(TELEMACHUS SNEEZED)
There came unto the High Chapperal one who had studied in the schools of the Purple Sage and of the Hung Mung Tong and of the Illuminati and of the many other schools; and this one had found no peace yet.
Yea: of the Discordians and the teachers of Mummu and of the Nazarene and of the Buddha he had studied; and he had found no peace yet.
And he spake to the High Chapperal and said: Give me a sign, that I may believe.
And the High Chapperal said unto him: Leave my presence, and seek ye the horizon and the sign shall come unto you, and ye shall seek no more.
And the man turned and sought of the horizon; but the High Chapperal crept up behind him and raised his foot and did deliver a most puissant kick in the man's arse, which smarted much and humiliated the seeker grievously.
He who has eyes, let him read and understand.
–"The Book of Grandmotherly Kindness," The Dishonest Book of Lies, by Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.
The Starry Wisdom Church was not 00005's idea of a proper ecclesiastical shop by any means. The architecture was a shade too Gothic, the designs on the stained-glass windows a bit unpleasantly suggestive for a holy atmosphere ("My God, they must be bloody wogs," he thought), and when he opened the door, the altar was lacking a proper crucifix. In fact, where the crucifix should have been he found instead a design that was more than suggestive. It was, in his opinion, downright tasteless.
Not High Church at all, Chips decided.
He advanced cautiously, although the building appeared deserted. The pews seemed designed for bloody reptiles, he observed- a church, of course, should be uncomfortable, that was good for the soul, but this was, well, gross. They probably advertise in the kink newspapers, he reflected with distaste. The first stained-glass window was worse from inside than outside; he didn't know who Saint Toad was, but if that mosaic with his name on it gave any idea of Saint Toad's appearance and predilections, then, by God, no self-respecting Christian congregation would ever think of sanctifying him. The next feller, a shoggoth, was even less appetizing; at least they had the common decency not to canonize him.
A rat scurried out from between two pews and ran across the center aisle, right before Chip's feet.
Fair got on one's nerves, this place did.
Chips approached the pulpit and glanced up at the Bible. That was, at least, one civilized touch. Curious as to what text might have been preached last in this den of wogs, he scrambled up into the pulpit and scanned the open pages. To his consternation, it wasn't the Bible at all. A lot of bragging and bombast about some Yog Sothoth, probably a wog god, who was both the Gate and the Guardian of the Gate. Absolute rubbish. Chips hefted the enormous volume and turned it so he could read the spine. Necronomicon, eh? If his University Latin could be trusted, that was something like "the book of the names of the dead." Morbid, like the whole building.
He approached the altar, refusing to look at the abominable design above it. Rust- now what could one say of brutes who let their altar get rusty? He scraped with his thumbnail. The altar was marble, and marble doesn't rust. A decidedly unpleasant suspicion crossed his mind, and he tasted what his nail had lifted. Blood. Fairly fresh blood.
Not High Church at all.
Chips approached the vestry, and walked into a web.
"Damn," he muttered, hacking at it with his flashlight- and something fell on his shoulder. He brushed it off quickly and turned the light to the floor. It started to run up his trouser leg and he brushed it off again, beginning to breathe heavily, and stepped on it hard. There was a satisfactory snapping sound and he stomped again to be sure. When he removed his shoe and turned the light down again, it was dead.
A damned huge ugly brute of a spider. Black gods, Saint Toads, rats, mysterious and heathenish capitalized Gates, that nasty-looking shoggoth character, and now spiders. A buggering tarantula it looked like, in fact. Next, Count Dracula, he thought grimly, testing the vestry door. It slid open smoothly and he stepped back out of visible range, waiting a moment.
They were either not home or cool enough to allow him the next move.
He stepped through the door and flashed his light around.
"Oh, God, no," he said. "No. God, no."
"Good-bye, Mr. Chips," said Saint Toad.
Did you ever take the underground from Charing Cross to one of the suburbs? You know, that long ride without stops when you're totally in the dark and everything seems to be rushing by outside in the opposite direction? Relativity, the laboratory-smock people call it. In fact, it was even more like going up a chimney than going forward in a tunnel, but it was like both at the same time, if you follow me. Relativity. A bitter-looking old man went by, dressed in turn-of-the-century Yankee clothing, muttering something about "Carcosa." An antique Pontiac car followed him, with four Italians in it looking confused- it was slow enough for me to spot the year, definitely 1936, and even to read the license plates, Rhode Island AW-1472. Then a black man, not a Negro or a wog, but a really truly black man, without a face and I'd hate to tell you what he had where the face should have been. All the while, there was this bleating or squealing that seemed to say "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" Another man, English-looking but in early 19th-century clothing; he looked my way, surprised, and said, "I only walked around the horses!" I could sympathize: I only opened a bleeding door. A giant beetle, who looked at me more intelligently than any bug I ever saw before- he seemed to be going in a different direction, if there was direction in this place. A white-haired old man with startling blue eyes, who shouted "Roderick Usher!" as he flew by. Then a whole parade of pentagons and other mathematical shapes that seemed to be talking to each other hi some language of the past or the future or wherever they called home. And by now it wasn't so much like a tunnel or even a chimney but a kind of roller coaster with dips and loops but not the sort you find in a place like Brighton- I think I saw this land of curve once, on a blackboard, when a class in non-Euclidean geometry had used the room before my own class in Eng Lit Pope to Swinb. and Neo-Raph. Then I passed a shoggoth or it passed me, and let me say that their pictures simply do not do them justice: I am ready to go anywhere and confront any peril on H.M. Service but I pray to the Lord Harry I never have to get that close to one of those chaps again. Next came a jerk, or cusp is probably the word: I recognized something: Ingolstadt, the middle of the university. Then we were off again, but not for long, another cusp: Stonehenge. A bunch of hooded people, right out of a Yank movie about the KKK, were busy with some gruesome mummery right in the center of the stones, yelling ferociously about some ruddy goat with a thousand young, and the stars were all wrong overhead. Well, you pick up your education where you can- now I know, even if I can't tell any bloody academic how I know, that Stonehenge is much older than we think. Whizz, bang, we're off again, and now ships are floating by- everything from old Yankee clippers to modern luxury liners, all of them signaling the old S.O.S. semaphore desperately- and a bunch of airplanes following in their wake. I realized that part must be the Bermuda Triangle, and about then it dawned that the turn-of-the-century Yank with the bitter face might be Ambrose Bierce. I still hadn't the foggiest who all those other chaps were. Then along came a girl, a dog, a lion, a tin man and a scarecrow. A real puzzler, that: was I visiting real places or just places in people's minds? Or was there a difference? When the mock turtle, the walrus, the carpenter and another little girl came along, my faith in the difference began to crumble. Or did some of those writer blokes know how to tap into this alternate world or fifth dimension or whatever it was? The shoggoth came by again (or was it his twin brother?) and shouted, or I should say, gibbered, "Yog Sothoth Neblod Zin," and I could tell that was something perfectly filthy by the tone of his voice. I mean, after all, I can take a queer proposition without butting the offender on the nose- one must be cosmopolitan, you know- but I would vastly prefer to have such offers coming out of human mouths, or at the very least out of mouths rather than orifices that shouldn't properly be talking at all. But you would have to see a shoggoth yourself, God forbid, to appreciate what I mean. The next stop was quite a refrigerator, miles and miles of it, and that's where the creature who kept up that howling of "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" hung his hat. Or its hat. I shan't attempt to do him, or it, justice. That Necronomicon said about Yog Sothoth that "Kadath in the cold waste hath known him," and now I realized that "known" was used there in the Biblical sense. I just hope he, or it, stays in the cold waste. You wouldn't want to meet him, or it, on the Strand at midday, believe me. His habits were even worse than his ancestry, and why he couldn't scrape off some of the seaweed and barnacles is beyond me; he was rather like Saint Toad in his notions of sartorial splendor and table etiquette, if you take my meaning. But I was off again, the curvature was getting sharper and the cusps more frequent. There was no mistaking the Heads where I arrived next: Easter Island. I had a moment to reflect on how those Heads resembled Tla-loc and the lloigor of Fernando Poo and then this kink's version of a Cook's Tour moved on, and there I was at the last stop.
"Damn, blast and thunder!" I said, looking at Mano-lete turning his veronica and Concepcion lying there with her poor throat cut. "Now that absolutely does tear it."
I decided not to toddle over to the Starry Wisdom Church this tune around. There is a limit, after all.
Instead, I went out into Tequila y Mota Street and approached the church but kept my distance, trying to figure where BUGGER kept the Time Machine.
While I was reflecting on that, I heard the first pistol shot.
Then a volley.
The next thing I knew the whole population of Fernando Poo- Cubans descended from the prisoners shipped there when it was a penal colony in the 19th century, Spaniards from colonial days, blacks, wogs, and whatnot- were on Tequila y Mota street using up all the munitions they owned. It was the countercoup, of course- the Captain Puta crowd who unseated Tequila y Mota and prevented the nuclear war- but I didn't know that at the time, so I dashed into the nearest doorway and tried to duck the flying bullets, which were coming, mind you, as thick as the darling buds in May. It was hairy. And one Spanish bloke- gay as a tree full of parrots from his trot and his carriage, goes by waving an old cutlass out of a book and shouting, "Better to die on our feet than to live on our knees!"- headed straightway into a group of Regular Army who had finally turned out to try to stop this business. He waded right into them, cutting heads like a pirate, until they shot him as full of holes as Auntie's drawers. That's your Spaniards: even the queers have balls.
Well, this wasn't my show, so I backed up, opened the door and stepped into the building. I just had a moment to recognize which building I had picked, when Saint Toad gave me his bilious eye and said, "You again!"
The trip was less interesting this time (I had seen it before, after all) and I had time to think a bit and realize that old frog-face wasn't using a Time Machine or any mechanical device at all. Then I was in front of a pyramid- they missed that stop last time- and I waited to arrive back in the Hotel Durrutti. To my surprise, when there was a final jerk in the dimensions or whatever they were, I found myself someplace else.
00005, in fact, was in an enormous marbled room deliberately designed to impress the bejesus out of any and all visitors. Pillars reached up to cyclopean heights, supporting a ceiling too high and murky to be visible, and every wall, of which there seemed to be five, was the same impenetrable ivory-grained marble. The eyes instinctively sought the gigantic throne, in the shape of an apple with a seat carved out of it, and made of a flawless gold which gleamed the more brightly in the dim lighting; and the old man who sat on the throne, his white beard reaching almost to the lap of his much whiter robe, commanded attention when he spoke: "If I may be trite," he said in a resonant voice, "you are welcome, my son."
This still wasn't High Church, but it was a definite improvement over the digs where Saint Toad and his loathsome objets d'art festered. Still, 00005's British common sense was disturbed. "I say," he ventured, "you're not some sort of mystic, are you? I must tell you that I don't intend to convert to anything heathen."
"Conversion, as you understand it," the aged figure told him placidly, "consists of pounding one's own words into a man's ears until they start coming out of his mouth. Nothing is of less interest to me. You need have no fear on that ground."
"I see." 00005 pondered. "This wouldn't be Shangri-La or some such place, would it?"
"This is Dallas, Texas, my son." The old man's eyes bore a slight twinkle although his demeanor otherwise remained grave. "We are below the sewers of Dealy Plaza, and I am the Dealy Lama."
00005 shook his head. "I don't mind having my leg pulled," he began.
"I am the Dealy Lama," the old man repeated, "and this is the headquarters of the Erisian Liberation Front."
"A joke's a joke," Chips said, "but how did you manage that frog-faced creature back in the Starry Wisdom Church?"
"Tsathoggua? He is not managed by us. We saved you from him, in fact Twice."
"Tsathoggua?" Chips repeated. "I thought the swine's name was Saint Toad."
"To be sure, that is one of his names. When he first appeared, in Hyperborea, he was known as Tsathoggua, and that is how he is recorded in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Necronomicon and other classics. The Atlantean high priests, Klarkash Ton and Lhuv Kerapht, wrote the best descriptions of him, but their works have not survived, except in our own archives."
"You do put on a good front," 00005 said sincerely. "I suppose, fairly soon, you'll get around to telling me that I have been brought here due to some karma or other?" He was actually wishing there were some place to sit down. No doubt, it added to the Lama's dignity to sit while Chips had to stand, but it had been a hard night already and his feet hurt.
"Yes, I have many revelations for you," the old man said.
"I was afraid of that. Isn't there some place where I can bring my arse to anchor, as my uncle Sid would say, before I listen to your wisdom? I'm sure it's going to be a long time in the telling."
The old man ignored this. "This is the turning point in history," he said. "All the forces of Evil, dispersed and often in conflict before, have been brought together under one sign, the eye in the pyramid. All the forces of Good have been gathered, also, under the sign of the apple."
"I see," 00005 nodded. "And you want to enlist me on the side of Good?"
"Not at all," the old man cried, bouncing up and down in his seat with laughter. "I want to invite you to stay here with us while the damned fools fight it out aboveground."
00005 frowned. "That isn't a sporting attitude," he said disapprovingly; but then he grinned. "Oh, I almost fell for it, didn't I? You are pulling my leg!"
"I am telling you the truth," the old man said vehemently. "How do you suppose I have lived to this advanced age? By running off to join in every idiotic barroom brawl, world war, or Armageddon that comes along? Let me remind you of the street where we picked you up; it is entirely typical of the proceedings during the Kali Yuga. Those imbeciles are using live ammunition, son. Do you want me to tell you the secret of longevity, lad- my secret? I have lived so outrageously long because," he spoke with deliberate emphasis, "I don't give a fuck for Good and Evil."
"I should be ashamed to say so, if I were you," Chips replied coolly. "If the whole world felt like you, we'd all be a sorry kettle of fish."
"Very well," the old man started to raise an arm. "I'll send you back to Saint Toad."
"Wait!" Chips stirred uneasily. "Couldn't you send me to confront Evil in one of its, ah, more human forms?"
"Aha," the old man sneered. "You want the lesser Evil, is it? Those false choices are passing away, even as we speak. If you want to confront Evil, you will have to confront it on its own terms, not in the form that suits your own mediocre concepts of a Last Judgment. Stay here with me, lad. Evil is much more nasty than you imagine."
"Never," Chips said firmly. " 'Ours not to reason why, Ours but to do or die!' Any Englishman would tell you the same."
"No doubt," the old man snickered. "Your countrymen are as fat-headed as these Texans above us. Glorifying that idiotic Light Brigade the way these bumpkins brag about their defeat at the Alamo! As if stepping in front of a steamroller were the most admirable thing a man could do with his time. Let me tell you a story, son."
"You may if you wish," 00005 said stiffly. "But no cynical parable will change my sense of Right and Duty."
"Actually, you're glad of the interlude; you're not all that eager to face the powers of Tsathoggua again. Let that pass." The old man shifted to a more comfortable position and, still oblivious of Chips' tired shifting from leg to leg, began:
This is the story of Our Lady of Discord, Eris, daughter of Chaos, mother of Fortuna. You have read some of it in Bullfinch, no doubt, but his is the exoteric version. I am about to give you the Inside Story.
Is the thought of a unicorn a real thought? In a sense, that is the basic question of philosophy-
I thought you were going to tell me a story, not launch into some dreary German metaphysics. I had enough of that at the University.
Quite so. The thought of a unicorn is a real thought, then, to be brief. So is the thought of the Redeemer on the Cross, the Cow who Jumped Over the Moon, the lost continent of Mu, the Gross National Product, the Square Root of Minus One, and anything else capable of mobilizing emotional energy. And so, in a sense, Eris and the other Olympians were, and are, real. At the same time, in another sense, there is only one True God and your redeemer in His only begotten son; and the lloigor, like Tsathoggua, are real enough to reach out and draw you into their world, which is on the other side of Nightmare. But I promised to keep the philosophy to a minimum.
You recall the story of the Golden Apple, in the exoteric and expurgated version at least? The true version is the same, up to a point. Zeus, a terrible old bore by the way, did throw a bash on Olympus, and he did slight Our Lady by not inviting Her. She did make an apple, but it was Acapulco Gold, not metallic gold. She wrote Kallisti, on it, to the prettiest one, and rolled it into the banquet hall. Everybody- not just the goddesses; that's a male chauvinist myth- started fighting over who had the right to smoke it. Paris was never called in to pass judgment; that's all some poet's fancy. The Trojan War was just another imperialistic rumble and had no connection with these events at all.
What really happened was that everybody was squabbling over the apple and working up a sweat and pushing one another around and pretty soon their vibrations- Gods have very high vibration, exactly at the speed of light, in fact- heated up the apple enough to unleash some heavy fumes. In a word, the Olympians all got stoned.
And they saw a Vision, or a series of Visions.
In the first Vision, they saw Yahweh, a neighboring god with a world of his own which overlapped theirs in some places. He was clearing the set to change its valence and start a new show. His method struck them as rather barbarous. He was, in fact, drowning everybody- except one family that he allowed to escape in an Ark.
"This is Chaos," said Hermes. "That Yahweh is a mean mother', even for a god."
And they looked at the Vision more closely, and because they could see into the future and were all (like every intelligent entity) rabid Laurel and Hardy fans and because they were zonked on the weed, they saw that Yahweh bore the face of Oliver Hardy. All around him, below the mountain on which he lived (his world was fiat), the waters rose and rose. They saw drowning men, drowning women, innocent babes sinking beneath the waves. They were ready to vomit. And then Another came and stood beside Yahweh, looking at the panorama of horrors below, and he was Yahweh's Adversary, and, stoned as they were, he looked like Stanley Laurel to them. And then Yahweh spoke, in the eternal words of Oliver Hardy: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the first Vision.
They looked again, and they saw Lee Harvey Oswald perched in the window of the Texas School Book Depository; and he, again, wore the face of Stanley Laurel. And, because this world had been created by a great god named Earl Warren, Oswald fired the only shots that day, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was, as the Salvation Army charmingly expresses it, "promoted to glory."
"This is Confusion," said Athena with her owl-eyes flashing, for she was more familiar with the world created by the god Mark Lane.
Then they saw a hallway, and Oswald-Laurel was led out between two policemen. Suddenly Jack Ruby, with the face of Oliver Hardy, stepped forward and fired a pistol right into that frail little body. And then Ruby spoke the eternal words, to the corpse at his feet: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the second Vision.
Next, they saw a city of 550,000 men, women and children, and in an instant the city vanished; shadows remained where the men were gone, a firestorm raged, burning pimps and infants and an old statue of a happy Buddha and mice and dogs and old men and lovers; and a mushroom cloud arose above it all. This was in a world created by the crudest of all gods, Realpolitik.
"This is Discord," said Apollo, disturbed, laying down his lute.
Harry Truman, a servant of Realpolitik, wearing the face of Oliver Hardy, looked upon his work and saw that it was good. But beside him, Albert Einstein, a servant of that most elusive and gnomic of gods, Truth, burst into tears, the familiar tears of Stanley Laurel facing the consequences of his own karma. For a brief instant, Truman was troubled, but then he remembered the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the third Vision.
Now they saw trains, many trains, all of them running on time, and the trains criss-crossed Europe and ran 24 hours a day, and they all came to a few destinations that were alike. There, the human cargo was stamped, catalogued, processed, executed with gas, tabulated, recorded, stamped again, cremated and disposed.
"This is Bureaucracy," said Dionysus, and he smashed his wine jug in anger; beside him, his lynx glared balefully.
And then they saw the man who had ordered this, Adolf Hitler, wearing still the mask of Oliver Hardy, and he turned to a certain rich man, Baron Rothschild, wearing the mask of Stanley Laurel, and they knew this was the world created by the god Hegel and the angel Thesis was meeting the demon Antithesis. Then Hitler spoke the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the fourth Vision.
They did then look further and, lo, high as they were they saw the founding of a great republic and proclamations hailing new gods named Due Process and Equal Rights for All. And they saw many in high places in the republic form a separate cult and worship Mammon and Power. And the Republic became an Empire, and soon Due Process and Equal Rights for All were not worshipped, and even Mammon and Power were given only lip-service, for the true god of all was now the impotent What Can I Do and his dull brother What We Did Yesterday and his ugly and vicious sister Get Them Before They Get Us.
"This is Aftermath," said Hera, and her bosom shook with tears for the fate of the children of that nation.
And they saw many bombings, many riots, many rooftop snipers, many Molotov cocktails. And they saw the capital city in ruins, and the leader, wearing the face of Stanley Laurel, taken prisoner amid the rubble of his palace. And they saw the chief of the revolutionaries look about at the rubble and the streets full of corpses, and they heard him sigh, and then he addressed the leader, and he spoke the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the fifth Vision.
And now the Olympians were coming down and they looked at each other in uncertainty and dismay. Zeus himself spoke first.
"Man," he said, "that was Heavy Grass."
"Far fuckin out," Hermes agreed solemnly.
"Tree fuckin mendous," added Dionysus, petting his lynx.
"We were really fuckin into it," Hera summed up, for all.
And they turned their eyes again on the Golden Apple and read the word Our Lady Eris had written upon it, that most multiordinal of all words, Kallisti. And they knew that each god and goddess, and each man and woman, was in the privacy of the heart, the prettiest one, the fairest; the most innocent, the Best. And they repented themselves of not having invited Our Lady Eris to their party, and they summoned her forth and asked her, "Why did you never tell us before that all categories are false and all Good and Evil a delusion of limited perspective?"
And Eris said, "As men and women are actors on a stage of our devising, so are we actors on the stage devised by the Five Fates. You had to believe in Good and Evil and pass judgments on your creatures, the men and women below. It was a curse the Fates put upon you! But now you have come to the Great Doubt and you are free."
The Olympians thereupon lost interest in the god-game and soon were forgotten by humanity. For She had shown them a great Light, and a great Light destroys shadows; and we are all, gods and mortals, nothing else but gliding shadows. Do you believe that?
"No," said Fission Chips.
"Very well," the Dealy Lama said somberly. "Begone, back to the world of maya!"
And Fission Chips whirled head over heels into a vortex of bleatings and squealings, as tune and space were given another sharp tug and, nearly a month later, head over heels, the Midget is up and tottering across Route 91 as the rented Ford Brontosaurus shrieks to a stop and Saul and Barney are out the doors (every cop instinct telling them that a man who runs from an accident is hiding something) but John Dillinger, driving toward Vegas from the north, continues to hum "Good-bye forever, old sweethearts and gals, God… bless… you.. " and the same tug in space-time grips Adam Weishaupt two centuries earlier, causing him to abandon his planned soft sell and blurt out to an astonished Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Spielen Sie Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" and Chips, hearing Weishaupt's words, is back in the graveyard at Ingolstadt as four dark figures move away in dusk.
"Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" Goethe asks, putting hand on chin in a pose that was later to become famous, "Das ist dein hoch Zauberwerk?"
"Ja, ja," Weishaupt says nervously, "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel."
Ingolstadt always reminds me of the set of a bleeding Frankenstein movie, and, after Saint Toad and that shoggoth chap and the old Lama with his wog metaphysics, it was no help at all to have an invisible voice ask me to join him in a bawdy card game. I've faced some weird scenes in H.M. Service but this Fernando Poo caper was turning out to be outright unwholesome, in fact unheimlich as these krauts would say. And, hi the distance, I began to hear wog music, but with a Yank beat to it, and suddenly I knew the worst: that blasted Lama or Saint Toad or somebody, had lifted nearly a month out of my life. I had walked into Saint Toad's after midnight on March 31 (call it April 1, then) and this would be April 30 or May 1. Walpur-gisnacht. When all the kraut ghosts are out. And I was probably considered dead back in London. And if I called in and tried to explain what had happened, old W. would be downright psychiatric about the matter, oh, he'd be sure I was well around the bend. It was a rum go either way.
Then I remembered that the old Lama in Dallas had said he was sending me to the final battle between Good and Evil. This was probably it, right here, right now, this night in Ingolstadt. A bit breathtaking to think of that. I wondered when the Angels of the Lord would appear: bloody soon, I hoped. It would be nice to have them around when Old Nick unleashed the shoggoth and Saint Toad and that lot.
So I toddled out into the streets of Ingolstadt and started sniffing around for the old sulphur and brimstone.
And half a mile below and twelve hours earlier, George Dorn and Stella Maris were smoking some Alamout Black hash with Harry Coin.
"You haven't got a bad punch for an intellectual," Coin said with warm regard.
"You're pretty good at rape yourself," George replied, "for the world's most incompetent assassin."
Coin started to draw back his lips in an angry snarl, but the hash was too strong. "Hagbard told you, Ace?" he asked bashfully.
"He told me most of it," George said. "I know that everybody on this ship once worked for the Illuminati directly or for one of their governments. I know that Hagbard has been an outlaw for more than two decades-"
"Twenty-three years exactly," Stella said archly.
"That figures," George nodded. "Twenty-three years, then, and never killed anybody until that incident with the spider ships four days ago."
"Oh, he killed us," Harry said dreamily, drawing on the pipe. "What he does is worse than capital punishment, while it's going on. I can't say I'm the same man I was before. But it's pretty bad until you come through."
"I know," George grinned. "I've had a few samples myself."
"Hagbard's system," Stella said, "Is very simple. He just gives you a good look at your own face in a mirror. He lets you see the puppet strings. It's still up to you to break them. He's never forced anyone to do anything that goes against their heart. Of course," she frowned in concentration, "he does sort of maneuver you into places where you have to find out in a hurry just what your heart is saying to you. Did he ever tell you about the Indians?"
"The Shoshone?" George asked. "The cesspool gag?"
"Let's play a game," Coin interrupted, sinking lower in his chair as the hash hit him harder. "One of us in this room is a Martian, and we've got to guess from the conversation which one it is."
"Okay," Stella said easily. "Not the Shoshone," she told George, "the Mohawk."
"You're not the Martian," Coin giggled. "You stick to the subject, and that's a human trait."
George, trying to decide if the octopus on the wall was somehow connected with the Martian riddle, said, "I want to hear about Hagbard and the Mohawk. Maybe that will help us identify the Martian. You think up good games," he added kindly, "for a guy who was sent on seven assassination missions and fucked up every one of them."
"I'm dumb but I'm lucky," Coin said. "There was always somebody else there blasting away at the same time. Politicians are awfully unpopular these days, Ace."
This was a myth, Hagbard had confided to George. Until Harry Coin had completed his course in the Celine System, it was better if he believed himself the world's most unsuccessful assassin rather than face the truth: that he had goofed only on his first job (Dallas, November 22, 1963) and really had killed five men since then. Of course, even if Hagbard wasn't a holy man any longer, he was still tricky: maybe Harry had, indeed, missed every time. Perhaps Hagbard was keeping the image of Harry as mass murderer in George's mind to see if George could relate to the man's present instead of being hung up on his "past."
At least I've learned this much, George thought. The word "past" is always in quotes for me, now.
"The Mohawk," Stella said, leaning back lazily (George's male organ or penis or dick or whatever the hell is the natural word, if there is a natural word, well, my cock, then, my delicious ever-hungry cock rose a centimeter as her blouse tightened on her breasts, Lord God, we'd been humping like wart hogs in rutting season for hours and hours and hours and I was still horny and still in love with her and I probably always would be, but then again maybe I'm the Martian). Well, in fact, the old pussy hunter didn't rise more than a millimeter, not a centimeter, and he was as slow, as an old man getting out of bed in January. I had just about fucked until my brains came out my ears, even before Harry brought in the hash and wanted to talk. Looking for the Martian. Looking for the governor of Dorn. Looking for the Illuminati. Krishna chasing his tail around the curved space of the Einsteinian universe until he disappears up his own ass, leaving behind a behind: the back of the void: the Dorn theory of circutheosodomognosis. "Owned some land," she continued. That beautiful black face, like ebon melody: yes, no painter could show but Bach could hint the delight of those purple-tinted lips in that black face, saying, "And the government wanted to steal the land. To build a dam." The inside of her cunt had that purple hue to it, also, and there was a tawny beige in her palm, like a Caucasian's skin, there were so many delights in her body, and in mine, too, treasures that couldn't be spent in a million years of the most tender and violent fucking. "Hagbard was the engineer hired to build the dam, but when he found out that the Indians would be dispossessed and relocated on less fertile ground, he refused the job." Eris, Eros spelled sideways. "He broke his contract, so the government sued him," she said. "That's how he got to be a close friend with the Mohawk."
Which was all pure crapperoo. Obviously, Hagbard had gone to court as a lawyer for the Indians, but that one touch of shame in him had kept him from admitting to Stella that he had once been a lawyer, so he made up that bit about being the engineer on the dam to explain how he got involved in the case.
"He helped them move when they were dispossessed." I could see bronze men and women moving in twilight, a hill in the background. "This was a long time ago, back in the '50s, I think. (Hagbard was a hell of a lot older than he looked.) One Indian was carrying a raccoon he said was his grandfather. He was a very old man himself. He said Grandfather could remember General Washington and how he changed after he became President. (He would be there tonight, that being who had once been George Washington and Adam Weishaupt: he of whom Hitler had said, "He is already among us. He is intrepid and terrible. I am afraid of him.") Hagbard says he kept thinking of Patrick Henry, the one man who saw what had happened at the Constitutional Convention. It was Henry who had looked at the Constitution and said right away, 'I smell a rat. It squints toward monarchy.' The Old Indian, whose name was Uncle John Feather, said that Grandfather, when he was a man, could speak to all animals. He said the Mohawk Nation was more than the living, it was the soul and the soil joined together. When the land was taken, some of the soul died. He said that was why he couldn't speak to all animals but only to those who had once been part of his family." The soul is in the blood, moving the blood. It is in the night especially. Nutley is a typical Catholic-dominated New Jersey town, and the Dorns are Baptists, so I was hemmed in two ways, but even as a boy I used to walk along the Passaic looking for Indian arrowheads, and the soul would move when I found one. Who was the anthropologist who thought the Ojibway believed all rocks were alive? A chief had straightened him out: "Open your eyes," he said, "and you'll see which rocks are alive." We haven't had our Frobenius yet, American anthropology is like virgins writing about sex.
"I know who the Martian is," Coin crooned in a singsong. "But I'm not telling. Not yet." That man who was either the most successful or the most unsuccessful assassin of the 20th century and who had raped me (which was supposed to destroy my manhood forever according to some idiots) was smashed out of his skull and he looked so happy that I was happy for him.
"Hagbard," Stella went on, "stood there like a tree. He was paralyzed. Finally, old Uncle John Feather asked what was the matter."
Stella leaned forward, her face more richly black against the golden octopus on the wall. "Hagbard had foreseen the ecological catastrophe. He had seen the rise of the Welfare State, Warrior Liberalism (as he calls it) and the spread of Marxism out of Russia across the world. He saw why it all had to happen, with or without the Illuminati helping it along. He understood the Snafu Principle."
He had worked all that night, after explaining to Uncle John Feather that he was troubled in his heart at the tragedy of the Mohawk (not mentioning the more enormous tragedy coming at the planet, the tragedy which the old man understood already in his own terms); hard work, carrying pitiful cheap furniture from cabins onto trucks, tying whole households' possessions with tough ropes; he was sweating and winded when they finished shortly before dawn. The next day, he had burned his naturalization papers and put the ashes in an envelope addressed to the President of the United States, with a brief note: "Everything relevant is ruled irrelevant. Everything material is ruled immaterial. An ex-citizen." The ashes of his Army Reserve discharge went to the Secretary of Defense with a briefer note: "Non serviam. An ex-slave." That year's income tax form went to the Secretary of the Treasury, after he wiped his ass on it; the note said: "Try robbing a poor box. Der Einziege." His fury still mounting, he grabbed his copy of Das Kapital off the bookshelf, smiling bitterly at the memory of his sarcastic marginal notes, scrawled "Without private property there is no private life" on the flyleaf, and mailed it to Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. Then he buzzed his secretary, gave her three months pay in lieu of notice of dismissal and walked out of his law office forever. He had declared war on all governments of the world.
His afternoon was spent giving away his savings, which at that time amounted to seventy thousand dollars. Some he gave to drunks on the street, some to little boys or little girls in parks; when the Stock Exchange closed, he was on Wall Street, handing out fat bundles of bills to the wealthiest-looking men he could spot, telling them, "Enjoy it. Before you die, it won't be worth shit." That night he slept on a bench hi Grand Central Terminal; in the morning, flat broke, he signed on as A.B.S. aboard a merchant ship to Norway.
That summer he tramped across Europe working as tourist guide, cook, tutor, any odd job that fell his way, but mostly talking and listening. About politics. He heard that the Marshall Plan was a sneaky way of robbing Europe under the pretense of helping it; that Stalin would have more trouble with Tito than he had had with Trotsky; that the Viet Minh would surrender soon and the French would retake Indo-China; that nobody in Germany was a Nazi anymore; that everybody in Germany was still a Nazi; that Dewey would unseat Truman easily.
During his last walking tour of Europe, in the 1930s, he had heard that Hitler only wanted Czechoslovakia and would do anything to avoid war with England; that Stalin's troubles with Trotsky would never end; that all Europe would go socialist after the next war; that America would certainly enter the war when it came; that America would certainly stay out of the war when it came.
One idea had remained fairly constant, however, and he heard it everywhere. That idea was that more government, tougher government, more honest government was the answer to all human problems.
Hagbard began making notes for the treatise that later became Never Whistle While You're Pissing. He began with a section that he later moved to the middle of the book:
It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people's brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation's capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.
It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell's 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a "radio" built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, "Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?" This little voice the Freudians call "The Superego," with Freud himself vividly characterized as "the ego's harsh master." With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as "a set of conditioned verbal habits."
This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram {the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart-'that is, from the biogram.
No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.
Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram- what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants -is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less "real." They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, "a tool, a machine, a robot."
Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class- the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe- is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.
But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.
The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.
I call this the Snafu Principle.
That autumn, Hagbard settled in Rome. He worked as a tourist guide, amusing himself by combining authentic Roman history with Cecil B. DeMille (none of the tourists ever caught him out); he also spent long hours scrutinizing the published reports of Interpol. His Wanderjahr was ending; he was preparing for action. Never subject to guilt or masochism, he had one reason only for his dispersal of his savings: to prove to himself that what he intended could be done starting from zero. When winter arrived, his studies were complete: Interpol's crime statistics had very kindly provided him with a list of those commodities which, either because of tariffs intended to stifle competition or because of "morals" laws, could become the foundation of a successful career in smuggling.
One year later, in the Hotel Claridge on Forty-fourth Street in New York, Hagbard was placed under arrest by two U.S. narcotics agents named Galley and Eichmann. "Don't take it too hard," Galley said. "We're only following orders."
"It's okay," Hagbard said, "don't feel guilty. But what are you going to do with my cats?"
Galley knelt on the floor and examined the kittens thoughtfully, scratching one under the chin, rubbing the ear of the other. "What's their names?" he asked.
"The male is called Vagina," Hagbard said. "The female I call Penis."
"The male is called what?" Eichmann asked, blinking.
"The male is Vagina, and the female is Penis," Hagbard said innocently, "but there's a metaphysic behind it. First, you have to ask yourself, which appeared earlier on this planet, life or death? Have you ever thought about that?"
'This guy is nuts," Galley told Eichmann.
"You've got to realize," Hagbard went on, "that life is a coming apart and death is a coming together. Does that help?"
("I never know whether Hagbard is talking profundity or asininity," George said dreamily, toking away.)
"Reincarnation works backward in time," Hagbard went on, as the narcs opened drawers and peered under chairs. "You always get reborn into an earlier historical period. Mussolini is a witch in the 14th century now, and catching hell from the Inquisitors for his bum karma in this age. People who 'remember' the past are all deluded. The only ones who really remember past incarnations remember the future, and they become science-fiction writers."
(A little old lady from Chicago walked into George's room with a collection can marked Mothers March Against Phimosis. He gave her a dime and she thanked him and left. After the door closed, George wondered if she had been a hallucination or just a woman who had fallen through a space-time warp and landed on the Leif Erikson.)
"What the hell are these?" Eichmann asked. He had been searching Hagbard's closet and found some red, white and blue bumper stickers. The top half of each letter was blue with white stars, and the bottom half was red-and-white stripes; they looked patriotic as all get-out. The slogan formed this way was
LEGALIZE ABORTION PREGNANCY IS A JEWISH PLOT!
Hagbard had been circulating these in neighborhoods like the Yorkville section of Manhattan, the western suburbs of Chicago, and other places where old-fashioned Father Coughlin-Joe McCarthy style Irish Catholic fascism was still strong. This was a trial run on the logogram-biogram double-bind tactic out of which the Dealy Lama later developed Operation Mindfuck.
"Patriotic stickers," Hagbard explained.
"Well, they look patriotic…" Eichmann conceded dubiously.
("Did a little woman from Chicago just walk through this room?" George asked.
"No," Harry Coin said, toking again. "I didn't see any woman from Chicago. But I know who the Martian is.")
"What the hell are these?" Galley asked. He had found some business-size cards saying RED in green letters and GREEN in red letters.
("When you're out of it all the way, on the mountain," George asked, "that's neither the biogram nor the logogram, right? What the hell is it, then?")
"An antigram," Hagbard explained, still helpful.
"The cards are an antigram?" Eichmann repeated, bewildered.
"I may have to place you under arrest and take you downtown," Hagbard warned. "You've both been very naughty boys. Breaking and entering. Pointing a gun at me- that's technically assault with a deadly weapon. Seizing my narcotics- that's theft. All sorts of invasion of privacy. Very, very naughty."
"You can't arrest us," Eichmann whined. "We're supposed to arrest you."
"Which is red and which is green?" Hagbard asked.
"Look again," They looked and RED was now really red and GREEN was really green. (Actually, the tints changed according to the angle at which Hagbard held the card, but he wasn't giving away his secrets to them.) "I can also change up and down," he added. "Worse yet, I clog zippers. Neither one of you can open your fly right now, for instance. My real gimmick, though, is reversing revolvers. Try to shoot me and the bullets will come out the back and you'll never use your good right hand again. Try it and see if I'm bluffing."
"Can't you go a little easy on us, officer?" Eichmann took out his wallet. "A cop's salary ain't the greatest in the world, eh?" He nudged Hagbard insinuatingly.
"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly.
"Why not?" Harry Coin whined. "You got nothing to gain by killing me. Take the money and put me off the sub at the first island you pass."
"Well," Hagbard said thoughtfully, counting the money.
"I can get more," Harry added. "I can send it to you."
"I'm sure." Hagbard put the money in his clam-shell ashtray and struck a match. There was a brief, merry blaze, and Hagbard asked calmly, "Do you have any other inducements to offer?"
"I'll tell you anything you want to know about the Illuminati!" Harry shrieked, really frightened now, realizing that he was in the hands of a madman to whom money meant nothing.
"I know more about the Illuminati than you do," Hagbard replied, looking bored. "Give me a philosophic reason, Harry. Is there any purpose in allowing a specimen like you to go on preying on the weak and innocent?"
"Honest, I'll go straight. I'll join your side. I'll work for you, kill anybody you want."
"That's a possibility," Hagbard conceded. "It's a slim one, though. The world is full of killers and potential killers. Thanks to the Illuminati and their governments, there's hardly an adult male alive who hasn't had some military training. What makes you think I couldn't go out on the streets of any large city and find ten better-qualified killers than you inside an afternoon?"
"Okay, okay," Harry said, breathing hard. "I don't have no college education, but I'm not a fool either. Your men dragged me from Mad Dog Jail to this submarine. You want something, Ace. Otherwise, I'd be dead already."
"Yes, I want something." Hagbard leaned back in his chair. "Now you're getting warm, Harry. I want something but I won't tell you what it is. You've got to produce it and show it to me without any clues or hints. And if you can't do that, I really will have you killed. I shit you not, fellow. This is my version of a trial for your past crimes. I'm the judge and the jury and you've got to win an acquittal without knowing the rules. How do you like that game?"
"It ain't fair."
"It's more of a chance than you gave any of the men you shot, isn't it?"
Harry Coin licked his lips. "I think you're bluffing," he ventured finally. "You're some chicken-shit liberal who doesn't believe in capital punishment. You're looking for an excuse to not kill me."
"Look into my eyes, Harry. Do you see any mercy in them?"
Coin began to perspire and finally looked down into his lap. "Okay," he said hollowly. "How much time do I have?"
Hagbard opened his drawer and took out his revolver. He cracked it open, showing the bullets, and quickly snapped it closed again. He slipped the safety catch- a procedure he later found unnecessary with George Dorn, who knew nothing about guns- and aimed at Harry's belly. "Three days and three minutes are both too long," he said casually. "If you're ever going to get it, you're going to get it now."
"Mama," Coin heard himself exclaim.
"You're going to shit your pants in a moment," Hagbard said coldly. "Better not. I find bad smells offensive, and I might shoot you just for that. And mama isn't here, so don't call her again."
Coin saw himself lunging across the room, the gun roaring in mid-leap, but at least trying to get his hands on this bastard's throat before dying.
"Pointless," Hagbard grinned icily. "You'd never get out of the chair." His finger tightened slightly, and Coin's gut churned; he knew enough about guns to know how easy it was to have an accident, and he thought of the gun going off even before the bastard Celine intended it to, maybe even as he was on the edge of guessing the goddam riddle, the pointlessness of it was the final horror, and he looked again into those eyes without guilt or pity or any weakness he could exploit; then, for the first time in his life, Harry Coin knew peace, as he relaxed into death.
"Good enough," Hagbard said from far away, snapping the safety back in place. "You've got more on the ball than either of us realized."
Harry slowly came back and looked at that face and those eyes. "God," he said.
"I'm going to give you the gun in a minute," Hagbard went on. "Then it's my turn to sweat. Of course, if you kill me you'll never get off this sub alive, but maybe you'll think that's worthwhile, just for revenge. On the other hand, maybe you'll be curious about that instant of peace- and you'll wonder if there's an easier way to get back there and if I can teach it to you. Maybe. One more thing, before I toss you the gun. Everybody who joins me does it by free choice. When you said you'd come over to my side just because you were afraid of dying, you had no value to me at all. Here's the gun, Harry. Now, I want you to check it. There are no gimmicks, no missing firing pin or anything like that. No other tricks, either- nobody watching you through a peephole and ready to gun you down the minute you aim at me, or anything like that. I'm totally at your mercy. What are you going to do?"
Harry examined the gun carefully, and looked back at Hagbard. He had never studied kinetics and orgonomy as Hagbard had, but he could read enough of the human face and body to know what was going on in the other man. Hagbard had that same peace he himself had experienced for a moment.
"You win, you bastard," Harry said, tossing the gun back. "I want to know how you do it."
"Part of you already knows," Hagbard smiled gently, putting the gun back in the drawer. "You just did it, didn't you?"
"What would he have done if I did block?" Harry asked Stella in present time.
"Something. I don't know. A sudden act of some sort that scared you more than the gun. He plays it by ear. The Celine System is never twice the same."
"Then I was right, he wouldn't have killed me. It was all bluff."
"Yes and no." Stella looked past Harry and George, into the distance. "He wasn't acting with you, he was manifesting. The mercilessness was quite real. There was no sentimentality involved in saving you. He did it because it's part of his Demonstration."
"His Demonstration?" George asked, thinking of geometry problems and the neat Q.E.D. at the bottom, back in Nutley years and years ago.
"I've known Hagbard longer than she has," Eichmann said. "In fact, Galley and I were among the first people he enlisted. I've watched him over the years, and I still don't understand him. But I understand the Demonstration."
"You know," George said absently, "when you two first came in, I thought you were a hallucination."
"You never saw us at dinner, because we work in the kitchen," Galley explained. "We eat after everybody else."
"Only a small part of the crew are former criminals," Stella told George, who was looking confused. "Rehabilitating a Harry Coin- pardon me, Harry- doesn't really excite Hagbard much. Rehabilitating policemen and politicians, and teaching them useful trades, is work that really turns Hagbard on."
"But not for sentimental reasons," Eichmann emphasized. "It's part of his Demonstration."
"It's his Memorial to the Mohawk Nation, too," Stella said. "That trial set him off. He tried a direct frontal assault that time, attempting to cut through the logogram with a scalpel. It didn't work, of course; it never does. Then he decided: 'Very well, I'll put them where words can't help, and see what they do then.' That's his Demonstration."
Hagbard, actually- well, not actually; this is just what he told me- had started with two handicaps, intending to prove that they weren't handicaps. The first was that he would have a bank balance of exactly $00.00 at the beginning, and the second was that he would never kill another human being throughout the Demonstration. That which was to be proved (namely, that government is a hallucination, or a self-fulfilling prophecy) could be shown only if all his equipment, including money and people, came to him through honest trade or voluntary association. Under these rules, he could not shoot even in self-defense, for the biogram of government servants was to be preserved, and only their logograms could be disconnected, deactivated and defused. The Celine System was a consistent, although flexible, assault on the specific conditioned reflex- that which compelled people to look outside themselves, to a god or a government, for direction or strength. The servants of government all carried weapons; Hagbard's insane scheme depended on rendering the weapons harmless. He called this the Tar-Baby Principle ("You Are Attached To What You Attack").
Being a man of certain morbid self-insight, he realized that he himself exemplified the Tar-Baby Principle and that his attacks on government kept him perpetually attached to it. It was his malign and insidious notion that government was even more attached to him; that his existence qua anarchist qua smuggler qua outlaw aroused greater energetic streaming in government people than their existence aroused in him: that, in short, he was the Tar Baby on which they could not resist hurling themselves in anger and fear: an electrochemical reaction in which he could bond them to himself just as the Tar Baby captured anyone who swung a fist at it.
More (there was always more, with Hagbard), he had been impressed, on reading Weishaupt's Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp, Weltspielen and Funfwissenschaft, by the passage on the Order of Assassins, which read:
Surrounded by Moslem maniacs on one side and Christian maniacs on the other, the wise Lord Hassan preserved his people and his cult by bringing the art of assassination to esthetic perfection. With just a few daggers strategically placed in exactly the right throats, he found Wisdom's alternative to war, and preserved the peoples by killing their leaders. Truly, his was a most exemplary life of grandmotherly kindness.
"Grossmutterlich Gefalligkeit," muttered Hagbard, who had been reading this in the original German, "now where have I heard that before?"
In a second, he remembered: the Mu-Mon-Kan or "Gateless Gate" of Rinzai Zen contained a story about a monk who kept asking a Zen Master, "What is the Buddha?" Each time he asked, he got hit upside the head with the Master's staff. Finally discouraged, he left and sought enlightenment with another Master, who asked him why he had left the previous teacher. When the poor gawk explained, the second Master gave him the ontological hotfoot: "Go back to your previous Master at once," he cried, "and apologize for not showing enough appreciation of his grandmotherly kindness!"
Hagbard was not surprised that Weishaupt evidently knew, in 1776 when Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp was written, about a book which hadn't yet been translated into any European tongue; he was astonished, however, that even the evil Ingolstadt Zauberer had understood the rudiments of the Tar-Baby Principle. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati, he thought then- for the first time. He was to think it many times in the next two and a half decades.
On April 24, when he told Stella to deliver some Kallisti Gold to George's stateroom, Hagbard had already asked FUCKUP the odds that Illuminati ships would arrive in Peos within the time he intended to be there. The answer was better than 100-to-l. He thought about what that meant, then buzzed to have Harry Coin sent in.
Harry swaggered to a chair, trying to look insolent, and said, "So you're the leader of the Discordians, eh?"
"Yes," Hagbard said evenly, "and on this ship, my word is law. Wipe that silly grin off your face and sit up straight." He observed the involuntary stiffening of Harry's body before the man caught himself and remembered to maintain his slouch. Typical: Coin could resist the key conditioning phrases, but only with effort. "Listen," he said softly "/ will tell you only one more time"-another Bavarian Fire Drill, that-"This is my ship. You will address me as Captain Celine. You will come to attention when I talk to you. Otherwise…" he let the phrase trail off.
Slowly, Coin shifted to a more respectful kinesic posture- immediately modifying it by grinning more insolently. Well, that was good; the streak of rebellion ran deep. The breathing was not bad for a professional criminal: the only block seemed to be at the bottom of the exhalation. The grin was a defense against tears, of course, as with most chronic American smilers. Hagbard attempted a probe: Harry's father was the kind who pretended to consider the case and to toy with forgiveness before he would administer the thrashing.
"Is that better?" Harry asked, accentuating his respectful posture and grinning more sarcastically.
"A little," Hagbard said, sounding mollified. "But I don't know what I'm going to do with you, Harry. That's a bad bunch you've been mixed up with, very un-American." He paused to get a reaction to the word; it came at once.
"Their money is as good as anyone's," Harry said defiantly. His shoes crept backwards, as he spoke, and his neck decreased an inch- the turtle reflex, Hagbard called it; and it was a sure sign of the repressed guilt denied by the man's voice.
"You were born pretty poor, weren't you?" Hagbard asked, in a neutral tone.
"Poor? We was white niggers."
"Well, I guess there's some excuse for you…" Hagbard watched: the grin grew wider, the body imperceptibly moved back toward slouching. "But, to turn on your own country, Harry. That's bad. That's the lowest thing a human being can do. It's like turning against your own mother." The toes curled inward again, tentatively. What did Harry's father say before wielding the belt? Hagbard caught it: "Harry," he repeated it gravely, "you haven't been acting like a proper white man. You've been acting like you got nigger blood."
The grin stretched to the breaking point and became a grimace, the body stiffened to the most respectful possible posture. "Now, look here, sir," Harry began, "you got no call to talk to me that way-"
"And you're not even ashamed," Hagbard ran over him. "You don't show any remorse." He shook his head with profound discouragement. "I can't let you wander around loose, committing more crimes and treasons. I'm going to have to feed you to the sharks."
"Listen, Captain Celine, sir, I've got a money belt under this shirt and it's full of more hundred-dollar bills than you ever saw at one time…"
"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly; the rest of the scene would be easy, he reflected. Part of his mind drifted to the Illuminati ships he would meet at Peos. There was no way to use the Celine System without communicating, and he knew the crew would be "protected" against him by some Illuminati variation on the ear wax of Ulysses' men passing the Sirens. The money would go in the giant clam-shell ashtray, a real shocker for a man like Coin, but what would he do about the Illuminati ships?
When the time came to produce the gun, he slipped the safety off viciously. If I'm going to join the ancient brotherhood of killers, he thought morosely, maybe I should have the stomach to start with a visible target. "Three days and three minutes are both too long," he said, trying to sound casual, "if you're ever going to get it, you're going to get it now." They would be at Peos in less than an hour, he thought, as Coin involuntarily cried "Mama." Like Dutch Schultz, Hagbard reflected; like how many others? It would be interesting to interview doctors and nurses and find out how many people passed out with that primordial cry for the All-Protector on their lips… but Harry finally surrendered, abdicated, left the robot running itself according to the biogram. He was no longer sitting in an insolent slouch, a respectful attention, a guilty cramp… He was simply sitting. He was ready for death.
"Good enough," Hagbard said. "You've got more on the ball than either of us realized." The man would now transfer his submissive reflexes to Hagbard; and the next stage would be longer and harder, before he learned to stop playing roles entirely and just manifest as he had in the face of extinction.
The gun gambit was variation #2 of the third basic tactic in the Celine System; it had five usual sequels. Hagbard picked the most dangerous one- he usually did, since he didn't much like the gun gambit at all, and could only stomach it if he gave most of the subjects a chance at the other role. This time, however, he knew he had another motive: somewhere, deep inside, a coward in him hoped Harry Coin was crazier than he had estimated and would, in fact, shoot; that way Hagbard could avoid the decision awaiting him in Peos.
"You win, you bastard," Coin's voice said; Hagbard came back and quickly rushed through a small verbal game involving Hell images picked up from Harry's childhood. When he had Coin sent back to his room, under light security, he slouched in his chair and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He probed for Dorn and found the Dealy Lama was on that channel, broadcasting.
– Leave the kid alone, he beamed. It's my turn now. Go contemplate your navel, you old fraud.
A shower of rose petals was the nonverbal answer. The Lama faded out. George went on rapping to himself on the themes planted by the ELF leader: Odd, the big red one. Eye think it was his I. The eye of Apollo. His luminous I.
– Aye, trust me not, Hagbard beamed. Trust not a man who's rich in flax- his morals may be sadly lax. (Some of my own doubts getting in here, he thought.) Her name is Stella Maris. Black star of the seas. (I won't tell him who she and Mavis really are.) George, I want you in the captain's control room.
George should start with variation #1, the Liebestod or orgasm-death trip, Hagbard decided. Make him aware of the extent to which he treats women as objects- and, of course, give him some mystical hogwash later to gloss it over temporarily, so the doubt will be pushed into the unconscious for a while. Yes: George was already on a pornography trip, very similar to Atlanta Hope and Smiling Jim Treponema, except that in his case it was egodystonic.
"That was a good trick," George said a few moment's later in the captain's control room, "how you got me up on the bridge with that telepathy thing."
Hagbard, still thinking about the decision in Peos, tried to look innocent when he replied, "I called you on the intercom." He realized that he was whistling and pissing at once, worrying about Peos as well as about George, and brought himself back sharply. "Absurd" was the word in George's mind- absurd innocence. Well, Hagbard thought, I fucked that one up.
"You think I can't tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?" George demanded. Hagbard roared with laughter, totally in the present again; but after George had been sent to the chapel for his initiation, the problem returned. Either the Demonstration failed, or the Demonstration failed. Double bind. Damned both ways. It was infuriating, but all the books had warned him long ago: "As ye give, so shall ye get." He had used the Celine System on quite a few people over nearly three decades, and now he was in the middle of a classic Celine Trap himself. There was no correct answer, except to give up trying.
When the moment came, though, he found that part of him had not given up trying. "Ready for destruction of enemy ships," said Howard.
Hagbard shook his head. George was remembering some crazy incident in which he had tried to commit suicide while standing by the Passaic River, and Hagbard kept picking up parts of that bum trip while trying to clear his own head. "I wish we could communicate with them," he said aloud, realizing that he was possibly blowing the guru game by revealing his inner doubts to George. "I wish I could give them a chance to surrender…"
"You don't want them too close when they go," said Howard.
"Are your people out of the way?" Hagbard asked in agony.
"Of course," the dolphin replied irritably. "Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."
"The sea is crueler than the land," Hagbard protested, but then he added "sometimes."
"The sea is cleaner than the land," Howard replied. Hagbard tried to focus- the dolphin was obviously aware of his distress, and soon George would be (no: a quick probe showed George had retreated from the scene into the past and was shouting, "You silly sons of bitches," at somebody named Carlo). "These people have been your enemies for thirty thousand years."
"I'm not that old," Hagbard said wearily. The Demonstration had failed. He was committed, and others with him were now committed. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively. "That's all there is to it," he said quietly.
("Be a wise-ass then! When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you'll come back to reality." A voice long, long ago… at Harvard… And once, in the South, he had been moved by a very simple, a ridiculously simple, Fundamentalist hymn:
Jesus walked this lonesome valley. He had to walk it all alone. Nobody else could walk there for Him. He had to walk it by Himself.
I will walk this lonesome valley, Hagbard thought bitterly, all by myself, all the way to Ingolstadt and the final confrontation. But it's meaningless now, the Demonstration has failed; all I can do is pick up the pieces and salvage what I can. Starting with Dorn right here and right now.)
Hate, like molten lead, drips from the wounded sky… they call it air pollution… August Personage dials slowly, with the cunt-starved eyes of a medieval saint… "God lies!" Weishaupt cried in the middle of his first trip, "God is Hate!"… Harry Coin is crumpled in his chair… George's head hangs at an angle, like a doll with a broken spring… Stella doesn't move… They are not dead but stoned…
Abe Reles blew the whistle on the entire Murder Inc. organization in 1940… He named Charley Workman as the chief gun in the Dutch Schultz massacre… He gave the details proving the roles of Lepke (who was executed) and Luciano (who was imprisoned and, later, exiled)… He kept his mouth shut about certain other things, however… But Drake was worried. He gave orders to Maldonado, who conveyed them to a capo, who passed them on to some soldiers… Reles was guarded by five policemen but nonetheless he went out his hotel window and spread like jam on the ground below… There were mutterings in the press… The coroner's jury couldn't believe that five cops were on the take from the Syndicate… Reles's. death was declared to be suicide… But in 1943, as the Final Solution moved into high gear, Lepke announced he wanted to talk before his execution… Tom Dewey, alive by grace of the Dutchman's death, was governor, and he granted a stay of execution… Lepke spent twenty-four hours with Justice Department officials and it was announced later that he refused to reveal anything of significance… One of the officials had been brought back from State to work with Justice because of his background on Schultz and the Big Six Syndicate… He said little, but Lepke read a lot in his eyes… His name, of course, was Winifred… Lepke understood: as Bela Lugosi once said, there are worse things than dying…
In 1932 the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped… Already at that time, a heist of that dimension could not be permitted in the Northeast without the consent of a full-fledged don of the Mafia… Even a capo could not authorize it alone… The aviator's father, Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr., had been an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve monopoly… Among other things, he had charged on the floor of Congress, "Under the Federal Reserve Act panics are scientifically created; the present one is the first scientifically created one worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…" The go-between in delivering the ransom money was Jafsie Condon, Dutch Schultz's old high school principal… "It's got to be one of them coincidences," as Marty Krompier said later…
John Dillinger arrived in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, and rented an Avis at the airport. He drove out to Dealy Plaza and scouted the terrain. The Triple Underpass where Harry Coin was supposed to stand when doing the job was under observation from a railroadman's shack, he noted; it occurred to him that the man in that shack would not have a long life expectancy. There would be a lot of other eyewitnesses, he realized, and the JAMs couldn't protect them all, not even with the help of the LDD. It was going to be bad all around… In fact, the man in the railroad shack, S. M. Holland, told a story that didn't jibe with the Earl Warren version, and later died when his car went off the road under circumstances that aroused speculation among those given to speculating; the coroner's jury called it an accident… Dil-linger found his spot in the thickly wooded part of the Grassy Knoll and waited until Harry Coin appeared on the Underpass. He made himself relax and looked around to be sure that he was invisible from everywhere but a helicopter (there were no helicopters: the Illuminati's top double agent within the Secret Service had seen to that). A movement in the School Book Depository caught Ms eye. Something not kosher up there. He swung his binoculars… and caught another head, ducking quickly, atop the Dal-Tex building. An Italian, very young… That was bad. If one of Maldonado's soldiers was here, either the Illuminati were aware they had a double agent in their midst and had hired two assassins, or else the Syndicate was acting on its own. John panned back to the School Book Depository: whoever that clown was, he had a rifle, too, and he was being cagey: definitely not Secret Service.
This was a piss-cutter.
John's original plan was to plug Harry Coin before Coin could get a bead on the young Hegelian from Boston. Now, he had three men to knock out at once. It couldn't be done. There was no human way of hitting more than two of those targets- all three of them in different areas and at different elevations- before the fuzz were swarming all over him. The third would have time to do the job while that was happening. It was what Hagbard called an existential koan.
"Shit, piss and industrial waste," John muttered, quoting another Celinism.
Well, save what you can, as Harry Pierpont always said when a bank job went sour in the middle. Save what you can and haul ass out of that place.
If Kennedy had to die, and obviously it was in the cards or in the I Ching at least (which probably explained why Hagbard, after consulting that computer of his, refused to get involved in this caper), then "save what you can" could only be applied, in this case, to mean: screw the Illuminati. He would give them a mystery they would never solve.
The motorcade was already in front of the School Book Depository, and the gazebo up there might start blasting at any minute, if Harry Coin or the Mafiosos weren't quicker. Dillinger hoisted his rifle, quickly sighted on John F. Kennedy's skull, and thought briefly, Even if it falls through and doesn't remain an enigma to bug the Illuminati, think of those wild headlines when I'm caught: PRESIDENT SHOT BY JOHN DILLINGER, people will think Orson Welles is publishing the papers now, and then he tightened his finger.
("Murder?" George asked. "It's hard not to think of Good and Evil when a man's games get that hairy."
"During the Kali Yuga," Stella replied, "almost all our games are played with live ammunition. Haven't you noticed?")
The three shots blew brains into Jackie Kennedy's lap and Dillinger, whirling in amazement, saw the man start to run out of the Grassy Knoll down into the street. John set off in pursuit and caught a glimpse of the face as the killer mingled in the crowd below.
"Christ!" John said. "Him?"
Stella toked again- she never seemed to think she I was sufficiently stoned. "Wait," she said. "There's a I passage in Never Whistle While You're Pissing that goes into this a bit." She got up, walking quite slowly like all potheads, and rummaged among the books on the wall shelf. "You know the old saying, 'different strokes for different folks'?" she asked over her shoulder. "Hagbard and FUCKUP have classified sixty-four thousand personality types, depending on which strokes, or gambits, they use most often in relating to others." She found the book and carefully walked back to her chair. "For instance," she said slowly. "Right now, you can intersect my life line in a number of ways, from kissing my hand to slitting my throat. Between those extremes, you can, let's say, carry on an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation underneath it, or an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation and also with kinesic signals indicating that the flirtation is only a game and you don't really want me to respond, and on an even deeper level you can be sending other signals indicating that actually you do want me to respond after all but you're not ready to admit that to yourself. In authoritarian society, as we know it, people are usually sending either very simple dominance signals- 'I'm going to master you, and you better accept it before I get really nasty'- or submissive signals- 'You're going to master me, and I'm reconciled to it.'"
"Lord in Heaven," Harry Coin said softly. "That was what my first session with him was all about. I tried dominance signals to bluff him, and it didn't work. So I tried submissive signals, which is the only other gimmick I ever knew, and that didn't work either. So I just gave up."
"Your brain gave up," Stella corrected. "The strategy center, for dealing with human relations in authoritarian society, was exhausted. It had nothing left to try. Then the Robot took over. The biogram. You acted from the heart."
"But what has redundance got to do with this?" George asked.
"Here's the passage," Stella said. She began to read aloud:
People exist on a spectrum from the most redundant to the most flexible. The latter, unless they are thoroughly trained in psychodynamics, are always at a disadvantage to the former in social interactions. The redundant do not change their script; the flexible continually keep changing, trying to find a way of relating constructively. Eventually, the flexible ones find the "proper" gambit, and communication, of a sort, is possible. They are now on the set created by the redundant person, and they act out his or her script.
The steady exponential growth of bureaucracy is not due to Parkinson's Law alone. The State, by making itself ever more redundant, incorporates more people into its set and forces them to follow its script.
"That's heavy," George said, "but I'll be damned if I can see how it applies to Jesus or Emperor Norton."
"Exactly!" Harry Coin chortled. "And that ends the game. You've just proven what I suspected all along. You're the Martian!"
"Don't raise your voices," Galley said drowsily from the floor. "I can see hundreds of blissful Buddhas floating through the air…"
A single blissful Buddha, meanwhile- together with an inverted Satanic cross, a peace symbol, a pentagon and the Eye in the Triangle- were taking up Danny Pricefixer's attention, back in New York. He had finally decided to play his hunch about the Confrontation bombing and the five associated disappearances. The decision came after he and the acting head of Homicide received a thorough ass-chewing from the Police Commissioner himself. "Malik is gone. The Walsh woman is gone. This Dora kid was taken right out of a jail in Texas. Two of my best men, Goodman and Muldoon, are gone. The Feds are nasty and I can tell they know something that makes this case even more important than five possible murders alone would account for. I want you to report some kind of progress before the day is over, or I'll replace you with Post-Toasties Junior G-Men."
When they escaped into the hall, Pricefixer asked the man from Homicide, Van Meter, "What are you going to do?"
"Go back and give my men the same ass-chewing. They'll produce." Van Meter didn't really sound convinced. "What are you going to do?" he added lamely.
"I'm going to play a hunch," Danny said, and he walked down to Bunco-Fraud, where he exchanged some words with a detective named Sergeant Joe Friday who always insisted on trying to act like his namesake in the famous television series.
"I want a mystic," Danny said.
"Palmist, crystal-gazer, witch, astrologer… any preference?" Friday asked.
"The technique doesn't matter. I want one you've never been able to pin anything on. One you investigated and found a little scary… as if she or he really did have something on the ball."
"I know the one you want," Friday said emphatically, hitting the intercom button on his phone. "R amp; I," he said and waited. "Carella? Send up the package on Mama Sutra."
The package, when it shot out of the interoffice tube, proved to be all that Danny had hoped for. Mama Sutra had no arrests. She had been investigated several times- usually at the demand of rich husbands who thought she had too much influence over their wives, and once at the demand of the board of directors of a public utility who thought the president of the firm consulted too often with her- but none of her activities involved any claims that could be construed to be in violation of the fraud laws. Furthermore, she had dealt with the extremely wealthy for many years and had never played any games remotely like an okanna borra or Gypsy Switch on any of them. Her business card, included in the package, modestly offered only "spiritual insight," but she evidently delivered it in horse doctor's doses: one detective, after interviewing her, quit the force and entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, a second became questionable and finally useless in the eyes of his superiors because of an incessant series of memos he wrote urging that New York be the first American city to experiment with the English system of unarmed policemen, and a third announced that he had been a closet queen for two decades and began sporting a Gay Liberation button, necessitating his immediate transfer to the Vice Squad.
"This is my woman," Pricefixer said; and an hour later, he sat in her waiting room studying the blissful Buddha and other occult accessories, feeling like a horse's ass. This was really going way out on a limb, he knew, and his only excuse was that Saul Goodman frequently cracked hopeless cases by making equally bizarre jumps. Danny was ready to jump: the disappearance of Professor Marsh, in Arkham, was connected with the Confrontation mystery, and both were connected with Fernando Poo and the gods of Atlantis.
The receptionist, an attractive young Chinese woman named Mao something-or-other, put down her phone and said, "You can go right in."
Danny opened the door and walked into a completely austere room, white as the North Pole. The white walls had no paintings, the white rug was solid white without any design in it, and Mama Sutra's desk and the Danish chair facing it were also white. He realized that the total lack of occult paraphernalia, together with the lack of color, was certainly more impressive than heavy curtains, shadows, smoldering candles and a crystal ball.
Mama Sutra looked like Maria Ouspenskaya, the old actress who was always popping up on the late late show to tell Lon Chaney Jr. that he would always walk the "thorny path" of lycanthropy until "all tears empty into the sea."
"What can I do for you?" she asked in a brisk, businesslike manner.
"I'm a detective on the New York Police," Danny said, showing her his badge. "I'm not here to hassle you or give you any trouble. I need knowledge and advice, and I'll pay for it out of my own pocket."
She smiled gently. "The other officers, who investigated me for fraud in the past, must have created quite a legend at police headquarters. I promise no miracles, and my knowledge is limited. Perhaps I can help you; perhaps not There will be no fee, in either case. Being in a sensitive profession, I would like to keep on friendly terms with the police."
Danny nodded. "Thanks," he said. "Here's the story…"
"Wait." Mama Sutra frowned. "I think I am picking up something already. Yes. District Attorney Wade. Clark. The ship is sinking. 2422. If I can't live as please, let me die when I choose. Does any of that mean anything to you?"
"Only the first part," Danny said, perplexed. "I suspect that the matter I'm investigating goes back at least as far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who handled the original investigation of that killing, in Dallas, was District Attorney Henry Wade. The rest of it doesn't help at all, though. Where did you get it from?"
"There are… vibrations… and I register them." Mama Sutra smiled again. "That's the best explanation I can offer. It just happens, and I've learned how to use it. Somewhat. I hope someday before I die a psychologist will go far enough out in his investigations to find something that will explain to me what I do. The sinking ship is meaningless? How about the date, June 15, 1904? That seems to be on the same wave."
Pricefixer shook his head. "No help, as they say in poker."
"Wait," Mama Sutra said. "It means something to me. There was an Irish writer, James Joyce, who studied the theosophy of Blavatski and the mysticism of the Golden Dawn Society. He wrote a novel in which all the action takes place on June 16, 1904. The novel is called Ulysses, and is impregnated on every page with coded mystical revelations. And, yes, now I remember, there is a shipwreck mentioned in it. Joyce made all the background details historically accurate, so he included what was actually in the Dublin papers that day- the book takes place in Dublin, you see- and one of the stories concerned the sinking of the ship, General Slocum, in New York Harbor the day before, June 15."
"Did you say Golden Dawn?" Pricefixer demanded excitedly.
"Yes. Does that help?"
"It just adds to the confusion, but at least it shows you're on the right track. The case I'm working on seems to be connected with the disappearance of a professor from a university in Massachusetts several years ago, and he left behind some notes that mentioned the Golden Dawn Society and… let's see… some of its members. Aleister Crowley is one name I remember."
"To Mega Theiron," Mama Sutra said slowly, beginning to pale slightly. "Young man, what you are involved in is very serious. Much more than an ordinary police officer could understand. But you are not an ordinary police officer or you wouldn't have come to me in the first place. Let me tell you flatly, then, that what you have stumbled upon is something that could very easily involve both James Joyce's mysticism and the assassination of President John Kennedy. But to understand it you will have to stretch your mind to the breaking point. Let me suggest that you wait while I have my receptionist make you a rather stiff drink."
"Can't drink on duty, ma'am," Danny said sadly. Mama Sutra took a deep breath. "Very well. You'll have to take it cold and struggle with it as best you can."
"Does it involve the lloigor?" Danny asked hesitantly.
"Yes. You already have a large part of the puzzle if you know that much."
"Ma'am," Danny said, "I think I'll have that drink. Bourbon, if you have it."
2422, he thought while Mama Sutra spoke to the receptionist, that's even crazier than the rest of this. 2 plus 4 plus 2 plus 2. Adds up to 10. The base of the decimal system. What the hell does that mean? Or 24 plus 22 adds up to 46. That's two times 23, the number missing in between 24 and 22. Another enigma. And 2 times 4 times 2 times 2 is, let's see, 32. Law of falling bodies. High school physics class. 32 feet per second per second. And 32 is 23 backwards. Nuts.
Miss Mao entered with a tray. "Your drink, sir," she said softly. Danny took the glass and watched her gracefully walk back toward the door. Mao is Chinese for cat, he remembered from his years in Army Intelligence, and she certainly moved like a cat. Mao: onomatopoeia they call that. Like kids calling a dog "woof-woof." Come to think of it, that's how we got the word "wolf." Funny, I never thought of that before. Oh, the pentagram outside, and the pentagram in those old Lon Chaney Wolf Man movies. Malik's mystery mutts. Enough of that.
He took a stiff wallop of the bourbon and said, "Go ahead. Start. I'll take some more of the medicine when my mind starts crumbling."
"I'll give it to you raw," Mama Sutra said quietly. "The earth has already been invaded from outer space. It is not some threat in the future, for writers to play with. It happened, a long time ago. Fifty million years ago, to be exact."
Danny took another belt of his drink. "The lloigor," he said.
"That was their generic name for themselves. There were several races of them. Shoggoths and Tcho-Tchos and Dholes and Tikis and Wendigos, for instance. They were not entirely composed of matter as we understand it, and they do not occupy space and time in the concrete way that furniture does. They are not sound waves or radio waves or anything like that either, but think of them that way for a while. It's better than not having any mental picture of them at all. Did you take any physics in high school?"
"Nothing like relativity," Danny said, realizing that he was believing all this.
"Sound and light?" she asked.
"A little."
"Then you probably know two elementary experiments. Project a white light through a prism and a spectrum appears on the screen behind the prism. You've seen that?"
"Yes."
"And the experiment with a glass tube that has a thin layer of colored powder on the bottom, when you send a sound wave through it?"
"Yeah. And the wave leaves little marks at each of its valleys and you can see them in the powder." The track of the invisible wave in a visible medium.
"Very well. Now you can picture, perhaps, how the lloigor, although not made of matter as we understand it, can manifest themselves in matter, leaving traces that show, let us say, a cross section of what they really are."
Danny nodded, totally absorbed.
"From our point of view," Mama Sutra went on, "they are intolerably hideous in these manifestations. There is a reason for that. They were the source of the worst terrors experienced by the first humans. Our DNA code still carries an aversion and terror toward them, and this activates a part of our minds which the psychologist Jung called the Collective Unconscious. That is where all myth and art come from. Everything frightening, loathsome and terrible-in the folklore, in the paintings and statues, in the legends and epics of every people on earth-contains a partial image of a manifestation of the lloigor. 'As a foulness shall ye know Them,' a great Arab poet wrote."
"And they've been at war with us through all history?" Danny asked unhappily.
"Not at all. Are the stockyards at war with the cattle? It's nothing like war at all," Mama Sutra said sinply. "It's just that they own us."
"I see," Danny said. "Yes, of course. I see." He looked into his empty glass dismally. "Could I have another?" he murmured.
After Miss Mao had brought him another bourbon, he took a huge swallow and slouched forward in his chair. "There's nothing we can do about it?" he asked.
"There is one group that has been trying to liberate humanity," Mama Sutra said. "But lloigor have great powers to warp and distort minds. This group is the most maligned, slandered and hated people on earth. All the evil they seek to prevent has been attributed to them. They operate in secret because otherwise they would be destroyed. Even now, the John Birch Society and various other fanatics- including an evil genius named Hagbard Celine- struggle ceaselessly to combat the group of whom I speak. They have many names, the Great White Brotherhood, the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, the Golden Dawn… usually, though they are known as the Illuminati."
"Yes!" Danny cried excitedly. "There was a whole bunch of memos about them at the scene of the crime that started this case."
"And the memos, I would wager, portrayed them in an unfavorable light?"
"Sure did," Danny agreed. "Made them seem the worst bastards in history. Pardon me, ma'am." I'm getting drunk, he thought.
"That is how they are usually portrayed," Mama Sutra said sadly. "Their enemies are many, and they are few…"
"Who are their enemies?" Danny leaned forward eagerly.
"The Cult of the Yellow Sign," Mama Sutra replied. "This is a group serving one particular lloigor called Hastur. They live in such terror of this being that they usually call him He Who Is Not To Be Named. Hastur resides in a mysterious place called Hali, which was formerly a lake but is now just desert. Hali was by a great city in the lost civilization of Carcosa. You look as if those names mean something to you?"
"Yes. They were in the notes of the professor who disappeared. The other case that I was convinced was connected with this one."
"They have been mentioned- unwisely, I think- by certain writers, such as Bierce and Chambers and Lovecraft and Bloch and Derleth. Carcosa was located where the Gobi Desert is at present. The major cities were Hali, Mnar and Sarnath. The Cult of the Yellow Sign has managed to conceal all this rather thoroughly, although a few archeologists have published some interesting speculations about the Gobi area. Most of the evidence of a great civilization before Sumer and Egypt has been either hidden or doctored so that it seems to point to Atlantis. Actually, Atlantis never existed, but the Cult of the Yellow Sign carefully keeps the myth alive so nobody will discover what went on, and still goes on, in the Gobian wastelands. You see, the Cult of the Yellow Sign still goes there, on certain occasions, to worship and make certain transactions with Hastur, and with Shub Niggurath, a lloigor who is known in mystical literature as the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, and with Nyarlathotep, who appears either as a solid black man, not a Negro but black as an abyss, or else as a gigantic faceless flute player. But I repeat: you cannot understand the lloigor by these manifestations or cross sections into our space-time continuum. Do you believe in God?"
"Yes," Danny answered, startled by the sudden personal question.
"Take a little more of your drink. I must tell you now that your God is another manifestation of some lloigor. That is how religion began, and how the lloigor and their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign continue it. Have you ever had what is called a religious or mystical experience?"
"No," Danny said, embarrassed.
"Good. Then your religion is just a matter of believing what you have been told and not of a personal emotional experience. All such experiences come from the lloigor, to enslave us. Revelations, visions, trances, miracles, all of it is a trap. Ordinary, normal people instinctively avoid such aberrations. Unfortunately, due to their gullibility and a concerted effort to brainwash them, they are willing to follow the witches and wizards and shamans who traffic in these matters. You see, and I urge you to take another drink right now, every religious leader in human history has been a member of the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all their efforts are devoted to hoaxing, deluding and enslaving the rest of us."
Danny finished his glass and asked meekly, "May I have more?"
Mama Sutra buzzed for Miss Mao and said, "You're taking this part very well. People who have had religious visions take it very poorly; they don't want to know what foul source those experiences actually came from. The lloigor, of course, can be considered gods- or demons- but it is more profitable, at this point in history, to just consider them another life form cast up by the universe, unfortunately superior to us and even more unfortunately inimical to us. You see, religion is always a matter of sacrifice, and whenever there is a sacrifice there is a victim- and also a person or entity profiting from the sacrifice. There is no religion in the world- not one- that is not a front for the Cult of the Yellow Sign. The Cult itself, like the lloigor, is of prehuman origin. It began among the snake people of Valusia, the peninsula that is now Europe, and then spread eastward to be adopted by the first humans in Carcosa. Always the purpose of the Cult has been to serve the lloigor, at the expense of other human beings. Since the rise of the Illuminati, the Cult has also acted to combat their work and discredit them."
Danny was glad that Miss Mao arrived then with his third stiff bourbon. "And who are the Illuminati and what is their goal?" he asked, belting away a strong swallow.
"Their founder," Mama Sutra said, "was the first man to think rationally about the lloigor. He realized that they were not supernatural, but just another aspect of nature; not all-powerful, but just more powerful than us; and that when they came 'out of the heavens' they came from other worlds like this one. His name has come down to us in certain secret teachings and documents. It was Ma-lik."
"Jesus," Danny said, "that's the name of the guy whose disappearance started all this."
"The name meant 'one who knows' in the Carcosan tongue. Among the Persians and some Arabs today it still exists but means 'one who leads.' His followers, the Illuminati, are those who have seen the light of reason- which is quite distinct from the stupefying and mind- destroying light in which the lloigor sometimes appear to overwhelm and mystify their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign. What Ma-lik sought, what the Illuminati still seek, is scientific knowledge that will surpass the powers of the lloigor, end mankind's enslavement and allow us to become self-owners instead of property."
"How large is the Illuminati?"
"Very small. I don't know the exact number." Mama Sutra sighed. "I have never been accepted for membership. Their standards are quite high. One must virtually be a walking encyclopedia to qualify for an initial interview. You must remember that this is the most dedicated, most persecuted, most secret group in the world. Everything they do, if not wiped off the records by the Cult of the Yellow Sign, is always misrepresented and pictured as malign, devious and totally evil. Indeed, any effort to be rational, to think scientifically, to discover or publish a new truth, even by those outside the Illuminati, is always pictured in those colors by the Cult and all the religions which serve as its fronts. All churches, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever, have always opposed and persecuted science. The Cult of the Yellow Sign even fills the mass media with this propaganda. Their favorite stories are the one about the scientist who isn't fully human until he has a religious insight and recognizes 'the higher powers'- the lloigor, that is- and the other one about the scientist who seeks truth without fear and causes a disaster. 'He meddled with things man should leave alone' is always the punch line on that one. The same hatred of knowledge and glorification of superstition and ignorance permeates all human societies. How much more of this can you stand?" Mama Sutra asked abruptly.
"I don't honestly know," Danny said wearily. "It seems if I do get to the bottom of this business, it'll bring every power in this country down on my head. The least that'll happen is that I'll get kicked out of my job. More likely, I'll disappear like the man I'm looking for and the first two detectives on this case. But for my own satisfaction, I'd like to know the rest of the truth, before I bid you good day and look for a hole to hide in. You might also tell me how you can survive, knowing as much as you do."
"I have studied much. I have a Shield. I cannot explain the Shield anymore than I can explain my ESP. I only know that it works. As to answering your other questions, first tell me about your investigation. Then I will be able to relate it to the Illuminati and the Cult of the Yellow Sign."
Danny took another drink, closed his eyes for a minute and launched into his story. He began with the Marsh disappearance in Arkham four years earlier, his perusal of the missing professor's notes, his reading in the books mentioned in those notes and his conclusion that a drug cult was involved. Then he told of the Confrontation bombing, his skimming of the Illuminati memos, the disappearance of Ma-lik, Miss Walsh, Goodman and Muldoon, and the frantic curiosity of the FBI. "That's it," he concluded. "That's about all I know."
Mama Sutra nodded thoughtfully, "It is as I feared," she said finally. "I think I can shed light on the matter, but you will be well advised to leave the police force and seek the protection of the Illuminati after you have heard. You are already, at this very moment, in great peril." She lapsed into silence again, and then said, "You will not see the picture of what is happening now, until I give you more of the background."
For the next hour, Danny Pricefixer sat transfixed as Mama Sutra told him of the longest war in history, the battle for the freedom of the human mind waged by the Illuminati against the forces of slavery, superstition and sorcery.
It began, she repeated, in ancient Carcosa when the first humans were contacted by the serpent people of Valusia. The latter brought with them certain fruits with strange powers. These fruits would be called hallucinogens or psychedelics today, Mama Sutra said, but what they did to the brain of the eater was not in any sense a hallucination. It opened him to invasion by the lloigor. The chief fruit used in these rites was a botanical cousin of the modern apple, yellowish or golden in color, and the snake people promised, "Eat of this and you shall become all-powerful." In fact, the eaters became enslaved by the lloigor, and especially by Hastur, who took up residence in the Lake of Hali; distorted versions of what happened have come down to us in various African legends about people who had commerce with snakes and lost their souls, in the Homeric tale of the lotus eaters, in Genesis, and in the Arabic lore utilized in the fiction of Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce and others. Soon, the Cult of the Yellow Sign was formed among the eaters of the golden apples, and its first high priest, Gruad, bargained with Hastur for certain powers in return for.which the lloigor were fed on human sacrifices. The people were told that the sacrifices were good for the crops-and this, in fact, was partially true, for the lloigor ate only the energy of the victim, and the body, buried in the fields, gave back its nitrogen to the soil. This was the beginning of religion-and of government. Gruad controlled the Temple, and the Temple soon controlled Hali, and, then, all of Carcosa.
So things went for many thousands of years, until the priests were rich, fat and decadent, while the citizens lived in terror and slavery. The number of sacrifices increased ever, for Hastur grew with each victim whose energy he absorbed and his appetite grew with him. Finally, among the people, there arose one who had been refused admission to the priesthood, Ma-lik, and he taught that humanity could become all-powerful, not through eating the golden apples and sacrificing to the lloigor, but through a process he called rational thought. He was, of course, fed to Hastur as soon as the priests heard of this teaching, but he had followers, and they quickly learned to keep their thoughts private and plan their activities in secret. This was the age of midnight arrests, purge trials and accelerating sacrifices in Carcosa, Mama Sutra said, and eventually the followers of Ma-lik-the few who had escaped extermination-fled to the Thuranian subcontinent, which is now Europe.
There they met little people who had come down from the north after the snake folk had exterminated each other in some form of slow, insidious and stealthy civil war. (Apparently, the snakes never met in a single battle during all this time: the poison in the wine cup, the knife in the back and similar subtle activities had slowly escalated to the deadly level of actual warfare. The serpent people had an aversion to facing an enemy as they killed him.) The little people had had their own experiences with the lloigor, long ago, but all they remembered were confused legends about Ores (whom Mama Sutra identified with the Tcho-Tchos) and a great hero named Phroto who battled a monster called Zaurn (evidently a shoggoth, Mama Sutra said.)
Many millenniums passed, and the little people and the followers of Ma-lik intermarried, producing basically the human race of today. A great law-giver named Kull tried to establish a rational society on Ma-lik's principles, and fought a battle with some of the serpent people who had surprisingly survived in hidden places; most of this got lost in exaggeration and legend. After more thousands of years, a barbarian named Konan or Conan arose, somehow, to the throne of Aquilonia, mightiest kingdom on the Thuranian subcontinent; Konan brooded much about the continuing horrors in Carcosa, which he sensed as a threat to the rest of the world. Finally, he disappeared, abdicating in favor of his son, Conn, and reputedly sailing to the west.
Konan, Mama Sutra said, was the same person who appeared in the Yucatan peninsula at that time and became known as Kukulan. He was evidently seeking, among the Mayan scientists, some knowledge or technology to use against the lloigor. Whatever happened, he left them, and only the legend of Kukulan, "the feathered serpent," remained. When the Aztecs came down from the north, Kukulan became Quetzalcoatl, and human sacrifice was instituted in his name. The lloigor, in some fashion, had turned the work of Konan around and made it serve their own ends.
Carcosa meanwhile perished. What happened is unknown, but some students of ancient lore suspect that Konan actually circumnavigated the globe, collecting knowledge as he went, and descended upon Carcosa with weapons that destroyed both the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all traces of the civilization that served it.
Throughout the rest of history, Mama Sutra went on, the Cult of the Yellow Sign never regained its former powers, but it has come very close in certain times and certain places. The lloigor continued to exist, of course, but could no longer manifest in our kind of space-time continuum unless the Cult performed very complicated technical operations, which were sometimes disguised as religious rituals and sometimes as wars, famines or other calamities.
Over the intervening ages, the Cult waged steady warfare against the one power that threatened them: rationality. When they couldn't manifest a lloigor to blast a mind, they learned to fake it; if real magic wasn't available, stage magic served in its place. "By 'real magic,' of course," Mama Sutra explained, "I mean the technology of the lloigor. As science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has commented, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The lloigor have that kind of technology. That's how they got to earth from their star."
"You mean their planet, don't you?" Danny asked.
"No, they lived originally on a star. I told you they were not made of matter as we understand it. Incidentally, their origin on a star explains why the pentagram or star shape always attracts their attention and is one of the best ways of summoning them. They invented that design. A star doesn't look five-pointed to a human being, but that's what it looks like to them."
Finally, in the 18th century, the Age of Reason appeared to be at hand. Tentatively, as an experiment, one branch of the Illuminati surfaced in Bavaria. They were led by an ex-Jesuit named Adam Weishaupt who had inside knowledge of how the Cult of the Yellow Sign operated and performed its hoaxes and "miracles." The real brain behind this movement, however, was Weishaupt's wife, Eve; but they knew that, even in the Age of Reason, humanity was not ready yet for a liberation movement led by a woman, so Adam fronted for her.
The experiment was unsuccessful. The Cult of the Yellow Sign planted fake documents in the home of an Illuminatus named Zwack, whispered some hints to Bavarian government and then watched with glee as the movement was disbanded and hounded out of Germany.
A simultaneous experiment began in America, started by two Illuminati named Jefferson and Franklin. Both preached reason, like Weishaupt, but carefully did not make his mistake of stating explicitly how this contradicted religion and superstition. (This latter matter they discussed only in their private letters.) Since Jefferson and Franklin were national heroes, and since the rationalistic government they helped to create seemed well established, the Cult of the Yellow Sign dared not denounce them openly. One trial balloon was attempted: the Reverend Jebediah Morse, a high Yellow Sign adept, openly accused Jefferson of being an Illuminatus and charged him and his party with most of the crimes that had discredited Weishaupt in Bavaria. The American public was not deceived- but all subsequent Yellow Sign propaganda in America has rested on the original anti-Illuminati claims of Reverend Morse.
Due to Jefferson, one Illuminati symbol was adopted by the new government: the Eye on the Pyramid, representing knowledge of geometry and, hence, of the order of nature. This was to be used in later generations, if necessary, to indicate the truth about the founding of the U.S. government, since it was well understood that the Cult of the Yellow Sign would try to distort the facts as soon as possible. Another Illuminati work, of more immediate importance, was the Bill of Rights (the part of the Constitution still under most vigorous attack by the Yellow Sign fanatics) and certain key expressions in early documents, such as the reference to "Nature and Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence- as far as Jefferson dared to go in leavening traditional superstition with a natural-science admixture. And, of course, the first half-dozen Presidents were all high-ranking Masons and Rosicrucians who understood at least the fundamentals of Illuminati philosophy.
Mama Sutra sighed briefly, and went on. All this, she said, is only the tip of the iceberg. Government actually plays a minor role in controlling people; far more important are the words and images that make up the semantic environment. The Cult of the Yellow Sign not only suppresses words and images that threaten their power, but infiltrates every branch of communications with their own ideology. Science and reason are forever mocked or portrayed as menacing. Wishful thinking, fantasy, religion, mysticism, occultism and magic are forever preached as the real solutions to all problems. Best-selling books teach people to pray, not work, for success. Movies win awards by showing a child's ignorant faith justified over the skepticism of adults. There is an astrology column in virtually every newspaper. More and more, the ideology of the Cult of the Yellow Sign is set forth openly, as the ideas of the Illuminati and the Founding Fathers are forgotten or distorted. One only has to think of any antidemocratic, antirational or antihumane idea out of the Dark Ages,' Mama Sutra said, and one can immediately think of some popular religious columnist or some movie star who is blatantly expounding it and calling it "Americanism."
The Cult of the Yellow Sign, the old woman continued, is determined to destroy the United States, because it came closer than any other nation to the Illuminati ideals of free minds and free people and because it still retains a few tattered relics of Illuminism in its laws and customs.
This is where Mr. Hagbard Celine enters the picture, Mama Sutra said grimly.
Celine, she went on, was a brilliant but twisted personality, the son of an Italian pimp and a Norwegian prostitute. Raised in the underworld, he early developed a contempt and hatred for ordinary, decent society. The Mafia, recognizing his talents and predilections, took him in and financed his way through Harvard Law School. After graduation, he became an important mouthpiece for Syndicate hoodlums in trouble with the law. On the side, however, he also took some cases for American Indians, since this was a way of frustrating the government. In one particularly bitter battle, he attempted to stop the construction of a much-needed dam in upstate New York; his unbalanced behavior in the courtroom (which helped lose the case) indicated his deep attraction for the occult, since he had obviously been taken in by the superstitions of the Indians he served. Mafia dons conferred with leaders of the Cult of the Yellow Sign, and soon, Hagbard, who had been wandering around Europe aimlessly, was recruited to start a new front for the Cult, to fight the United States both politically and religiously. This front, Mama Sutra said, was called the Legion of Dynamic Discord, and, while it pretended to be against all governments, it was actually devoted only to harming the U.S. He was given a submarine (which he later claimed to have designed himself) and became an important cog in the Mafia heroin-smuggling business. More important, his crew-renegades and misfits from all nations-were indoctrinated in a deliberately nonsensical variety of mysticism.
An important center of Celine's heroin network, Mama Sutra added, was a fake church in Santa Isobel on the island of Fernando Poo.
Obviously, Mama Sutra concluded, Joseph Malik, the editor of Confrontation, was investigating the IIluminati, deceived by the lies spread against them by Celine and the Yellow Sign adepts. As for Professor Marsh, his explorations in Fernando Poo may have revealed something about Celine's heroin ring.
"Then you think they're both dead," Danny said somberly. "And, probably, Goodman and Muldoon and Pat Walsh, the researcher, also."
"Not necessarily. Celine, as I have told you, is both brilliant and quite insane. He has perfected his own form of brainwashing and it amuses him to recruit rather than destroy any possible opponent. It is quite possible that all of these people are working for him right now, against the Illuminati and the United States, which they will believe to be the major enemies of humanity." Mama Sutra paused thoughtfully. "However, that is far from sure. Events in the last few days have changed Celine for the worse. He is more insane, and more dangerous, than ever. The assassinations of April 25 all across the nation appear to be his work, engineered through the Mafia. He is striking out blindly against anyone he imagines may be an Illuminatus. Needless to say, most of the victims were not actually in the Illuminati, which is, as I have mentioned, a very small organization. Since he is in this violent and paranoid frame of mind, I fear for the lives of anyone associated with him."
Danny was slumped forward in his chair, drunk, dejected and depressed. "Now that I know," he asked rhetorically, "what can I do about it? My God, what can I do about it?"
I finally got around to reading Telemachus Sneezed on the flight to Munich, a touch of appropriate synchronicity, since Atlanta Hope (like the Illuminati's pet paperhanger) had an umbilical connection backward toward Clark Kent's old enemy Lothar and his festive burgher's unsure God. In fact, Atlanta wrote as if she had her own Diet of Worms for breakfast every morning. What made it even more fan-fuckin'-tastic was that she was on the same flight with me, sitting, in fact, a few seats ahead of me and to port, or starboard, or whatever is the correct word for right when you're in the air.
Mary Lou was with me; she was a hard woman to get out of your system once you'd made it with her. John had advanced me only enough money for my own passage, so I'd hustled some Alamout Black on Wells Street to raise the extra fare for her, and then I had to explain that it wasn't just a pleasure trip.
"What's all the mystery?" she had asked, "Are you CIA or a Commie or something for Christ's sake?"
"If I told you," I said, "you wouldn't believe it. Just enjoy the music and the acid and whatever else is coming down, and when it happens you'll see it. You'd never believe it before you see it."
"Simon Motherfucking Moon," she told me gravely, "after the yoga and sex you've taught me these last three days, I'm ready to believe anything."
"Ghosts? The grand zombi?"
"Oh, there you go again, putting me on," she protested.
"See?"
So it was more or less left at that and we smoked two joints and hopped a cab out to O'Hare, passing all the signs where they were tearing down lower-middle-class neighborhoods to turn them into upper-middle-class high-rise neighborhoods and each sign said,
THIS IS ANOTHER IMPROVEMENT FOR CHICAGO-RICHARD J. DALEY, MAYOR.
Of course, in the lower-class neighborhoods, they weren't tearing anything down, just waiting for the people to go on another rampage and burn it down. The signs there were all done with spray cans and had more variety: OFF THE PIG, BLACK P. STONE RUNS IT, POWER TO THE PEOPLE, FRED LIVES, ALMIGHTY LATIN KINGS RUN IT, and one that would have pleased Hagbard, OFF THE LANDLORDS. Then we got into the traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway (Miss Doris Day standing before Ike's picture in my old schoolroom flashed through memory like the ghost of an old hard-on, the flesh of her mammary) and we put on our gas masks and sat while the cab crawled along fast enough to possibly catch a senile snail with arthritis.
Mary Lou bought Edison Yerby's seventieth or eightieth novel in the airport, which suited me fine since I like to read on airplanes myself. Looking around, I spotted Telemachus Sneezed and decided, what the hell, let's see how the other half thinks. So there we were at fifty thousand feet a few yards from the author herself and I was plunged deeply into the donner-und-blitzen metaphysics of God's Lightning. Unlike the lamentable Austrian monorchoid, Atlanta wrote like she had balls, and she expressed her philosophy in a frame of fiction rather than autobiography. Pretty soon, I was in her prose up to my ass and sinking rapidly. Fiction always does that to me: I buy it completely and my critical faculties come into action only after I'm finished.
Briefly, then, Telemachus Sneezed deals with a time in the near future when we dirty, filthy, freaky, lazy, dope-smoking, frantic-fucking anarchists have brought Law and Order to a nervous collapse in America'. The heroine, Taffy Rhinestone, is, like Atlanta was once herself, a member of Women's Liberation and a believer in socialism, anarchism, free abortions and the charisma of Che. Then comes the rude awakening: food riots, industrial stagnation, a reign of lawless looting and plunder, everything George Wallace ever warned us against- but the Supreme Court, who are all anarchists with names ending in -stein or -farb or -berger (there is no overt anti-Semitism in the book), keeps repealing laws and taking away the rights of policemen. Finally, in the fifth chapter- the climax of Book One- the heroine, poor toughy Taffy, gets raped fifteen times by an oversexed black brute right out of The Birth of a Nation, while a group of cops stand by cursing, wringing their hands and frothing at the mouth because the Supreme Court rulings won't allow them to take any action.
In Book Two, which takes place a few years later, things have degenerated even further and factory pollution has been replaced by a thick layer of marijuana smoke hanging over the country. The Supreme Court is gone, butchered by LSD crazed Mau-Maus who mistook them for a meeting of the Washington chapter of the Policemen's Benevolent Association. The President and a shadowy government-in-exile are skulking about Montreal, living a gloomy emigre existence; the Blind Tigers, a rather thinly disguised caricature of the Black Panthers, are terrorizing white women everywhere from Bangor to Walla Walla; the crazy anarchists are forcing abortions on women whether they want them or not; and television shows nothing but Maoist propaganda and Danish stag films. Women, of course, are the worst sufferers in this blightmare, and, despite all her karate lessons, Taffy has been raped so many times, not only by standard vage-pen but orally and anally as well, that she's practically a walking sperm bank. Then comes the big surprise, the monstro-rape to end all rapes, committed by a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. "Everything is fire," he tells her, as he pulls his prick out afterwards, "and don't you ever forget it." Then he disappears.
Well, it turns out that Taffy has gone all icky-sticky-gooey over this character, and she determines to find him again and make an honest man of him. Meanwhile, however, a subplot is brewing, involving Taffy's evil brother, Diamond Jim Rhinestone, an unscrupulous dope pusher who is mixing heroin in his grass to make everybody an addict and enslave them to him. Diamond Jim is allied with the sinister Blind Tigers and a secret society, the Enlightened Ones, who cannot achieve world government as long as a patriotic and paranoid streak of nationalism remains in America.
But the forces of evil are being stymied. A secret underground group has been formed, using the cross as their symbol, and their slogan is appearing scrawled on walls everywhere:
SAVE YOUR FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES, BOYS, THE STATE WILL RISE AGAIN!
Unless this group is found and destroyed, Diamond Jim will not be able to addict everyone to horse, the Blind Tigers won't be able to rape the few remaining white women they haven't gotten to yet, and the Enlightened Ones will not succeed in creating one world government and one monotonous soybean diet for the whole planet. But a clue is discovered: the leader of the Underground is a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. Furthermore, he is in the habit of discussing Heracleitus for like seven hours on end (this is a neat trick, because only about a hundred sentences of the Dark Philosopher survive- but our hero, it turns out, gives lengthy comments on them).
At this point there is a major digression, while a herd of minor characters get on a Braniff jet for Ingolstadt. It soon develops that the pilot is tripping on acid, the copilot is bombed on Tangier hash and the stewardesses are all speed freaks and dykes, only interested in balling each other. Atlanta then takes you through the lives of each of the passengers and shows that the catastrophe that is about to befall them is richly deserved: all, in one way or another, had helped, to create the Dope Grope or Fucks Fix culture by denying the "self-evident truth" of some hermetic saying by Heracleitus. When the plane does a Steve Brodie into the North Atlantic, everybody on board, including the acid-tripping Captain Clark, are getting just what they merit for having denied that reality is really fire.
Meanwhile, Taffy has hired a private detective named Mickey "Cocktails" Molotov to search for her lost Aryan rapist with hollow cheeks. Before I could get into that, however, I was wondering about the synchronistic implications of the previous section, and called over one of the stewardesses.
"Could you tell me the pilot's name?" I asked.
"Namen?" she replied. "Ja, Gretchen."
"No, not your name," I said, "the pilot's name. Namen wiser, um, Winginmacher?"
"Winginmacher?" she repeated, dubiously, "Bin Augenblick." She went away, while I looked up Augenblick in a pocket German-English dictionary, and another stewardess, with the identical uniform, the identical smile and the identical blue eyes, came over, asking, "Was wollen sie haben?"
I gave up on Winginmacher, obviously a bad guess. "Gibt mir, bitte," I said, "die Namen unser Fliegen-macher." I spread my arms, imitating the plane. "Luft Fliegenmacher," I repeated, adding helpfully, "How about Luft Piloten?"
"It's Pilot, not Piloten," she said wit h lots of teeth. "His name is Captain Clark. Heathcliffe Clark."
"Danke- Thanks," I said glumly, and returned to Telemachus Sneezed, imagining friend Heathcliffe up front there weathering heights of MISSPELLED - soaring and plunging into the ocean because, as Mallory said, it's there. An Englishman piloting a kraut airline, no less, just to remind me that I'm surrounded by the paradoxical paranoidal paranormal parameters of synchronicity. Their wandering ministerial Eye. Lord, I buried myself again in Atlanta Hope's egregious epic.
Cocktails Molotov, the private dick, starts looking for the Great American Rapist, with only one clue: an architectural blueprint that fell out of his pocket while he was tupping Taffy. Cocktails's method of investigation is classically simple: he beats up everybody he meets until they confess or reveal something that gives him a lead. Along the way he meets an effete snob type who makes a kind of William O. Douglas speech putting down all this brutality. Molotov explains, for seventeen pages, one of the longest monologues I ever read in a novel, that life is a battle between Good and Evil and the whole modern world is corrupt because people see things in shades of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet instead of in clear black and white.
Meanwhile, of course, everybody is still mostly involved in fucking, smoking grass and neglecting to invest their capital in growth industries, so America is slipping backward toward what Atlanta calls "crapulous precapitalist chaos."
At this point, another character enters the book, Howard Cork, a one-legged madman who commands a submarine called the Life Eternal and is battling everybody- the anarchists, the Communists, the Diamond Jim Rhinestone heroin cabal, the Blind Tigers, the Enlightened Ones, the U.S. government-in-exile, the still-nameless patriotic Underground and the Chicago Cubs-since he is convinced they are all fronting for a white whale of superhuman intelligence who is trying to take over the world on behalf of the cetaceans. ("No normal whale could do this," he says after every TV newscast reveals further decay and chaos in America, "but a whale of superhuman intelligence…!") This megalomaniac tub of blubber- the whale, not Howard Cork- is responsible for the release of the famous late-1960s record Songs of the Blue Whales, which has hypnotic powers to lead people into wild frenzies, dope-taking, rape and loss of faith in Christianity. In fact, the whale is behind most of the cultural developments of recent decades, influencing minds through hypnotic telepathy. "First, he introduced W. C. Fields," Howard Cork rages to the dubious first mate, "Buck" Star, "then, when America's moral fiber was sufficiently weakened, Liz and Dick and Andy
Warhol and rock music. Now, the Songs of the Blue Whales!" Star becomes convinced that Captain Cork went uncorked and wigged when he lost his leg during a simple ingrown toenail operation bungled by a hip young chiropodist stoned on mescaline. This suspicion is increased by the moody mariner's insistence on wearing an old cork leg instead of a modern prosthetic model, proclaiming, "I was born all Cork and I'm not going to die only three-fourths Cork!"
Then comes a turnabout scene, and it is revealed that Cork is actually not bananas at all but really a smooth apple. In a meeting with a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression, it develops that the Captain is an agent of the Underground which is called God's Lightning because of Heracleitus's idea that God first manifested himself as a lightning bolt which created the world. Instead of hunting the big white whale, as the crew thinks, the Life Eternal is actually running munitions for the government-in-exile and God's Lightning. When the hollow-cheeked leader leaves, he says to Cork, "Remember: the way up is the way down."
Meanwhile, the Gateless Gate swung creakingly open and I started picking up some of the "real" world. That is, I began to recognize myself, again, as the ringmaster. All of this information gets fed into me, entropy and negentropy all synergized up in a wodge of wonderland, and I compute it as well as my memory banks give it unto me to understand these doings.
But, as Harry Coin, I enter Miss Portinari's suite somewhat diffidently. I am conscious of the ghosts of dead pirates, only partly induced by this room's surrealist variety of Hagbard's nautical taste in murals. In fact, Harry, in his own language, had an asshole tight enough to shit bricks. It was easy, now, to accept that long-haired hippie, George, and even his black girlfriend as equals, but it just didn't seem right to be asked to accept a teenage girl as a superior. A couple days ago I would have been thinking how to get into her panties. Now I was thinking how to get her into my head. That Hagbard and his dope sure have screwed up my sense of values worse than anything since I left Biloxi.
And, for some reason, I could hear the Reverend Hill pounding the Bible and hollering up a storm back there in Biloxi, long ago, "No remission without blood! No remission without blood, brothers and sisters! Saint Paul says it and don't you forget it! No remission without the blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! Amen."
And Hagbard reads FUCKUP'S final analysis of the strategy and tactics in the Battle of Atlantis. All the evidence is consistent with Assumption A, and inconsistent with Assumption B, the mathematical part of FUCKUP has decided. Hagbard grinds his teeth in a savage grimace: Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control, and Assumption B is that there were human beings aboard them.
–Trust not a man who's rich in flax-his morals may be sadly lax.
"Ready for destruction of enemy ships," Howard's voice came back to him.
"Are your people out of the way?"
"Of course. Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."
(Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control.)
The sea is cruder than the land. Sometimes.
(None of the evidence is consistent with Assumption B.)
Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively. That's all there is to it, he said.
But that wasn't all there was to it. He had decided, coolly and in his wrong mind, that if he was a murderer already the final gambit might as well be one that would salvage part of the Demonstration. He had sent: George to Drake (Bob, you're dead now, but did you ever understand, even for a moment, what I tried to tell you? What Jung tried to tell you even earlier?) and then twenty-four real men and women were dead, and now the bloodshed was escalating, and he wasn't sure that any part of the Demonstration could be saved.
"No remission - without blood! No remission without blood, brothers and sisters… No remission without the blood of our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ!"
I got into the Illuminati in 1951, when Joe McCarthy was riding high and everybody was looking for conspiracies everywhere. In my own naive way (I was a sophomore at New York University at the time) I was seeking to find myself, and I answered one of those Rosicrucian ads in the back of a girlie magazine. Of course, the Rosicrucians aren't a front in the simple way that the Birchers and other paranoids think; only a couple of plants at AMORC headquarters are Illuminati agents. But they select possible candidates at random, and we get slightly different mailings than those sent to the average new member. If we show the proper spirit, our mailings get more interesting and a personal contact is made. Well, pretty soon I swore the whole oath, including that silly part about never visiting Naples, which is just an expression of an old grudge of Weishaupt's, and I was admitted as Illuminatus Minerval with the name Ringo Erigena. Since I was majoring in law, I was instructed to seek a career in the FBI.
I met Eisenhower only once, at a very large and sumptuous ball. He called another agent and myself aside. "Keep your eye on Mamie," he said. "If she has five martinis, or starts quoting John Wayne, get her upstairs quick."
Kennedy I never even talked to, but Winifred (whose name in the order is Scotus Pythagoras) used to bitch about him a lot. "This New Frontier stuff is dangerous," Winfred would say testily. "The man thinks he's living in a western movie. One big showdown, and the bad guys bite the dust. We'd best not let him last too long."
You can imagine how upset I was when the Dallas caper began to throw light on the whole overall pattern. Of course, I didn't know what to do: Winifred was my only superior in the government who was also a superior in the Illuminati, but I had a lot of hunches and guesses about some others, and I wouldn't want to bet that John Edgar wasn't one of them, for instance. When the feeler came from the CIA I went on what these kids today call a paranoid trip. It could have been coincidence or synchronicity, but it could have been the Order, scanning me, and ensuring that my involvement would get deeper.
("Most people in espionage don't know who they're working for," Winifred told me once, in that voice of silk and satin and stilettos, "especially the ones who only do 'small jobs.' Suppose we find a French Canadian separatist in Montreal who's in a position to provide certain information at certain times. We certainly don't ask him to work for American Intelligence. That's no concern of his, and even inimical to his real interests. So he's approached by another very convincing French Canadian who has 'evidence' to prove he's an agent of the most secret of all Quebec Libre underground movements. Or, if the Russians find a woman in Nairobi who has access to certain offices and happens to be anti-Communist and pro-English: no sense in trying to recruit her for the MVD, right? The contact she meets has a full set of credentials and just the right Oxford tone to convince her he's with M.5 in London. And so it goes," he ended dreamily, "so it goes…")
My CIA contact really was CIA; I'm almost absolutely willing to give odds around 60-40 on that. At least, he knew the proper passwords to show that he was acting under presidential orders, whatever that proves.
It was Hoover himself who ordered me to infiltrate God's Lightning. Well, he didn't pick me alone; I was part of a group, and a rousing pep talk he gave us. I can still remember him saying, "Don't let their American flags fool you. Look at those lightning bolts, right out of Nazi Germany, and, remember, the next thing to a godless Commie is a godless Nazi. They're both against Free Enterprise." Of course, as soon as I was admitted to the Arlington chapter of God's Lightning, I found out that Free Enterprise stood second only to Heracleitus in their pantheon. J. Edgar did get some queer hornets in his headgear at times-like his fear that John Dillinger was really still alive some place, laughing at him. That was the dread that turned him against Melvin Purvis, the agent who gunned Dillinger down in Chicago, and he rode Purvis right out of the Bureau. Those of you with long memories will recall that poor Purvis ended up working for a breakfast cereal company, acting as titular head of the Post-Toasties Junior G-Men.
It was in God's Lightning that I read Telemachus Sneezed, which I still think is a rip-roaring good yarn. That scene where Taffy Rhinestone sees the new King on television and it's her old rapist friend with the gaunt cheeks and he says, "My name is John Guilt"- man, that's writing. His hundred-and-three-page-long speech afterwards, explaining the importance of guilt and showing why all the anti-Heracleiteans and Freudians and relativists are destroying civilization by destroying guilt, certainly is persuasive-especially to somebody like me with three-going-on-four personalities each of which was betraying the others. I still quote his last line, "Without guilt there can be no civilization." Her nonfiction book, Militarism: The Unknown Ideal for the New Heracleitean is, I think, a distinct letdown, but the God's Lightning bumper stickers asking "What Is John Guilt?" sure give people the creeps until they learn the answer.
I met Atlanta Hope herself at the time of the New York Draft Riots. That was, you will remember, when God's Lightning, disgusted with reports that the FBI was swamped in two years' backlog in draft resistance and draft evasion cases, decided to organize vigilante groups to hunt down the hippie-yippie-commie-pacifist scum themselves. As soon as they entered the East Village- which harbored, as they suspected, hundreds of thousands of bearded, long-haired and otherwise semi-visible fugitives from the Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Chile and Tierra del Fuego conflicts-they began to encounter both suspects and resistance. After the third hour, the Mayor ordered the police to cordon the area. The police, of course, were on the side of God's Lightning and did all they could to aid their mayhem against the Great Unwashed while preventing reciprocal mayhem. After the third day, the Governor called out the National Guard. The Guard, who were mostly draft-dodgers at heart themselves, tried to even the score, and even help the Dregs and Drugs a bit. After the third week, the President declared that part of Manhattan a disaster area and sent in the Red Cross to help the survivors.
I was in the thick and din of it (you have no idea how bizarre civil war gets when one side uses trash cans as a large part of their arsenal) and even met Joe Malik, prematurely, under a Silver Wraith Rolls Royce where he had crawled to take notes near the front line and I had crept to nurse wounds received while being pushed through the window of the Peace Eye Bookstore- I have scars I could show you still- and a voice over my shoulder says that I should put in the fact that August Personage was trapped in a phone booth only a few feet away, suffering hideous paranoid delusions that in spite of all this chaos the police would trace his last obscene call and find him still in the.booth afraid to come out and face the trash can covers and bullets and other miscellaneous metals in the air- and I even remember that the Rolls had license plate RPD-1, which suggests that a certain person of importance was also in that odd vicinity on some doubtless even odder errand. I met Atlanta herself a day later and a block north, on the scene where Taylor Mead was making his famous Last Stand. Atlanta grabbed my right arm (the wounded one: it made me wince) and howled something like, "Welcome, brother in the True Faith! War is the Health of the State! Conflict is the creator of all things!" Seeing she was on a heavy Heracleitus wavelength, I quoted, with great passion, "Men should fight for the Laws as they would for the walls of the city!" That won her and I was Atlanta's Personal Lieutenant for the rest of the battle.
Atlanta remembered me from the Riots and I was summoned to organize the first tactical strikes against Nader's Raiders. If I do say so myself, I did a commendable job; it earned me a raise from the Bureau, a tight but genuinely pleased smile from my CIA drop, a promotion to Illuminatus Prelator from Winifred- and another audience with Atlanta Hope which led to my initiation into the A:.A:., the supersecret conspiracy for which she was really working. (The A:.A:. is so arcane that even now I can't reveal the full name hinted in those initials.) My secret name was Prince of Wands E; I got the Prince of Wands by picking a Tarot card at random, and she gave me the E herself- from which I deduced that there were four other Princes of Wands, together with five Kings of Swords, and so forth, meaning that the A:.A:. was something special in even esoteric realms, since it was a worldwide conspiracy with no more than three hundred ninety members (five tunes the number of cards in the Tarot deck). The name fairly suited me- I wouldn't want to be Hanged Man D or Fool A- and I was happy that the Prince is known for his multiple personalities.
If I had been three and a half agents before (my role in God's Lightning a fairly straightforward one, at least from GL's point of view, since I was only asked to smash, not to spy) there was no doubt that I was four agents now, belonging to the FBI, the CIA, the Illuminati and the A:.A:.and betraying each of them to at least one and sometimes two or three of the others. (Yes, I had been converted to the A:.A:. during their initiation; if I could describe that most amazing ritual you would not wonder why.) Then came the Vice President's brainstorm about economizing on agents, and I began to get transferred on loan to the CIA frequently, whereupon the Bureau discreetly asked me to report anything interesting that I observed. This, however, I perceive as a further complexification of my four-way psychic stretch and not as the inevitable, irrefragable and synergetic fifth step.
And I was right. For it was only in the last year that I entered the terminal stage, or Grumment as the Order calls it, due to those curious events which led me from Robert Putney Drake to Hagbard Celine.
I was sent to the Council on Foreign Relations banquet carrying the credentials of a Pinkerton detective; my supposed role as private dick was to keep an eye on the jewels of the ladies and other valuables. My real job was to place a small bug on the table where Robert Putney Drake would be sitting; I was on loan to IRS that week, and they didn't know that Justice had standing orders never to prosecute him for anything, so they were trying to prove he had concealed income. Naturally, I also had an ear peeled for anything that might be of import for the Illuminati, the A:.A:. and the CIA, if my Lincoln Memorial contact really was CIA and not Military or Naval Intelligence or somebody else entirely. (You can be sure I often meditated on the possibility that he might be Moscow, Peking or Havana, and Winifred told me once that the Illuminati had reason to believe him part of an advance-guard fifth column sent by invaders from Alpha Centauri- but Grand Masters of the Illuminati are notorious put-on artists, and I didn't buy that yarn any more than I bought the tale that had originally brought me into the Illuminati, the one about them being a conspiracy to establish a world government run by British Israelites.) Conspiracy was its own reward to me, now; I didn't care what I was conspiring for. Art for art's sake. Not whether you betray or preserve but how you play the game. I sometimes even identified it with the A:.A:. notion of the Great Work, for in the twisting labyrinths of my selves I was beginning to find the rough sketch for a soul.
There was a hawk-faced wop at Drake's table, very elegant in a spanking new tuxedo, but the cop in me made him as illegit. Sometimes you can make a subject precisely, as bunco-con, safe-blower, armed robber or whatnot, but I could only place him vaguely somewhere on that side of the game; in fact, I associated him with images of piracy on the high seas or the kind of gambits the Borgias played. Somehow the conversation got around to a new book by somebody named Mortimer Adler who had already written a hundred or so great books if I understood the drift. One banker type at the table was terribly keen on this Adler and especially on his latest great book. "He says that we and the Communists share the same Great Tradition" (I could hear the caps by the way he pronounced the term) "and we must join together against the one force that really does threaten civilization-anarchism!"
There were several objections, in which Drake didn't take part (he just sat back, puffing his cigar and looking agreeable to everyone, but I could see boredom under the surface) and the banker tried to explain the Great Tradition, which was a bit over my head, and, judging by the expressions around the table, a bit over everybody else's head, too, when the hawk-faced dago spoke up suddenly.
"I can put the Great Tradition in one word," he said calmly. "Privilege."
Old Drake suddenly stopped looking agreeable-but-bored- he seemed both interested and amused. "One seldom encounters such a refreshing freedom from euphemism," he said, leaning forward. "But perhaps I am reading too much into your remark, sir?"
Hawk-face sipped at his champagne and patted his mouth with a napkin before answering. "I think not," he said at last. "Privilege is defined in most dictionaries as a right or immunity giving special favors or benefits to those who hold it. Another meaning in Webster is 'not subject to the usual rules or penalties.' The invaluable thesaurus gives such synonyms as power, authority, birthright, franchise, patent, grant, favor and, I'm sad to say, pretension. Surely, we all know what privilege is in this club, don't we, gentlemen? Do I have to remind you of the Latin roots, privi, private, and lege, law, and point out in detail how we have created our Private Law over here, just as the Politburo have created their own private law in their own sphere of influence?"
"But that's not the Great Tradition," the banker type said (later, I learned that he was actually a college professor; Drake was the only banker at that table). "What Mr. Adler means by the Great Tradition-"
"What Mortimer means by the Great Tradition," hawk-face interrupted rudely, "is a set of myths and fables invented to legitimize or sugar-coat the institution of privilege. Correct me if I'm wrong," he added more politely but with a sardonic grin.
"He means," the true believer said, "the undeniable axioms, the time-tested truths, the shared wisdom of the ages, the…"
"The myths and fables," hawk-face contributed gently.
"The sacred, time-tested wisdom of the ages," the other went on, becoming redundant. "The basic bedrock of civil society, of civilization. And we do share that with the Communists. And it is just that common humanistic tradition that the young anarchists, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, are blaspheming, denying and trying to destroy. It has nothing to do with privilege at all."
"Pardon me," the dark man said. "Are you a college professor?"
"Certainly. I'm head of the Political Science Department at Harvard!"
"Oh," the dark man shrugged. "I'm sorry for talking so bluntly before you. I thought I was entirely surrounded by men of business and finance."
The professor was just starting to look as if he spotted the implied insult in that formal apology when Drake interrupted.
"Quite so. No need to shock our paid idealists and turn them into vulgar realists overnight. At the same time, is it absolutely necessary to state what we all know in such a manner as to imply a rather hostile and outside viewpoint? Who are you and what is your trade, sir?"
"Hagbard Celine. Import-export. Gold and Appel Transfers here in New York. A few other small establishments in other ports." As he spoke my image of piracy and Borgia stealth came back strongly. "And we're not children here," he added, "so why should we avoid frank language?"
The professor, taken aback a foot or so by this turn in the conversation, sat perplexed as Drake replied:
"So. Civilization is privilege- or Private Law, as you say so literally. And we all know where Private Law comes from, except the poor professor here- out of the barrel of a gun,' in the words of a gentleman whose bluntness you would appreciate. Is it your conclusion, then, that Adler is, for all his naivete, correct, and we have more in common with the Communist rulers than we have setting us at odds?"
"Let me illuminate you further," Celine said- and the way he pronounced the verb made me jump. Drake's blue eyes flashed a bit, too, but that didn't surprise me: anybody as rich as IRS thought he was, would have to be On the Inside.
"Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom- in anarchy- such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor- raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is- and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws- the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side- are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor.
The professor had a lot more to say in a hurry then, about the laws of society being the laws of nature and the laws of nature being the laws of God, but I decided it was time to circulate a bit more so I didn't hear the rest of the conversation. The IRS has a complete tape of it, I'm sure, since I had placed the bug long before the meal.
The next time I saw Robert Putney Drake was a turning point. I was being sent to New York again, on a mission for Naval Intelligence this time, and Winifred gave me a message that had to be delivered to Drake personally; the Order wouldn't trust any mechanical communication device. Strangely, my CIA drop also gave me a message for Drake, and it was the same message. That didn't jar me any, since it merely confirmed some of what I had begun to suspect by then.
I went to this office on Wall Street, near the corner of Broad (just about where I'd be toiling at Corporate Law, if my family had had its way) and I told his secretary, "Knigge of Pyramid Productions to see Mr. Drake." That was the password that week; Knigge had been a Bavarian baron and second-in-command to Weishaupt in the original AISB. I sat and cooled my heels awhile, studying the decor, which was heavily Elizabethan and made me wonder if Drake had some private notion about being a reincarnation of his famous ancestor.
Finally, Drake's door opened and who stood there but Atlanta Hope, looking kind of wild-eyed and distraught. Drake had his arm on her shoulder and he said piously, "May your work hasten the day when America returns to purity." She stumbled past me in a kind of daze and I was ushered into his office. He motioned me to an overstuffed chair and stared at my face until something clicked. "Another Knigge in the woodpile," he laughed suddenly. "The last time I saw you, you were a Pinkerton detective." You had to admire a memory like that; it had been a year since the CFR banquet and I hadn't done anything to attract his attention that night.
"I'm FBI as well as being in the Order," I said, leaving out a few things.
"You're more than that," he said flatly, sitting behind a desk as big as some kids' playgrounds. "But I have enough on my mind this week without prying into how many sides you're playing. What' s the message?"
"It comes from the Order and the CIA both," I said, to be clear and relatively above-board. "This it is: The Taiwan heroin shipments will not arrive on time. The Laotian opium fields are temporarily in the hands of the Pathet Lao. Don't believe the Pentagon releases about our troops having the Laotian situation under control. No answer required." I started to rise.
"Wait, damn it," Drake said, frowning. "This is more important than you realize." His face went blank and I could tell his mind was racing like an engine with governor off; it was impressive. "What's your rank in the Order?" he asked finally.
"Illuminatus Prelator," I confessed, humbly.
"Not nearly high enough. But you have more practical espionage experience than a great many higher members. You'll have to do." The old barracuda relaxed, having come to a decision. "How much do you know about the Cult of the Black Mother?" he asked.
"The most militant and most secret Black Power group in the country," I said carefully. "They avoid publicity instead of seeking it, because their strategy is based on an eventual coup d'etat, not on revolution. Until a minute ago, I thought no white man in the country even knew of their existence, except those of us in the FBI. The Bureau has never reported on them to other government agencies, because we're ashamed to admit we've never been able to keep an informer inside for long. They all die of natural causes, that's what bugs us."
"Nobody in the Order has ever told you the truth?" Drake demanded.
"No," I said, curious. "I thought what I just told you was the truth."
"Winifred is more closed-mouth than he needs to be," Drake said. "The Cult of the Black Mother is entirely controlled by the Order. They monitor ghetto affairs for us. Right now, they predict a revival of 1960s-style uprisings for late summer in Harlem, on the West Side of Chicago, and in Detroit. They need to up the addiction rate at least eighteen percent, hopefully twenty or twenty-five percent, in all those areas, or the property damage will be even more enormous than we are prepared to absorb.
"They can't do it, if they have to cut their present stock even more than it's already cut. There just has to be more junk in the ghettoes or all hell will break loose by August."
I began to realize that he had used the word "monitor" in its strict cybernetic meaning.
"There's only one alternative," Drake went on. "The black market. There's a very cunning and well-organized group that's been trying to crack the CIA-Syndicate heroin monopoly for quite a while now. The Cult, of the Black Mother will have to deal with them directly. I don't want the Order involved at all- that would make it messy, and besides we'll have to crush this group later, when we're able to pierce their cover."
The upshot of it was that I found myself on One Hundred Tenth Street in Harlem, feeling very white and un-bulletproof, entering a restaurant called The Signifying Monkey. Walking through a lot of hostile stares, I went direct to the coffee-colored woman at the cash register and said, "I've got a tombstone disposition."
She gave me a piercing look and muttered, "Upstairs, after the men's room, the door marked Private. Knock five times." She grinned maliciously, "And if you're not kosher, kiss your white ass good-bye, brother."
I went up the stairs, found the door, knocked five times, and one eye in an ebony face looked out at me stonily. "White," he said.
"Man," I replied.
"Native," he came back.
"Born," I finished. A bolt slipped on a chain and the door opened the rest of the way. I never did find out whose idea of a joke that password was- they had lifted it from the Ku Klux Klan, of course. The room I was in was heavy with marijuana smoke, but I could see that it was decently furnished and dominated by an enormous statue of Kali, the Black Mother; I had visions of weird Gunga Din rites and shouts of "Kill for the love of Kali!" There were four other men in the room, hi addition to the one who let me in, and two reefers were circulating, one deosil and one widder-shins.
"Who you from?" a voice asked in the murk.
"AISB," I answered carefully, "And I'm to speak to Hassan i Sabbah X."
"You're speaking to him," said the tallest and blackest character in the bunch, passing me a reefer. I took a quick, deep draw and, Christ, it was good. I'd been half addicted ever since the March on the Pentagon in 1967, where I walked right behind Norman Mailer part of the way, and later fell in with some hippies who were sitting on the steps smoking it. I say I was half addicted since then, because two of me believe, as a loyal government employee, that the old government publications claiming marijuana is addicting must be true or the government wouldn't have printed them. Fortunately, the other two of me know that it isn't addicting, so I don't go through very bad withdrawal when it's scarce.
I started to outline the situation to Hassan i Sabbah X but the other joint came around, widdershins, and I took a drag on that. "A man could get stoned doing this," I said facetiously.
"Yeah," a satisfied black voice agreed in the gloom.
Well, by the time I explained the problem to Hassan, I was so bombed that I immediately let him recruit me for the next step, on his rationalization that a white man could handle it easier than a black man. Actually, I was curious to contact this group of heroin pirates.
Hassan wrote the address carefully. "Now, here's the passwords," he said. "You say, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' Don't say 'Do what you will'- they can't stand anybody fucking around with the words, it has something to do with magic. She replies, 'Love is the law, love under will.' Then you finish it with 'Every man and every woman is a star.' Got it?"
You can bet your ass I got it. I was almost goggleeyed. It was the passwords of the A:.A:.
"One more thing," Hassan added, "be sure to ask for Miss Mao, not Mama Sutra. Mama isn't cleared for this."
(As the Braniff jet took off from Kennedy International, Simon was already deep into Telemachus Sneezed again. He didn't notice the preoccupied-looking red-headed young man who took the seat across the aisle; if he had, he would have immediately made the identification, cop. He was reading, "Factory smog is a symbol of progress, of the divine fire of industry, of the flaming deity of Heracleitus.")
HARRY KRISHNA HARRY KRISHNA HARRY HARRY
Harry Coin didn't know what the drug was; Miss Portinari had merely said, "It takes you further than pot," and handed him the tablet. It might be that LSD the hippies use, he reflected, or it might be something else entirely that Hagbard and FUCKUP had concocted in the ship's laboratory. Miss Portinari went on chanting:
HARRY RAMA HARRY RAMA HARRY HARRY
Obediently, he continued to stare into the aquamarine pool between them; she wore a yellow robe and sat placidly in the lotus position.
("I've gotta know," he had told her. "I can't go around with two sets of memories and never be sure which are real and which Hagbard just put in my head like a man puts a baby into a woman. Did I kill all those people or didn't I?"
"You must be in the proper frame of mind before you can accept the answer," she had replied remotely.)
HARRY COINSHA HARRY COINSHA HARRY HARRY
Was she changing the chant or was it the drug? He tried to keep calm and continue staring into the pool, as she had ordered, but the porcelain design around it was changing. Instead of two dolphins chasing each other's tails like the astrological sign of Pisces (the age that was ending, according to Hagbard), it was now one long serpentlike creature trying to swallow its own tail.
That's me, he thought. A lot of people have told me I'm as thin and long as a snake.
And it's everybody else, too (he realized suddenly). I'm seeing what George told me: the Self pursuing the Self and trying to govern it, the Self trying to swallow the Self.
But as he stared, fascinated, the pool turned red, blood red, the color of guilt, and he felt it reach out and try to pull him down into it, into red oblivion, a void made flush.
"It's alive," he screamed. "Jesus Motherfucking Christ!"
Miss Portinari casually stirred the pool, remote and calm, and its spiral inward slowly turned back to aquamarine. Harry felt himself blushing, it was only a hallucination, and muttered, "Pardon my language, ma'am."
"Don't apologize," she said sharply. "The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy. Think about what you said. Since it has five words and fits the Law of Fives, it is especially significant."
This is a weird bunch, but they know important things, Harry reminded himself. He looked deep into the blue spiral and silently repeated to himself, "It's alive, Jesus Motherfucking Christ, it's alive…"
Jesus, looking strangely hawk-faced and Hagbardian, rose from the pool. "This is my bodhi," he said, pointing. Harry looked and saw Buddha sitting beneath the bodhi-tree. "Tat TVam Asi," he said, and the falling leaves of the tree turned into millions of TV sets all broadcasting the same Laurel and Hardy movie. "Now look what you made me do," Hardy was saying… In a previous incarnation, Harry saw himself as a centurion, Semper Cuni Linctus, driving the nails into the cross. "Look," he said to Jesus, "nothing personal. I'm only following orders." "So am I," Jesus said, "My Father's orders. Aren't we all?"
"Look into the pool," Miss Portinari repeated. "Just look into the pool."
It was like each Chinese box had another Chinese box inside it; but the best of all belonged to Miss Mao Tsu-hsi. We were reclining in her trim but elegant pad on West Eighty-seventh Street, passing a joint back and forth and comparing multiple identities. We were naked on a bearskin rug, a dream come true, for she was my ideal woman. "I got into the A:.A:. first, Tobias," she was saying. "They recruited me at a Ba'Hai meeting- they have cruisers out, looking for likely prospects, in every mystical group from Subud to Scientology, you know. Then Naval Intelligence contacted me and I reported to them on what the A:.A:. was up to. I'm not flexible as you, though, and my loyalties tend to stay fairly constant- chiefly I was reporting to A:.A:. what I gleaned from Naval Intelligence. I did believe in the A:.A:. basically. Until I met Him"
"That reminds me," I said, jealous of the worshipful way she said Him as if talking about a god. "If he's coming soon, shouldn't we get up and put some clothes on?"
"If you want to be bourgeois," she said.
While we were dressing, I remembered something. "By the way," I asked casually, "who are you spying on Mama Sutra for- the A:.A:. Naval Intelligence, or Him?"
"All three of them." She was starting to pull her panties on, and I said suddenly, "Wait." I knelt and kissed her pussy one last time, "For the nicest Chinese box I've opened in this whole case," I said gallantly. That was my Illuminati training; as an FBI man, I was ashamed of such a perverted act.
We finished dressing and she was pouring some wine (a light German vintage from, of all places, Bavaria) when the knock came.
Miss Mao sidled over to the door in her slinky Chinese dress and said softly, "Hail Eris."
"All hail Discordia," came a voice from outside. She slipped the lock and a little fat man walked in. My first reaction was astonishment; he didn't look anything like the superintellectual superhero she had described.
"Hagbard couldn't come," he said briefly. "I'll handle the sale, and initiate you" with a glance at me, "into the Legion of Dynamic Discord, if you're really ready, as Miss Mao says, to battle every government on earth and the Illuminati to boot."
"I'm ready," I said passionately. "I'm tired being a puppet on four sets of strings." (Actually, I know I just wanted a fifth set.)
"Good," he said. "Put her there," and he held out his hand. As we shook, he said, "Episkopos Jim Cartwright of the Mad Dog Cabal."
"Tobias Knight," I said, "of the FBI, the CIA, the A:.A:. and the Illuminati."
He blinked briefly. "I've met double agents and triple agents, but you're the first quadruple agent in my experience. I guess this was inevitable, by the Law of Fives. Welcome to the fifth ring of the world's oldest continuous Five Ring Circus. Prepare for Death and Rebirth."
JESUS MOTHERFUCKING CHRIST IT'S ALIVE…
LEVIATHAN
The mutation from terrestrial to interstellar life must be made, because the womb planet itself is going to blow up within a few billion years… Planet Earth is a stepping stone on our time-trip through the galaxy. Life has to get its seed-self off the planet to survive…
There are also some among us who are bored with the amniotic level of mentation on this planet and look up in hopes of finding someone entertaining to talk to. -TIMOTHY LEARY, Ph.D., and L. WAYNE BRENNER, Terra II