The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick

priest."
    They drove in silence after that.
    "Do you deny the miracle of transubstantiation?" Elias asked that night as he put the boy to bed.
    "I deny that it took place today," Emmanuel said. "There in that place. I will not go there again."
    "What I want," Elias said, "is for you to be as wise as a serpent and as innocent as a dove."
    Emmanuel regarded him.
    "They killed—"
    "They have no power over me," Emmanuel said.
    "They can destroy you. They can arrange another accident. Next year I'm required to put you in school. Fortunately because of your brain damage you won't have to go to a regular school. I'm counting on them to—" Elias hesitated.
    Emmanuel finished, "—Consign anything they see about me that is different to the brain damage."
    "Right."
    "Was the brain damage arranged?"
    "I—Perhaps."
    "It seems useful." But, he thought, if only I knew my real name . "Why can't you say my name?" he said to Elias.
    "Your mother did," Elias said obliquely.
    "My mother is dead."
    "You will say it yourself, eventually."
    "I'm impatient." A strange thought came to him. "Did she die because she said my name?"
    "Maybe," Elias said.
    "And that's why you won't say it? Because it would kill you if you did? And it wouldn't kill me."
    "It is not a name in the usual sense. It is a command."
    All these matters remained in his mind. A name that was not a name but a command. It made him think of Adam who named the animals. He wondered about that. Scripture said:
     
    …and brought them unto the man to see
    what he would call them…
     
    "Did God not know what the man would call them?" he asked Elias one day.
    "Only man has language," Elias explained. "Only man can give birth to language. Also—" He eyed the boy. "When man gave names to creatures he established his dominion over them."
    What you name you control, Emmanuel realized. Hence no one is to speak my name because no one is to have—or can have—control over me. "God played a game with Adam, then," he said. "He wanted to see if the man knew their correct names. He was testing the man. God enjoys games."
    "I'm not sure I know the answer to that," Elias said.
    "I did not ask. I said."
    "It is not something usually associated with God."
    "Then the nature of God is known."
    "His nature is not known."
    Emmanuel said, "He enjoys games and play. It says in Scripture that he rested but I say that he played."
    He wanted to feed that into the hologram of the Bible, as an addendum, but he knew that he should not. How would it alter the total hologram? he wondered. To add to the Torah that God enjoys joyful sport… Strange, he thought, that I can't add that. Someone must add it; it has to be there, in Scripture. Someday.
----
    He learned about pain and death from an ugly dying dog. It had been run over and lay by the side of the road, its chest crushed, bloody foam bubbling from its mouth. When he bent over it the dog gazed at him with glasslike eyes, eyes that already saw into the next world.
    To understand what the dog was saying he put his hand on its stumpy tail. "Who mandated this death for you?" he asked the dog. "What have you done?"
    "I did nothing," the dog replied.
    "But this is a harsh death."
    "Nonetheless," the dog told him, "I am blameless."
    "Have you ever killed?"
    "Oh yes. My jaws are designed to kill. I was constructed to kill smaller things."
    "Do you kill for food or pleasure?"
    "I kill out of joy," the dog told him. "It is a game; it is the game I play."
    Emmanuel said, "I did not know about such games. Why do dogs kill and why do dogs die? Why are there such games?"
    "These subtleties mean nothing to me," the dog told him. "I kill to kill; I die because I must. It is necessity, the rule that is the final rule. Don't you live and kill and die by that rule? Surely you do. You are a creature, too."
    "I do what I wish."
    "You lie to yourself," the dog said. "Only God does as he wishes."
    "Then I must be God."
    "If you are God, heal me."
    "But you are under the