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CHAPTER 15 At the bar both men sat as they often sat; Elias, as always, had a Coke with ice. He never drank. "Okay," he said, nodding. "There's nothing you can do to stop the letter. It's probably already mailed." "I'm a poker chip," Herb Asher said. "Between Zina and Emmanuel." "They're not betting as to whether Linda Fox will answer," Elias said. "They're betting on something else." He wadded up a bit of cardboard and dropped it into his Coke. "There is no way in the world that you're going to be able to figure out what their wager is. The bamboo and the children's swings. The stubble growing . . . I have a residual memory of that myself; I dream about it. It's a school. For kids. A special school. I go there in my sleep again and again. "The real world," Herb said. "Apparently. You've reconstructed a lot. Don't go around saying God told you this is a fake universe, Herb. Don' tell any- body else what you've told me." "Do you believe me?" "I believe you've had a very unusual and inexplicable expe- rience, but I don't believe this is an ersatz world. It seems per- fectly substantial." He rapped on the plastic surface of the table between them. "No, I don't believe that; I don't believe in unreal worlds. There is only one cosmos and Jehovah God created it. "I don't think anyone creates a fake universe," Herb said, "since it isn't there." "But you're saying someone is causing us to see a universe that doesn't exist. Who is this someone?" He said, "Satan." Cocking his head, Elias eyed him. "It's a way of seeing the real world," Herb said. "An oc- cluded way. A dreamlike way. A hypnotized, asleep way. The nature of world undergoes a perceptual change; actually it is the perceptions that change, not the world. The change is in us." 'The Ape of God,' "Elias said. "A Medieval theory about the Devil. That he apes God's legitimate creation with spurious interpolations of his own. That's really an exceedingly sophisti- cated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?"
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