johnson swamped him, but Goldwater’s unsuccessful campaign that year paved the way for Nixon’s comeback in ‘68, and the Democrats haven’t been able to mount a convincing challenge since.

  “So everything you’ve done since then politically,” Lia said, “you’ve done in memory of your father? Is that it?”

  “Of course. There’s no doubt about it. And if he could see how my work—my Hollywood activism, my Americulturation programs, my consistent support of Dick’s domestic and foreign policies—has contributed to the current health of our nation, well, Lia, I know, really know, that he’d be proud of me. The way he was proud of me for flying that training aircraft—taking its joystick and putting it through its paces—when I was a little girl of four. Shit, yes, he’d be proud. If only he could see…” The actress’s voice faded into a breathy sibilance.

  Meanwhile, a great melancholy descended on Lia. Grace Rinehart was a megalomaniacal superpatriot with an Electra complex. Her daddy had given her phallic control of an Air Force trainer during her toddlerhood. Later, when she was building a screen career that would have secured his everlasting admiration, he had perished over the Soviet heartland during the administration of a man she could only regard as an opportunistic rake in his private life and a self-seeking traitor in the public performance of his presidential duties. These disparate episodes had shaped the woman’s psyche in ways that would probably resist a decade of conscientious therapy, and Lia could not imagine sessioning with her another week or two, much less ten years.

  I’ll never make this fanatical bitch like herself, she thought bitterly. Even if I make some small headway, I’ll do so only at the expense of my own peace of mind. I’m a woman diminished, and how a diminished woman can heal a woman who secretly believes herself unworthy of her dead daddy’s love is a mystery I’ll never wholly fathom …

  20

  VEAR FELT SOMEONE shaking him. Rolling over, he saw Dolly, his pie-wedge partner, mouthing something urgent.

  “… a visitor,” Dolly’s lips finally gave voice. “We’ve got a visitor, Gordon.”

  But I’ve already talked to the President, Vear thought, trying to shove Peter Dahlquist’s hand aside. I almost killed him with one of your finagled solenoids. But his bodyguard strangled me, I woke up, and none of it had really happened…

  Dear Lord, am I about to have another of those episodes? Vear asked himself.

  Panicked, he swung his feet to the floor, almost booting Dolly in the groin, and found to his relief that he was in his room, the quarters to which Commander Logan had ordered him confined (except for shuttle-pilot missions and trips to the mess hall) days upon days ago. It was an even greater relief to see that their visitor was not King Richard but Von Braunville’s resident psychotherapist, Dr. Erica Zola.

  A woman? In his and Dolly’s pie wedge? Wasn’t that against base regs?

  “Forgive me,” she said, “for imposing on you like this. I know how much you value privacy. But an impossible thing has happened, and my orders are to take you and Peter with me to a place where we can safely commune.”

  “Safely commune?”

  “The words of the one who sent me, quoted verbatim.”

  “Commander Logan ordered you to take my roomie and me someplace where we can… ‘safely commune’?”

  “She isn’t talking about Commander Logan,” Dolly said.

  What the hell’s going on? Vear wondered. His commander wanted him to stay in his dormitory dome under a kind of self-monitored house arrest, but Dolly and this woman were urging him to follow them to a tryst with a mysterious order-giver who apparently wasn’t the base commander.

  “You’re not talking a
bout the President, are you?” Vear asked.

  “Gordon, I’ve had my own nanophany.”

  “Nanophany?” Dolly asked Erica.

  “Dwarf sighting,” she said. “Impossible dwarf sighting.”

  Jumpsuited and barefoot, Vear grabbed her by the shoulders and looked down into her pleasant but vaguely lupine face. “You mean you saw the same dwarf I did? That proves I’m not out of my gourd, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what it proves. Maybe that I’m out of mine.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “He’s waiting for us, Gordon. All three of us.”

  Dolly said, “But I never saw a dwarf cavorting outdoors without a suit. What the hell does he want with me?”

  “Perhaps he’ll tell you, Peter. Come on.”

  “Wait a minute,” Vear said. He was growing suspicious. This was a practical joke. Franciscus and Stanfield had recruited Erica to help make him look like an idiot in front of everybody serving at Von Braunville. She would lead him—and the slyly dissembling Dolly—to an “empty” sanctuary in the next dome, and when they got there and let themselves in, Franciscus and all the others would jump out dressed like the Seven Dwarfs. They’d have signs around their necks identifying them as Grumpy, Doc, Bashful, Dopey, etc. One of them might even be wearing blackface and a sign proclaiming himself (hi ho; ha ha) Darky.

  “What’s wrong?” Erica asked.

  “I’m disappointed in you, that’s all.” Angrily, Vear outlined his suspicions. He paced and fumed. It wasn’t surprising that the personnel at the moonbase should fall prey to boredom, but trying to alleviate it by making cruel sport of someone who’d suffered an upsetting hallucination on a crater ledge, well, that was behavior worthy of cretinous fifth graders, not of professionals who took pride in their professionalism.

  “What if this had something to do with Roland Nyby?” the woman countered. “Would you still regard it as a barbarous ruse?”

  Vear stopped pacing, stopped fuming. No, he thought. If this has anything at all to do with Nyby, you’d never turn it into an excuse to ridicule me. Or anyone else. You’d do just what you’re doing now, namely, come to our room and summon us forth. And if I were anything but a horse’s patootie, I’d pull on my dome slippers and follow you.

  “Lead on, McDuff,” Vear said.

  And so Erica Zola led Major Gordon Vear and the civilian NASA official Peter Dahlquist, computer troubleshooter, out of C dome, through a little-used connecting tunnel, and into a slump-pit cavern. This cavern, vitrifoamed and lunacreted, served the base as a warehouse for auxiliary supplies and as a motor pool for its ‘dozers and exploration vehicles.

  Several of the sealed bays in this cavern were airless. Erica had to pause at two or three airlock doors to determine the oxygen levels beyond them before proceeding. Even Vear, a ferry-shuttle pilot, felt like a trespasser here, and he was glad that the amber lights on the tracking console over in HQ dome worked only for base personnel who ventured outdoors.

  Dolly had brought one of his mock mockingbirds. Each time they had to stop, he would wind its rubber band and let the artificial bird go flapping about in the tight corridors of the warehouse cum motor pool. This clumsy flapping annoyed Vear, who tolerated it only because it did not bother Erica and because Dolly was plainly fighting to overcome several serial bouts of nerves.

  At last, well below the floor of the Censorinus crater, Erica escorted them into a chamber—its atmosphere of 27% oxygen and 73% nitrogen was oddly musty—stacked with boxes of commercial snacks, cans of soft drinks, and crates full of jars of cocktail cherries, boysenberry jam, and Spanish olives. These were food items that several American firms had paid NASA to ship to Kennedy Port and then on to Von Braunville for promotional purposes. Most of these goods were less than sterling; they warranted warehouse space only because Commander Logan—so the rumor went—had promised a Soviet cosmonaut with whom he had become friendly that the cosmonaut could take a few crates home and sell their contents on Moscow’s black market, where almost any American-manufactured item was regarded as a prestigious acquisition.

  “Here?” Vear asked, glancing around.

  “This way,” Erica replied. She led them to a sorting stand and told them to fetch three metal stools that workers in this chamber used to reach goods on the upper shelves. Vear wondered where the dwarf was. No one had jumped out at him with a Dopey or a Sneezy sign. Too bad. Such a “surprise” would have been more uplifting than stumbling into this eerie gloom and silence.

  “I guess we have to wait,” the psychotherapist said.

  “But where did you first see him?” Vear asked.

  “In my room, Gordon. Just a few minutes before I came to get you and Dolly. He said it was lucky you guys were rooming together because I wouldn’t have to disturb anybody else fetching you down here to this rendezvous.”

  “Okay. And then what happened?”

  “He disappeared. He faded out and was gone.”

  Dolly passed the time by launching his mock mockingbird at the soda-pop cases at Vear’s back. Vear finally retaliated by batting the damn thing from the air as it flapped past him on its seventh languorous flight. But why the hell am I so jumpy? the major asked himself. We’re anxious, that’s all. Like a couple of monks taking their tonsures from a man with pruning shears…

  Someone appears at the head of the sorting stand. Vear tries unsuccessfully to wrap an identity around this figure. He feels an oscillating uncertainty, warmth giving way to fear, fear giving way to warmth. Are the others similarly affected? Dolly and Erica are staring raptly at the spot where the homunculus slips in and out of focus.

  A hologram, thinks Vear. Franciscus and Stanfield have set up a goddamn holo-projector in here.

  But the figure slowly acquires resolution, being—just as Erica had indicated—a Negroid dwarf. He wears blue jeans and a white shirt. The shirt billows almost imperceptibly at the sleeves and shoulders, like wings in a faint breeze.

  Before Vear can think of a greeting that does not sound flip or nincompoopish, the dwarf turns to the modular storage unit behind him and takes down a package of soda crackers. Then, again at the sorting stand, he shakes out three crackers, mumbles a prayer or an incantation, and nonchalantly shies the crackers across the table. Vear catches his sedately floating cracker as if it were a small square Frisbee. As both Erica and Dolly catch theirs.

  “Take, eat,” says the dwarf. (His accent is a kind of basic Californian.)

  The three people at the sorting stand eat.

  Then the dwarf pulls down three cans of grape soda, pongs their special spouts, and slides them across the table to his guests. Vear briefly wonders why he, Erica, and Dolly—moonbase personnel of long standing—should now regard themselves as this apparition’s “guests”, but guests, like it or not, is what they are.

  “Take, drink,” says the apparition.

  Vear drinks. So do Erica and Dolly. The only one who neither eats nor drinks is the dwarf, who now seems familiar to the major, not simply because he saw him on the crater rim a few days ago, but because both Dolly and Erica appear to recognize him, too.

  “Elijah!” declares the psychotherapist.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” says the computer specialist.

  “Thomas Merton?” suggests Vear, tentatively.

  The dwarf chuckles modestly. “Elijah. Christ. Merton. What can I say? You guys aren’t even close. I may’ve been taken over by Elijah once upon a time, Dr. Zola, but when his spirit abandoned me—back in ‘76—well, I tried to kill myself. As for Christ, you might get a point or two, Mr. Dahlquist, but only if you’re broad-minded. What did you mean the H to stand for?”

  Dolly looks confused. “Nothing. It was a profane H, part of an oath. Like when somebody says, “Jesus X. Christ!””

  “Well, X is the symbol for chi, the first letter of Christ if you’re writing Greek. I was sort of hoping, you know, that your H stood for, uh, “Horsy”. But in English, not in Greek.”

 
Vear feels the hair on his nape dancing, like tiny, filamentous snakes swaying to an unheard flute. Nothing of what the dwarf has just said makes any sense. All Vear understands is that even in misidentifying the apparition, Erica and Dolly have named a part of his identity. They’ve come closer to defining him than either they know or the homunculus is yet willing to concede.

  “As for Merton,” the dwarf continues, “well, that’s flattering, I guess. Seriously flattering. But so what if we both died when we were fifty-three? Coincidence. Stupid coincidence. All Merton and I have in common is our unshakable faith that the Transcendent exists and that It’ll talk to you if ever It decides you’re worth the effort. And that’s about it. That and a quest to understand whatever the fuck we’re being handed when the Transcendent finally deigns to speak.”

  “You told me you’d identify yourself,” Erica says. “So why do you have us playing this silly guessing game?”

  “You guys started zapping out names. Not my fault. But if you still want to play, here’s a hint: Confessions of a Crap Artist.”

  “Philip K. Dick?” Dolly hazards.

  “Good, Mr. Dahlquist. The K stands for Kai.” Kai hops onto the table and sits cross-legged. Glorified but hazy, he shimmers there. “Go ahead. Eat. Drink. We may be here awhile.”

  “We can’t afford to be here ‘awhile’,” Erica protests. “We’ve got duties to perform, appointments to keep.”

  “I meant subjectively,” Kai says. “Outside this chamber, no time at all is passing. It’s stalled. Von Braunville’s enchanted, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. If you stuck your head into one of your colleague’s rooms, you’d see a red fog hanging over everything and your colleague suspended in that fog like a grape in a bowl of black-cherry Jell-O.”

  I’m hallucinating again, Vear thinks. Or I’m dreaming. Erica and Dolly aren’t really here, and I’m playing out this “nanophany” in a remote corner of my dreaming mind. When I wake up, I’ll still be confined to quarters for my trek outside the domes. Nyby will still be dead. Erica won’t remember anything about this, and Dolly will have started making mock mockingbirds by the dozens. To boost morale. Which, by now, may be unboostable.