He looked at his door, then down the hallway, anywhere but at me or at the pages in his hand. “Please,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Ram said. “I cannot help you.” He stepped inside and closed the door without looking at me again.
“Liar,” I said.
Later, my new friend Tom steered me toward the bar.
“Trust me,” he said. “You need another fucking beer.”
“No, I’m okay . . .”
“Three more Coors Light,” he told the bartender. Then he turned to me. “Seriously, you look like somebody just ran over your cat.”
I laughed, shrugged. “So is your friend really a demon?”
Tom looked back toward the table. We were in a lounge on the second floor of the Hyatt. The place was crowded, half the people in costume. Valis, with his neatly trimmed beard and tweed jacket, looked like an Oxford don. He sat next to the handsome woman—Tom’s wife, Selena. They were surrounded by half a dozen people who had coalesced around Valis in the past hour. Tom had spotted me sitting alone by the bar and had sucked me into their gravitational field. Tom sighed. “Phil’s had a complicated life. Ever since the stroke—
well, even before the stroke, he heard voices. Imaginary friends, you know? Then in eighty-two, the first thing he said when he got his speech back was that we should refer to him from now on as Valis.” He shrugged. “I asked an exorcist to talk to him—”
“Mother Mariette?”
Tom’s eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, that’s right, you saw her! Anyway, she declared him a fake. Valis didn’t jump, he wasn’t in the public record, and it was simpler to say that Phil had finally . . . well, Phil had taken a lot of medications in his life, and this wasn’t his first hallucination. And frankly, Valis’s arrival wasn’t all bad. Look at him—you can’t even tell that half of him used to be paralyzed. Total recovery. Better than total! He eats better than he used to, he exercises, doesn’t take pills. He lives with Selena and me, but he takes care of us as much as we take care of him. I mean, shit, he’s enjoying himself! He can’t help it. He tries to do the silent Valis thing, but then somebody hits one of his hot topics, and he’s off, man.”
The bartender returned with three tall glasses filled with faintly discolored tap water. We carried the beers back to the table, navigating around bodies, through the smoke. Selena barely seemed to speak, Tom talked constantly, and Valis mostly listened, though when he did speak, as he was doing now, people shut up. A glass of ginger ale sat on the low table in front of him, untouched.
“But you cannot separate science fiction from fantasy,” Valis said,
“and a moment’s thought will show why. Take psionics; take mutants such as we find in More Than Human. If the reader believes that such mutants could exist, then he will view Sturgeon’s novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not cannot be objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.”
There was a slight pause, and then a Hispanic kid younger than me, dressed in a black T-shirt and immaculately pressed khakis, spoke up. “But does it matter what the readers think is possible? It seems to me that it’s how the characters in the novel behave that determines what kind of book it is. A character in a science fiction novel believes
that the world is rational, that you can find the answer, the ultimate truth, and goes about finding it. In More Than Human, the characters think that they’re the next step in evolution, part of a scientific process—”
“No, it’s the fact that there is no ultimate truth that makes it SF.”
This from a tall, bony man who looked as old as Valis. He sat on a low chair, his knees at the same height as his shoulders. “You can always ask one more question. But magic is fundamentally unexplainable.”
Behind him, I saw the back of a shaved head, weaving through the crowd. Mother Mariette? I stepped sideways, trying to get a glimpse of her profile. If I could catch her . . .
“Nobody in a fantasy novel tries to figure out why magic works,”
the bony man said. “It just does. Jesus turns the water into wine, end of story. In the real world—”
“In the real world most people don’t try to figure out how things work, either,” the Hispanic kid said. “Electricity works by flipping a switch.”
I’d lost her. If it was her at all. I turned back to the group, and Selena was looking at me curiously. I shrugged. The tall man said, “Yes, most people are philistines. But if they wanted to find out, nothing is presumed to be unexplainable.”
A frizzy-haired woman in a peasant skirt said, “Wait, most of the important things in life are unexplainable. The soul is unexplainable; demons are unexplainable; consciousness is unexplainable . . .”
Somebody laughed—the pale young man in the eyeliner and tuxedo shirt leaning on the arm of a chair. “That just means you’re a confused fantasy character intruding in a science fictional world. Most scientists—most scientists at ICOP, anyway—think that we’ll eventually be able to understand all of that. Just because we don’t understand it now—”
“Man in his present state is not able to comprehend,” Valis said in his distant voice. “Or if he comprehends, he is unable to hold on to that comprehension. The Eye of Shiva opens, then closes.” His voice seemed to carry much farther than it ought to at such low volume, like a radio signal catching a lucky bounce off the ionosphere. Or maybe it was just that people strained to hear him. He was famous, he was rich, he wrote books. At least he used to, before he decided he was possessed by a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. I hadn’t read the books, but I’d seen a couple of the movies.
“Okay, so we get maybe one second of total enlightenment, now that’s depressing.” I couldn’t see who was talking. “At least in a fantasy novel, everybody gets to know the truth. Moral order is restored, the One True King returns, Jesus rises from the dead.”
Somebody else said, “You’re confusing theme with genre.”
“No, he’s talking about destiny,” Tom said. “As soon as you introduce destiny, you’re in a fantasy, even if you dress it up as The Matrix or Star Wars. As soon as the universe starts responding to you personally, that’s magic—you only get to draw the sword out of the stone if you’re King Arthur—”
“—or Bugsy Siegel,” someone said.
“Yeah, sure,” Tom said, waving him off. “But in an impersonal science fictional world, anybody who knows the trick, the technology of sword extraction, gets to be King of All Britain.”
“Or else you scuba dive down and wrestle the Lady of the Lake for it.”
“ ‘Strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords,’ ” the pale man said in a not-quite British accent. “ ‘Is no basis for a system of government.’ ”
The conversation instantly degenerated into a flurry of Monty Python quotes, then fragmented into a variety of smaller conversations. The tall man had left with the frizzy-haired woman, but other people joined the group. Tom seemed to know everyone, and everyone at least recognized Valis. The volume of noise and smoke climbed, and it wasn’t just our little band; DemoniCon partiers were descending from all levels of the Hyatt towers. At some point in the night—1 a.m.? Certainly past midnight—I found myself in the john, Valis at the urinal next to me. I was pissing away what seemed to be gallons of Coors Light, amused by the fact that it looked almost exactly the same going out as coming in.