"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.