Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online

you remember that? It’s a simple name.”
    “Sure,” Pete said. “Oh Ho, a Chinese name.”
    The pot wavered; it was shimmering away. “Oh Ho,” it repeated. “Ho Oh. Oh, Oh, Oh. Ho On. Think of Ho On, Peter Sands, someday when you are talking with Dr. Abernathy. The little clay pot which came from the earth and can, like you, be smashed to bits and return to the earth, which lives only as long as your kind does.”
    “‘Ho On,’” Pete echoed dutifully.
    “That which is benign will identify itself by name,” Ho On said, invisible now; it was only a voice, a thinking, mentational entity which had possessed Pete’s mind. “That which won’t is not. We are alike, you and I, equals in a certain real way, made from the same stuff. Peter Sands. I have told you who I am;
and from old, I know you.
”
    What a silly name, he thought: Ho On. A silly name for a transitory, breakable pot. Well, he liked it anyhow; it had, as it said, treated him as an equal. And somehow that seemed more important than any vast transcendent significance which the weighty foreign words in the huge book might contain. Words he could not fathom anyhow; they were beyond him. He, like the clay potHo On, was too limited. But that
was
Jesus Christ I saw, he realized. I know it was Him. It
looked
like Him.
    “Anything else you wish to know before I leave?” Ho On’s thoughts came to him, within his head.
    Pete Sands said, “Tell me the most important thing that, under any circumstance, could be told. But that’s true.”
    Ho On thought, “St. Sophia is going to be reborn. She wasn’t acceptable before.”
    He blinked. Who was St. Sophia? It was like telling him that St. Vitus was going to dance again … it was a joke. Keen disappointment filled him. It had simply ended up with something silly, like its name. And now he felt it leave … on that meager, if meaningless, note.
    And then the drugs wore off. And he now no longer saw or heard; again he surveyed his living room, his familiar microtapes and projector, his tape-spools, and littered plastic desk; he saw Lurine smoking her pipe, he smelled the cavendish tobacco … his head felt swollen and he got up unsteadily, knowing that only an instant in real time had passed, and for Lurine nothing had occurred. Nothing had changed. And she was right.
    This was not an event; Christ had not manifested Himself. What had occurred was that which Pete Sands had hoped for: an augmentation of his own faculties of perception.
    “Jesus,” he said aloud.
    “What’s the matter?” Lurine asked.
    “I saw Him,” he informed her. “He exists. To save us. He’s always there, always will be, has always been.” He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a small quantity, perhaps two thirds of a shot, of bourbon from the precious prewar bottle.
    When he returned to the living room Lurine was reading a badly printed magazine, a mimeographed newsletter circulated from town to town here in the Mountain States area.
    “You merely sit,” he said, incredulous.
    “What am I supposed to do? Clap?”
    “But it’s important.”
    “You saw it; I didn’t.” She continued reading the newsletter; it came from Provo, Utah.
    “But He’s there for you, too,” Pete said.
    “Good.” She nodded absently.
    He seated himself, feeling weak and nauseated; side-effects from the pills. There was silence and then Lurine spoke again, still absently.
    “The Sows are sending the inc, Tibor McMasters, on a Pilg. To find the God of Wrath and capture his essence for their murch.”
    “What in god’s name is a ‘murch’?” SOW jargon; he did not ever understand.
    “Church mural.” She glanced up. “They speculate he’ll have to travel well over a thousand miles; it’s Los Angeles, I believe.”
    “You think I care?” he said furiously.
    “I think,” she said, laying aside the newsletter, then, and frowning thoughtfully, “that you ought to go along on the Pilg and then about fifty miles from here cut a