"Mother Goose," Emmanuel said.
On the slate the word VALIS disappeared. Now it read:
HEPHAISTOS
"Kyklopes," Emmanuel said instantly. Zina laughed. "You're as fast as it is.,'
"What's it connected to? Not Big Noodle." He did not like Big Noodle.
"Maybe it'll tell you," Zina said.
The slate now read:
SHIVA
"Kyklopes," Emmanuel repeated. "It's a trick. This was built by the troop of Diana."
At once the girl's smile faded.
"I'm sorry," Emmanuel said. "I won't say it again out loud even one more time."
"Give me the slate back." She held out her hand.
Emmanuel said, "I will give it back if it says for me to give it back. He pressed the tab.
NO
"All right," Zina said. "I'll let you keep it. But you don't know what it is: you don't understand it. The troop didn't build it. Press the tab."
Again he pressed the tab.
LONG BEFORE CREATION
"I-" Emmanuel faltered.
"It will come back to you," Zina said. "Through this. Use it. I don't think you should tell Elias either. He might not under- stand."
Emmanuel said nothing. This was a matter that he himself would decide. It was important not to let others make his choices for him. And, basically, he trusted Elias. Did he also trust Zina? He was not sure. He sensed the multitude of natures within her, the profusion of identities. Ultimately he would seek out the real one; he knew it was there, but the tricks obscured it. Who is it, he asked himself, who plays tricks like this? What being is the trickster? He pressed the tab.
DANCING
To that, he gave a nod of assent. Dancing certainly was the right answer; in his mind he could see her dancing, with all the troop, burning the grass beneath their feet, leaving it scorched, and the minds of men disoriented. You cannot disorient me, he said to himself. Even though you control time. Because I control time, too. Perhaps even more than you.
------------------------
That night at dinner he discussed Valis with Elias Tate.
"Take me to see it," Emmanuel said.
"It's a very old movie," Elias said.
"But at least we could rent a cassette. From the library. What does 'Valis' mean?"
"Vast Active Living Intelligence System," Elias said. "The movie is mostly fiction. It was made by a rock singer in the latter part of the twentieth century. His name was Eric Lampton but he called himself Mother Goose. The film contained Mini's Syn- chronicity Music, which had considerable impact on all modern music to this day. Much of the information in the film is conveyed subliminally by the music. The setting is an alternate U.S.A. where a man named Ferris F. Fremount is president."
Emmanuel said, "But what is Valis?"
"An artificial satellite that projects a hologram that they take to be reality."
"Then it's a reality generator."
"Yes," Elias said.
"Is the reality genuine?"
"No; I said it's a hologram. It can make them see whatever it wants them to see. That's the whole point of the film. It's a study of the power of illusion."
Going to his room, Emmanuel picked up the slate that Zina had given him and pressed the tab.
"What are you doing?" Elias said, coming in behind him.
The slate showed one word:
NO
"That's plugged into the government, Elias said. "There's no point in using it. I knew Plaudet would give you one of those." He reached for it. "Give it to me."
"I want to keep it," Emmanuel said.
"Good grief; it says I.B.M. right on it! What do you expect it to tell you? The truth? When has the government ever told any- one the truth? They killed your mother and put your father into cryonic suspension. Let me have it, damn it."
"If this is taken from me," Emmanuel said, "they will give me another."
"I suppose so." Elias withdrew his hand. "But don't believe what it says."
"It says you're wrong about Valis," Emmanuel said.
"In what way?"
Emmanuel said, "It just said 'no.' It didn't say anything more." He pressed the tab again.
YOU
"What the hell does that mean?" Elias said, mystified.
"I don't know," Emmanuel said truthfully. He thought, I will keep using it.
And then he thought, It is tricking me. It dances along the path like a bobbing light, leading me and leading me, away, fur- ther, further, into the darkness. And then when the darkness is everywhere the bobbing light will wink out. I know you, he thought at the slate. I know how you work. I will not follow; you must come to me.
He pressed the tab.
FOLLOW ME
"Where no one ever returns," Emmanuel said.
-----------------
After dinner he spent some time with the holoscope, studying Elias's most precious possession: the Bible expressed as layers at different depths within the hologram, each layer according to age. The total structure of Scripture formed, then, a three- dimensional cosmos that could be viewed from any angle and its contents read. According to the tilt of the axis of observation, differing messages could be extracted. Thus Scripture yielded up an infinitude of knowledge that ceaselessly changed. It became a wondrous work of art, beautiful to the eye, and incredible in its pulsations of color. Throughout it red and gold pulsed, with strands of blue.
The color symbolism was not arbitrary but extended back in time to the early medieval Romanesque paintings. Red always represented the Father. Blue the color of the Son. And gold, of course, that of the Holy Spirit. Green stood for the new life of the elect; violet the color of mourning; brown the color of endurance and suffering; white, the color of light; and, finally, black, the color of the Powers of Darkness, of death and sin.
All these colors could be found in the hologram formed by the Bible along the temporal axis. In conjunction with sections of text, complex messages formed, permutated, re-formed. Emman- uel never tired of gazing into the hologram; for him as well as Elias it was the master hologram, surpassing all others. The Christian-Islamic Church did not approve of transmuting the Bible into a color-coded hologram, and forbade the manufacture and sale. Hence Elias had constructed this hologram himself, without approval.
It was an open hologram. New information could be fed into it. Emmanuel wondered about that but he said nothing. He sensed a secret. Elias could not answer him, so he did not ask.
What he could do, however, was type out on the keyboard linked to the hologram a few crucial words of Scripture, where- upon the hologram would align itself from the vantage point of the citation, along all its spacial axes. Thus the entire text of the Bible would be focused in relationship to the typed-out information.
"What if I fed something new into it?" he had asked Elias one day.
Elias had said severely, "Never do that."
"But it's technically possible."
"It is not done."
About that the boy wondered often.
He knew, of course, why the Christian-Islamic Church did not allow the transmuting of the Bible into a color-coded holo- gram. If you learned how you could gradually tilt the temporal axis, the axis of true depth, until successive layers were super- imposed and a vertical message-a new message-could be read out. In this way you entered into a dialogue with Scripture; it became alive. It became a sentient organism that was never twice the same. The Christian-Islamic Church, of course, wanted both the Bible and the Koran frozen forever. If Scripture escaped out from under the church its monopoly departed.
Superimposition was the critical factor. And this sophisticated superimposition could only be achieved in a hologram. And yet he knew that once, long ago, Scripture had been deciphered this way. Elias, when asked, was reticent about the matter. The boy let the topic drop.
There had been an acutely embarrassing incident at church the year before. Elias had taken the boy to Thursday morning mass. Since he had not been confirmed, Emmanuel could not receive the host; while the others in the congregation gathered at the rail Emmanuel remained bent in prayer. All at once, as the priest carried the chalice from person to person, dipping the waf- ers in the consecrated wine and saying, "The Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee-" all at once Emmanuel had stood up where he was in his pew and stated clearly and calmly: