"Connie Willis - Inside Job" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

“Great,” she said. “Bring the Sony videocam.”

“Not the little one?” I asked. Most psychic events don’t allow recording devices—they make it too easy
to spot the earpieces and wires—and the Hasaka is small enough to be smuggled in.

“No,” she said, “bring the Sony. See you Saturday, Rob. Bye.”

“Wait,” I said. “You haven’t told me what this guy does.”

“Woman. She’s a channeler. She channels an entity named Isis,” Kildy said and hung up again.

I was surprised. We don’t usually waste our time on channelers. They’re no longer trendy. Right now
mediums like Charles Fred and Yogi Magaputra and assorted sensory therapists (aroma-, sonic-,
auratic-) are the rage.

It’s also an exercise in frustration, since there’s no way to prove whether someone’s channeling or not,
unless they claim to be channeling Abraham Lincoln (like Randall Mars) or Nefertiti (like Hanh Nah). In
that case you can challenge their facts—Nefertiti could not have had an affair with Alexander the Great,
who wasn’t born till a thousand years later, and she was not Cleopatra’s cousin—but most of them
channel hundred-thousand-year-old sages or high priests of Lemuria, and there are no physical
manifestations.

They’ve learned their lesson from the Victorian spiritualists (who kept getting caught), so there’s no
ectoplasm or ghostly trumpets or double-exposed photographic plates. Just a deep, hollow voice that
sounds like a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Basil Rathbone. Why is it that channeled “entities” all
have British accents? And speak King James Bible English?

And why was Kildy willing to waste fifteen hundred bucks—correction, twenty-two fifty; she’d already
been to the seminar once—to have me see this Isis? The channeler must have a new gimmick. I’d noticed
a couple of people advertising themselves as “angel channelers” in the local psychic rag, but Isis wasn’t
an angel name. Egyptian channeler? Goddess conduit?

I looked “Isis-channeler” up on the net. At first I couldn’t find any references, even using Google. I tried
skeptics.org and finally Marty Rumboldt, who runs a website that tracks psychics.

“You’re spelling it wrong, Rob,” he e-mailed me back. “It’s Isus.”

Which should have occurred to me. The channelers of Lazaris, Kochise, and Merlynn all use variations
on historical names (probably from some fear of spiritual slander lawsuits), and more than one
channeler’s prone to “inventive” spellings: Joye Wildde. And Emmanual.

I googled “Isus.” He—bad sign, the channeler didn’t even know Isis was female—was the “spirit entity”
channeled by somebody named Ariaura Keller. She’d started in Salem, Massachusetts (a breeding
ground for psychics), moved to Sedona (another one), and then headed west and worked her way down
the coast, appearing in Seattle, the other Salem, Eugene, Berkeley, and now Beverly Hills. She had six
afternoon seminars and two week-long “spiritual immersions” scheduled for L.A., along with private
“individually scheduled enlightenment audiences” with Isus. She’d written two books, The Voice of Isus
and On the Receiving End (with links to amazon.com), and you could read her bio: “I knew from
childhood that I was destined to be a channel for the Truth,” and extracts from her speeches: “The earth
is destined to witness a transforming spiritual event,” on-line. She sounded just like every other channeler