Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Another insistent knock.

  “Coming!” the bishop cried again. He pushed the button to open the door, and Cal saw in the B dome corridor (1) the shuttle ferry pilot who had brought them down from lunar orbit, (2) a tall blond man wearing a boyishly perplexed frown, and (3) a familiar-looking woman with large eyes and discolored teeth. “Major Vear,” Bishop Marlin said. “Please come in.”

  The trio entered. Vear made hasty introductions, and Cal found himself hugging Erica Zola, the resident psychotherapist, not from any initiative of his own but because she had sprung upon him as if she were a long-lost sister. It took a minute or two to iron out the particulars of their previous acquaintance, but when he finally had it straight, Cal returned her hug, reflecting, This is it, this is the beginning…

  Erica stepped back and spoke to Bishop Marlin: “You’ve come to help us abreact our suppressed liberty, haven’t you?”

  Even if the chaplain’s office were bugged, Cal thought, no one overhearing that remark would be able to deduce much from it. He knew what abreact meant, of course, but it didn’t seem to have an immediate application to this perilous situation, a conspiracy of five motley, very nervous persons in the chaplain’s quarters at the US moonbase.

  Even so, they arranged themselves about the pie wedge, Erica on the sofa opposite Marlin’s desk, Peter Dahlquist on a chair, Cal back in his hammock, and Vear on the seat of the confessional that the last chaplain, Easson, had refused to use. Bishop Marlin gave out Magic Markers and notepads so that they could “talk” without tipping Big Brother to their plans.

  “All we lack now,” said Dahlquist aloud, turning a skeptical eye on his Magic Marker, “is our resurrected boss man, Kai.”

  “Who?” Cal exclaimed. “What did you say?”

  “Shhhh,” said Bishop Marlin. “Use your notepads. The walls have amplified telemetric auditory capabilities, and if we fail, our entire terrestrial ecosphere may die.”

  That’s just the reminder we need, Cal thought, to work calmly and assuredly toward our goals.

  “Actually,” Dahlquist said, “I regularly check the chaplain’s and Dr. Zola’s offices to make sure they aren’t bugged. But we’ll use your silly Magic Markers if you like, sir.”

  “Oh,” said Marlin, nonplussed, after which their plotting went forward aloud. Cal, meanwhile, put his hand into his jumpsuit and found Lia’s fish pin: It was faintly warm, a soothing talisman.

  At Brown Thrasher Barony, Lia showed up in blue jeans and one of Cal’s western-cut shirts. The shirt had mother-of-pearl snaps and a blue satin yoke in front and back. The sky above the horse farm was clear, the air brisk, and the ground slightly marshy from a recent rain. A pretty good afternoon for riding.

  Jeff Bonner said, “No news from Cal since he got to the Moon?”

  The entire Bonner family was walking from the double-wide to the horse barn. The azaleas along the fence had already faded, but wild flowers—primroses and violets, mostly—still punctuated the meadows, pastel corks on a wide emerald lake. A bit farther down the road, a red-capped flicker was drilling a fence post.

  “It’s a pretty expensive long-distance call, Jeff.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “ ‘Yeah, but,’ ‘Yeah, but,’ ‘Yeah, but,’ ” mocked Suzi. “Listen, Jeff. We got Lia out here to take her mind off that stuff, not to quiz her on it.”

  Bless you, thought Lia. Only the chief executive of the United States can call home from Censorinus and reverse the charges to the American taxpayer. And although you guys don’t know it, none of us may ever hear from my hubby again—at least not in this historical continuum. And what our chances of encountering one another in the abreacted reality are, well, I honestly don’t know…

  Abreacted reality? Where did you get that? Lia asked herself. The term had a strange, almost an ominous, ring, and yet she knew intellectually that Cal had gone to Von Braunville to help Bishop Joshua Marlin and presumably some unspecified others “engineer the redemptive shift”.

  That King Richard had gone, too, was ominously significant, for although Cal was Kai’s “lens”, a glass that would focus the dead writer’s stereographia, the President was the tinder that this purifying focus must ignite and burn out of existence to make room for the better, long-suppressed reality that their effort would… well, abreact.

  Jeff said, “Hey, Suzi, I’m just making brotherly conversation.”

  “As usual, you’re pick-pick-picking. Please stop it.”

  “Christ. Forgive me for breathing.”

  Martin and Carina, who were running ahead of the three adults, disappeared into the stable.

  “You guys ever ride the thoroughbreds?” Lia asked. What would it be like to sit on one of those magnificent animals? she wondered. Most of the people who rode at Brown Thrasher Barony were given a quarter horse. The thoroughbreds, which Horsy Stout trained for the private tracks in Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky, were verboten to amateurs because of the huge sums invested in them—not so much for the racing purses that Wiedenhoedt pipe-dreamed they would win as for the tax write-off that they already represented. It seemed to Lia, in fact, that Divine Intervention, Radioactive, and the other thoroughbreds were living off the fat of the land. They got groomed, fed, and pampered, and they did virtually nothing—beyond exist—to justify their staples and stall.

  “Not often,” Suzi said. “They’re persnickety creatures. We really don’t want the kids on them.”

  “What if I rode a thoroughbred? I’d like to.”

  “Lia—” Jeff began, transparently annoyed.

  They entered the high-ceilinged stable. Shafts of bourbon-hued brightness slanted in from the skylights, and Suzi said, “Come on, Jeffrey. Let her. It’d be good for the horse and fun for Lia.”

  “She’ll break her neck.”

  “Then you’d be well rid of me, wouldn’t you?”

  “My luck, your lawyers would descend with thirty-six lawsuits.”

  But Suzi prevailed upon Jeff to give Lia one of the high-strung horses, and Horsy came down from his rafter room to help Carina and Martin to saddle up. Again, the dwarf’s crippled-seeming but bluntly powerful physique reminded Lia of a trash-compacted bodybuilder.

  As soon as Horsy had the kids mounted, he swaggered over on his bandy legs to ask the adults which horses they wanted.

  “Sophisticated Lady for Lia,” Jeff directed. This was a sorrel filly with white stockings.

  “But I want Ubiquity,” Lia said.

  “Christ.”

  “Let her have him, Jeff.”

  Lia had known that this choice would further upset her brother and that Suzi would probably jump to her defense. But why go out of her way to nettle Jeff and to energize Suzi? Well, because after returning to Georgia from the Cape, her days had alternated drudgery and disappointment.

  Striving to rattle her brother was a cheap way of exorcising her pique—first, that Cal was so far away and, second, that a fickle actress had apparently dumped her as her psychotherapist. Not satisfied with merely blackmailing them, Grace Rinehart was compounding Lia’s sense of isolation by abandoning her.

  But I’m going to ride away from my worries, Lia thought. I’m going to arrest my melancholy on Ubiquity’s back and restore my capacity for wonder.

  “Ubiquity’s a good choice for what ails you,” Horsy Stout said, uncannily seconding her private reasoning.

  Jeff said, “Yeah. He’ll flip you over onto your head and make your every ailment obsolete.”

  This sarcasm was his final objection, however, and Horsy went into the blue-black stallion’s stall to ready him for Lia’s ride. A saddle as delicate as a leather doily. A bit and bridle as light as an oversized paper clip. Stirrups as stylish as macrame swings. Lia mounted from the wooden ledge inside the stall, whereupon Horsy led Ubiquity out onto the concrete floor of the stable to join Jeff and Suzi and the kids, all of whom were astride easygoing quarter horses that looked like spavined mules—in comparison, that is, to Lia’s majestic thor
oughbred.

  Still afoot, Horsy led the horseback Bonners through the long building to the east pasture.

  “Run ‘em hard,” he said. “But bring ‘em back so’s I can rub ‘em down and give ‘em their mash.”

  “Ride with us,” Lia said.

  “Don’t got any ponies here, ma’am, and the colts, besides not bein’ broke, ain’t stout enough to hold this Stout.”

  “But you’re just jockey size, Horsy.”

  “Only from head to toe. From shoulder to shoulder, though, I’m a cannonball they don’t fancy balancin’.”

  Lia and the others rode. The east pasture graded into a stand of pines riven by a bridle path. They made this pinecone-littered circuit in forty minutes and came back into the pasture. Here, Jeff nudged his horse into an all-out trot. Martin and Carina, whooping like Indians, followed suit. So did Suzi, less gleefully than her kids. Ubiquity—whom Lia had been handling with a taut rein and a stream of comforting nonsense—snorted, reared, twisted, and leapt off after the other galloping horses. “Whoa!” Lia cried. “Damn you, Yubik, slow down!” But the thoroughbred ran past Suzi’s mount, split the kids’ two horses, and overtook Jeff’s laboring animal about a hundred yards from the eastern end of the stable. Ubiquity was flying, and Lia would have relaxed and enjoyed the wind scouring her eyes—except that she could sense through the stallion’s flanks the marshiness of the pasture and her own utter lack of control in his headlong dash. As in a corny cowboy movie, she was aboard a runaway, and Cal, the hero any screenwriter would have named to save her, was a quarter of a million miles away.

  “I told you!” Jeff was shouting at Suzi somewhere behind her. “I told you this would happen!”

  Lia thought, But I’m all right. There may be peril here, but it isn’t mine. Ubiquity’s more likely to suffer than I am. He’s generating terrific speed under adverse conditions, and I’m waiting to hear one of his ankles crack. If I’m thrown, well, the ground’s going to receive me like a big benevolent catcher’s mit…

  Unfortunately, everyone behind her was shouting—Jeff, Suzi, Martin, Carina. They were offering advice (“Rein him in, rein him in!”), expressing dismay (“Oh, my God!”), or cheering her on (“Go, Aunt Lia! Ride him!”). The sound of this uproar drew Horsy Stout from the east end of the stable. He ran bandy-legged into the pasture. Clearly fearful that Ubiquity would collide with one of the paddock fences, he began waving his arms.

  “It’s all right!” Lia yelled. “Just get out of his way!”

  The horse was trying to spook her. This “out-of-control” jaunt was meant to panic the poor female astride him. Well, she’d ridden a meaner creature—not just high-strung but congenitally ornery—in one of the annual Pioneer Days rodeos in Snowy Falls, Colorado, and Ubiquity was a pussycat next to Buckshot. If only Horsy would jump aside. If only he wouldn’t try to play the hero that he thinks I’m desperately worthy of…

  But the nearer Ubiquity and she approached the stable, the more agitated the dwarf became. Now he was running toward them, and as the thoroughbred ripped past the muscular little man, Horsy reached up, grabbed Lia’s leg, and toppled her out of the saddle. Damn it all to hell! she thought, bruising her shoulder but simultaneously rolling to a sitting position. She fully expected to find Horsy on the sodden ground somewhere nearby. It would be pleasant to thank him for attempting a rescue but even more pleasant to tell him that his effort had been totally unnecessary.

  Then she saw that Ubiquity was running south along the paddock fence dragging the stirrup-entangled dwarf and bouncing him off every primary support post along it. All she could really see of him was his lower body, the blur of his blue jeans rotating within the eggbeater blur of Ubiquity’s limbs, and a shocking flash of white from the tail of his shirt. The way he was getting whipped around off those fence posts—a staff for scoring pain—it was hard to imagine him surviving.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Lia got to her feet and ran along the fence after both Ubiquity and Horsy Stout. Jeff came riding up, too, and, suddenly, after a breakneck run to the outside corner of the paddock, Ubiquity eased off, blew a mucous bubble from one flaring nostril, and nonchalantly began to nibble at the grass. The dwarf was a shapeless body bag, leaking blood, hung up in the left stirrup strap. Lia slowed to a walk, while Jeff turned his mount aside. The trip along the fence had torn nearly every button off Horsy’s shirt and lacerated him as if with a cat-o’-nine-tails.

  Lia approached and knelt. A simple twist of the stirrup freed him, and he slumped into the grass. Lia hit Ubiquity on the thigh to get the horse to move off, then stretched out beside the dwarf to study his pain-filled face.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” Horsy Stout managed.

  “You’ve killed yourself for no reason.”

  “Ain’t dead. Ain’t dying, either. What I am is”—a contorted smile—“goin’ travelin’, ma’am.”

  “Yeah? Traveling where, Horsy?”

  “Don’ always know. Mebbe the Moon.”

  Delirious, Lia thought. “Well, say hello to Cal for me.”

  “ ‘S not me who’ll be there. ‘S my angel. My pilot.”

  “Get him to say hello, then.”

  “Ain’t dressed to travel, ma’am. Look at me, all bloody like.”

  “You’re fine, Horsy. You look just fine.”

  “Button my shirt, Miss Lia.” Horsy peered down his nose at his lacerated chest. “To keep up the proprieties.”

  He may not be dying, Lia thought, but that sounds like a last request. She tugged his shirt out from under him and buttoned its sole remaining button. Then, tenderly, she took the fish pin off the yoke of her western shirt and used it to fasten Horsy’s shirt just below its collar.

  “Thank you, Miss Lia,” he said. “Remember now: Cal loves you, gal, and somewhere, somehow, you all gonna see each other again in the happiest sort of way. I’m off.”

  Jeff came walking up. His shadow fell across both Lia and the prostrate dwarf. As it did, the air around Horsy began to tingle, a sensation both visual and tactile. Another face was hovering above the black man’s: a clear Caucasian mask over the dwarf’s Negroid visage. And the very air had changed, giving their May sky the fragile, fairy-tale color of muscadine wine.

  “Holy shit,” Jeff said, awed.

  Lia, looking back toward Suzi and the kids, saw their horses frozen in midstride and a crow flapping over the woods behind them suspended there like a bizarre taxidermic illusion.

  “Horsy’s okay,” said the man on the ground. “He’s just off on a jaunt is all.”

  “Kai!”

  “Hey, I don’t have long. I’ve got to follow him before his glorified body gets there uninhabited.”

  “Censorinus?”

  The laminate features masking Horsy’s nodded. “I’ve got this thing I want you to do. It’s okay with Horsy. He’s come to see the two of us as symbionts, I think.”

  Jeff knelt beside Lia. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Would you tell me what the fuck is happening here, little sister?”

  Kai ignored the intrusion. “There’s an envelope with several twenty-dollar bills in it on the bedside table in Horsy’s rafter room. It’s already addressed. I want you to seal it, put a stamp on it, and mail it. Okay?”

  “Sure, Kai. Of course.”

  “Fine. That’s it, then. I’m off, too.”

  “Lia!” Jeff insisted.

  Lia shook off her brother’s touch and stood. Kai had followed Horsy; now the abandoned husk of the dwarf’s body was lying in the grass breathing on automatic pilot, sustaining itself through mere habit until its animating spirit could return to reclaim it.

  Meanwhile, the muscadine-tinted stasis surrounding Kai’s pocket of out-of-time mobility was decaying and the sky’s immemorial blue flooding back in. The horses belonging to the other three Bonners unthawed, and so did the crow briefly pinned to the muscadine sky above the woods.

  “Is he dead?” Suzi
cried, riding up. “Did he break any bones?”

  “You talk to her,” Lia told her brother. “I’ve got something to do.” She kissed her dismounted sister-in-law, told her agitated nephew and niece that Horsy would be all right, and walked along the paddock rail to the horse barn.

  A moment later, in Horsy’s rafter room, Lia understood that Kai had addressed the envelope full of cash to the cab driver who had driven him to Warm Springs from the Atlanta airport. That’s good, she thought. Maybe things are getting better already. At the same time, her innate practicality asserting itself, she realized that she would have to buy a money order at the post office. Only an utter idiot would send so much cash through the mails, and both Kai and Horsy would want her to do everything in her power to make sure that the wronged cabbie finally got his fare.

  Another thing immensely cheered her: Horsy had promised that somewhere, somehow, she and Cal would be reunited. Of course, we will, Lia thought. Of course we will. How could our story end in any other way…?

  24

  EATING DINNER with Major Vear and the computer troubleshooter Peter Dahlquist, Cal had two disturbing insights.

  “Bishop Marlin isn’t eating,” he announced. “He hasn’t eaten since we got here. Three whole days.”

  “The Black Fast,” Vear said. “He’s readying himself.”

  Yes, Cal thought, for the exorcism. But his second insight was even more disturbing than the length of the bishop’s fast. “What’s happened to Easter?”

  Vear and Dolly looked at each other.

  “Easter,” Cal repeated, annoyed. “Look, I’m not a churchgoer, but the calendar says May, and Easter hasn’t happened yet.”

  Vear’s face finally registered puzzlement and a discernible trace of worry. He found a small date-book calendar in one of his jumpsuit pockets and consulted it.

  “Easter is always the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox,” he said. He looked at Cal and Dolly. “This year, it should’ve been April the eleventh. But we didn’t observe it. Easson took no special note of it at all. It was Sunday like any other Sunday.”