The VALIS Trilogy

by Philip K. Dick

  Sherri even resented her own sister, who had sheltered, fed and cared for her all the time she was sick. The reason: Mae drove a Mercedes-Benz and had a rich husband. But most of all Sherri resented the career of her best friend Eleanor, who had become a nun.

  "Here I am throwing up in Santa Ana," Sherri frequently said, "and Eleanor's walking around in a habit in Las Vegas."

  "You're not throwing up now," Fat pointed out. "You're in remission."

  "But she doesn't know that. What kind of place is Las Vegas for a religious order? She's probably peddling her ass in—"

  "You're talking about a nun," Fat said, who had met Eleanor; he had liked her.

  "I'd be a nun by now if I hadn't got sick," Sherri said.

  ***

  To escape from Sherri's nattering drivel, Fat shut himself up in the bedroom he used as a study and began working once more on his great exegesis. He had done almost 300,000 words, mostly holographically, but from the inferior bulk he had begun to extract what he termed his Tractate: Cryptica Scriptura (see Appendix p.257), which simply means "hidden discourse." Fat found the Latin more impressive as a title.

  At this point in the Meisterwerk he had begun patiently to fabricate his cosmogony, which is the technical term for, "How the cosmos came into existence." Few individuals compose cosmogonies; usually entire cultures, civilizations, people or tribes are required: a cosmogony is a group production, evolving down through the ages. Fat well knew this, and prided himself on having invented his own. He called it:

  TWO SOURCE COSMOGONY

  In his journal or exegesis it came as entry 47 and was by far the longest single entry.

  The One was and was-not, combined, and desired to separate the was-not from the was. So it generated a diploid sac which contained, like an eggshell, a pair of twins, each an androgyny, spinning in opposite directions (the Yin and Yang of Taoism, with the One as the Tao). The plan of the One was that both twins would emerge into being (wasness) simultaneously; however, motivated by a desire to be (which the One had implanted in both twins), the counter-clockwise twin broke through the sac and separated prematurely; i.e., before full term. This was the dark or Yin twin. Therefore it was defective. At full term the wiser twin emerged. Each twin formed a unitary entelechy, a single living organism made of psyche and soma, still rotating in opposite directions to each other. The full term twin, called Form I by Parmenides, advanced correctly through its growth stages, but the prematurely born twin, called Form II, languished.

  The next step in the One's plan was that the Two would become the Many, through their dialectic interaction. From them as hyperuniverses they projected a hologram-like interface, which is the pluriform universe we creatures inhabit. The two sources were to intermingle equally in maintaining our universe, but Form II continued to languish toward illness, madness and disorder. These aspects she projected into our universe.

  It was the One's purpose for our hologramatic universe to serve as a teaching instrument by which a variety of new lives advanced until ultimately they would be isomorphic with the One. However, the decaying condition of hyperuniverse II introduced malfactors which damaged our hologramatic universe. This is the origin of entropy, undeserved suffering, chaos and death, as well as the Empire, the Black Iron Prison; in essence, the aborting of the proper health and growth of the life forms within the hologramatic universe. Also the teaching function was grossly impaired, since only the signal from the hyperuniverse I was information-rich; that from II had become noise.

  The psyche of hyperuniverse I sent a micro-form of itself into hyperuniverse II to attempt to heal it. The micro-form was apparent in our hologramatic universe as Jesus Christ. However, hyperuniverse II, being deranged, at once tormented, humiliated, rejected and finally killed the micro-form of the healing psyche of her healthy twin. After that, hyperuniverse II continued to decay into blind, mechanical, purposeless causal processes. It then became the task of Christ (more properly the Holy Spirit) to either rescue the life forms in the hologramatic universe, or abolish all influences on it emanating from II. Approaching its task with caution, it prepared to kill the deranged twin, since she cannot be healed; i.e., she will not allow herself to be healed because she does not understand that she is sick. This illness and madness pervades us and makes us idiots living in private, unreal worlds. The original plan of the One can only be realized now by the division of hyperuniverse I into two healthy hyperuniverses, which will transform the hologramatic universe into the successful teaching machine it was designed to be. We will experience this as the "Kingdom of God."

  Within time, hyperuniverse II remains alive: "The Empire never ended." But in eternity, where the hyperuniverses exist, she has been killed—of necessity—by the healthy twin of hyperuniverse I, who is our champion. The One grieves for this death, since the One loved both twins; therefore the information of the Mind consists of a tragic tale of the death of a woman, the undertones of which generate anguish into all the creatures of the hologramatic universe without their knowing why. This grief will depart when the healthy twin undergoes mitosis and the "Kingdom of God" arrives. The machinery for this tranformation—the procession within time from the Age of Iron to the Age of Gold—is at work now; in eternity it is already accomplished.

  Not long thereafter, Sherri got fed up with Fat working night and day on his exegesis; also she got mad because he asked her to contribute some of her SSI money to pay the rent, since because of a court judgment he had to pay out a lot of spousal and child support to Beth and Christopher. Having found another apartment for which the Santa Ana housing authority would pick up the tab, Sherri wound up living by herself rent-free, without the obligation to fix Fat's dinner; also she could go out with other men, something Fat had objected to while he and Sherri were living together. To this possessiveness, Sherri had said hotly one night, when she came home from walking hand-in-hand with a male friend to find Fat furious:

  "I don't have to put up with this crap."

  Fat promised not to object to Sherri going out with other men any more, nor would he continue to ask her to contribute toward the rent and food costs, even though at the moment he had only nine dollars in his bank account. This did no good; Sherri was pissed.

  "I'm moving out," she informed him.

  After she moved out, Fat had to raise funds to purchase all manner of furniture, dishes, TV set, flatware, towels—everything, because he had brought little or nothing with him from his marriage; he had expected to depend on Sherri's chattels. Needless to say, he found life very lonely without her; living by himself in the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment which they had shared depressed the hell out of him. His friends worried about him and tried to cheer him up. In February Beth had left him and now in early September Sherri had left him. He was again dying by inches. All he did was sit at his typewriter or with notepad and pen, working on his exegesis; nothing else remained in his life. Beth had moved up to Sacramento, seven hundred miles away, so he did not get to see Christopher. He thought about suicide, but not very much, he knew that Maurice would not approve of such thoughts. Maurice would require of him another list.

  What really bothered Fat was the intuition that Sherri would soon lose her remission. From going to class at Santa Ana College and working at the church she became rundown and tired; every time he saw her, which was as often as possible, he noticed how tired and thin she looked. In November she complained of the flu; she had pains in her chest and coughed continuously.

  "This fucking flu," Sherri said.

  Finally he got her to go to her doctor for an X-ray and blood tests. He knew she had lost her remission by then; she could barely drag herself around.

  The day she found out that she had cancer again, Fat was with her; since her appointment with the doctor was at eight in the morning, Fat stayed up the night before, just sitting. He drove her to the doctor, along with Edna, a lifelong friend of Sherri's; he and Edna sat together in the waiting room while Sherri conferred with Dr. Applebaum.<
br />
  "It's just the flu," Edna said.

  Fat said nothing. He knew what it was. Three days before, he and Sherri had walked to the grocery store; she could hardly put one foot before the other. No doubt existed in Fat's mind; as he sat with Edna in the crowded waiting room terror filled him and he wanted to cry. Incredibly, today was his birthday.

  When Sherri emerged from Dr. Applebaum's office, she had a Kleenex pressed to her eyes; Fat and Edna ran over to her; he caught Sherri as she fell saying, "It's back, the cancer's back." She had it in the lymph nodes in her neck and she had a malignant tumor in her right lung which was suffocating her. Chemotherapy and radiation would be started in twenty-four hours.

  Edna said, stricken, "I was sure it was just flu. I wanted her to go to Melodyland and testify that Jesus had cured her."

  To that remark, Fat said nothing.

  The argument can be made that at this point Fat no longer had any moral obligation to Sherri. For the most meager reason she had moved out on him, leaving him alone, grieving and desperate, with nothing to do but scribble away at his exegesis. Fat's friends had all pointed this out. Even Edna pointed this out, when Sherri wasn't present in the same room. But Fat still loved her. He now asked her to move back in with him so that he could take care of her, inasmuch as she had become too weak to fix herself meals, and once she began the chemotherapy she would become a lot sicker.

  "No thanks," Sherri said, tonelessly.

  Fat walked down to her church one day and talked with Father Larry; he begged Larry to put pressure on the State of California Medicare people to provide someone to come in and fix meals for Sherri and to help clean up her apartment, since she would not let him, Fat, do it. Father Larry said he would, but nothing came of it. Again Fat went over to talk to the priest about what could be done to help Sherri, and while he was talking, Fat suddenly began to cry.

  To this, Father Larry said enigmatically, "I've cried all the tears I am going to cry for that girl."

  Fat could not tell if that meant that Larry had burned out his circuits from grief or that he had calculatedly, as a self-protective device, curtailed his grief. Fat does not know to this day. His own grief had reached critical mass. Now Sherri had been hospitalized; Fat visited her and saw lying in the bed a small sad shape, half the size he was accustomed to, a shape coughing in pain, with wretched hopelessness in its eyes. Fat could not drive home after that, so Kevin drove him home. Kevin, who usually maintained his stance of cynicism, could not speak from grief; the two of them drove along and then Kevin slapped him on the shoulder, which is the only avenue open to men to show love for each other.

  "What am I going to do?" Fat said, meaning, What am I going to do when she dies?

  He really loved Sherri, despite her treatment of him—if indeed, as his friends maintained, she had treated him shabbily. He himself—he neither knew nor cared about that. All he knew was that she lay in the hospital bed with metastasized tumors throughout her. Every day he visited her in the hospital, along with everyone else who knew her.

  At night he did the only act left open to him: work on his exegesis. He had reached an important entry.

  Entry 48. ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction—a failure—of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis—more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia)—although it has individual significance for each of us—a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality—it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.

  Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit via linear and orthogonal time changes, as well as continual signaling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.

  The external information or gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us—that is, already there (first observed by Plato; viz: that learning is a form of remembering).

  The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of restorative value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself, the total entity.

  The Godhead is impaired; some primordial crisis occurred in it which we do not understand.

  Fat reworked journal entry 29 and added it to his ON OUR NATURE entry:

  29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. "The Empire never ended."

  By now Fat's mind was going totally. All he did was work on his exegesis or his tractate or just listen to his stereo or visit Sherri in the hospital. He began to install entries in the tractate without logical order or reason.

  30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.

  27.If the centuries of spurious time are excised, the true date is not 1978 C.E. but 103 C.E. Therefore the New Testament says that the Kingdom of the Spirit will come before "some now living die." We are living, therefore, in apostolic times

  20. The Hermetic alchemists knew of the secret race of three-eyed invaders but despite their eff orts could not contact them, therefore their eff orts to support Frederick V, Elector Palatine, King of Bohemia, failed. "The Empire never ended."

  21. The Rose Cross Brotherhood wrote, "Ex Deo nascimur, in Jesu mortimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus," which is to say, "From God we are born, in Jesus we die, by the Holy Spirit we live again." This signifi es that they had rediscov-ered the lost formula for immortality which the Empire had destroyed. "The Empire never ended."

  10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, "That which is above is that which is below." By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.

  12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" to which some of those present correctly said, "The man is calling on Elijah." Elijah had left him and he died alone.

  At this moment as he made this entry. Horselover Fat was dying alone. Elijah, or whatever divine presence it was that had fired tons of information into his skull in 1974, had indeed left him. The dreadful question that Fat asked himself over and over again did not get put down in his journal or tractate; the question could be put this way:

  If the divine presence knew about Christopher's birth defect and did something to correct it, why doesn't it do something about Sherri's cancer? How could it let her lie there dying?

  Fat could not figure this out. The girl had gone an entire year wrongly diagnosed; why hadn't Zebra fired that information to Fat or to Sherri's doctor or to Sherri—to someone?

  Fired it in time to save her!

  One day when Fat visited Sherri in the hospital, a grinning fool stood there by her bed, a simp who Fat had met; this thing used to shamble in while Fat and Sherri lived together and would put his arms around Sherri, kiss her and tell her he loved her—never mind Fat. This childhood friend of Sherri's, when Fat entered the hospital room, was saying to Sherri:

  "What'll we do when I'm king of the world and you're queen of the world?"

  To which Sherri, in agony, murmured, "I just want t
o get rid of these lumps in my throat."

  Fat had never come so close to coldcocking anybody into tomorrow as at that moment. Kevin, who had accompanied him, had to physically hold Fat back.

  On the drive back to Fat's lonely apartment, where he and Sherri had lived together for such a short time, Fat said to Kevin, "I'm going crazy. I can't take it."

  "That's a normal reaction," Kevin said, showing nothing of his cynical pose, these days.

  "Tell me," Fat said, "why God doesn't help her." He kept Kevin up on the progress of his exegesis; his encounter with God in 1974 was known to Kevin, so Fat could talk openly.

  Kevin said, "It's the mysterious ways of the Great Punta."

  "What the fuck is that?" Fat said.

  "I don't believe in God," Kevin said. "I believe in the Great Punta. And the ways of the Great Punta are mysterious. No one knows why he does what he does, or doesn't do."

  "Are you kidding me?"

  "No," Kevin said.

  "Where did the Great Punta come from?"

  "Only the Great Punta knows."

  "Is he benign?"

  "Some say he is; some say he isn't."

  "He could help Sherri if he wanted to."

  Kevin said, "Only the Great Punta knows that."

  They started laughing.

  Obsessed with death, and going crazy from grief and worry about Sherri, Fat wrote entry 15 in his tractate.

  15. The Sibyl of Cumae protected the Roman Republic and gave timely warnings. In the first century C.E. she foresaw the murders of the two Kennedy brothers, Dr. King and Bishop Pike. She saw the two common denominators in the four murdered men: first, they stood in defense of the liberties of the Republic; and second, each man was a religious leader. For this they were killed. The Republic had once again become an empire with a caesar. "The Empire never ended."