Radio Free Albemuth Read online

  “But suppose,” Rachel said frantically, “it turns out it is from the Party?”

  “It’s not from the Party. I don’t know anyone in the Party; I’m not even sure there is a Party. If there is, they wouldn’t be writing me, especially in code.”

  “It could be a mistake of some kind. They intended to write to someone else.”

  “Fuck ’em then,” I said. Anyhow, I knew it was the authorities; or rather the sibyl knew. Valis knew. Valis, who had come through at the critical time and saved me.

  Rachel said, “They’ll think you’re a Communist, from what you told them.”

  “No, they won’t. No Communist would have phoned them in the first place, let alone said what I said. They’ll know I am exactly what I am: a patriotic American. Fuck them and fuck the Party; they’re one and the same, as far as I’m concerned. It’s the party that kills its political rivals in purges—Ferris Fremont is the Party, and the Party killed the Kennedys and Dr. King and Jim Pike to take power in America. We have one enemy and that’s it. That’s Comrade Ferris Fremont.”

  My wife stared at me dumbfounded.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but it’s true. That’s the great secret. That’s what the people aren’t supposed to know. But I know. I was told.”

  “Fremont isn’t a Communist,” Rachel said feebly, her face ashen. “He’s a fascist.”

  “The U.S.S.R. turned fascist in Stalin’s time,” I said. “Now it’s totally fascistic. America was the last stronghold of freedom and they took us over, internally, under fake names. We go too much on names—labels. Fremont is the first Communist Party president, and I’m going to get him out.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Rachel said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen you display such animosity, Nick.”

  “That letter today,” I said savagely, “that alleged shoe ad—that’s murder, murder aimed at me. I am going to get the sons-of-bitches for that—for sending that to me—if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “But…you never showed such hate for the Party before. In Berkeley—”

  “They never tried to kill me before,” I said.

  “Can…” She could scarcely talk; trembling, she seated herself on the arm of the couch, by Pinky. The cat still dozed. “Can FAP help you?”

  “TAP the enemy,” I said. “Finessed back onto itself. I will get it to do all the work; I already have.”

  “How many other people do you think know? About President Fremont, I mean?”

  “Look at his foreign policy. Trade deals with Russia, grain sales at a loss to us; he gives them what they want. The U.S. is their supplier; it does what they say. If they’re out of grain they get grain; if they’re low on—”

  “But our big military establishment.”

  “To keep our own people down. Not theirs.”

  Rachel said. “You didn’t know this yesterday.”

  “I knew it when I saw the shoe ad,” I said. “When I saw the message from the Communist Party that was also from FAP. They are working with the KGB in New York, not against it; how could it operate openly if FAP didn’t let it? There is one intelligence community and one only. And we are all its victims, wherever we live.”

  “I need a drink,” Rachel managed to say.

  “Take heart,” I said. “The beginning of the change has set in. The turning point has come. They will be exposed; they will stand in court, every one of them, and answer for crimes they have committed.”

  “Because of you?” She gazed timidly at me.

  “Because of Valis,” I said.

  Rachel said. “It’s not you any longer, Nick. You’re not the same person.”

  “That is right,” I said.

  “Who are you?”

  I said, “Their adversary. Who is going to see them hunted down.”

  “You can’t do it by—”

  “I’ll be given the names of others.”

  “Like yourself?”

  I nodded.

  “So that letter,” Rachel said, “that shoe ad—it would never have gotten in the mail without the permission and cooperation of the American authorities.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “What about Aramchek?”

  I said nothing.

  “Is Valis Aramchek?” Rachel asked hesitantly. “Or maybe you shouldn’t tell me; maybe I’m not supposed to know.”

  “I’ll tell you—” I began, but all at once I felt two great invisible hands grip me by the upper arms; they held so tightly that I grunted in pain. Rachel stared at me. I could not speak any further; all I could do was try to withstand the pressure of the invisible hands holding me. Then, at last, they released me. I was free.

  “What happened?” Rachel asked.

  “Nothing.” I took in deep, unsteady breaths.

  “The look on your face—something had hold of you, didn’t it? You started to say something you shouldn’t have.” She patted me gently on the arm. “It’s okay, Nick; you don’t have to say. I don’t want you to say.”

  “Maybe some other time,” I said.

  16TOWARD the end of the day two FAPers, both of them lean and alert young men, showed up at my door.

  Silently, they examined the shoe ad I had received in the mail. I showed them the piece of paper on which I had written the encoded message that I had extracted.

  “I am Agent Townsend,” the first FAPer said. “And this is my teammate, Agent Snow. It was very alert of you to report this, Mr. Brady.”

  I said, truthfully. “I knew it would be coming. I even knew the day.”

  “I imagine,” Agent Townsend said, “that the Communists would very much like to control someone in your position. You have power over a large number of recording artists, do you not?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You can sign up and record whomever you wish?”

  “I need the approval of two other executives,” I said. “But usually they go along with me.”

  “They have come to respect your judgment?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How has the Party contacted you before?” Agent Snow asked.

  “They never before—”

  “We realize they never turned the screws before. But did they contact you through mutual friends, or by phone, or mail? Or directly, through their agents?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I know the contact, the pressure has been there, but it’s been too devious and subtle up until now to put my finger on.”

  “No one person in particular.”

  “No,” I said.

  Agent Townsend said. “This is the first time they’ve come out overtly, then.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “In your case,” Agent Townsend said, “they made a mistake. We have a mail intercept on you, Mr. Brady; we intercepted this document and decoded it ourselves. We knew the hour of its arrival in your mailbox. You were watched as you took it upstairs to this apartment. You were timed as to how long it took you to react to it. And of course we were looking to see your reaction. Frankly, we didn’t expect you to call us. We assumed you’d destroy it.”

  “My wife suggested I destroy it,” I said. “But that could have been taken two ways.”

  “Oh, yes,” Agent Townsend said. “Two ways easily. You read the encoded message and then burned it; that’s a normal process for Party members; they wouldn’t leave something like this lying around after they had assimilated its contents; it’d be incriminating.”

  The sibyl had directed me right. Inwardly, without any visible sign, I sighed with relief. Thank God for her, I said to myself; on my own, like Rachel, I most likely would have destroyed it, imagining that was enough. And thus incriminated myself forever.

  Destroying it would have proved I had read it. That I knew what it was. One does not carry a harmless shoe ad to the bathroom and set fire to it in the bathtub.

  Studying the name and address written on the back of the document, Agent Townsend said to Ag
ent Snow, “This looks like…you know, that girl’s handwriting.” To me he said. “Your friend Phil Dick knows a girl named Vivian Kaplan. Do you know her?”

  “No,” I said, “but he’s mentioned her.”

  “You wouldn’t have any samples of her handwriting around?” Agent Townsend asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Vivian is a rather far-out person,” Agent Townsend said with a half smile. “She reported about you recently, Mr. Brady, that you hold prolonged conversations with God. Is that true?”

  “No,” I said.

  “She got it from his friend,” Agent Snow pointed out to Agent Townsend.

  “What,” Agent Townsend continued, “would possibly give rise to such an idea in her head? Can you think of anything?”

  I said. “I never met the girl.”

  “She is reporting on you,” Agent Townsend said.

  “I know that,” I said.

  “What would your feelings toward her be,” Agent Townsend said, “if evaluation of this shoe ad document showed that it emanated from her?”

  “I would want nothing to do with her,” I said.

  “Well, we are not really sure,” Agent Townsend said, “and in all likelihood it emanated from the KGB in New York, but until we are positive we have to consider the outside possibility that one of our own posts mailed it off to you.”

  I said nothing.

  “What we’d like you to do,” Agent Snow said, “is pass on to us any further documents of this sort which you may receive, or any contacts with suspicious persons coming in any form whatever, phone or mail, or at your door. You realize, of course, that the Party may have decided to destroy you for your unwillingness to cooperate with them.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

  “I mean physically destroy. Kill.”

  I felt cold, hearing that, terribly cold.

  “There is not much we can do to help you,” Agent Snow said, “in that regard. If someone wants to kill a person they usually can.”

  “Could you assign anyone to stay with me?” I said.

  The two FAP agents exchanged glances. “Afraid not,” Agent Townsend said. “It exceeds our authority. And we don’t have the manpower. You can if you wish buy a handgun. That might be a good idea, especially in view of the fact that you have a wife and small child.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “We will okay it,” Agent Townsend said.

  “Then you don’t think one of your own posts sent this,” I said.

  “Frankly, I doubt it very much,” Agent Townsend said. “We’ll conduct a routine inquiry. It would certainly simplify everything, from our standpoint. May I take this ad and the envelope?”

  “Certainly,” I said. I was glad to have it out of my hands.

  That night I sat out alone on the patio of our apartment, gazing up at the stars. By now I knew what had happened to me; for reasons I did not understand, I had become plugged into an intergalactic communications network, operating on a telepathic basis. Sitting there in the dark by myself I experienced the stars overhead and the enormous amount of traffic flowing between them. I was in touch with one station in the network, and I gazed up trying to locate it, although most likely locating it was impossible.

  A star system with a name out of our own devising; I knew the star’s name. It was Albemuth. But I could find no such star listed in our reference works, although the prefix Al was common to stars, since it signified the word ‘the’ in Arabic.

  There I sat, and there overhead twinkled and glowed the star Albemuth, and from its network came an infinitude of messages, in assorted unknown tongues. What had happened was that the AI operator of Albemuth’s station, an artificial intelligence unit, had raised me at some prior time and was holding the contact open. Therefore information reached me from the communications network whether I liked it or not.

  It was the voice of the AI unit which I saw in dreams as the ‘Roman sibyl.’ In point of fact it was not the Roman sibyl, not at all, and really not a woman; it was a totally synthetic entity. But I loved the sound of her voice—I still thought of the entity as her—since whenever I beard it, either in my head during a hypnagogic or hypnopompic state or in dreams, it meant that I would soon be informed of something. Beyond the AI voice, the synthetic female voice, lay Valis himself, the ultimate constituent link to the universe-wide communications network. Now that I had peaked in my rapport with it, enormous amounts of material were flooding across; ever since the phosphene activity they were evidently jamming it to me, feeding me as much as possible, in case, perhaps, the contact was broken.

  They had never visited Earth—no actual extraterrestrials had landed ships and walked around here—but they had informed certain humans now and then throughout the ages, especially in ancient times. Since my contact came in most strangely between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., I realized that probably a booster satellite, of alien origin, orbited Earth, a slave communications satellite that had been sent here thousands of years ago.

  “What are you doing sitting out on the patio?” Rachel asked me.

  “Listening,” I said.

  “To what?”

  “To the voices of the stars,” I said, although more accurately I meant the voices from the stars. But it was as if the stars themselves spoke, as I sat there in the chilly dark, alone except for my cat, who was out there out of custom anyhow; each night Pinky sat on the railing of the patio, communing as I was but over a longer period of time, over his entire adult life. Seeing him now I understood that he was picking up information in the night, from the night, from the pattern of blinks that came by starlight. He was hooked up with the universe as he sat here now, like myself, gazing upward silently.

  The Fall of man, I further realized, represented a falling away from contact with this vast communications network and from the AI unit expressing the voice of Valis, which to the ancients would be the same as God. Originally, like the animal beside me, we had been integrated into this network and had been expressions of its identity and will operating through us. Something had gone wrong; the lights had gone out on Earth.

  17THESE realizations came to me not as speculation or even as logical deduction, but as insights presented me by the sympathetic AI operator at work at my station. She was making me aware of that which man had ceased to understand: his role and place in the system of things. I saw on the inner screen of my mind an inferior agency creeping into our world, combating the wisdom of God; I saw it take over this planet with its own dreary plans and will, supplanting the benign will of God…or Valis, as I still preferred to call him. Over the ages God had played a great game for the relief of this planet, but lifting the siege had still not been accomplished. Earth was still an unlit button on the exchange board of the intergalactic communications network. We had not yet begun to function as our first ancestors had, in communion with our creator and the lord of the universe. Such examples as me were random flukes—I had not achieved it; it had happened to me, due to a combination of circumstances. One of the deformed progeny had lifted the receiver of the long-abandoned telephone, so to speak, and was now hearing the sympathetic, informative voice that he and all his kind should have known by heart.

  The new personality in me had not awakened from a sleep of two millennia; it had, more accurately speaking, been printed out by the alien satellite, impressed on me afresh from outside. It was an addition, not a substitution in place of me but a kind of package identity based on the total knowledge of the satellite. It was to raise me to the highest level possible in my ability to cope. The satellite, itself linked to higher life forms, was concerned with my capacity to live; it or they, the totality of them, had seen me faltering under the oppression, and their response was reflexive. It amounted to a rational attempt to give aid to whoever was in touch with them, who was capable of assimilating their printout. I had been selected for that reason alone. Their concern was universal. They would have assisted anyone they could reach.

&nbs
p; The tragedy lay in their inability to reach the people of our planet. It went back to the original invasion of our world by the malign entity that did not wish to hear. It had contaminated our world with its presence; it was not merely around us, it was also in us. We bore its mark. Probably the maximum harm it had done us was to sever us from the communications network. Due to its opaqueness it probably was not even aware of what it had done. Or if it understood, it did not consider it a loss.

  It certainly was a loss as far as I was concerned, now that I had heard the mild voice of the AI system as it relayed information to me and accepted questions in response. Were I never to hear it again I would remember that sound the rest of my life. It was far off; whenever I queried it, there was a measurable lag before it responded. I wondered how many stars away it lay: deep in the heavens, perhaps, and perhaps serving many worlds.

  Already the AI voice had saved my life once, by taking over and guiding me in the face of imminent police arrest. The only fear I had now was loss of contact.

  The AI voice, I soon understood, possessed the capacity to educate and inform human beings on a subliminal level, during times when they were relaxed in contemplation or in outright sleep. But this was not enough; on waking, the humans generally overrode these quiet promptings, which they correctly identified with the voice of conscience, and went their own way.

  I asked the name of the opaque antagonist. The answer: it had no name. The messengers of the communications network continually baffled it by their wisdom, since it could not, as they could, see ahead in time; but it held out by its physical power, blind as it was.

  The capacity to see ahead in time was now granted to me to a certain extent. Its first manifestation had come when I saw what I took to be the Roman sibyl expounding on the fate of the conspirators. This had been merely the precognitive statement of the AI monitor, transformed by my head to a visible entity familiar from Earth’s history. She or it had merely stated what was coming, without interpretive comment. The forces that would unhinge the conspirators were as yet unstated; the monitor could foresee the consequences of certain acts without error, but either she could not see how those acts came about or she elected not to inform me. I believed it to be the latter. There was a great deal I still did not know.