Radio Free Albemuth

connection with it. They want to see the record mastered; they want to see it produced, so they can play it and determine its content. We’re doing what they want us to do. Well, maybe not; maybe they’re not sure—​they’re guessing and wondering, playing hunches. The police are so full of lies. Maybe there was no sound engineer who phoned in a tip. Maybe they didn’t pick up our conversation at the La Paz Bar. All they may know is that Let’s Play! is our hottest new album, that we’ve got a lot of time and effort invested in it, so the naturally suspicious police mind is alerted to come down hard on us, ask for a tape, ask for a copy before distribution, rather than monitoring it the usual way.”

“I say they’re lying,” Sadassa said. “Bluffing. That is certainly a possibility. We should go on.”

“If we stop now,” I said, “they won’t kill us.”

“Let’s go on,” Sadassa said.

“Knowing we have no chance of escape?”

She nodded silently.

“I’m just thinking of Johnny,” I said. “Valis had me anoint him and everything . . . even give him a secret name. I guess that name will perish with him, one of these days soon.”

“If Valis had you do that, your boy will live on.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I hope you’re right.”

“Valis may not be here now,” Sadassa said, “but within each of us—”

“I know,” I said. “I felt him stir the other day. The new life within me. The second birth . . . the birth from above.”

“That is eternal. What more could we hope for? Bonded to that. If your body or my body is destroyed, firebright escapes into the atmosphere and our own spark goes with him. There we will gather, ultimately, as one entity, always together. Until Valis returns. All of us: you, me, the rest. However many.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sounds good to me.”

“Let me ask you,” Sadassa said. “Of all that the satellite showed you, what was the . . . I don’t know how to say it.”

“The final view of things?”

“Yes. The deepest. Penetrating farthest. Because when it overpowers you it shows you so much about the universe.”

I said, “For a little while I saw the universe as a living body.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding somberly.

“And we are in it. The experience was so strange—​it’s hard to express it. Like a hive of bees, millions of bees, all communicating over vast distances by means of colored light. Patterns of light, exchanged back and forth, and us deep inside. Continual signaling and response from the—​well, bees or whatever they were; maybe they were stars or star systems of sentient organisms. Anyhow, this signaling went on all the time, in shifting patterns, and I heard a humming or a bell-like sound, emitted by all the bees in unison.”

“The universe is a great group mind,” Sadassa said. “I saw that too. The ultimate vision imposed on us, as to how things are in comparison to how they simply appear.”

I said, “And all the bees, as they signal across great distances to one another, are in the process of thinking. So the total organism thinks by means of this. And throughout it exerts pressure, also across great distances, to coordinate every part, so it’s synchronized into a common purpose.”

“It is alive,” Sadassa said.

“Yes,” I said. “It is alive.”

“The bees,” Sadassa said, “were described to me as stations. Like transmitting and receiving on a grid. Each lit up as it transmitted. I guess the colors were prearranged different frequencies of the light spectrum. A great universe of transmitting and receiving stations, but, Nicholas, sometimes many of them, differing at different moments, were dark. They were temporarily inactive. But I kept watching lit-up stations receiving transmissions from distances so far off that—​I guess we use the word parsecs for distances like that.”

“It was beautiful,” I said. “The pattern of shifting lights formed by the active stations.”

Sadassa said, “But into it, Nicholas, had crept something which snuffed out some of the stations. Abolished them so they never lit up again. And replaced them with itself, like a cloak falling over them here and there.”

“But new stations were opened up to replace them,” I said. “In unexpected spots.”

“This planet does not receive or transmit,” Sadassa said, after a moment. “Except for the few of us—​a few thousand out of three billion—​governed by the satellite. And now we’re not. So we’ve gone dark.”

“Until the replacement satellite arrives.”

Sadassa said, “Did we see a kind of brain?”

“More like a jungle gym that kids play on,” I said, “with colored buttons stuck all over.” Her analogy was too heavy for me: the universe as a giant brain, thinking.

“This is a very great thing we were shown,” Sadassa said. “To see from that vantage point, the ultimate vantage point. We should always treasure it. Even if the stations in this local region or sector are all overshadowed and don’t light up any longer, it is a sight to remember. With this the satellite presented us with its final insight into the nature of things: synapses in a living brain. And the name we give to its functioning, its awareness of itself and its many parts—” She smiled at me. “It’s why you saw the figure of Aphrodite. That’s what holds all the trillions of stations into harmony.”

“Yes,” I said, “it was harmonized, and over such distances. There was no coercion, only agreement.”

And the coordination of all the transmitting and receiving stations, I thought, we call Valis: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Our friend who cannot die, who lies on this side of the grave and on the other. His love, I thought, is greater than empires. And unending.

Sadassa cleared her throat. “When do you expect to have a tape?”

“At the end of the month.”

“And the master discs?”

“First the mother and then the masters. It won’t take long, once we have the tape. I have nothing to do with that. My part will be over when the tape is prepared and authorized.”

Sadassa said somberly, “Be prepared