Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick Page A

Natura.
Didn’t you recognize it, Seb?”
    “No,” he admitted.
    “Maybe,” Lindy said caustically, “if you recite it backward, he’ll return to life; maybe that’s how you’re supposed to handle this.” He turned his hostility directly on Sebastian. “I don’t like trying to bring a corpse back to life; it’s completely different from hearing a live person who’s trapped underground in the box, and hauling him up.”
    “A difference,” Sebastian said, “only in time. A matter of days or hours, maybe minutes. You just don’t like to think about it.”
    Lindy said brutally, “Do you spend much of your time, Seb, remembering the days when you were a corpse? Do you think about that?”
    “There’s nothing to think about,” he answered. “I had no awareness after death; I went from the hospital to the coffin and I woke up in the coffin.” He added, “I remember that; I think about that.” After all, he still had claustrophobia because of that. Many old-borners did; it constituted their shared psychological ailment.
    “I guess,” Cheryl Vale, watching from a distance said, “this disproves God and the Afterlife. What you said, Seb, about not having any awareness after you died.”
    “No more so,” Sebastian said, “than the absence of pre-uterine memories disproves Buddhism.”
    “Sure,” R.C. Buckley put in. “Just because the old-borners can’t remember doesn’t mean nothing happened; like a lot of times in the morning I know I’ve dreamed like hell all night but I can’t remember a damn thing about them, not anything at all.”
    “Sometimes,” Sebastian said, “I have dreams.”
    “About what?” Bob Lindy asked.
    “A sort of forest.”
    “And that’s all?” Lindy demanded.
    “One other.” He hesitated, then said it. “A pulsating black presence, beating like a huge heart. Enormous and loud, going thump, thump, rising and falling, in and out. And very angry. Burning out everything in me it disapproves of . . . and that seemed to be most of me.”
    “Dies Irae,”
Father Faine said. “The Day of Wrath.” He did not seem surprised. Sebastian had talked with him about it before.
    Sebastian said, “And a sense on my part of being so alive. It was absolutely living. By comparison—we’re a spark of life in a lump that isn’t alive, that the spark makes move around and talk and act. But this was totally aware; not out of eyes or ears, just aware.”
    “Paranoia,” Dr. Sign murmured. “The sense of being watched.”
    “What was it angry at you about?” Cheryl asked.
    He pondered and then said, “I wasn’t small enough.”
    “‘Small enough,’” Bob Lindy echoed in disgust. “Feood.”
    “It was right,” Sebastian said. “I was in reality much smaller than I realized. Or admitted; I liked to think I was larger, with large ambitions.” Like seizing the Anarch’s corpse, he thought wryly. And trying to cash in big; that was an example, a perfect one. He hadn’t learned.
    “Why,” Cheryl persisted, “did it want you to be small?”
    “Because it was true. A fact. I had to face the fact.”
    “Why?” Lindy demanded.
    “That’s what happens on the Day of Judgment,” R.C. Buckley said philosophically. “That’s the day you have to face all the reality you’ve been avoiding. I mean, we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.”
    “Yes,” Sebastian said; that expressed it. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. It would be interesting, if they could bring back the Anarch Peak, to talk to him about it; he might know a good deal. “He—God—can’t help you until you understand that everything you do depends on Him.”
    “Religious victuals,” Lindy said contemptuously.
    “But think about it,” Sebastian said. “Literally. I raise my hand.” He raised his hand. “I think I do it, can do it. But it’s done by a complex biochemical, physiological apparatus that I inherited, that I entered; I didn’t