Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Read online

  Grafton Books

  A Division of the Collins Publishing Group

  8 Grafton Street, London W1X SLA

  A Grafton UK Paperback Original 1988

  Copyright © Michael Bishop 1987

  ISBN 0-586-20151-3

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow

  Set in Plantin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. All the events in this book and the vast majority of its characters are fictional. Historical figures—as, for instance, Richard M. Nixon and Philip K. Dick—are deliberately presented in the wholly fictional context of an alternative reality. Otherwise, any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book is for the heirs, biological and literary, of Philip K. Dick

  It is the essence of moral responsibility to determine beforehand the consequences of our action or inaction.

  —Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prelude

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  THIS NOVEL grew out of my respect and affection for the novels of the late Philip K. Dick. The best, to my mind, remains The Man in the High Castle, but I also admire Time Out of Joint, Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Valis, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. I think it important—even if more or less redundant—to note that the influence of these novels, and of many other Dick titles, pervades this literary homage.

  On the other hand, I do not mean Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas as a slavish pastiche of Dick’s work. Yes, I use many of Dick’s favorite literary techniques (for instance, multiple third-person point-of-view narration) and some of those quintessentially Dickian science fictional “elements” (for instance, the reality breakdown) to structure the novel, but I do not always deploy them as Dick would have. My failure to do so may or may not be lamentable, but it is not an accident.

  These books proved particularly helpful in the writing of my novel: Only Apparently Real by Paul Williams, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament by Gregg Rickman, The Novels of Philip K. Dick by Kim Stanley Robinson, Real Peace and No More Vietnams by Richard Nixon, People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck, MD, The Demonologist by Gerard Brittle, Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler, and two titles that satirically depict the political personality of Richard Nixon, Our Gang by Philip Roth and The Public Burning by Robert Coover. I thank the authors.

  Finally, I acknowledge the signal contribution of Geoffrey A. Landis, whom I met in July 1985 while teaching a week of the Clarion SF & Fantasy Writing Workshop at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Through a subsequent correspondence, Geoff gave me pages of good material—drawings, tables, personal speculations, etc.—about the likely evolution of the American space program if our country had achieved a military victory in Vietnam in 1974. I have never been known as a writer of “hard”—that is, technologically and/or scientifically knowledgeable—science fiction, and Geoff is largely responsible for whatever accuracy and/or verisimilitude the Von Braunville segments of my narrative may possess. On the other hand, no one should blame him for my surrealistic lapses in these same passages. Once again, Geoff, my gratitude.

  Michael Bishop

  Pine Mountain, Georgia

  January 14 to May 19, 1986

  Prelude

  THE ALIEN PINK MOON peers into Philip K. Dick’s apartment in Santa Ana, California. The year is 1982 (although maybe not the 1982 of most history books), and Dick himself has just suffered a debilitating stroke.

  The Moon pins him to the floor in a circle of pink light. It projects—weirdly—an arc of lunar surface onto his back. Craters, maria, and bays ripple across the jacket that he was wearing when the stroke felled him. He is still wearing it as, subconsciously conscious, he lies waiting for someone—a friend, neighbor, the police—to find him and dispatch him to the hospital.

  A hefty tomcat stalks into this ring of pink light, sits down beside the stricken man. The cat meows once, nuzzles Dick’s brow, grates his cheek with a tongue like wet Velcro. After a while, the cat gingerly mounts its owner’s jacket, pads across the shadowy map of the Moon, and settles down in the clammy swale of the small of Dick’s back for a winter snooze.

  February, thinks the quasi-conscious stroke victim, is a fucking horrible time to die…

  Soon, tiny machines in the fallen writer’s blood begin to build a half-substantive, half-astral simulacrum to warehouse his mind and memories.

  Half-assed’s more like it, thinks Dick, noting the buzz in his veins. This is weird. This is all-fired fucking weird.

  His second self is a sort of material ghost, which rises buck-naked and shimmering from the mortal body of the stricken man. So swiftly, silently, and imperceptibly is Philip K. Dick2 lifted out of Philip K. Dick1 that Harvey Wallbanger, the cat, doesn’t even stir. The other cats in the apartment are equally unaffected.

  It feels to Dick2 as if someone has left a freezer door open somewhere, and he looks upon his fallen self with astonished pity. “You poor bastard,” he says. “Crazy shit like this always happens to you. It’s happened again.”

  A tangible ghost, Dick2 knows that intangible nanocomputers in the circulatory system of Dick1 used that body as a template for his own miraculous form.

  Goosebumps begin to prickle Dick2‘s resurrected flesh, and he begins trembling with compassion as well as the cold. Dick1 has not arisen—he will never arise again—and Dick2, bereaved, loves him as fully as Dick1 loved each of his friends in life.

  A life, Dick2 realizes, that is soon to end. A life that the evil policies of King Richard twisted into a parody of the real thing in Dick1‘s middle age, and a life for which Dick2 mourns as he stands shivering in the frigid lunar pinkness.

  This is another secret ascension, reflects Dick2. My second fucking secret ascension. I understand—again—that this world is irreal, and that above or beyond it dwells some benign but hidden Entity who wants to remove our blinders. Although we’re occluded, this Entity wants us to see through our occlusion to the reality that eternally appertains …

  Time and space are illusions, Dick2 tells himself, walking to a closet to find something with which to cover his nakedness. For at the moment it is warmth that Dick2 wants, not profound ontological insights. When he opens the closet door, he finds that his half-astral body can indeed impinge upon the “solid” forms of this world. And why not? If Dick1‘s world is actually irreal, then why shouldn’t a ghost—to some, the very essence of irreality—be able to function within it?

  And I can function here, thinks Dick2, the pre-ghost of the yet living Phili
p K. Dick. At least for a time. Until the Entity behind our occlusion withdraws its support…

  The pre-ghost rifles the stuff in the closet like a prop lady going through the trunk of a theater company. He just wants to get warm. To bundle himself in comfortable clothes that don’t make any kind of premeditated statement—except, possibly, that he isn’t a proponent of empty style-consciousness.

  At last he finds some worn trousers, a loose denim work shirt, and a silver jacket. This last is a name-brand jobbie, with an affected little designer tag, but he—Dick1—bought it on a whim because he needed a jacket and liked the sportiness of its cut, and he—Dick2—is delighted to snug into it as soon as he’s pulled on the pants and shirt.

  No underwear.

  Why do I need underwear? wonders the Dickian pre-ghost. Isn’t it clear that I don’t? Biology’s behind me. Us half-astral beings are no longer slaves to secretions and exudates …

  Dick2 falls into an easy chair, tugs on some slouchy, low-cut tennis shoes, glances again at Dick1.

  You’re doomed, he thinks. You were always doomed. You managed to get as far as you did only because you were too fucking proud to succumb to the lie of consensus reality. You wouldn’t pull in your antennae. And look where it got you, Phil. Just look.

  Dick2 rises, shuffles around the apartment, eventually sits down at the desk in the room where Dick1‘s typewriter resides. He begins to type. Silently but maniacally, his fingers tap-dance the keys. The type arms blur in their cage, a hundred hummingbirds hammering at the mendaciousness of the night. Time is telescoped, reality turned upside down.

  Neighbors, barging in, find Dick1 sprawled unconscious on the living-room rug. Harvey Wallbanger meows, and friends arrive to ferry the comatose writer to a nearby medical facility. Every once in a while, someone enters the apartment to take away a cat or a paperback novel or a toothbrush, but, through all of this, Dick2 continues to type.

  February falls, March marches in, and the pre-ghost becomes a true ghost when a new series of merciless strokes, triggering heart failure, abstracts Philip K. Dick1 from the alternative irreality of the time stream in which he lived.

  You poor fucking bastard, mourns the feverish consciousness at his typewriter, fingers still furiously tapping. God-speed.

  Bizarre images elbow the brain of Dick2. Writing on erasable parchment, invisible bond, he takes himself to the Moon. A tunnel opens in the spot where the Moon should be, and he goes through it to the Omicron Ceti binary, seventy parsecs distant, there to meet the Entity sustaining this entire irreal Cosmos. They rap, God and the ghost at the machine, and at the end of their colloquy Dick2 is sent spiraling back through the hoops of his consciousness to an apartment in Santa Ana, California.

  The ghost stops typing. He has been mind-wiped. Somewhere in King Richard’s Amerika—apparently one of the mountain states—he catches a disturbing glimpse of his primary’s burial, but he can no longer remember the identity of this person—which is to say, he can no longer recall his own identity.

  If he could read, a skill that he has forgotten, he could put a name to himself by pulling out X1‘s driver’s license, or scanning his book plates, or trying to dig up some of his canceled checks. Unfortunately, just back from his chat with the Deity, all he knows about himself now is that he has fallen prey to an unforgiving kind of amnesia.

  I need help, thinks X2. God knows, I need help.

  Although the apartment holds him several more days, he works up his courage by doing snuff and brewing hot black coffee. Finally, he ventures out of doors. Mysteriously, greenbacks bulge in X1’s wallet, and he—X2—is able to extract them from the billfold at will, a karmic gift of startling proportion. On the sidewalks, out in the wan March sunlight, he, the ghost, acquires full substance. He suddenly possesses both a shadow and a voice.

  Impressed by this second shot at life, X2 hails a cab.

  It comes squealing up. “Where to, buddy?” asks the driver. He is a real human being, the erstwhile ghost observes. A dude with a brilliant bald spot. A dude whose breath reeks of jalapeño peppers and bravura cheddar.

  “The airport,” X2 says. “Take me to the airport.”

  1

  IN ORDER to clean their cage, Cal Pickford picked up two of the varmints known as Brezhnev bears. Although they didn’t stink (at least no worse than did most of the critters in the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium), or gobble live mice, or scream like banshees, or secrete venom or musk, or need a lot of arduous grooming, or go belly up if he once forgot to feed them, or parrot his every thoughtless cuss word, Cal wrinkled his nose and unceremoniously dropped the “bears” into a deep cardboard box full of cedar chips.

  The fall didn’t hurt them, but it was a less than delicate way to treat the creatures, easily the pet shop’s most profitable item since his arrival.

  Cal knew why he disliked them, of course, but as he worked at the rear of the shop in West Georgia Commons mall dumping out the pee-soaked carpeting of cedar chips from his fifth glass cage of the morning and replacing it with a fresh layer of newsprint and a clean floor of chips, he tried not to think about the popular, but grotesque, beasties. Let the ugly-cute varmints scurry, and let the with-it young professionals (UpMos) who regarded them as status symbols plop down their cash to buy ‘em.

  Today, Lia monopolized Cal’s thoughts. She was in only the third week of her private practice as a psychotherapist over in Warm Springs, but if clients didn’t soon start signing up with her for sessions, his pay as a pet-shop hand would fall far short of what the Bonner-Pickfords needed to meet the payments on either Lia’s new “preowned” car or the rent on their apartment in Pine Mountain. Cal had a paid-for ‘68 Dodge Dart for his commute to LaGrange, but Lia had mortgaged her success as a shrink to a ‘79 Mercury Cougar. Together they were just scraping by.

  That they both lived seventeen-plus miles from their jobs made no sense, but after moving to Georgia from Colorado, where they had met at a Red Rocks folk-rock concert in ‘76, Lia had insisted on living as near her surviving relatives—her invalid mother, Emily, and her brother, Jeff, and his family—as possible. Because Jeff managed a horse farm northwest of Pine Mountain, Pine Mountain had snared them, but Cal still wondered how he—a superannuated hippie cowboy—had ever ended up in King Richard’s Solid South, land of cotton, cloggers, and Co’ Cola.

  Suddenly, Cal was aware of another presence at the back of the shop. He looked up and saw a man of immense size walking between the aisles, scrutinizing everything around him. Occasionally, this well-dressed man—his three-piece suit was conspicuously at odds with his middle linebacker’s physique—would pick an item off a shelf (a currying comb or a container of flea powder), examine it briefly, and then set it back down. He peered at the ceiling and into the corners of the shop, as well as at the merchandise, and he carried himself with menacing authority.

  “Anything I can do for you?” Cal asked, squatting beside a bag of cedar chips.

  The man stopped and stared down at him. “Just looking.”

  “Well, go right ahead. We’re glad to have browsers.”

  “I didn’t say I was browsing,” the big man replied, stepping closer to Cal’s row of glass cages. “I said I was looking.”

  “Looking’s okay, too. Go ahead and look.”

  The interloper scrutinized Cal as if he were a currying comb or a box of flea powder. “One thing I don’t do is browse. Guess I’ll never be your typical goddamn ‘browser’.”

  A bruiser’s more like it, Cal thought, decidedly uncomfortable with this line of talk. Why was the guy still looking at him, for God’s sake, and why would he come into the Happy Puppy and put his hands all over everything if he weren’t in the market for some kind of animal or pet product?

  “If there’s anything I can help you with,” Cal said, “let me know.”

  “You’ll be the first to know, buddy,” the man said, the line of his lips vaguely resembling a smirk. But the smirk faded, and the man ambled slowly back toward the front of t
he shop, picking up or squinting at various items as he walked. Eventually, he swaggered past the cash computer into the main concourse of the mall.

  Cal, shaken, tried to recall what he had been thinking about before the interruption.

  “Pickford!” Mr. Kemmings, the owner of this franchise of the Pet Emporium, shouted. “Pickford, come up here, please!”

  Cal was up to his elbows in cedar chips, fragrant red shavings sticking to his arms like flower petals. He brushed them back down into the sack, shouted “Coming!” at his employer, and then hurried to wash up at a sink in the shop’s restroom. When he finally got to the front, Mr. Kemmings, who was trying to sell a couple of ring doves to an old woman in a tweed suit, told him to wait on a second customer.

  This woman had just entered. Although she was decades younger than the Agatha Christie character harkening to Mr. Kemmings, she hovered much closer to forty than did Cal, who was still six years shy of that scary personal benchmark. Thirty-nine, Cal estimated. Maybe as much as forty-one. She wore a black cape, sunglasses, and scarlet riding britches tucked into tall leather boots.

  Incognito, Cal thought. She’s sauntering around incognito.

  Mr. Kemmings said, “This lady says she’d like to buy a pet, Pickford. She wants recommendations. Help her.”

  “Yes, sir.” In Colorado, you said, “Yeah” or “All right” or “You bet.” In Georgia, you said, “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am.”

  The woman in sunglasses was peering through her mirror lenses at a tank of tropical fish.

  “Do you like fish?” Cal asked her.

  “Only when they’re baked and served with lemon and a sprig of parsley. Preferably on rice.”

  “You’d have to bake a whole school of these to make a meal,” Cal said. “And even one red snapper’d be cheaper.”

  The woman straightened. Her mirrors tracked him down. “I’m not terribly concerned about costs.”

  “I wish we’d known that. We could’ve stocked a few animals from endangered species.” Immediately, Cal regretted the sarcasm. If Mr. Kemmings heard crap like that, the old guy’d can him, and then what would he and Lia do?