Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “A Sunday like any other Sunday on the Moon,” Dolly qualified. “Maybe the chaplain didn’t celebrate Easter on that Sunday because, up here, we don’t have full moons. Or vernal equinoxes. Or enough rabid Christians to make the holiday worth getting hot and bothered about.”

  “Easter?” Vear said, outraged. “Even tepid believers observe Easter. How could Chaplain Easson utterly forget it? How could we forget it?”

  Cal said, “It didn’t happen back home, either. If it had, Lia would’ve dragged me to church.”

  “Hey, Gordon,” Dolly said, “I’m not even tepid. I’m your basic agnostic-on-good-days, atheist-on-bad.”

  “What about Kai?” Vear attacked him. “How do you account for a phenomenon like Kai?”

  Heads began to turn, and Cal realized that he had to shut these two guys up or risk losing something in addition to Easter, namely, any chance of abreacting a time line that would restore it.

  “Let’s go talk to the bishop,” he said.

  Vear ignored Cal. “If you’re an agnostic, Dolly, why in God’s name would you write an elegy for Kai that goes ‘Philip K. Dick is dead, alas./Let’s all queue up and kick God’s ass’? That’s pretty fuckin’ irreverent, I admit, but at least it acknowledges the fact that God exists.”

  “Hold it down,” Dolly cautioned the major. The eyes of three quarters of the people in the hall were fixed on their table.

  Just a minute, Cal thought. Just a damn minute. Dolly didn’t write that “pretty fuckin’ irreverent” elegy. I wrote it. I wrote it the afternoon of the day I learned of Dick’s death. This guy—this computer person— can’t run off with my poem just because he’s been up here longer than I have…

  Angrily, Cal declared that authorship of the elegy in question belonged to him, not to the major’s roommate, and that if Vear kept insisting otherwise, he was a liar.

  “Watch it, Pickford,” Dolly countered. “Gordon’s no liar. I did write it. Maybe I shouldn’t jump to confess myself the author of such doggerel, but honesty has its compulsions and so I’m being honest and taking you off the hook.”

  Very clever, Cal thought. You arrogant wiseacre. Aloud, he declared, “Listen, if you say you wrote my elegy, you’re guilty of plagiarism.”

  Dolly feigned a look of abashed horror. “Oh, no. Please don’t accuse me of plagiarizing that drecky couplet. I hereby abjure all claim to its authorship. It’s yours, Pickford.”

  “You can’t give me what’s already mine.”

  “He can give you what’s his, though. And Dolly wrote that poem not long after I saw Kai dancing around suitless outside.”

  “You’re both—” Wait, Cal told himself. This is absurd. It’s not the authorship of my elegy for Dick that’s important; it’s the evaporation of Easter from the April 1982 calendar. That’s the issue. And Cal said so aloud.

  “Maybe Phil Dick’s resurrection in late March preempted Easter this year,” Dolly conjectured. “Maybe it’s a temporal law that you can have only one big resurrection event every spring.”

  But Vear roared, “Nothing’s so goddamn big that it preempts the resurrection of the Son of God!”

  A high-ranking officer at a nearby table got up and approached them. At least it isn’t Commander Logan, Cal thought. Instead, it was Colonel Mick Hoffman, the ranking ferry-shuttle pilot, who had recently persuaded their leader to set aside Vear’s “house arrest” so that he could return to full active status.

  “Major,” the colonel said, “would you gentlemen hold it down to a minor tumult, please?”

  “Theological discussion,” Cal said.

  “No such thing as a discussion on that head, Pickford. They’re arguments. Yours is ruining everybody’s digestion.”

  “What happened to Easter?” Cal gave the colonel a challenging look. “That’s what we’ve been trying to decide.”

  Hoffman’s craggy face split into a grin. “Can’t you goyim keep up with your own goddamn holy days anymore? No wonder the West’s going to Sheol in a shopping cart.” Now grinless, he scrutinized them as if they were the Von Braunvillian counterpart of the Three Stooges; then, almost disdainfully, he turned and left.

  Larry, Curly, and Moe, Cal thought. That’s exactly the crew we resemble, sitting here puzzling over the dimension, or the temporal singularity, into which Easter has vanished. Therefore, my earlier suggestion is the only one that makes any sense.

  “Let’s go talk to the bishop,” Cal said again.

  The three men strolled the circumferential corridor of B dome until they had come to the chapel and the chaplain’s quarters. A glowing sign above the former indicated that Bishop Marlin was busy confessing someone, and they remained in the hall until this sign was automatically extinguished by the penitent’s departure from the confessional. Then they entered.

  Cal was surprised to find that the man whom the bishop had just shriven was Robinson, one of President Nixon’s two Secret Service bodyguards. About Cal’s own age, he had a sinewy physique, a face like a youthful night watchman’s, and long hands that he had often used aboard the Checkers to operate a portable videocam. Cal had always supposed him the more trusted of the President’s two agents, and Vear and Dolly’s cool reaction to his presence suggested that they, too, were troubled to see him here. As for Robinson, he was compulsively squeezing his beret, manipulating it like an exercise ball for arthritics.

  “Major Vear, Mr. Dahlquist, allow me to introduce you to Tyler Robinson,” said the bishop. “Cal already knows him.”

  Do I? wondered Cal. We voyaged across outer space together to reach Von Braunville, but during those four days he probably spoke two complete sentences to me. In my opinion, the only good thing about him is that he falls just a little shy of Grieg’s glowering ogrehood…

  Added Bishop Marlin, “He’s officially off duty, which he never was on our voyage out, and now I know that he’s an Episcopalian.”

  “Congratulations,” said Dahlquist.

  “Thanks,” mumbled Tyler Robinson, throttling the beret.

  “And now I’m free to tell you,” the bishop said, an avuncular hand on Robinson’s shoulder, “that he’s our seventh. Because he’s joined us, we can proceed. And everything should be easier because of his involvement.”

  Am I supposed to laugh or cry? Cal wondered. Hurrah, on the one hand. On the other, what if this guy is a plant? What if the President’s setting us up for a bun-busting tumble?

  “Our seventh?” Dolly said. “Why do we need a seventh?”

  Virtually simultaneously, Vear asked, “And what’s happened to Easter, Bishop Marlin? Where did it go?”

  “We need a seventh because it’s a holy number, Mr. Dahlquist, and nothing’s happened to Easter, Major Vear, except that it’s been delayed—I have this, gentlemen, on divine authority—until we can do what we must do.”

  Cal said, “And when’s that?”

  “Today. This afternoon. As soon as possible.” The bishop let Robinson out, assuring him that the penance he had prescribed would absolve him of his sins; then he walked past the confessional to the altar at the rear of the tiny chapel. “Come over here,” he urged Cal. “You’ll want to see this.”

  Cal joined him beside the low altar. Behind it, concealed from Vear and Dolly, sat one of the cavy cages that they had transported all the way from Earth. Looking down, Cal saw that the pregnant guinea pig inside this cage had given birth to at least four baby Brezhnev bears. They were minute, and naked except for the collars of colorful fur around their heads and shoulders. Despite himself, Cal grinned and reached down through the cage’s open top to scratch the brindle mane of the mother. Except for the crucifix above the altar and the low gravity, it was like being back in Mr. K.‘s Happy Puppy Pet Emporium.

  “I’m finally getting fond of these stupid things,” Cal said. “They’re like crosses between a link sausage and a woolly bear.”

  “Don’t get too fond of them,” Bishop Marlin advised. “It’s not too likely the little guys’ll make the shi
ft with us.”

  Erica Zola was sessioning with Major Romanenko, the cosmonaut whose technical specialty—materials science—was the same as the late Roland Nyby’s. Romanenko had come in, literally begging for a consultation, during the psychotherapist’s lunch break, and she had acceded to his request because he was so painfully distraught that to have refused him would have been a small crime against humanity, both his and hers.

  “I want to kill him,” he repeated for the ninth time.

  “An illogical response to the insult of a deranged man, Kolya. Intellectually, you know this, don’t you?”

  Kolya Romanenko gave her a look hot enough to singe the potted hydrangea basking in the fluorescent panel behind her desk. “You cognitive therapists are all the same, doctor lady.”

  “A behaviorial therapist would advise you similarly. As far as that goes, so would a family therapist, a psychodynamist, probably even an interpersonalist. You’ve got a right to be angry, but you have no right to kill President Nixon.”

  “I want to defect.”

  Another off-the-wall desire, Erica thought. Did Cal’s wife, Lia, ever have clients like this? Aloud she said, “To the country whose leader insulted you?”

  “No. To here. Your führer cried, ‘I am a Von Braunvillian.’ So let me defect to this moonbase. Forever.”

  “That’s a political problem, Kolya, not a psychological or an emotional one. I can only help you with it if you understand that your wish is at bottom an absurd one.”

  Besides, Erica reflected, after today this place may no longer exist. And if you’ve defected to it, you’ll be without a country. Without a community, even. And what hypocrisy—my asserting it’s wrong to want to kill Nixon when I myself am part of a conspiracy to effect his overthrow by parapsychotherapeutic means … I am a Von Braunvillian,” Romanenko insisted. A knock on the door and an announcement from the speaker unit next to it: “Erica, it’s Cal Pickford. May I come in?”

  Erica said, “Just a mi—”

  “I’m leaving,” Major Kolya Romanenko said, standing up. “But I promise you that I will die a Von Braunvillian.” He stormed to the door, jabbed the button unsheathing its panel, and brushed past Cal Pickford into B dome’s circumferential corridor.

  “Kolya!” Erica shouted. What did that mean, “I will die a Von Braunvillian”? Probably a suicide threat. No idle one, either. Romanenko will precipitate himself out of our community in the same desperate way that Nyby did. I need to go after him…

  But Cal was entering, clutching a Brezhnev bear. “For you,” he said, setting the cavy on her blotter and casting a puzzled look after the cosmonaut. “A feisty little male.” The panel whooshed shut again. “The ‘bear’, I mean.”

  “I’m afraid Kolya needs it more than I do, Cal.”

  “Should I go after him?”

  Erica could not say. The fluorescents in her office flickered, bringing darkness but snapping back so quickly that every cabinet, computer, and console was lit as if by a sustained nuclear flash. When the intensity of this light—oddly pink in color—at last fell off, the crippled body of the dwarf called Kai (alias Horsy Stout: alias Philip K. Dick) began to materialize in the chair that Kolya Romanenko had so abruptly vacated.

  A spirit clothed in the glorified body of a black stable-hand, Erica thought. But it looks as if our homunculus has only barely escaped from a fistfight with his life. Torn shirt, lacerated chest, bunged-up face—all of him paradoxically spilling a sheen that bespeaks an incorruptible spiritual body. And never mind his perishable-appearing flesh and duds.

  “Let him go,” Kai said, nodding after the Soviet. “If we work fast enough, he won’t have time to off himself.”

  “Now?” Erica asked.

  “Yeah. The place is already prepared. You, Dr. Zola, are the secular specialist on our team. You’ll help Bishop Marlin and me direct a massive spiritual assault. Everyone else has a role, too, even if it’s only assisting our abreactive exorcism by projecting love at the guy pinned down to the gurney.”

  “Projecting love at King Richard?” Cal said. “You’ve got to be joking. I’ll be absolutely worthless to you.”

  “No. No, you won’t. You’ll be holding the joker to the table for us. And when you’re not doing that, well, you’ll be—this is the truth, even if it sounds dumb—you’ll be radiating love at the invaded person you think you’ve got cause to hate. Broadcasting it like a radio tower. ‘S true. Cross my heart.”

  Cal, Erica noticed, was shaking his head. Then he caught sight of something glittering on Kai’s shirt front—a pin of some kind—and knelt to touch it. The homunculus warned him off by wagging a finger at him. So Cal pulled back and stared up at the enthroned dwarf with… well, what? Expectant awe, apparently.

  “Yeah, you’ve got one, too. And Lia’s going to find another one later tonight in her jewelry box. A trinity of fish pins.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep us three lost crumbs in this vast perceptive omniverse from getting separated when the shift comes.”

  Lost, Erica reflected. I’m the one who’s lost. None of this adds up to diddlysquat. A trinity, Kai says, but to me it’s all koine Greek…

  The dwarf looked directly at her. Then he said, “The spirit of evil is one of unreality, Dr. Zola, but it, itself, is real. It genuinely exists. To think otherwise is to err.”

  Erica stroked the mane of the animal on her desk. Then she put the “bear” in a cage that Cal had brought by earlier. What would happen to her pet when the abreaction came? Kai said no more, and the three of them made their way from B dome to C and from C into the narrow underground tunnel to the converted slump-pit cavern where she, Vear, and Dahlquist had first “safely communed” with the homunculus. Erica knew that this time they would go farther than the warehouse/motor pool. In the musty lunacrete honeycombing beneath Censorinus, she could hear her heart beating beating beating…

  On the pretext of doing some selenological work that his house arrest had prevented, Vear suited up and exited C dome from an air lock near his and Dolly’s pie wedge. Claiming that he wanted to gather two or three bags of breccias from the “impact gardening” on the crater floor and that he needed some help, Vear had convinced Logan to let him take Dolly. Dahlquist, he had argued, had already resolved every major computer problem at the base, and if he, Vear, had his roommate’s help, he’d finish up faster and limit the loss of unrecyclable oxygen.

  This ruse was necessary because Bishop Marlin believed that the seven should use at least three different routes to the slump-pit cavern chosen for their exorcism site. Suspicion would accrue—at the very least, questions would arise—if they all converged on the underground chamber en masse. Vear agreed with the bishop, and he was ready to do anything in his power, including pray, to frustrate prying eyes and expedite their mission.

  Dolly seldom left the domes. He would have been content, Vear knew, to wear a space suit only on arriving at and departing from Von Braunville—if he’d had that option. Unfortunately for him, institutionalized safety procedures required everyone to suit up periodically and to bound around outside as if one of the domes had suffered a meteorite strike. Fortunately for Vear, Dolly therefore remembered how to comport himself on the surface. Still, he was overdeliberate in his movements and an inevitable brake on the more reckless major.

  Moondozers were gouging out shovelsful of the crater floor, as well as parts of its slope, to feed the O2 plant opposite the domes, and a pair of space-suited technicians were working in the near end of the solar-array field. They looked like tiny, articulate dolls, and Vear was amazed—as he always was—by the bootprints in the monochrome powder underfoot. These herringbone patterns would remain on the windless Moon forever—unless wiped out by a machine or a meteorite. It was therefore base policy to erase the prints occasionally, usually by rolling them with huge aluminum drums that attached to the rears of the ‘dozers.

  “All of this is going to disappear,” Vear said. A closed radio band carried his
words into Dolly’s helmet, and Dolly turned to him a wide reflecting visor that concealed his expression. “After the exorcism, I mean.” A pause. “How, Dolly? How?”

  They mounted the lunacrete pad on which sat the Daisy Duck and a second ferry shuttle. Dolly moved with more assurance here, but he was fatigued. “Nixon’s the focus. Tolstoy notwithstanding, the ‘great man’ theory of history has real validity.” (Huff-puff, huff-puff.) “The moral and metaphysical makeup of persons in power counts. It counts heavily, Gordon.”

  Dolly halted near the Daisy Duck, an upright craft whose four spindly legs, terminating in platelike footpads, were each taller than a human adult. The ship’s crew-and-cargo cabin resembled a two-story balloon gondola, except that it was made of metal and bore upon it a pair of engines like hair dryers in a beauty salon for Titans. Above the blocky cabin rested a spherical tank that could hold thirty tons of oxygen, and perched atop this sphere was an end-standing oval tank as tall as the cabin and the oxygen tank combined: It hauled hydrogen.

  Waiting for Dolly to recover, Vear marveled at Daisy. Here on the Moon, she could soar. On Earth, however, she would never even achieve lift-off. And if Von Braunville were doomed to disappear in the wake of a suppressed time line’s abreaction, well, his ability to pilot such an ungainly-looking flying machine would mean nothing at all. A poignant rime of regret added itself to the cold anxious lump in Vear’s gut, and he clenched the fingers of his pressurized gloves into fat quasi-fists.

  So what if piloting the ferry shuttle becomes obsolete? Vear asked himself. Aren’t you the guy who wanted to go home and enter a monastery? Well, how much better for everybody if your monastery exists in a just rather than an unjust reality. And, if the Earth is again redeemed, how can you mourn the passing of Daisy?

  Dolly had recovered his breath. “Kai says that by exorcising the President, the ‘great man’ who primarily shaped this time line, we’ll halt the temporal flow altogether. Naturally, time will seek another channel to run into. If we’ve effected Nixon’s healing in the right—I mean, a loving— way, we’ll abreact a saner reality, and time will back up and flow into a channel in which his grossest crimes have no moorings and so can’t occur. As for us, we’ll find ourselves riding the new current at a point parallel to this moment in our unexorcized time line.” Dolly was ready to go again. “And, more than likely, we’ll be ignorant of the shift.”