Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “As if we had any choice,” Dolf says.

  After President Jordan’s Easter message, the Today newscaster recaps yesterday’s news, ending with accounts of a joint British-Argentine satellite launch and the dedication of a fusion-power facility in the Golan Heights that has already begun to serve both Israel and Syria.

  Leah stood by Dolf, an arm through his, only half her attention on the tri-D screen. She remembered the weird evening in ‘76 that the Choir—as most English speakers call the aliens—“popped” into view in Earth’s sky. They arrived via a paradimensional realm that her friend Erica Gipp dubbed the “Id Grid”. Often, one’s mind can better solve problems through dreams or daydreams than through conscious logic. Similarly, star travelers can better cross vast distances by forsaking the physical plane of the universe than by skating its surface. Therefore, if Space, like Mind, has conscious and subconscious aspects, the shortest distance between Mira Ceti and the sun lies along Erica’s Id Grid.

  However one explains their advent, the Choir emerged from their paradimensional corridor aboard a transparent globe as large as the Moon. This globe, which had no measurable gravitational effects on the Earth or its seas, neared the Moon, opened a vertical seam, and engulfed the satellite. This process—alternately fascinating and horrifying—took exactly one week. Ever since, the Moon has been a chameleonic stranger. Sometimes it looks like a burnished hubcap, sometimes a bowl full of tropical fish and bioluminescent eels, and sometimes the lens of a giant projector showing surrealistic movies in kaleidoscopic Technicolor.

  Things are going on up there, strange things. Now and again, the Choir floods the airways of Earth with eerie music, messages that synchronize with the pulsings of the Moon’s alien skin. A few select human beings—the Choir have singled them out—are able to translate this “singing” into recommendations for implementing new technologies or for solving the various problems still dividing the people of Earth. And, so far, nearly all these recommendations have had an immediate influence for good. On the other hand, Leah thinks, you can no longer look at the Moon and find the features—craters, seas, and lakes—that NASA and the Soviets were mapping in earnest in the heyday of the East-West “space race”.

  “I’m tired of sittin’ here on my butt waitin’ for you guys,” Eldred told his parents.

  “Me, too,” Karina seconded him.

  Oh, no, thought Leah. Daddy’s going to blister that butt you’re tired of sittin’ on. And our whole damn morning will be ruined.

  But Dolf only laughed. “I bet you are, podnah,” he said. “And you, too, Missy K.” He turned off the tri-D with the master remote and led everyone over to the tree.

  The Packards sat down near the frosty rectangle of the picture window and began opening presents.

  The first two were for the kids, big boxes that Dolf told them to open together.

  Package one contained a pair of foot-high plastic horses, with toy saddles, bridles, and riders.

  Package two, which required no unwrapping, only the removal of the carton’s top, held two more quirky creatures. But these were alive. A pair of guinea pigs, with fur the color of snow. Pet shops were calling them “snow babies” rather than guinea pigs, and that’s what they looked like: snow babies. The kids needed to be a bit older to take care of them properly, Leah thought, but Dolf had insisted on buying them anyhow.

  For Leah, the smallest box of all. It contained a gold pin, the intaglio profile of a fish. She was surprised and delighted, for Dolf was not usually the sort to give jewelry.

  For Dolf, a book. He had recognized the item inside its paper as soon as he had seen her place it under the tree. Of course, he couldn’t know which book she’d bought, and Leah watched intently as he pulled the wrappings off.

  “Ah,” he said. “Philip Kyle Dick. The Three Desiderata of Calvin Deckard.” And he kissed her.

  “I knew you liked his novels.”

  “This one’s not a novel. It’s what Dick calls his ‘Exegesis’, of work of speculative theology. All that’s novelistic about it, I think, is that he puts it in the mouth of a precognitive disciple of the Immortal One. The disciple’s name is Calvino Deckard.”

  “The Immortal One? Christ?”

  “Not exactly. Dick—I mean, the fictional Calvino Deckard—calls him a ‘plasmate’, a form of living information, and he writes this about him.” Dolf thumbed through the hardcover. “ ‘The Head Apollo is about to return.’ He wrote that in ‘74, which makes it sound predictive of the Choir’s arrival.

  “Farther on, this: ‘All creation is language and nothing but language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside…’ Of course, the Choir have begun to show us how to read and hear this ‘language’, and when our Lottery winners go to Mira Ceti to behold God and to witness from ringside the events preceding their star’s supernova, we’ll know more about creation—and the language that formulated it—than anyone who ever lived before the Choir showed up here. It’s just too bad that I resent them for hijacking our Moon and horning in on a search that we ought to be bright enough to conduct for ourselves.”

  “Maybe we aren’t bright enough.”

  “They’re millions of years older than the human species. Given that much time, we’d surely evolve an intelligence—and abilities—comparable to theirs. They’re not giving us the chance.”

  “We’re just as likely to blow ourselves up.”

  “I don’t think that justifies their meddling.”

  Leah put her hand on Dolf s arm. “Enough for now, okay? Let’s help the kids.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, setting the book down. And they showed the twins how to prepare a box of cedar chips for the snow babies, how to put food pellets in jar lids nailed to small boards, and exactly how the babies’ gravity-flow water bottles worked.

  Bishop Jamie A. Parr of the Georgia diocese of the Protestant Episcopal Church stood by himself on a platform in the Mountain Convention Center in Gainesville, Georgia. He was waiting for the Choragus to speak to him through the two-hundred-member human choir standing on tiers to his immediate left. A tri-D camera was aimed at him from the control booth opposite his dais, perhaps a hundred yards away.

  Spotlights fell on the bishop and on the robed choristers, whom he had personally selected from the choirs of forty of the largest churches in his diocese. Otherwise, the Convention Center, a great tiled hangar of a building, was ominously dark. Air conditioning had dropped Gainesville’s springlike outside temperature to a nippy sixty-two degrees, but Bishop Parr was sweating.

  When would the Choragus, who spoke for the alien Choir, reveal itself to him this time?

  At exactly one o’clock, if its recent promise of today’s modern Easter Event were trustworthy—for the Choragus had spoken to Parr two Sundays ago, while he was holding forth in the pulpit of Christ Episcopal Church in Savannah. It had ordered him to tell the world that seven human families would soon be given an audience with God, and it had urged him to gather a representative Episcopal choir to act as its mouthpiece. This command, this urging, had come to him as a kind of auditory hallucination in the midst of his sermon, and the congregation had had to tolerate a queer lapse in his delivery until he could sort out the matter.

  The Choragus of the Choir from Mira Ceti B VIII wanted a human choir for a mouthpiece, Parr believed, not only for the spectacle that it would provide on the world’s tri-D sets but also for the irony inherent in this arrangement. Over eight years, the aliens who had homesteaded the Moon had slowly developed something vaguely akin to a sense of humor. A human sense of what was both funny and fitting…

  In Parr’s ear sounded the voice of a technician in the control booth: “You’re on the air, Bishop.”

  Looking toward the camera, Parr managed an awkward hello and a few equally awkward prefatory words about today’s Easter Event. As he spoke, the dark hall began to fill with a translucent mulberry light. A suffused glow like rippling silk.

  A wind
—nearly arctic in its chill—swept from one side of the Mountain Convention Center to the other, sighing past the bishop, billowing the indigo, saffron, maroon, or ivory robes of the choir members. Thus cued, the choir sang a major chord, a cappella. Then another, and then another. The alien wind corkscrewing through the hall inspirited every person singing.

  Soon, the bishop was translating these powerful wordless carols as if they were all pieces of a lost text of which he was the sole reliable interpreter. The choir sang on and on, the silky crimson light in the hall waved rhythmically, and Bishop Parr rendered into both English and graceful sign language the latest love message to humanity from the alien Choir on the Moon. Time ceased for him as he translated, and for the two hundred people singing, and for most of the world’s people watching on their tri-D screens and listening to the magnificent accompanying chorale.

  During the last minutes of the broadcast, Bishop Parr spoke the names of seven families worldwide. The fifth name spoken was that of the Dolf Packard family of Snowy Falls, Colorado.

  Dolf held his breath. The last American astronauts to attempt to reach the Moon were the hapless crew of the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, and their deaths in lunar orbit—a drama played out over five excruciating days on live radio and television—had put an emphatic period to the American space program, wrapping it up at nearly the same time that the United States was pulling out of Vietnam at the direction of President Muskie.

  Now, Dolf, Leah, Eldred, and Karina Packard—as unlikely a crew of interstellar explorers as Dolf could imagine—were flying to the Moon in a craft hurled into space by means of a set of acceleration tracks on the flank of Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa. The ship itself had been molecularly assembled, three months ago, by Revolutionary NanoTech of Hanoi. All around the Packards, on couches like their own, sat the other passengers aboard the iridescent ship carrying them heavenward.

  A family from Leningrad, a family from Hong Kong, a family from Zaire, a family from Saudi Arabia, a family from Peru, and a family from Malaysia.

  None of these families, Dolf had long since learned, spoke the native tongue of any of the others; all communications to date had consisted of nods, smiles, and bemused shrugs. The fact that the vessel held thirty-five people added to this confusion.

  All that kept Dolf from panicking was the presence of his loved ones and the knowledge that they would reach the Moon in thirty-six hours. Then they would fly through the multicolored rind encasing the Moon into a paradimensional expressway linking humanity’s solar system to the Mira Ceti binary.

  Or so, nearly nine weeks ago, Bishop Parr had told the world, deciphering the alien Choir’s message from the eerie harmonies of their two-hundred human mouthpieces.

  “I’ve told you guys before,” Eldred whined. “I don’t want to meet God.”

  “Me, either,” Karina said, squirming.

  “Just hush and watch the Moon,” Leah advised them, for the Moon was visible as a huge bronze and verdigris cantaloupe in the banks of windows at the forward end of their craft.

  When the twins continued to protest, Dolf leaned across Leah’s seat-belted body and shouted, “Hush!”

  Much more quietly, he added, “You’re damned well going to meet God. And like it. Didn’t we have a democratic vote to see if we’d do this or not? And didn’t you guys say over and over again that you wanted to see a star explode?”

  “Almost explode,” Eldred corrected him.

  “Okay, ‘almost explode’. Well, ours is a free family, and your votes counted, and I don’t want to hear any more of this guff about ‘not wanting’ to go. It’s too late for second thoughts.”

  “I’m worried about our snow babies,” Karina said:

  “Gramby and Grandma Packard have them,” Leah said. “They’ll be fine. We’ve been all over that, too.”

  The argument continued, and Dolf wondered briefly if the Choir had ever considered supplying their Lottery winners with some kind of soporific for hyperactive five-year-old pilgrims. If the twins were this fidgety all the way to Mira Ceti, he’d be a nervous wreck long before entering the awesome presence of the Holy One. He and Leah both…

  At last, though, the kids quieted, playing a made-up zero-g game with a red squeeze ball and Dixie cup.

  Leah laid her hand on Dolf’s thigh. “It’s too bad President Humphrey didn’t live to see this,” she said, nodding at the Moon. Its bronze and verdigris bands had turned pewter and platinum; now they were streaming in opposite directions across the glassy Choral rind. A remarkable, if disorienting, sight.

  “Yeah, it is,” Dolf agreed. Humphrey had died in a helicopter crash at Camp David the day after the Apollo 11 astronauts took off from Cape Kennedy for the first successful Moon landing. Muskie, freshly sworn in, had greeted Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet upon their return, but the nation’s triumph had been tempered by a profound sadness. NASA dedicated its next four Apollo missions to the memory of the late President, but the shocking failure of the fifteenth was the entire program’s death knell. The Soviets, by limiting their efforts in space to orbital flights, had virtually assured that men would not set foot on the Moon again before the year 2000.

  And then, in the year of America’s Bicentennial, the Choir had arrived. Initially, mass hysteria. Afterward, the growing global conviction that humanity would never venture to the Moon so long as these mysterious aliens occupied it.

  Later in the year, Barbara Jordan, after taking the Democratic nomination for president from Muskie, defeated Ronald Reagan in the general election, and the Choir began bestowing both technology and advice on the shell-shocked human species.

  Eight years of their largess had not inured Dolf to the oddness—the down-and-dirty perversity— of the relationship between these impalpable energy beings and humankind, but here he was riding one of their ships to the most improbable sort of celestial rendezvous, and his foremost concern was not that the Packards all get back safely or that he make a good impression on God, but that the kids refrain from driving him and Leah crazy during the journey. He was on the verge of praying for their good behavior, and, if he did, he hoped to hell that the Holy One would hear him…

  In a monastery near Conyers, Georgia, Philip Kyle Dick sat in his cell writing.

  God or the demiurge had a hand on his shoulder, giving him to understand that this oddball reality was still not the one that he wanted to live in.

  He was fifty-three years old, and his literary career lay in ruins behind him.

  Hence his retreat to this Trappist institution, a spin-off from the one in Kentucky to which Thomas Merton had belonged.

  Hence his feverish cogitations long into the night, past all the canonical hours of monastic worship.

  Hence his realization that he would have to write his and his compatriots’ way out of bondage.

  For this reality would hold them forever unless he lifted his pen and began to re-create the world. Once again, he must make a concerted effort to bring about the redemptive shift.

  Therefore, Philip Kyle Dick put pen to paper and painstakingly altered the basic lineaments of the universe.

  Scan Notes, a.b.e-book v3.0 Proofed carefully against DT, italics intact. Changed quotes from ‘British Style’ to “American Style”.

  the real caterpillar. Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 15:07:17 -0600

  Conversion Notes: Converted to .epub by antimist 23/06/14. No original text has been altered, although some nested double quotes have been changed to single quotes.

 

 

 
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