“We taped your last conversation at the La Paz Bar,” Vivian Kaplan said.
“Oh?” I said with fear, trying to remember what we had said.
Vivian Kaplan said. “What is this record you are going to be bringing out? There was a good deal of emphasis on it. A new LP by the Playthings.”
“That’s going to be our new hit record,” I said; I could feel the sweat standing out on my forehead, and my pulse racing. “Everybody at Progressive is talking about it.”
“You supplied the lyrics for the record?”
“No,” I said. “Just supplementary material, not the basic lyrics.”
Vivian Kaplan wrote all this down.
“It’s going to be one hell of a record,” I said.
“Yes, it sounds as if it would be. You’re going to press how many copies?”
“We hope to sell two million.” I said. “The initial pressing will be only fifty thousand, however. To see how it goes over.” Actually, I planned to get them to press three times that number.
“When can you make a copy available to us?”
“It isn’t even mastered yet,” I said.
“A tape, then?”
“Yeah, we could get a tape to you sooner.” It came into my mind that I could give her a tape which lacked the subliminal material; we would simply not add that layer of sound-on-sound.
“It is our opinion,” Vivian Kaplan said, “after examining the evidence, that you are having a sexual affair with Ms Aramchek.”
“Well,” I said, “you can stick it up your ass.”
Vivian Kaplan gazed at me for a time; then she wrote a few words with her pen.
“It’s my business entirely,” I said.
“What does your wife say?”
“She says fine.”
“She knows, then?”
I could think of no answer to that. I had walked into a verbal trap, but one which meant nothing; they were on the wrong track entirely. I thought, They have the wrong ball; let them run it to the wrong goal line. Fine.
“As far as we can tell,” Vivian Kaplan said, “you have completely severed your ties with your leftist Berkeley past. Is that so, Mr. Brady?”
“It is so,” I said.
“Would you like to draw up a statement of political loyalty about Ms Aramchek for our files? Since you know her and can speak reliably with her?”
“No,” I said.
“We have great confidence in you, Mr. Brady, in terms of your patriotism.”
“You should have,” I said.
“Why would you turn this chance down to ratify your standing? This would virtually close your files.”
“Nobody’s file is ever closed,” I said.
“Inactive, then.”
“Sorry,” I said. Ever since the displacement of my own will by the ETI helper I had found it difficult to lie. “I can’t oblige you,” I said. “What you want is evil and immoral; this is what is destroying the fabric of our society. Mutual spying by friend upon friend is the most insidious wickedness that Ferris Fremont has inflicted on a formerly free people. You can write that down, Miss Kaplan, and put it in my file; better yet, you can paste it on the outside of my file as my official statement to all of you.”
Vivian Kaplan laughed. “You must feel you have a pretty good lawyer.”
“I feel I have a pretty good grasp of the situation,” I said. “Now if you’re through, get out of my office. I have tapes to listen to.”
Rising, Vivian Kaplan said. “When will you have the tape for us?”
“A month.”
“It will be the tape you’ll use to transfer onto the master?”
“More or less.”
“‘More or less’ is not good enough, Mr. Brady. We want the exact master tape.”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
Lingering for a moment, Vivian Kaplan said. “We got a telephone tip from one of your sound engineers. He said there’s some very funny stuff in some of the subtracks.”
“Hmmm,” I said.
“It made him suspicious.”
“Which sound engineer is that?”
“We protect the anonymity of our informants.”
“You certainly should,” I said.
“Mr. Brady,” Vivian Kaplan said briskly. “I want to inform you at this time that you are terribly, terribly close to arrest, you and Ms Aramchek, in fact your entire record firm and anyone connected intimately with you, your families, and friends.”
“Why?”
“We have reason to believe that there will be subversive sentiments expressed in the Let’s Play! album, put there probably by you and Ms Aramchek and possibly others. We are giving you the benefit of the doubt, however; we will examine the record before its release and if we find nothing in it, you may release it on schedule and distribute as planned. But after analysis, if we find anything—”
“The curtain comes down,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“The Iron Curtain,” I said.
“What does that mean, Mr. Brady?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just tired of all the suspiciousness, all the spying and accusing. All the arrests and murders.”
“What murders, Mr. Brady?”
“Mine,” I said. “I’m thinking specifically of that.”
She laughed. “You’re highly neurotic, as your profile indicates. You worry too much. You know what is going to kill you, Mr. Brady, if anything does? Screwing around with that Aramchek girl at your age. The last time you had a physical exam you showed elevated blood pressure; that was when you were admitted to the hospital in Downey following—”
“The elevated blood pressure,” I said, “was because—”I broke off.
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
Vivian Kaplan waited for an interval, and then she said in a low, quiet voice. “You don’t have the satellite to help you any more, Mr. Brady. They got the satellite.”
“I know,” I said. “You mean the ETI one? Yes, the Russians blew that up; I saw that on TV.”
“You’re by yourself now.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You understand what I mean.”
“I don’t,” I managed to say; it was an effort to lie, a dreadful effort, an offense against myself. I could hardly do it. “I thought the official U.S. position on that satellite was that it—what crap did I hear? ‘A discarded satellite of our own?’ or something like that. Not from outer space; worthless. Our own obsolete signals coming back to us.”
“That was before the Soviet Union photographed it.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. “So now the line has changed.”
“We know what that satellite was,” Vivian Kaplan said.
“Then how could you destroy it? What kind of demented mind could give the signal to destroy it? I don’t understand you. You don’t understand me and I don’t understand you. To me you are insane.” I ceased; I had said too much.
“You want an alien entity ruling your mind? Telling you what to do? You want to be a slave to—”
“What the hell do you think you are, Ms Kaplan?” I said. “That’s what FAP is, a bunch of robots receiving their orders blindly and going out blindly to coerce everyone else who isn’t already in the net into becoming a robot like them, all following the will of the leader. And what a leader!”
“Goodbye, Mr. Brady,” Vivian Kaplan said, and my office door shut after her; she had gone.
I just put my head in the noose, I said to myself. Like Phil did with her; she seems to have an ability to get you to do it one way or another. Phil did it one way, I did it another. I hope they pay her a good salary, I said to myself. She deserves it. She could entrap anybody.
They have enough on me now, I realized, to execute a warrant any time they want. But they have always had enough. It makes no difference. They taped our conversation at the La Paz Bar; they have all they need. And due process, the constitutional guarantees, are no longer observ
ed anyhow; the national security issue is always invoked in matters like this. So the hell with it. I’m glad I said it. I lost nothing I hadn’t already lost.
There isn’t much, I said to myself, that has not been lost. Now that the satellite is gone.
Within my mind, firebright stirred; I felt his presence. He was still alive, still there within me. Tucked away out of harm’s way: safe.
I was not completely alone. Vivian was wrong.
27I MET Sadassa in the middle of an orange grove in Placentia; we walked together, holding hands, speaking in low voices. Perhaps they were picking up what we said, perhaps not. In any case we had to confer. I had to keep her informed.
First there was something I wanted to ask her about.
“The satellite is gone,” I said as we walked, “but every now and then I still see something, superimposed and in color, as if it’s a further satellite transmission to me.” Everything I had ever been shown before had been comprehensible, at least with sufficient analysis; this, however, I could not fathom. “It has to do with—” I broke off; I. had been about to mention Pinky.
What I was seeing now was a door, proportioned by the measure which the Greeks had called the Golden Rectangle, which they had considered the perfect geometric form. I repeatedly saw this door, marked with letters of the Greek alphabet, projected onto natural formations that resembled it: a dictionary stand, a basalt block, a speaker cabinet. And one time, astonishingly, I had seen Pinky pressing outward from beyond the door into our world, only not as he had been: much larger, more fierce, like a tiger, and, most of all, filled to bursting with life and health.
I now told Sadassa about my witnessing the outline of the door, and she listened silently, nodding. At the end I told her what I glimpsed beyond the door: a static landscape, nocturnal, a quiet black sea, sky, the edge of an island, and, surprisingly, the unmoving figure of a nude woman standing on the sand at the edge of the water. I had recognized the woman; it was Aphrodite. I had seen photographs of Greek and Roman statues of her. The proportions, the beauty and sensuality, could not be mistaken.
“You are seeing,” Sadassa said somberly, “the last receding image of love, moving away from you now that the satellite is gone. A kind of afterimage.”
“My dead cat,” I said, “is over there.”
“It is the far shore,” Sadassa said. “The other land, which we are now cut off from. You’ll see it a few days longer and then it will be gone, and that will be the last; you won’t see anything again.” She laughed, but not happily. “It’s like when you shut off your TV set; the picture dwindles before it fades out entirely. A residual charge.”
“It’s very beautiful,” I said. “Perfect balance.” I remembered, then, the original abstract graphics, the phosphene activity that had initiated the satellite’s overwhelming of my human mind with its superior view. “I keep thinking there ought to be a way to cross over there.”
“There is a way.”
“What way?” I said, and then I remembered Pinky. “Oh,” I said. “I see what you mean.”
“Aphrodite was the goddess of the generation of life,” Sadassa said, “as well as love. I see it too, Nicholas; I see the door through which we can’t go. I see the static landscape we can’t reach. There, the source of life exists; it once orbited our sky. This is a residual message already placed in us by the satellite, before its destruction, a goodbye to each of us. To remember—to keep with us. A goodbye and a promise.”
I said. “I have never seen anything so beautiful.”
Changing the subject, Sadassa said. “What are you going to do about Vivian Kaplan? That’s the immediate problem.”
“We’ll give them a tape,” I said, “lacking the subliminal material. That’ll satisfy them for a while. Then we’ll begin to press the records. I’ll have a few records made from a master lacking the subliminal material and turn one over to them. I’ll keep more of the clean pressings around my office, so if they break in and steal them, what they get will confirm their tape. Finally we’ll take the plunge and start shipping the discs with the subliminal material on them. And then sit back and wait for the police. They’ll go from one radio station to the next, and one record store to the next, confiscating the records, but maybe some will survive and some will get played before that happens. And of course when they pick us up, us and our families, they will kill us. There is no doubt of that.”
“Yes,” Sadassa said.
“What I feel bad about,” I said, “is that I know we are in the trap already. They are aware of what we’re doing; they know about the record. At least they know there is this record and we are probably planning some political act in-connection with it. They want to see the record mastered; they want to see it produced, so they can play it and determine its content. We’re doing what they want us to do. Well, maybe not; maybe they’re not sure—they’re guessing and wondering, playing hunches. The police are so full of lies. Maybe there was no sound engineer who phoned in a tip. Maybe they didn’t pick up our conversation at the La Paz Bar. All they may know is that Let’s Play! is our hottest new album, that we’ve got a lot of time and effort invested in it, so the naturally suspicious police mind is alerted to come down hard on us, ask for a tape, ask for a copy before distribution, rather than monitoring it the usual way.”
“I say they’re lying,” Sadassa said. “Bluffing. That is certainly a possibility. We should go on.”
“If we stop now,” I said, “they won’t kill us.”
“Let’s go on,” Sadassa said.
“Knowing we have no chance of escape?”
She nodded silently.
“I’m just thinking of Johnny,” I said. “Valis had me anoint him and everything…even give him a secret name. I guess that name will perish with him, one of these days soon.”
“If Valis had you do that, your boy will live on.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“I hope you’re right.”
“Valis may not be here now,” Sadassa said, “but within each of us—”
“I know,” I said. “I felt him stir the other day. The new life within me. The second birth…the birth from above.”
“That is eternal. What more could we hope for? Bonded to that. If your body or my body is destroyed, firebright escapes into the atmosphere and our own spark goes with him. There we will gather, ultimately, as one entity, always together. Until Valis returns. All of us: you, me, the rest. However many.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sounds good to me.”
“Let me ask you,” Sadassa said. “Of all that the satellite showed you, what was the… I don’t know how to say it.”
“The final view of things?”
“Yes. The deepest. Penetrating farthest. Because when it overpowers you it shows you so much about the universe.”
I said, “For a little while I saw the universe as a living body.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding somberly.
“And we are in it. The experience was so strange—it’s hard to express it. Like a hive of bees, millions of bees, all communicating over vast distances by means of colored light. Patterns of light, exchanged back and forth, and us deep inside. Continual signaling and response from the—well, bees or whatever they were; maybe they were stars or star systems of sentient organisms. Anyhow, this signaling went on all the time, in shifting patterns, and I heard a humming or a bell-like sound, emitted by all the bees in unison.”
“The universe is a great group mind,” Sadassa said. “I saw that too. The ultimate vision imposed on us, as to how things are in comparison to how they simply appear.”
I said. “And all the bees, as they signal across great distances to one another, are in the process of thinking. So the total organism thinks by means of this. And throughout it exerts pressure, also across great distances, to coordinate every part, so it’s synchronized into a common purpose.”
“It is alive,” Sadassa said.
&nbs
p; “Yes,” I said. “It is alive.”
“The bees,” Sadassa said, “were described to me as stations. Like transmitting and receiving on a grid. Each lit up as it transmitted. I guess the colors were prearranged different frequencies of the light spectrum. A great universe of transmitting and receiving stations, but, Nicholas, sometimes many of them, differing at different moments, were dark. They were temporarily inactive. But I kept watching lit-up stations receiving transmissions from distances so far off that—I guess we use the word parsecs for distances like that.”
“It was beautiful,” I said. “The pattern of shifting lights formed by the active stations.”
Sadassa said. “But into it, Nicholas, had crept something which snuffed out some of the stations. Abolished them so they never lit up again. And replaced them with itself, like a cloak falling over them here and there.”
“But new stations were opened up to replace them,” I said. “In unexpected spots.”
“This planet does not receive or transmit,” Sadassa said, after a moment. “Except for the few of us—a few thousand out of three billion—governed by the satellite. And now we’re not. So we’ve gone dark.”
“Until the replacement satellite arrives.”
Sadassa said. “Did we see a kind of brain?”
“More like a jungle gym that kids play on,” I said, “with colored buttons stuck all over.” Her analogy was too heavy for me: the universe as a giant brain, thinking.
“This is a very great thing we were shown,” Sadassa said. “To see from that vantage point, the ultimate vantage point. We should always treasure it. Even if the stations in this local region or sector are all overshadowed and don’t light up any longer, it is a sight to remember. With this the satellite presented us with its final insight into the nature of things: synapses in a living brain. And the name we give to its functioning, its awareness of itself and its many parts—” She smiled at me. “It’s why you saw the figure of Aphrodite. That’s what holds all the trillions of stations into harmony.”
“Yes,” I said, “it was harmonized, and over such distances. There was no coercion, only agreement.”
And the coordination of all the transmitting and receiving stations, I thought, we call Valis: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Our friend who cannot die, who lies on this side of the grave and on the other. His love, I thought, is greater than empires. And unending.