A Maze Of Death

Philip K. Dick

• Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780544018495
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

From Hugo Award–winning author Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death is a sci-fi murder mystery set on a mysterious planet where colonists experience unexplained shifts in reality and perception. Delmak-O is a dangerous planet. Though there are only fourteen citizens, no one can trust anyone else and death can strike at any moment. The planet is vast and largely unexplored, populated mostly by gelatinous cube-shaped beings that give cryptic advice in the form of anagrams. Deities can be spoken to directly via a series of prayer amplifiers and transmitters, but they may not be happy about it. And the mysterious building in the distance draws all the colonists to it, but when they get there each sees a different motto on the front. The mystery of this structure and the secrets contained within drive this mind-bending novel.

1

HIS JOB, AS ALWAYS, bored him. So he had during the previous week gone to the ship’s transmitter and attached conduits to the permanent electrodes extending from his pineal gland. The conduits had carried his prayer to the transmitter, and from there the prayer had gone into the nearest relay network; his prayer, during these days, had bounced throughout the galaxy, winding up—he hoped—at one of the god-worlds.

His prayer had been simple. “This damn inventory-control job bores me,” he had prayed. “Routine work—this ship is too large and in addition it’s overstaffed. I’m a useless standby module. Could you help me find something more creative and stimulating?” He had addressed the prayer, as a matter of course, to the Intercessor. Had it failed he would have presently readdressed the prayer, this time to the Mentufacturer.

But the prayer had not failed.

“Mr. Tallchief,” his supervisor said, entering Ben’s work cubicle. “You’re being transferred. How about that?”

“I’ll transmit a thankyou prayer,” Ben said, and felt good inside. It always felt good when one’s prayers were listened to and answered. “When do I transfer? Soon?” He had never concealed his dissatisfaction from his supervisor; there was now even less reason to do so.

“Ben Tallchief,” his supervisor said. “The praying mantis.”

“Don’t you pray?” Ben asked, amazed.

“Only when there’s no other alternative. I’m in favor of a person solving his problems on his own, without outside help. Anyhow, your transfer is valid.” His supervisor dropped a document on the desk before Ben. “A small colony on a planet named Delmak-O. I don’t know anything about it, but I suppose you’ll find it all out when you get there.” He eyed Ben thoughtfully. “You’re entitled to use one of the ship’s nosers. For a payment of three silver dollars.”

“Done,” Ben said, and stood up, clutching the document.

 

He ascended by express elevator to the ship’s transmitter, which he found hard at work transacting official ship business. “Will you be having any empty periods later today?” he asked the chief radio operator. “I have another prayer, but I don’t want to tie up your equipment if you’ll be needing it.”

“Busy all day,” the chief radio operator said. “Look, Mac—we put one prayer through for you last week; isn’t that enough?”

Anyhow I tried, Ben Tallchief mused as he left the transmitter with its hardworking crew and returned to his own quarters. If the matter ever comes up, he thought, I can say I did my best. But, as usual, the channels were tied up by nonpersonal communications.

He felt his anticipation grow; a creative job at last, and just when he needed it most. Another few weeks here, he said to himself, and I would have been pizzling away at the bottle again as in lamented former times. And of course that’s why they granted it, he realized. They knew I was nearing a break. I’d probably have wound up in the ship’s brig, along with—how many were there in the brig now?—well, however many there were in there. Ten, maybe. Not much for a ship this size. And with such stringent rules.

From the top drawer of his dresser he got out an unopened fifth of Peter Dawson scotch, broke the seal, unscrewed the lid. Little libation, he told himself as he poured scotch into a Dixie cup. And celebration. The gods appreciate ceremony. He drank the scotch, then refilled the small paper cup.

To further enlarge the ceremony he got down—a bit reluctantly—his copy of The Book: A. J. Specktowsky’s How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You, a cheap copy with soft covers, but the only copy he had ever owned; hence he had a sentimental attitude toward it. Opening at random (a highly approved method) he read over a few familiar paragraphs of the great twenty-first century Communist theologian’s apologia pro vita sua.

“God is not supernatural. His existence was the first and most natural mode of being to form itself.”

True, Ben Tallchief said to himself. As later theological investigation had proved. Specktowsky had been a prophet as well as a logician; all that he had predicted had turned up sooner or later. There remained, of course, a good deal to know . . . for example, the cause of the Mentufacturer’s coming into being (unless one was satisfied to believe, with Specktowsky, that beings of that order were self-creating, and existing outside of time, hence outside of causality). But in the main it was all there on the many-times-printed pages.

“With each greater circle the power, good and knowledge on the part of God weakened, so that at the periphery of the greatest circle his good was weak, his knowledge was weak—too weak for him to observe the Form Destroyer, which was called into being by God’s acts of form creation. The origin of the Form Destroyer is unclear; it is, for instance, not possible to declare whether (one) he was a separate entity from God from the start, uncreated by God but also self-creating, as is God, or (two) whether the Form Destroyer is an aspect of God, there being nothing—”

He ceased reading, sat sipping scotch and rubbing his forehead semi-wearily. He was forty-two years old and had read The Book many times. His life, although long, had not added up to much, at least until now. He had held a variety of jobs, doing a modicum of service to his employers, but never ever really excelling. Maybe I can begin to excel, he said to himself. On this new assignment. Maybe this is my big chance.

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind’s eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed. For example, he shaved now with an electric razor, unwilling to gaze at himself in his bathroom mirror. Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went. He sighed.

Of all his many meager jobs he had enjoyed one alone, and he still meditated about it now and then. In 2105 he had operated the background music system aboard a huge colonizing ship on its way to one of the Deneb worlds. In the tape vault he had found all of the Beethoven symphonies mixed haphazardly in with string versions of Carmen and of Delibes and he had played the Fifth, his favorite, a thousand times throughout the speaker complex that crept everywhere within the ship, reaching each cubicle and work area. Oddly enough no one had complained and he had kept on, finally shifting his loyalty to the Seventh and at last, in a fit of excitement during the final months of the ship’s voyage, to the Ninth—from which his loyalty never waned.

Maybe what I really need is sleep, he said to himself. A sort of twilight of living, with only the background sound of Beethoven audible. All the rest a blur.

No, he decided; I want to be! I want to act and accomplish something. And every year it becomes more necessary. Every year, too, it slips further and further away. The thing about the Mentufacturer, he reflected, is that he can renew everything. He can abort the decay process by replacing the decaying object with a new one, one whose form is perfect. And then that decays. The Form Destroyer gets hold of it—and presently the Mentufacturer replaces that. As with a succession of old bees wearing out their wings, dying and being replaced at last by new bees. But I can’t do that. I decay and the Form Destroyer has me. And it will get only worse.

God, he thought, help me.

But not by replacing me. That would be fine from a cosmological standpoint, but ceasing to exist is not what I’m after; and perhaps you understood this when you answered my prayer.

The scotch had made him sleepy; to his chagrin he found himself nodding. To bring himself back to full wakefulness: that was necessary. Leaping up as he strode to his portable phonograph, took a visrecord at random, and placed it on the turntable. At once the far wall of the room lit up, and bright shapes intermingled with one another, a mixture of motion and of life, but unnaturally flat. He reflexively adjusted the depth-circuit; the figures began to become three dimensional. He turned up the sound as well.

“ . . . Legolas is right. We may not shoot an old man so, at unawares and unchallenged, whatever fear or doubt be on us. Watch and wait!”

The bracing words of the old epic restored his perspective; he returned to his desk, reseated himself and got out the document which his supervisor had given him. Frowning, he studied the coded information, trying to decipher it. In numbers, punch-holes and letters it spelled out his new life, his world to come.

“ . . . You speak as one that knows Fangorn well. Is that so?” The visrecord played on, but he no longer heard it; he had begun to get the gist of the encoded message.

“What have you to say that you did not say at our last meeting?” a sharp and powerful voice said. He glanced up and found himself confronted by the gray-clad figure of Gandalf. It was as if Gandalf were speaking to him, to Ben Tallchief. Calling him to account. “Or, perhaps, you have things to unsay?” Gandalf said.

Ben rose, went over to the phonograph and shut it off. I do not feel able at this time to answer you, Gandalf, he said to himself. There are things to be done, real things; I can’t indulge myself in a mysterious, unreal conversation with a mythological character who probably never existed. The old values, for me, are suddenly gone; I have to work out what these damn punch-holes, letters and numbers mean.

He was beginning to get the drift of it. Carefully, he replaced the lid on the bottle of scotch, twisting is tight. He would go in a noser, alone; at the colony he would join roughly a dozen others, recruited from a variety of sources. Range 5 of skills: a class C operation, on a K-4 pay scale. Maximum time: two years of operation. Full pension and medical benefits, starting as soon as he arrived. An override for any instructions he had already received, hence he could go at once. He did not have to terminate his work here before leaving.

And I have the three silver dollars for the noser, he said to himself. So that is that; nothing else to worry about. Except—

He could not discover what his job would consist of. The letters, numbers and punch-holes failed to say, or perhaps it was more correct to say that he could not get them to divulge this one piece of information—a piece he would much have wanted.

But still it looked good. I like it, he said to himself. I want it. Gandalf, he thought, I have nothing to unsay; prayers are not often answered and I will take this. Aloud he said, “Gandalf, you no longer exist except in men’s minds, and what I have here comes from the One, True and Living Deity, who is completely real. What more can I hope for?” The silence of the room confronted him; he did not see Gandalf now because he had shut the record off. “Maybe someday,” he continued. “I will unsay this. But not yet; not now. You understand?” He waited, experiencing the silence, knowing that he could begin it or end it by a mere touch of the phonograph’s switch.

2

SETH MORLEY NEATLY divided the Gruyère cheese lying before him with a plastic-handled knife and said, “I’m leaving.” He cut himself a giant wedge of cheese, lifted it to his lips via the knife. “Late tomorrow night. Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz has seen the last of me.” He grinned, but Fred Gossim, the settlement’s chief engineer, failed to return the message of triumph; instead Gossim frowned even more strongly. His disapproving presence pervaded the office.

Mary Morley said quietly, “My husband applied for this transfer eight years ago. We never intended to stay here. You knew that.”

“And we’re going with them,” Michael Niemand stammered in excitement. “That’s what you get for bringing a top-flight marine biologist here and then setting him to work hauling blocks of stone from the goddam quarry. We’re sick of it.” He nudged his undersized wife, Clair. “Isn’t that right?”

“Since there is no body of water on this planet,” Gossim said gratingly, “we could hardly put a marine biologist to use in his stated profession.”

“But you advertised, eight years ago, for a marine biologist,” Mary Morley pointed out. This made Gossim scowl even more profoundly. “The mistake was yours.”

“But,” Gossim said, “this is your home. All of you—” He gestured at the group of kibbutz officials crowded around the entrance of the office. “We all built this.”

“And the cheese,” Seth Morley said, “is terrible, here. Those quakkip, those goat-like suborganisms that smell like the Form Destroyer’s last year’s underwear—I want very much to have seen the last of them and it. The quakkip and the cheese both.” He cut himself a second slice of the expensive, imported Gruyère cheese. To Niemand he said, “You can’t come with us. Our instructions are to make the flight by noser. Point A. A noser holds only two people; in this case my wife and me. Point B. You and your wife are two more people, ergo you won’t fit. Ergo you can’t come.”

“We’ll take our own noser,” Niemand said.

“You have no instructions and/or permission to transfer to Delmak-O,” Seth Morley said from within his mouthful of cheese.

“You don’t want us,” Niemand said.

“Nobody wants you,” Gossim grumbled. “As far as I’m concerned without you we would do better. It’s the Morleys that I don’t want to see go down the drain.”

Eying him, Seth Morley said tartly, “And this assignment is, a priori, ‘down the drain.’”

“It’s some kind of experimental work,” Gossim said, “As far as I can discern. On a small scale. Thirteen, fourteen people. It would be for you turning the clock back to the early days of Tekel Upharsin. You want to build up from that all over again? Look how long it’s taken for us to get up to a hundred efficient, well-intentioned members. You mention the Form Destroyer. Aren’t you by your actions decaying back the form of Tekel Upharsin?”

“And my own form too,” Morley said, half to himself. He felt grim, now; Gossim had gotten to him. Gossim had always been good with words, amazing in an engineer. It had been Gossim’s silver-tongued words which had kept them all at their tasks throughout the years. But those words, to a good extent, had become vapid as far as the Morleys were concerned. The words did not work as they once had. And yet a glimmer of their past glory remained. He could just not quite shake off the bulky, dark-eyed engineer.

But we’re leaving, Morley thought. As in Goethe’s Faust, “In the beginning was the deed.” The deed and not the word, as Goethe, anticipating the twentieth century existentialists, had pointed out.

“You’ll want to come back,” Gossim opined.

“Hmm,” Seth Morley said.

“And you know what I’ll say to that?” Gossim said loudly. “If I get a request from you—both of you Morleys—to come back here to Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz, I’ll say, ‘We don’t have any need of a marine biologist; we don’t even have an ocean. And we’re not going to build so much as a puddle so that you can have a legitimate reason for working here.’”

“I never asked for a puddle,” Morley said.

“But you’d like one.”

“I’d like any kind of body of water,” Morley said. “That’s the whole point; that’s why we’re leaving and that’s why we won’t be coming back.”

“You’re sure Delmak-O has a body of water?” Gossim inquired.

“I assume—” Morley began, but Gossim cut him off.

“That,” Gossim said, “is what you assumed about Tekel Upharsin. That’s how your trouble began.”

“I assumed,” Morley said, “that if you advertised for a marine biologist—” He sighed, feeling weary. There was no point trying to influence Gossim; the engineer—and chief officer of the kibbutz—had a closed mind. “Just let me eat my cheese,” Morley said, and tried an additional slice. But he had grown tired of the taste; he had eaten too much. “The hell with it,” he said, tossing his knife down. He felt irritable and he did not like Gossim; he felt no desire to continue the conversation. What mattered was the fact that no matter how he felt, Gossim could not revoke the transfer. It carried an override, and that was the long and the short of it . . . to quote William S. Gilbert.

“I hate your bloody guts,” Gossim said.

Morley said, “I hate yours, too.”

“A Mexican standoff,” Niemand said. “You see, Mr. Gossim, you can’t make us stay; all you can do is yell.”

Making an obscene gesture toward Morley and Niemand Gossim strode off, parting the group gathered there, and disappeared somewhere on the far side. The office was quiet, now. Seth Morley immediately began to feel better.

“Arguments wear you out,” his wife said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And Gossim wears me out. I’m tired ju...