THE DIVINE INVASION

"I'm not going to marry you; I don't even know you." She stared at him. "Are you kidding? Marry you? I've got M.S. and I'm pregnant- Damn it, both of you; go away and leave me alone. I mean it. Why didn't I take that bottle of Seconax when I had the chance? I never had the chance; Yah was watching. He sees even the fallen sparrow. I forgot."

"Do you have any whiskey?" Herb Asher said.

"Oh fine," Rybys said bitterly. "You can get drunk but can I? With M.S. and some kind of baby inside me? There I was"- she glared hatefully at Elias Tate-' 'picking up your thoughts visually on my TV set, and I imagined in my deluded folly that it was a corny soap opera dreamed up by writers at Fomalhaut -pure fiction. Arachnids were going to decapitate you? Is that what your unconscious fantasies consist of? And you're Yahweh's spokesperson?" She blanched. "I spoke the Sacred Name. Sorry."

"Christians speak it all the time," Elias said.

Rybys said, "But I'm a Jew. I it'ould be a Jew; that's what got me into this. If I was a Gentile Yah wouldn't have picked me. If I'd ever been laid I'd-" She broke off. "The Divine Machinery has a peculiar brutality to it," she finished. "It isn't romantic. It's cruel; it really is."

The Divine Invasion

"Because there is so much at stake," Elias said.

"What is at stake?" Rybys said.

"The universe exists because Yah remembers it," Elias said.

Both Herb Asher and Rybys stared at him.

"If Yah forgets, the universe ceases," Elias said.

"Can he forget?" Rybys said.

"He has yet to forget," Elias said elliptically.

"Meaning he could forget," Rybys said. "Then that's what this is about. You just spelled it out. I see. Well-" She shrugged and then reflexively sipped at her cup of tea. "Then I wouldn't exist in the first place except for Yah. Nothing would exist."

Elias said, "His name means 'He Brings into Existence Whatever Exists.' "

"Including evil?" Herb Asher asked.

"It says in Scripture," Elias said, "thus:

So that men from the rising and the setting sun

May know that there is none but I:

I am the LORD, there is no other;

I make the light, I create darkness,

author alike of prosperity and trouble.

I, the LORD, do all these things."

"Where does it say that?" Rybys said.

"Isaiah forty-five," Elias said.

'Prosperity and trouble,' " Rybys echoed. " 'Weal and woe.'

"Then you know the passage." Elias regarded her.

"It's hard to believe," she said.

"It is monotheism," Elias said harshly.

"Yes," she said, "I guess it is. But it's brutal. What's happening to me is brutal. And there's more ahead. I want out and I can't get out. Nobody asked me originally. Nobody is asking me now. Yah foresees what lies ahead but I don't, except that there's more cruelty and pain and throwing up. Serving God seems to mean throwing up and shooting yourself with a needle every day. I am a diseased rat in a kind of cage. That's what he's made me into. I have no faith and no hope and he has no love, only power. God is a symptom of power, nothing else. The hell with it. I give up. I don't care. I'll do what I have to but it will kill me and I know it. OK?"

The two men were silent. They did not look at her or at each other.

Herb Asher said finally, "He saved your life tonight. He sent me over here."

"That and five credpops will get you a cupee of Kaff," Rybys said. "He gave me the illness in the first place!"

"And he's guiding you through," Herb said.

"To what end?" she said.

"To emancipate an infinitude of lives," Elias said.

"Egypt," she said. "And the brick makers. Over and over again. Why doesn't the emancipation last? Why does it fade out? Isn't there any final resolution?"

"This," Elias said, "is that final resolution."

"I am not one of the emancipated," Rybys said. "I fell along the way."

"Not yet," Elias said.

"But it's coming."

"Perhaps." The expression on Elias Tate's face could not be read.

As the three of them sat, there came a low, murmuring voice which said, "Rybys, Rybys."

Rybys gave a muffled cry and looked around her.

"Fear not," the voice said. "You will live on in your son. You ca

Silently, her face buried in her hands, Rybys began to cry.

------

Late in the day, when school had ended, Emmanuel decided to try the Hermetic transform once again, so that he would know the world around him.

First he speeded up his internal biological clock so that his thoughts raced faster and faster; he felt himself rushing down the tu

Thereupon he saw the Lower Realm-not as a place-but as transparent pictures permutating at immense velocity. These pictures were the Forms outside of space being fed into the Lower Realm to become reality. He was one step away, now, from the Hermetic transform.

The final picture froze and time ceased for him. With his eyes shut he could still see the room around him; the flight had ended; he had eluded that which pursued him. That meant that his neural firing was perfect, and his pineal body registered the presence of light carried up its branch of the optic conduit.

He sat for a little while, although "little while" no longer signified anything. Then, by degrees, the transform took place. He saw outside him the pattern, the print, of his own brain; he was within a world made up of his brain, with living information carried here and there like little rivers of shining red that were alive. He could reach out, therefore, and touch his own thoughts in their original nature, before they became thoughts. The room was filled with their fire, and immense spaces stretched out, the volume of his own brain external to him.

Meanwhile he introjected the outer world so that he contained it within him. He now had the universe inside him and his own brain outside everywhere. His brain extended into the vast spaces. far larger than the universe had been. Therefore he knew the extent of all things that were himself, and, because he had incorporated the world, he knew it and controlled it.

He soothed himself and relaxed, and then could see the outlines of the room, the coffee table, a chair, walls, pictures on the walls: the ghost of the external universe lingering outside him. Presently he picked up a book from the table and opened it. Inside the book he found, written there, his own thoughts, now in a printed form. The printed thoughts lay arranged along the time axis which had become spacial and the only axis along which motion was possible. He could see, as in a hologram, the different ages of his thoughts, the most recent ones being closest to the surface, the older ones lower and deeper in many successive layers.

He regarded the world outside him which now had become reduced to spare geometric shapes, squares mostly, and the Golden Rectangle as a doorway. Nothing moved except the scene beyond the doorway, where his mother rushed happily among tangled old rosebushes and a farmland she had known as a child; she was smiling and her eyes were bright with joy.

Now, Emmanuel thought, I will change the universe that I have taken inside me. He regarded the geometric shapes and allowed them to fill up a little with matter. Across from him the ratty blue couch that' Elias prized began to warp away from plumb; its lines changed. He had taken away the causality that guided it and it stopped being a ratty blue couch with Kaff stains on it and became instead a Hepplewhite cabinet, with fine bone china plates and cups and saucers behind its doors.