The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page B

make you worse. Your mother was very sick, you know. She probably would not have lived anyhow. And your father will be out of cryonic suspension in four more years."
    "You're sure?" Emmanuel said excitedly.
    "When you're ten years old you'll see him. He's back with your mother right now; he likes to retrotime to when he first met her. She was very sloppy; he had to clean up her dome."
    "What is a 'dome'?" Emmanuel asked.
    "They don't have them here; that's for outspace. The colonists. Where you were born . I know Elias told you. Why don't you listen to him more?"
    "He's a man," Emmanuel said. "A human being."
    "No he's not."
    "He was born as a man. And then I—" He paused, and a segment of memory came back to him. "I didn't want him to die. Did I? So I took him, all at once. When he and—" He tried to think, to frame the word in his mind.
    "Elisha," Zina said.
    "They were walking together," Emmanuel said, "and I took him up, and he sent part of himself back to Elisha. So he never died; Elias, I mean. But that's not his real name."
    "That's his Greek name."
    "I do remember some things, then," Emmanuel said.
    "You'll remember more. You see, you set up a disinhibiting stimulus that would remind you before—well, when the right time came. You're the only one who knows what the stimulus is. Even Elias doesn't know it. I don't know it; you hid it from me, back when you were what you were."
    "I am what I am now," Emmanuel said.
    "Yes, except that you have an impaired memory," Zina said, pragmatically. "So it isn't the same."
    "I guess not," the boy said. "I thought you said you could make me remember."
    "There are different kinds of remembering. Elias can make you remember a little, and I can make you remember more; but only your own disinhibiting stimulus can make you be . The word is … you have to bend close to me to listen; only you should hear this word. No, I'll write it." Zina took a piece of paper from a nearby desk, and a length of chalk, and wrote one word.
    HAYAH
    Gazing down at the word, Emmanuel felt memory come to him, but only for a nanosecond; at once—almost at once—it departed.
    " Hayah ," he said, aloud.
    "That is the Divine Tongue," Zina said.
    "Yes," he said. "I know." The word was Hebrew, a Hebrew root word. And the Divine Name itself came from that word. He felt a vast and terrible awe; he felt afraid.
    "Fear not," Zina said quietly.
    "I am afraid," Emmanuel said, "because for a moment I remembered." Knew , he thought, who I am .
----
    But he forgot again. By the time he and the girl had gone outside into the yard he no longer knew. And yet—strange!—he knew that he had known, known and forgotten again almost at once. As if, he thought, I have two minds inside me, one on the surface and the other in the depths. The surface one has been injured but the deep one has not. And yet the deep one can't speak; it is closed up. Forever? No; there would be the stimulus, one day. His own device.
    Probably it was necessary that he not remember. Had he been able to recall into consciousness everything, the basis of it all, then the government would have killed him. There existed two heads of the beast, the religious one, a Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms, and then a scientific one named N. Bulkowsky. But these were phantoms. To Emmanuel the Christian-Islamic Church and the Scientific Legate did not constitute reality. He knew what lay behind them. Elias had told him. But even had Elias not told him he would have known anyhow; he would everywhere and at every time be able to identify the Adversary.
    What did puzzle him was the girl Zina. Something in the situation did not ring right. Yet she had not lied; she could not lie. He had not made it possible for her to deceive; that constituted her fundamental nature: her veracity. All he had to do was ask her.
    Meanwhile, he would assume that she was one of the zine ; she herself had admitted that she danced. Her name, of course, came from dziana , and sometimes it