I now told Phil about the girl I had met, Sadassa Silvia. He did not react particularly until I came to the Aramchek part.
"Her real name," Phil said thoughtfully.
"That's why it was incised into the sidewalk," I said.
"If you have any more dreams about this girl," Phil said, "tell me. Anything."
This is important, isn't it?" I said. "Them arranging for me to meet this girl."
They just told you it was important."
I said, They brought her into Progressive. They maneuvered both of us."
"You don't know that. All you know is the precog-"
"I knew you'd say that," I said. ""Precog," shit - it's an arranging of both our lives by supernatural forces."
"By a bunch of Portuguese scientists," Phil said.
"Bull. They brought us together. They didn't just tell me something; they did something." I couldn't prove it but I was certain of it.
I had not told Phil, or anyone else for that matter, about the shoe ad. All I had told him was that the personality of the telepathic sender had, recently, overpowered me completely for a limited and critical period of time. It did not seem to me a good idea to go into detail; it was a matter between me and my unseen friends. And, evidently, the FAPers. I tended anyhow to think of it as a past issue; Valis had settled it once and for all. Now we could get on to positive issues, such as Miss Silvia, Mrs Silvia, or Miss Aramchek, whatever it was.
Phil was saying, "I'd like to know more about the sender overpowering you with his personality. What kind of personality was it? Does it fit with the alternate world theory?"
As a matter of fact it certainly did; the sender was highly religious in terms of executing the sacred rites of Christianity. I had, in stealth with Johnny, gone through three or four of the sacraments of the ancient liturgical church. And I had viewed the world, not as I customarily view it but from the eyes of a dedicated Christian. It was a different world entirely. Seeing what he saw, I knew what he knew; I understood the mysteries of the church.
I, who had grown up in Berkeley, singing Spanish Civil War marching songs in its radical streets!
A lot of the recent events remained known only to me; I had not told Phil and did not intend to. Perhaps I had made a mistake in admitting that the telepathic sender had taken possession of me; telling things like that might frighten people ... Well, the entire subject was inherently frightening, for that matter, and so I had restricted my audience to people such as Phil and a few professional people. These recent occurrences certainly should not be told, I had decided. They amounted to a description of a godlike power seizing me and turning me into its instrument, a benign power and benign instrument, but nonetheless those were the true dynamics of the situation, for better or worse.
If I accepted Phil's theory that it was a breaching through from an alternate parallel world, some of the eeriness was removed, but the awesome power remained, tremendous power and knowledge, of a sort unknown to our world. Perhaps ancient accounts of theolepsy -possession by a god, such as Dionysos or Apollo -described the identical event. Even so, it was not something to make public. This theory made it less threatening, but it did not defang it entirely. Nothing would. No words strung together could truly account for an experience of this magnitude, for an experience of such vast force. I would have to live with it to some degree unexplained. I doubted if any human theory, at least by the people I could tell, would completely subsume everything I had gone through and was still going through. For example, the precognition, the fact that they knew Sadassa Silvia was going to approach Progressive Records. Well, if they had covertly motivated her to come there, that would explain it; but it explained away one event by revealing another evqn more awesome one.
I was evidently not the sole human in their power, acting on their advice and authority. But that comforted me rather than frightened me. And it was to be expected. They would want to bring together those who acted as extensions of them. One could assess this as a ‘safety in numbers" situation. For one thing, it eased my worries about being wiped out. Suppose I were the only human on this planet they had established contact with. Too much would be riding on my shoulders. This way, with the appearance of Sadassa Silvia, I was relieved of that burden; they could work through any number of other people. And there was the black-haired girl with the fish necklace. I had already gone by the pharmacy to ask about her. They did not remember any such girl working for them; the pharmacist merely smiled. "They come and go," he told me. "Those delivery girls." It was what I had more or less expected. But that made three people I knew of.
The tyranny of Ferris Fremont would be toppled by a number of extensions of the intergalactic communications web. It seemed evident that I would meet and get to know only those who would be working directly with me: those few and no more. If I went to FAP I could tell them only so much.
In fact, I had reflected that morning driving to work, what could I tell FAP anyhow - at least that they would believe? My experiences had taken, perhaps by design, a lunatic form; I would appear a religious nut, babbling about the Holy Spirit or a conversion to Christ or being born again, a mixture of ecstatic but irrational contacts with the Deity... . FAP and any other normal group would dismiss my witnessing upon first hearing. As a matter of fact, Phil had already informed FAP that I talked with God - much to their disappointment and disgust; as the FAP girl had said, We can't do anything with that.
"You going to answer me?" Phil was saying.
I said, "I think I've said enough. I don't really feel like finding all this in one of those dozens of paperback books you write for Ace and Berkley."
Phil flushed with anger at the jibe. "I've got enough already," he said. "And I can fill in the rest out of my own head. So tell me."
With reluctance I told him.
"Sufferin" succotash," Phil said, when I had finished. "A totally different human personality from yours. Taking over, acting and thinking. You know..."He rubbed the snuff from his nose, reflexively. "There's that business in the Bible: in Revelation, I think it is. The first fruits of the harvest, the first Christian dead coming back to life. That's where they get the figure of 144,000. They return to help create the new order, as the Bible calls it. Long before the others are resurrected."
We both pondered that.
"How does it say they'll return?" I asked. I had read it but couldn't remember; I had read so much.
They will join the living," Phil said solemnly.
"Really?"
"Really. In a way not specified. I remember when I read that I wondered where they'd get their bodies from. Do you have a Bible here I can look it up in?"
"Sure." I gave him a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, and he soon had the passage.
"It doesn't say what I thought it said," Phil said. "But the rest is somewhere in the New Testament scattered about in different places. At the end times the first Christian dead will begin to return to life. When you consider how few of them there were in the apostolic age, ten or fifteen, then a hundred, I would think the first appearance of them - assuming this all has some relevance - would be like one here, another there, then maybe a fourth, fifth, and sixth. Scattered around the world... But in what kind of bodies? Their bodies, the original ones, wouldn't be the ones they'd return in; Paul makes that clear. Those were corruptible bodies. Sarx was the Greek term he used."
"Well," I said, "the only other bodies around are ours."
"Right," Phil said, nodding. "Let me suggest the following to you. Suppose one of the firstfruits returned to life, not outside in his own body, of whatever sort, but like the Holy Spirit does - manifests itself inside you. Tell me, how would this differ from what you've experienced?"