Valis

11

It had been years since I'd visited Sonoma, California, which lies in the heart of the wine country, with lovely hills on three sides of it. Most attractive of all is the town's park, set dead-center, with the old stone courthouse, the pond with ducks, the ancient cannons left over from used-up wars.

The many small shops surrounding the square park pandered by and large to weekend tourists, bilking the unwary with many trashy goods, but a few genuine historically-important buildings from the old Mexican reign still stood, painted and with plaques proclaiming their ancient roles. The air smelled good -- especially if you emanate from the Southland -- and even though it was night we strolled around before finally entering a bar called Gino's to phone the Lamptons.

In a white VW Rabbit both Eric and Linda Lampton picked us up; they met us in Gino's where the four of us sat at a table drinking Separators, a specialty of the place.

"I'm sorry we couldn't pick you up at the airport," Eric Lampton said as he and bis wife came over to our table; apparently he recognized me from my publicity pictures.

Eric Lampton is slender, with long blond hair; he wore red bellbottoms and a T-shirt reading: SAVE THE WHALES. Kevin, of course, identified him at once, as did many of the people in the bar; calls, shouts and hellos greeted the Lamptons, who smiled around them at what obviously were their friends. Beside Eric, Linda walked quickly, also slender, with teeth like Emmylou Harris's. Like her husband she is slender, but her hair is dark and quite soft and long. She wore cutoffs, much washed, and a checkered shirt with a bandana knotted around her neck. Both of them had on boots: Eric's were sideboots and Linda's were granny boots.

Shortly, we were squeezed into the Rabbit, sailing down residential streets of relatively modern houses with wide lawns.

"We are the Rhipidon Society," Fat said.

Eric Lampton said, "We are the Friends of God."

Amazed, Kevin reacted violently; he stared at Eric Lampton. The rest of us wondered why.

"You know the name, then," Eric said.

"Gottesfreunde," Kevin said. "You go back to the fourteenth century!"

"That's right," Linda Lampton said. "The Friends of God formed originally in Basel. Finally we entered Germany and the Netherlands. You know of Meister Eckehart, then."

Kevin said, "He was the first person to conceive of the Godhead in distinction to God. The greatest of the Christian mystics. He taught that a person can attain union with the Godhead -- he held a concept that God exists within the human soul!" We had never heard Kevin so excited. "The soul can actually know God as he is! Nobody today teaches that! And, and -- " Kevin stammered; we had never heard him stammer before. "Sankara in India, in the ninth century; he taught the same things Eckehart taught. It's a trans-Christian mysticism in which man can reach beyond God, or merges with God, as or with a spark of some kind that isn't created. Brahman; that's why Zebra -- "

"VALIS," Eric Lampton said.

"Whatever," Kevin said; turning to me, he said in agitation, "this would explain the revelations about the Buddha and about St. Sophia or Christ. This isn't limited to any one country or culture or religion. Sorry, David."

David nodded amiably, but appeared shaken. He knew this wasn't orthodoxy.

Eric said, "Sankara and Eckehart, the same person; living m two places at two times."

Half to himself, Fat said, "'He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.'"

"Time and space both," Linda said.

"What is VALIS?" I asked.

"Vast Active Living Intelligence System," Eric said.

"That's a description," I said.

"That's what we have," Eric said. "What else is there but that? Do you want a name, the way God had man name all the animals? VALIS is the name; call it that and be satisfied."

"Is VALIS man?" I said. "Or God? Or something else."

Both Eric and Linda smiled.

"Does it come from the stars?" I said.

"This place where we are," Eric said, "is one of the stars; our sun is a star."

"Riddles," I said.

Fat said, "Is VALIS the Savior?"

For a moment, both Eric and Linda remained silent and then Linda said, "We are the Friends of God." Beyond that she added nothing more.

Cautiously, David glanced at me, caught my eye, and made a questioning motion: Are these people on the level?

"They are a very old group," I answered, "which I thought had died out centuries ago."

Eric said, "We have never died out and we are much older than you realize. Than you have been told. Than even we will tell you if asked."

"You date back before Eckehart, then," Kevin said acutely.

Linda said, "Yes."

"Centuries?" Kevin asked.

No answer.

"Thousands of years?" I said, finally.

"' High hills are the haunt of the mountain-goat," Linda said, "and boulders a refuge for the rock-badger.'"

"What does that mean?" I said; Kevin joined in; we spoke in unison.

"I know what it means," David said.

"It can't be," Fat said; apparently he recognized what Linda had quoted, too.

"'The stork makes her home in their tops,'" Eric said; after a time.

To me, Fat said, "These are Ikhnaton's race. That's Psalm 104, based on Ikhnaton's hymn; it entered our Bible -- it's older than our Bible."

Linda Lampton said, "We are the ugly builders with clawlike hands. Who hide ourselves in shame. Along with Hephaistos we built great walls and the homes of the gods themselves."

"Yes," Kevin said. "Hephaistos was ugly, too. The builder God. You killed Asklepios."

"These are Kyklopes," Fat said faintly.

"The name means 'Round-eye,'" Kevin said.

"But we have three eyes," Eric said. "So an error in the historic record was made."

"Deliberately?" Kevin said.

Linda said, "Yes."

"You are very old," Fat said.

"Yes, we are," Eric said, and Linda nodded. "Very old. But time is not real. Not to us, anyhow."

"My God," Fat said, as if stricken. "These are the original builders."

"We have never stopped," Eric said. "We still build. We built this world, this space-time matrix."

"You are our creators," Fat said.

The Lamptons nodded.

"You really are the friends of God," Kevin said. "You are literally."

"Don't be afraid," Eric said. "You know how Shiva holds up one hand to show that there is nothing to fear."

"But there is," Fat said. "Shiva is the destroyer; his third eye destroys."

"He is also the restorer," Linda said.

Leaning against me, David whispered in my ear, "Are they crazy?"

They are gods, I said to myself; they are Shiva who both destroys and protects. They judge.

Perhaps I should have felt fear. But I did not. They had already destroyed -- brought down Ferris F. Fremount, as he had been depicted in the film Valis.

The period of Shiva the Restorer had begun. The restoration, I thought, of all we have lost. Of two dead girls.

As in the film Valis, Linda Lampton could turn time back, if necessary; and restore everything to life.

I had begun to understand the film.

The Rhipidon Society, I realized, fish though it be, is out of its depth.

An irruption from the collective unconscious, Jung taught, can wipe out the fragile individual ego. In the depths of the collective the archetypes slumber; if aroused, they can heal or they can destroy. This is the danger of the archetypes; the opposite qualities are not yet separated. Bipolarization into paired opposites does not occur until consciousness occurs.

So, with the gods, life and death -- protection and destruction -- are one. This secret partnership exists outside of time and space.

It can make you very much afraid, and for good reason. After all, your existence is at stake.

The real danger, the ultimate horror, happens when the creating and protecting, the sheltering, comes first -- and then the destruction. Because if this is the sequence, everything built up ends in death.

Death hides within every religion.

And at any time it can flash forth -- not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

But we had started out wounded. And VALIS had fired healing information at us, medical information. VALIS approached us in the form of the physician, and the age of the injury, the Age of Iron, the toxic iron splinter, had been abolished.

And yet ... the risk is, potentially, always there.

It is a kind of terrible game. Which can go either way.

Libera me, Domine, I said to myself. In die illa. Save me, protect me, God, in this day of wrath. There is a streak of the irrational in the universe, and we, the little hopeful trusting Rhipidon Society, may have been drawn into it, to perish.

As many have perished before.

I remembered something which the great physician of the Renaissance had discovered. Poisons, in measured doses, are remedies; Paracelsus was the first to use metals such as mercury as medication. For this discovery -- the measured use of poisonous metals as medications -- Paracelsus has entered our history books. There is, however, an unfortunate ending to the great physician's life.

He died of metal poisoning.

So put another way, medications can be poisonous, can kill. And it can happen at any time.

"Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." As Heraclitus wrote twenty-five hundred years ago. In many ways this is a terrible thought. The most terrible of all. A child playing a game... with all life, everywhere.

I would have preferred an alternative. I saw now the binding importance of our motto, the motto of our little Society, binding upon all occasions as the essence of Christianity, from which we could never depart:

FISH CANNOT CARRY GUNS!

If we abandoned that, we entered the paradoxes, and, finally, death. Stupid as our motto sounded, we had fabricated in it the insight we needed. There was nothing more to know.

In Fat's quaint little dream about dropping the M-16 rifle, the Divine had spoken to us. Nihil Obstat. We had entered love, and found ourselves a land.

But the divine and the terrible are so close to each other. Nommo and Yurugu are partners; both are necessary. Osiris and Seth, too. In the Book of Job, Yahweh and Satan form a partnership. For us to live, however, these partners must be split. The behind-the-scenes partnership must end as soon as time and space and all the creatures come into being.

It is not God nor the gods which must prevail; it is wisdom, Holy Wisdom. I hoped that the fifth Savior would be that: splitting the bipolarities and emerging as a unitary thing. Not of three persons or two but one. Not Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer and Shiva the destroyer, but what Zoroaster called the Wise Mind.

God can be good and terrible -- not in succession -- but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him with confines which render him safe. But now, as Fat had seen, God had escaped the confines and was transubstantiating the world; God had become free.

The gentle sounds of the choir singing "Amen, amen" are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god.

When you know this you have penetrated to the innermost core of religion. And the worst part is that the god can thrust himself outward and into the congregation until he becomes them. You worship a god and then he pays you back by taking you over. This is called "enthousiasmos" in Greek, literally "to be possessed by the god." Of all the Greek gods the one most likely to do this was Dionysos. And, unfortunately, Dionysos was insane.

Put another way -- stated backward -- if your god takes you over, it is likely that no matter what name he goes by he is actually a form of the mad god Dionysos. He was also the god of intoxication, which may mean, literally, to take in toxins; that is to say, to take a poison. The danger is there.

If you sense this, you try to run. But if you run he has you anyhow, for the demigod Pan was the basis of panic which is the uncontrollable urge to flee, and Pan is a subform of Dionysos. So in trying to flee from Dionysos you are taken over anyhow.

I write this literally with a heavy hand; I am so weary I am dropping as I sit here. What happened at Jonestown was the mass running of panic, inspired by the mad god-panic leading into death, the logical outcome of the mad god's thrust.

For them no way out existed. You must be taken over by the mad god to understand this, that once it happens there is no way out, because the mad god is everywhere.

It is not reasonable for nine hundred people to collude in their own deaths and the deaths of little children, but the mad god is not logical, not as we understand the term.

When we reached the Lamptons' house we found it to be a stately old farm mansion, set in the middle of grape vines; after all, this is wine country.

I thought, Dionysos is the god of wine.

"The air smells good here," Kevin said as we got out of the VW Rabbit.

"We sometimes get pollution," Eric said. "Even here."

Entering the house, we found it warm and attractive; huge posters of Eric and Linda, framed behind non-reflecting glass, covered all the walls. This gave the old wooden house a modern look, which linked us back to the Southland.

Linda said, smiling, "We make our own wine, here. From our own grapes."

I imagine you do, I said to myself.

A huge complex of stereo equipment rose up along one wall like the fortress in VALIS which was Nicholas Brady's sound-mixer. I could see where the visual idea had originated.

"I'll put on a tape we made," Eric said, going over to the audio fortress and clicking switches to on. "Mini's music but my words. I'm singing but we're not going to release it; it's just an experiment."

As we seated ourselves, music at enormous DBs filled the living room, rebounding off all the walls.

"I want to see you, man.

As quickly as I can.

Let me hold your hand

I've got no hand to hold

And I'm old, old; very old.

Why won't you look at me?

Afraid of what you see?

I'll find you anyhow,

Later or now; later or now."

Jesus, I thought, listening to the lyrics. Well, we came to the right place. No doubt about that. We wanted this and we got this. Kevin could amuse himself by deconstructing the song lyrics, which did not need to be deconstructed. Well, he could turn his attention to Mini's electronic noises, then.

Linda, bending down and putting her lips to my ears, shouted over the music, "Those resonances open the higher chakras."

I nodded.

When the song ended, we all said how terrific it was, David included. David had passed into a trance-state; his eyes were glazed over. David did this when he was faced by what he could not endure; the church had taught him how to phase himself out mentally for a time, until the stress situation was over.

"Would you like to meet Mini?" Linda Lampton said.

"Yes!" Kevin said.

"He's probably upstairs sleeping," Eric Lampton said. He started out of the living room. "Linda, you bring some cabernet sauvignon, the 1972, up from the cellar."

"Okay," she said, starting out of the room in the other direction. "Make yourselves comfortable," she said over her shoulder to us. "I'll be right back."

Over at the stereo, Kevin gazed down in rapture.

David walked up to me, his hands stuck deep in his pockets, a complex expression on his face. "They're -- "

"They're crazy," I said.

"But in the car you seemed -- "

"Crazy," I said.

"Good crazy?" David said; he stood close beside me, as if for protection. "Or -- the other thing."

"I don't know," I said, truthfully.

Fat stood with us now; he listened, but did not speak. He looked deeply sobered. Meanwhile, Kevin, by himself, continued to analyze the audio system.

"I think we should -- " David began, but at that moment Linda Lampton returned from the wine cellar, carrying a silver tray on which stood six wine glasses and a bottle still corked.

"Would one of you open the wine?" Linda said. "I usually get cork in it; I don't know why." Without Eric she seemed shy with us, and completely unlike the woman she had played in Valis.

Rousing himself, Kevin took the wine bottle from her.

"The opener is somewhere in the kitchen," Linda said.

From above our heads thumping and scraping noises could be heard, as if something awfully heavy were being dragged across the upper-story floor.

Linda said, "Mini -- I should tell you this -- has multiple myeloma. It's very painful and he's in a wheelchair."

Horrified, Kevin said, "Plasma cell myeloma is always fatal."

"Two years is the life span," Linda said. "His has just been diagnosed. He'll be hospitalized in another week. I'm sorry."

Fat said, "Can't VALIS heal him?"

"That which is to be healed will be healed," Linda Lampton said. "That which will be destroyed will be destroyed. But time is not real; nothing is destroyed. It is an illusion."

David and I glanced at each other.

Bump-bump. Something awkward and enormous dragged its way down a flight of stairs. Then, as we stood unmoving, a wheel chair entered the living room. In it a crushed little heap smiled at us in humor, love and the warmth of recognition. From both ears ran cords: double hearing aids. Mini, the composer of Synchronicity Music, was partially deaf.

Going up to Mini one by one we shook his faltering hand and identified ourselves, not as a society but as persons.

"Your music is very important," Kevin said.

"Yes it is," Mini said.

We could see his pain and we could see that he would not live long. But in spite of the suffering he held no malice toward the world; he did not resemble Sherri. Glancing at Fat, I could see that he was remembering Sherri, now, as he gazed at the stricken man in the wheelchair. To come this far, I thought, and to find this again -- this, which Fat had fled from. Well, as I already said, no matter which direction you take, when you run the god runs with you because he is everywhere, inside you and out.

"Did VALIS make contact with you?" Mini said. "The four of you? Is that why you're here?"

"With me," Fat said. "These others are my friends."

"Tell me what you saw," Mini said.

"Like St. Elmo's Fire," Fat said "And information --"

"There is always information when VALIS is present," Mini said, nodding and smiling. "He is information. Living information."

"He healed my son," Fat said. "Or anyhow fired the medical information necessary to heal him at me. And VALIS told me that St. Sophia and the Buddha and what he or it called the 'Head Apollo' is about to be born soon and that the -- "

" -- the time you have waited for," Mini murmured.

"Yes," Fat said.

"How did you know the cypher?" Eric Lampton asked Fat.

"I saw a set to ground doorway," Fat said.

"He saw it," Linda said rapidly. "What was the ratio of the doorway? The sides?"

Fat said, "The Fibonacci Constant."

"That's our other code," Linda said. "We have ads running all over the world. One to point six one eight zero three four. What we do is say, 'Complete this sequence: One to point six.' If they recognize it as the Fibonacci constant they can finish the sequence."

"Or we use Fibonacci numbers," Eric said. "1,2,3,5,8,13 and so on. That doorway is to the Different Realm."

"Higher?" Fat asked

"We just call it "Different,'" Eric said.

"Through the doorway I saw luminous writing," Fat said.

"No you didn't," Mini said, smiling. "Through the doorway is Crete."

After a pause, Fat said, "Lemnos."

"Sometimes Lemnos. Sometimes Crete. That general area." In a spasm of pain, Mini drew himself up in his wheel chair.

"I saw Hebrew letters on the wall," Fat said.

"Yes," Mini said, still smiling. "Cabala. And the Hebrew letters permutated until they factored out into words you could read."

"Into KING FELIX," Fat said.

"Why did you lie about the doorway?" Linda said, without animosity; she seemed merely curious.

Fat said, "I didn't think you'd believe me."

"Then you're not normally familiar with the Cabala," Mini said. "It's the encoding system which VALIS uses; all its verbal information is stored as Cabala, because that's the most economical way, since the vowels are indicated by mere vowel-points. You were given a set-ground discriminating un-scrambler, you realize. We normally can't distinguish set from ground; VALIS has to fire the unscrambler at you. It's a grid. You saw set as color, of course."

"Yes." Fat nodded. "And ground as black and white."

"So you could see the false work."

"Pardon?" Fat said.

"The false work that's blended with the real world."

"Oh," Fat said. "Yes, I understand. It seeemed as if some tilings had been taken away -- "

"And other things added," Mini said.

Fat nodded.

"You have a voice inside your head now?" Mini said. "The AI voice?"

After a long pause, and a glance at me, Kevin and David, Fat said, "It's a neutral voice. Neither male nor female. Yes, it does sound as if it's an artificial intelligence."

"That's the inter-system communications network," Mini said. "It stretches between stars, connecting all the star systems with Albemuth."

Staring at him, Fat said,"'Albemuth'? It's a star?"

"You heard the word, but -- "

"I saw it in written form," Fat said, "but I didn't know what it meant. I connected it with alchemy, because of the 'al.'"

"The al prefix," Mini said, "is Arabic; it simply means 'the.' It's a common prefix for stars. That was your clue. Anyhow, you did see written pages, then."

"Yes," Fat said. "Many of them. They told me what was going to happen to me. Like -- " He hesitated. "My later suicide attempt. It gave me the Greek word 'ananke' which I didn't know. And it said, 'A gradual darkening of the world; a sickling over.' Later I realized what it meant; a bad thing, a sickness, a deed that I had to commit. But I did survive."

"My illness," Mini said, "is from proximity to VALIS, to its energy. It's an unfortunate thing, but as you know, we are immortal, although not physically so. We will be reborn and remember."

"My animals died of cancer," Fat said.

"Yes," Mini said. "The levels of radiation can sometimes be enormous. Too much for us."

I thought, So that's why you're dying. Your god has killed you and yet you're happy. I thought, We have to get out of here. These people court death.

"What is VALIS?" Kevin said to Mini. "Which deity or demi-urge is he? Shiva? Osiris? Horus? I've read The Cosmic Trigger and Robert Anton Wilson says -- "

"VALIS is a construct," Mini said. "An artifact. It's anchored here on Earth, literally anchored. But since space and time don't exist for it, VALIS can be anywhere and any time it wishes to. It's something they built to program us at birth; normally it fires extremely short bursts of information at babies, engramming instructions to them which will bleed across from their right hemispheres at clock-time intervals during their full lifetimes, at the appropriate situational contexts."

"Does it have an antagonist?" Kevin said.

"Only the pathology of this planet," Eric said. "Due to the atmosphere. We can't readily breathe this atmosphere, here; it's toxic to our race."

"'Our'?" I said.

"All of us," Linda said. "We're all from Albemuth. This atmosphere poisons us and makes us deranged. So they -- the ones who stayed behind in the Albemuth System -- built VALIS and sent it here to fire rational instructions at us, to override the pathology caused by the toxicity of the atmosphere."

"Then VALIS is rational," I said.

"The only rationality we have," Linda said.

"And when we act rationally we're under its jurisdiction," Mini said. "I don't mean us here in the room; I mean everyone. Not everyone who lives but everyone who is rational."

"Then in essence," I said, "VALIS detoxifies people."

"That's exactly it," Mini said. "Ifs an informational antitoxin. But exposure to it can cause -- illness such as I have."

Too much medication, I said to myself, remembering Paracelsus, is a poison. This man has been healed to death.

"I wanted to know VALIS as much as possible," Mini said, seeing the expression on my face. "I begged it to return and communicate with me further. It didn't want to; it knew the effect its radiation would have on me if it returned. But it did what I asked. I'm not sorry. It was worth it, to experience VALIS again." To Fat he said, "You know what I mean. The sound of bells..."

"Yes," Fat said. "The Easter bells."

"Are you talking about Christ?" David said. "Christ is an artificial construct built to fire information at us that works on us subliminally?"

"From the time we are born," Mini said. "We the lucky ones. We whom it selects. Its flock. Before I die, VALIS will return; I have its promise. VALIS will come and take me with it; I will be a part of it forever." Tears filled his eyes.

Later, we all sat around and talked more calmly.

The Eye of Shiva was of course the way the ancients represented VALIS firing information. They knew it could destroy; this is the element of harmful radiation which is necessary as a carrier for the information. Mini told us that VALIS is not actually close when it fires; it may be literally millions of miles away. Hence, in the film Valis, they represented it by a satellite, a very old satellite, not put into orbit by humans.

"So we're not dealing with religion then," I said, "but with a very advanced technology."

"Words," Mini said.

"What is the Savior?" David said.

Mini said, "You'll see him. Presently. Tomorrow, if you wish; Saturday afternoon. He's sleeping now. He still sleeps a great deal; most of the time, in fact. After all, he was completely asleep for thousands of years."

"At Nag Hammadi?" Fat said.

"I would rather not say," Mini said.

"Why must this be kept secret?" I said.

Eric said, "We're not keeping it secret; we made the film and we're making lps with information in the lyrics. Subliminal information, mostly. Mini does it with his music."

"'Sometimes Brahman sleeps,'" Kevin said, "'and sometimes Brahman dances.' Are we talking about Brahman? Or Siddhartha the Buddha? Or Christ? Or is it all of them?"

I said to Kevin, "The great -- " I had intended to say, "The great Punta," but I decided not to; it wouldn't be wise. "It's not Dionysos, is it?" I asked Mini.

"Apollo," Linda said. "The paired opposite to Dionysos."

That filled me with relief. I believed her; it fitted with what had been revealed to Horselover Fat: "The Head Apollo."

"We are in a maze, here," Mini said, "which we built and then fell into and can't get out. In essence, VALIS selectively fires information to us which aids us in escaping from the maze, in finding the way out. It started back about two thousand years before Christ, in Mycenaean times or perhaps early Helladic. That's why the myths place the maze at Minos, on Crete. That's why you saw ancient Crete through the 1:.618034 doorway. We were great builders, but one day we decided to play a game. We did it voluntarily; were we such good builders that we could build a maze with a way out but which constantly changed so that, despite the way out, in effect there was no way out for us because the maze -- this world -- was alive? To make the game into something real, into something more than an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This, unfortunately, included loss of memory -- loss of knowledge of our true origins. But worse than that -- and here is where we in a sense managed to defeat ourselves, to turn victory over to our servant, over to the maze we had built -- "

"The third eye closed," Fat said.

"Yes," Mini said. "We relinquished the third eye, our prime evolutionary attribute. It is the third eye which VALIS re-opens."

"Then it's the third eye that gets us back out of the maze," Fat said. "That's why the third eye is identified with god-like powers or with enlightenment, in Egypt and in India."

"Which are the same thing," Mini said. "God-like, enlightened."

"Really?" I said.

"Yes," Mini said. It is man as he really is: his true state."

Fat said, "So without memory, and without the third eye, we never had a chance to beat the maze. It was hopeless."

I thought, Another [sic] Chinese finger-trap. And built by our own selves. To trap our own selves.

What kind of minds would create a Chinese finger-trap for themselves? Some game, I thought. Well, it isn't merely intellectual.

"The third eye had to be re-opened if we were to get out of the maze," Mini said, "but since we no longer remembered that we had that ajna faculty, the eye of discernment, we could not go about seeking techniques for re-opening it. Something outside had to enter, something which we ourselves would be unable to build."

"So we didn't all fall into the maze," Fat said.

"No," Mini said. "And those that stayed outside, in other star systems, reported back to Albemuth that we had done this thing to ourselves... thus VALIS was constructed to rescue us. This is an irreal world. You realize that, I'm sure. VALIS made you realize that. We are in a living maze and not in a world at all."

There was silence as we considered this.

"And what happens when we get outside the maze?" Kevin said.

"We're freed from space and time," Mini said. "Space and time are the binding, controlling conditions of the maze -- its power."

Fat and I glanced at each other. It dovetailed with our own speculations -- speculations engineered by VALIS.

"And then we never die?" David asked.

"Correct," Mini said.

"So salvation -- "

"'Salvation,'" Mini said, "is a word denoting 'Being led out of the space-time maze, where the servant has become the master."

"May I ask a question?" I said. "What is the purpose of the fifth Savior?"

"It isn't 'fifth,'" Mini said. "There is only one, over and over again, at different times, in different places, with different names. The Savior is VALIS incarnated as a human being."

"Crossbonded?" Fat said.

"No." Mini shook his head no vigorously. "There is no human element in the Savior."

"Wait a minute," David said.

"I know what you've been taught," Mini said. "In a sense, it's true. But the Savior is VALIS and that is the fact of the case. He is born, however, from a human woman. He doesn't just generate a phantasm-body."

To that, David nodded; he could accept that.

"And he's been born?" I asked.

"Yes," Mini said.

"My daughter," Linda Lampton said. "Not Eric's, however. Just mine and VALIS'S."

"Daughter?" several of us said in unison.

"This time," Mini said, "for the first time, the Savior takes female form."

Eric Lampton said, "She's very pretty. You'll like her. She talks a blue streak, though; she'll talk your ear off."

"Sophia is two," Linda said. "She was born in 1976. We tape what she says."

"Everything is taped," Mini said. "Sophia is surrounded by audio and video recording equipment that automatically monitors her constantly. Not for her protection, of course; VALIS protects her -- VALIS, her father."

"And we can talk with her?" I said.

"She'll dispute with you for hours," Linda said, and then she added, "in every language there is or ever was."