"It is an illusion. In the real world both men hold world power; they jointly control the planet."
Zina said, "I will tell you something you do not understand. We have made changes in the past. We saw to it that the C.I.C. and the S.L. did not come into existence. The world you see here, my world, is an alternate world to your own, and equally real."
"I don't believe you," Emmanuel said.
"There are many worlds."
He said, "I am the generator of world, I and I alone. No one else can create world. I am He Who causes to be. You are not."
"Nonetheless-"
"You do not understand," Emmanuel said. "There are many potentialities that do not become actualized. I select from among the potentialities the ones I prefer and I bestow actuality onto them."
"Then you have made poor choices. It would have been far better if the C.I.C. and the S.L. never came into being."
"You admit, then, that your world is not real? That it is a forgery?"
Zina hesitated. "It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology; in any case we can enter retrotime and overrule mistakes in history. We have done that. In this alternate world Bulkowsky and Harms are minor figures-they exist, but not as they do in your world. It is a choice of worlds, equally real."
"And Belial," he said. "Belial sits in a cage in a zoo and throngs of people, vast hordes of them, gape at him."
"Correct."
"Lies," he said. "It is wish fulfillment. You cannot build a world on wishes. The basis of reality is bleak because you cannot serve up obliging mock vistas; you must adhere to what is possible: the law of necessity. That is the underpinning of reality: necessity. Whatever is, is because it must be; because it can be no other way. It is not what it is because someone wishes it but because it has to be-that and specifically that, down to the most meager detail. I know this because I do this. You have your job and I have mine, and I understand mine; I understand the law of necessity."
Zina, after a moment, said:
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head.
That is the first poem by Yeats," she finished.
"I know that poem," Emmanuel said. "It ends:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
'Sooth' meaning 'truth,'" he explained.
"You don't have to explain," Zina said. "And you disagree with the poem."
"Gray truth is better than the dream," he said. "That, too, is sooth. It is the final truth of all, that truth is better than any lie however blissful. I distrust this world because it is too sweet. Your world is too nice to be real. Your world is a whim. When Herb Asher saw the Fox he saw deception, and that deception lies at the heart of your world." And that deception, he said to himself, is what I shall undo.
I shall replace it, he said to himself, with the veridical. Which you do not understand.
The Fox as reality will be more acceptable to Herb Asher than any dream of the Fox. I know it; I stake everything on this proposition. Here I stand or fall.
"That is correct," Zina said.
"Any seeming reality that is obliging," Emmanuel said, "is something to suspect. The hallmark of the fraudulent is that it becomes what you would like it to be. I see that here. You would like Nicholas Bulkowsky not to be a vastly influential man; you would like Fulton Harms to be a minor figure, not part of history. Your world obliges you, and that gives it away for what it is. My world is stubborn. It will not yield. A recalcitrant and implacable world is a real world."
"A world that murders those forced to live in it."
"That is not the whole of it. My world is not that bad; there is much besides death and pain in it. On Earth, the real Earth, there is beauty and joy and-" He broke off. He had been tricked. She had won again.
"Then Earth is not so bad," she said. "It should not be scourged by fire. There is beauty and joy and love and good people. Despite Belial's rule. I told you that and you disputed it, as we walked among the Japanese cherry trees. What do you say now, Lord of Hosts, God of Abraham? Have you not proved me right?"
He admitted, "You are clever, Zina."
Her eyes sparkled and she smiled. "Then hold back the great and terrible day that you speak of in Scripture. As I begged you to."
For the first time he sensed defeat. Enticed into speaking foolishly, he realized. How clever she is; how shrewd.
"As it says in Scripture," Zina said.
I am Wisdom, I bestow shrewdness and show the way to knowledge and prudence.
"But," he said, "you told me you are not Holy Wisdom. That you only pretended to be."
"It is up to you to discern who I am. You yourself must decipher my identity; I will not do it for you."
"And in the meantime-tricks."
"Yes" Zina said, "because it is through tricks that you will learn."
Staring at her he said, "You are tricking me so that I wake! As I woke Herb Asher!"
"Perhaps."
"Are you my disinhibiting stimulus?" Staring fixedly at her he said in a low stern voice, "I think I created you to bring back my memory, to restore me to myself."
"To lead you back to your throne," Zina said. "Did I?"
Zina, steering the flycar, said nothing.
"Answer me," he said.
"Perhaps," Zina said.
"If I created you I can-"
"You created all things," Zina said.
"I do not understand you. I cannot follow you. You dance toward me and then away."
"But as I do so, you awaken," Zina said.
"Yes," he said. "And I reason back from that that you are the disinhibiting stimulus which I set up long ago, knowing as I did that my brain would be damaged and I would forget. You are systematically giving me back my identity, Zina. Then-I think I know who you are."
Turning her head she said, "Who?"
"I will not say. And you can't read it in my mind because I have suppressed it. I did so as soon as I thought it." Because, he realized, it is too much for me; even me. I can't believe it.
They drove on, toward the Atlantic and Washington, D.C.
CHAPTER 14
Herb Asher felt himself engulfed by the profound impression that he had known the boy Manny Pallas at some other time, perhaps in another life. How many lives do we lead? he asked himself. Are we on tape? Is this some kind of a replay?
To Rybys he said, "The kid looked like you."
"Did he? I didn't notice." Rybys, as usual, was attempting to make a dress from a pattern, and screwing it up; pieces of fabric lay everywhere in the living room, along with dirty dishes, overfilled ashtrays and crumpled, stained magazines.
Herb decided to consult with his business partner, a middle-aged black named Elias Tate. Together he and Tate had operated a retail audio sales store for several years. Tate, however, viewed their store, Electronic Audio, as a sideline: his central interest in life was his missionary work. Tate preached at a small, out-of-the-way church, engaging a mostly black audience. His message, always, consisted of:
REPENT! THE KINGDOM OF GOD 15 AT HAND!
It seemed to Herb Asher a strange preoccupation for a man so intelligent, but, in the final analysis, it was Tate's problem. They rarely discussed it.
Seated in the listening room of the store, Herb said to his partner, "I met a striking and very peculiar little boy last night, at a cocktail lounge in Hollywood."
Involved in assembling a new laser-tracking phono component, Tate murmured, "What were you doing in Hollywood? Trying to get into pictures?"
"Listening to a new singer named Linda Fox."
"Never heard of her."
Herb said, "She's sexy as hell and very good. She-"
"You're
married."
"I can dream," Herb said.
"Maybe you'd like to invite her to an autograph party at the store."
"We're the wrong kind of store."
"It's an audio store; she sings. That's audio. Or isn't she audible?"
"As far as I know she hasn't made any tapes or cut any records or been on TV. I happened to hear her last month when I was at the Anaheim Trade Center audio exhibit. I told you you should have come along."
"Sexuality is the malady of this world," Tate said. "This is a lustful and demented planet."
"And we're all going to hell."
Tate said, "I certainly hope so.
"You know you're out of step? You really are. You have an ethical code that dates back to the Dark Ages."
"Oh, long before that," Tate said. He placed a disc on the turntable and started up the component. On his 'scope the pattern appeared to be adequate but not perfect; Tate frowned.
"I almost met her. I was so close; a matter of seconds. She's better looking up close than anyone else I ever saw. You should see her. I know-I've got this intuition-that she's going to soar all the way to the top."
"Okay," Tate said, reasonably. "That's fine with me. Write her a fan letter. Tell her."
"Elias," Herb said, "the boy I met last night-he looked like Rybys."
The black man glanced up at him. "Really?"
"If Rybys could collect her goddam scattered wits for one second she could have noticed. She just can't goddam concentrate. She never looked at the boy. He could have been her son."
"Maybe there's something you don't know."
"Lay off," Herb said.
Elias said, "I'd like to see the boy."
"I felt I'd known him before, in some other life. For a second it started to come back to me and then-" He gestured. "I lost it. I couldn't pin it down. And there was more . . . as if I was remembering a whole other world. Another life entirely."
Elias ceased working. "Describe it."
"You were older. And not black. You were a very old man in a robe. I wasn't on Earth; I glimpsed a frozen landscape and it wasn't Terra. Elias-could I be from another planet, and some powerful agency laid down false memories in my mind, over the real ones? And the boy-seeing the boy-caused the real memories to begin to return? And I had the idea that Rybys was very ill. In fact, about to die. And something about Immigration officials with guns."
"Immigration officers don't carry guns."
"And a ship. A long trip at very high speed. Urgency. And most of all-a presence. An uncanny presence. Not human. Maybe it was an extraterrestrial, the race I'm really a part of. From my home planet."
"Herb," Elias said, "you are full of shit."
"I know. But just for a second I experienced all that. And-listen to this." He gestured excitedly. "An accident. Our ship crashing into another ship. My body remembered; it remembered the concussion, the trauma."
"Go to a hypnotherapist," Elias said, "get him to put you under, and remember. You're obviously a weird alien programmed to blow up the world. You probably have a bomb inside you."
Herb said, "That's not funny."
"Okay; you're from some wise, super-advanced noble spiritual race and you were sent here to enlighten mankind. To save us."
Instantly, in Herb Asher's mind, memories flicked on, and then flicked off again. Almost at once.
"What is it?" Elias asked, regarding him acutely.
"More memories. When you said that."
After an interval of silence Elias said, "I wish you would read the Bible sometime."
"It had something to do with the Bible," Herb said. "My mission."
"Maybe you're a messenger," Elias said. "Maybe you have a message to deliver to the world. From God."
"Stop kidding me."
Elias said, "I'm not kidding. Not now." And apparently that was so; his dark face had turned grim.
"What's wrong?" Herb said.
"Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell," Elias said. "We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim."
"Strange," Herb Asher said.
His business partner said, "Yes. Very strange."
----------------------------
At the end of the work day, as Herb Asher and his partner were preparing to close up the store a young woman wearing a suede leather jacket, jeans, moccasins and a red silk scarf tied over her hair came in. "Hi," she said to Herb, her hands thrust into the pockets of her jacket. "How are you?"
"Zina," he said, pleased. And a voice inside his head said, How did she find you? This is three thousand miles away from Hollywood. Through an index of locations computer, probably. Still . . . he sensed something not right. But it did not pertain to his nature to turn down a visit by a pretty girl.
"Do you have time for a cup of coffee?" she asked.
"Sure," he said.
Shortly, they sat facing each other across a table in a nearby restaurant.
Zina, stirring cream and sugar into her coffee, said, "I want to talk to you about Manny."
"Why does he resemble my wife?" he said.
"Does he? I didn't notice. Manny feels very badly that he prevented you from meeting Linda Fox."
"I'm not sure he did."
"She was coming right at you."
"She was walking our way, but that doesn't prove I would have met her."
"He wants you to meet her. Herb, he feels terrible guilt; he couldn't sleep all night."
Puzzled, he said, "What does he propose?"
"That you write her a fan letter. Explaining the situation. He's convinced she'd answer."
"It's not likely."
Zina said quietly, "You'd be doing Manny a favor. Even if she doesn't answer."
"I'd just as soon meet you," he said. And his words were weighed out carefully; weighed out and measured.
"Oh?" She glanced up. What black eyes she had!
"Both of you," he said. "You and your little brother."
"Manny has suffered brain damage. His mother was injured in a sky accident while she was pregnant with him. He spent several months in a synthowomb, but they didn't get him in the synthowomb in time. So..." She tapped her fingers against the table. "He is impaired. He's been attending a special school. Because of the neurological damage he comes up with really nuts ideas. As an example-" She hesitated. "Well, what the hell. He says he's God."
"My partner should meet him, then," Herb Asher said.
"Oh no," she said, vigorously shaking her head. "I don't want him to meet Elias."
"How did you know about Elias?" he said, and again the peculiar warning sensation drifted through him.
"I stopped at your apartment first and talked to Rybys. We spent several hours together; she mentioned the store and Elias. How else could I have found your store? It's not listed under your name."
"Elias is into religion," he said.
"That's what she told me; that's why I don't want Manny to meet him. They'd just jack each other up higher and higher into theological moonshine."
He answered, "I find Elias very levelheaded."
"Yes, and in many ways Manny is levelheaded. But you get two religious people together and they just sort of- You know. Endless talk about Jesus and the world coming to an end. The Battle of Armageddon. The conflagration." She shivered. "It gives me the creeps. Hellfire and damnation."
"Elias is into that, all right," Herb said. It almost seemed to him that she knew. Probably Rybys had told her; that was it.
"Herb," Zina said, "will you do Manny the favor he wants? Will you write the Fox-" Her expression changed.
"'The Fox,'" he said. "I wonder if that'll catch on. It's a natural."
Continuing, Zina said, "Will you write Linda Fox and say you'd like to meet her? Ask her where she'll be appearing; they se
t up those club dates well in advance. Tell her you own an audio store. She's not well known; it isn't like some nationally famous star who gets bales of fan mail. Manny is sure she'll answer."
"Of course I will," he said.
She smiled. And her dark eyes danced.
"No problem," he said. "I'll go back to the store and type it there. We can mail it off together."
From her mail-pouch purse, Zina brought out an envelope. "Manny wrote out the letter for you. This is what he wants you to say. Change it if you want, but-don't change it too much. Manny worked real hard on it."
"Okay." He accepted the envelope from her. Rising, he said, "Let's go back to the shop."
As he sat at his office typewriter transcribing Manny's letter to the Fox-as Zina had called her-Zina paced about the closed-up shop, smoking vigorously.
"Is there something I don't know?" he said. He sensed more to this; she seemed unusually tense.
"Manny and I have a bet going," Zina said. "It has to do with -well, basically, it has to do with whether Linda Fox will answer or not. The bet is a little more complicated, but that's the thrust of it. Does that bother you?"
"No," he said. "Which of you put down your money which way?"
She did not answer.
"Let it go," he said. He wondered why she had not responded, and why she was so tense about it. What do they think will come of this? he asked himself. "Don't say anything to my wife," he said, then, thinking some thoughts of his own.
He had, then, an intense intuition: that something rested on this, something important, with dimensions that he could not fathom.
"Am I being set up?" he said.
"In what way?"
"I don't know." He had finished typing; he pressed the key for print and the machine-a smart typewriter-instantly printed out his letter and dropped it in the receiving bin.
"My signature goes on it," he said.
"Yes. It's from you."
He signed the letter, typed out an envelope, from the address on Manny's copy . . . and wondered, abruptly, how Zina and Manny had gotten hold of Linda Fox's home address. There it was, on the boy's carefully written holographic letter. Not the Golden Hind but a residence. In Sherman Oaks.
Odd, he thought. Wouldn't her address be unlisted?
Maybe not. She wasn't well known, as had been repeatedly pointed out to him.
"I don't think she'll answer," he said.
"Well, then some silver pennies will change hands."
Instantly he said, "Fairy land."
"What?" she said, startled.
"A children's book. Silver Pennies. An old classic. In it there's the statement, 'You need a silver penny to get into fairy land.'" He had owned the book as a child.
She laughed. Nervously, or so it seemed to him.
"Zina," he said, "I feel that something is wrong."
"Nothing is wrong as far as I know." She deftly took the envelope from him. "I'll mail it," she said.
"Thank you," he said. "Will I see you again?"
"Of course you will." Leaning toward him she pursed her lips and kissed him on the mouth.
----------------------------------
He looked around him and saw bamboo. But color moved through it, like St. Elmo's fire. The color, a shiny, glistening red, seemed alive. It collected here and there, and where it gathered it formed words, or rather something like words. As if the world had become language.
What am I doing here? he wondered wildly. What happened? A minute ago I wasn't here!
The red, glistening fire, like visible electricity, spelled out a message to him, distributed through the bamboo and children's swings and dry, stubby grass.
The Divine Invasion Page 15