The illuminatus! trilogy (101 page)

“I hope to hell Hauptmann was telling the truth about not following me,” said Hagbard. “It’s going to take time to get us all down below.”

“What are we doing with the cars?” Harry Coin asked.

“Well, the Bugatti, obviously, is too beautiful for me to part with, which is why I’m taking it aboard the
Leif Erikson
. But the rest we’ll just leave. Maybe some of the people who went to the festival will be able to use them.”

“Don’t worry about them Huns,” said John-John Dillinger, strolling up. “Any of them give us trouble, we’ll just reply with a few short sharp words from old Mr. Thompson. Leave ‘em in stitches.”

“Peace, it’s wonderful,” said Hagbard sourly.

“Give it a chance,” said Malaclypse, still in the guise of
Jean-Paul Sartre. “It needs time to spread. The absence of the Illuminati has to make itself felt. It
will
make a difference.”

“I doubt it,” said Hagbard. “The Dealy Lama was right all along.”

The entire operation of outfitting Hagbard’s people with wetsuits, paddling them out to the scuba-launches, and transporting them down to the
Leif Erikson
took more than an hour. When it was George’s turn he looked eagerly into the depths for the
Leif Erikson
and was happy when he saw it glowing below him like a great golden blimp. Well, at least that’s real, he thought. I’m approaching it from the outside, and it’s just as big as I think it is. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere and this is all happening in Disney World.

An hour later the submarine was deep in the Sea of Valusia. George, Joe, and Hagbard stood on the bridge, Hagbard leaning against the ancient Viking prow, George and Joe peering into the endless gray depths, watching the strange blind fishes and monsters swim by.

“There’s a type of fungus that has evolved into something resembling seaweed in this ocean,” said Hagbard. “It’s luminescent. There’s no light down here, so no green plants grow.”

A dot appeared in the distance and grew rapidly in size until George recognized a porpoise, doubtless Howard. There was scuba-diving equipment strapped to the animal’s back. When he had come alongside he turned a somersault, and his translated voice started to come through the loudspeaker in a song:

Hagbard shook his head. “That doggerel is just awful. I’m going to have to do something about FUCKUP’S ability to translate poetry. What are you talking about, Howard?”

“Aha,” said Joe. “I didn’t get a look at your talking porpoise friend last time I was aboard. Hello, Howard. I’m Joe.”

“Hello, Joe,” said Howard. “Welcome to my world. Unfortunately, it’s not a very hospitable world at the moment.
There is grave danger in the Atlantic. The true ruler of the Illuminati is on the prowl on the high seas—Leviathan himself. The land is collapsing beside the Pacific, and the tremors have made the earth shake, and Leviathan is disturbed and has risen from the depths. Besides the trembling of the lands and seas, he knows that his chief worshippers, the Illuminati, are dead. He had read their passing in the pulsings of consciousnes-energy that reach even into the depths of the sea.”

“Well, he can’t eat the submarine,” said Hagbard. “And we’re well armed.”

“He can crack the submarine open as easily as a gull cracks a penguin’s
egg,”
said Howard. “And your weapons will bother him not at all. He’s virtually indestructible.”

Hagbard shrugged, while Joe and George looked askance at each other. “I’ll be careful, Howard. But we can’t turn around now. We’ve got to get back to North America. We’ll try to evade Leviathan if we see him.”

“He fills the whole ocean,” said Howard. “No matter what you do, you’ll see him, and he’ll see you.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Only slightly. I must bid you farewell now. I think we’ve done a good week’s work, and the menace to my people recedes even as does the danger to yours. Our porpoise horde is scattering and leaving by different exits into the North Atlantic. I’m getting out of the Sea of Valusia by way of Scotland. We think Leviathan will head south around Cape Horn into the Pacific. Everything that swims and is hungry is going that way. There’s a lot of fresh meat in the water, I’m sorry to say. Good-bye, friends.”

“So long, Howard,” said Hagbard. “That was a good bridge you helped me build.”

“Yes, it was,” said Howard. “Too bad you had to sink it.”

“What were those tanks on Howard’s back?” said Joe.

“Scuba gear,” said George. “There’s no air available in the Sea of Valusia, so Howard has to have breathing equipment till he can get to the open ocean. Hagbard, what was that business about the true ruler of the Illuminati? I’ve heard again and again that there were five Illuminati Primi. Four of them were the Saure family. That leaves one. Is it Leviathan? Is the whole show being run by a sea monster? Is that the big secret?”

“No,” said Hagbard. “You have yet to figure out who the fifth Illuminatus Primus is.” He threw Joe a wink that George missed. “By true ruler Howard meant a godlike being whom the Illuminati worship.”

“A sea monster?” said Joe. “There was a hint about a sea monster of enormous size and power in that movie those people showed me in that loft on the Lower East Side. But the original Illuminati—Gruad’s bunch—were portrayed as sun worshippers. That big pyramid with the eye in it was supposed to be the sun god’s eye. Who the hell were those people with the movie, anyway? I know who Miss Mao is now, but I still don’t know who they were.”

“Members of the Erisian Liberation Front—ELF,” said Hagbard. “They have a somewhat different view of the prehistory and origins of the Illuminati than we do. One thing we both agree upon is that the Illuminati invented religion.”

“The Original Sin, right?” said Joe sardonically.

“Joe, you ought to start a religion yourself,” said Hagbard.

“Why?”

“Because you are so skeptical.”

“We’re going back to America, huh?” said George. “And the adventure is more or less over?”

“This phase of it, at least,” said Hagbard.

“Good. I want to try to write about what I’ve seen and what has happened to me. I’ll see you guys later.”

“There’s to be a magnificent dinner tonight in the main dining salon,” said Hagbard.

Joe said, “Don’t forget,
Confrontation
has a first option on anything you write.”

“Fuck you,” George’s voice came back as the door of the bridge closed behind him.

“Wish I had something better to do than this. Gimme two,” said Otto Waterhouse.

“You do, don’t you?” said Harry Coin. “Ain’t that Nigra gal, Stella, your gal? Why ain’t you with her?”

“Because she doesn’t exist,” said Otto, picking up the two cards John-John Dillinger had slid across the polished teak-wood table to him. He studied his hand for a moment, then threw a five-ton flax note into the pot. “Any more than Mavis or Miss Mao exists. There’s a woman somewhere under all of those identities, but everything I’ve experienced has been a hallucination.”

“There isn’t a woman in the world you couldn’t say that about,” said Dillinger. “How many cards you want, Harry?”

“Three,” said Harry. “This is a lousy hand you dealt me, John-John. Come to think of it, you’re hallucinatin’ all the time when you have sex. That’s what makes it good. And that’s how come I can fuck anything.”

“I’ll just take one,” said Dillinger. “Dealt myself a pretty good hand. What do you see when you’re fucking trees and little boys and whatnot, Harry?”

“A white light,” said Harry. “Just a big beautiful clear white light. I’ll throw in ten tons of flax this time.”

“Must be your hand isn’t so lousy after all,” said Water-house.

“Come in,” said George. The stateroom door opened, and he put down his pen. It was Stella.

“We have a little problem, don’t we, George?” she said, coming into the room and sitting beside him on the bed. “I think you’re angry at me,” she went on, putting her hand on his knee. “You feel like this identity of mine is a sham. So, in a sense, I was deceiving you.”

“I’ve lost you and Mavis both,” said George. “You’re both the same person—which means you’re really neither. You’re immortal. You’re not human; I don’t know what you are.” Suddenly he looked at her hopefully. “Unless that was all a hallucination last night. Could it have been the acid? Can you really change into different people?”

“Yes,” said Mavis.

“Don’t do that,” said George. “It upsets me too much.” He darted a little glance to his side. It was Stella.

“I don’t really understand why it bothers me so much,” said George. “I ought to be able to take everything in stride by now.”

“Did it ever bother you that you were in love with Mavis, besides being in love with me?” said Stella.

“Not much. Because it hardly ever seemed to bother you. But I know why now. How could you be jealous when you and Mavis were the same person?”

“We’re not the same person, really.”

“What does that mean?”

“Did you ever read
The Three Faces of Eve?
Listen …”

Like all the best love stories, it began in Paris. She was well-known as a Hollywood actress (and was actually an
Illuminatus); he was becoming fairly famous as a jet-set millionaire (and was actually a smuggler and anarchist). Envision Bogart and Bergman in the flashback sequences from
Casablanca
. It was like that: a passion so intense, a Paris so beautiful (recovering from the war it had been slipping toward in the Bogart-Bergman epic), a couple so radiant that any observer with an eye for nuance would have foretold a storm ahead. It came the night he confessed he was a magician and made a certain proposal to her; she left him at once. A month later, back in Beverly Hills, she realized that what he had asked was her destiny. When she tried to find him—as often happened with Hagbard Celine—he had dropped from public view, leaving his businesses in other hands temporarily, and was
in camera
.

A year later she heard that he was again a public figure, hobnobbing with English businessmen of questionable reputation and even more dubious Chinese import-export executives in Hong Kong. She violated her contract with the biggest studio in Hollywood and flew to the Crown colony, only to find he had dropped from sight again, while his recent friends were being investigated for involvement in the heroin business.

She found him in Tokyo, at the Imperial Hotel.

“A year ago, I decided to accept your proposal,” she told him, “but now, after Hong Kong, I’m not so sure.”

“Thelema,”
he said, facing her across a room that seemed designed for Martians; it had actually been designed for Welshmen.

She sat down abruptly on a couch. “You’re in the Order?”

“In the Order and against the Order,” he said. “The real purpose is to destroy them.”

“I’m one of the top Five in the United States,” she said unsteadily. “What makes you think I’ll turn on them now?”

“Thelema,” he repeated. “It’s not just a password. It means
Will.”

“‘The Order is my Will.’” She quoted from Weishaupt’s original Oath of Initiation.

“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’re talking to me because part of you knows that a human being’s Will is never in an external organization.”

“You sound like a moralist. That’s odd—for a heroin merchant.”

“You sound like a moralist, too, and that’s very odd—for a servant of Agharti.”

“Nobody joins
that lot,”
she said with a pert Cockney accent, “without being a moralist to start with.” They both laughed.

“I was right about you,” Hagbard said.

But, George interrupted, is he really in the heroin business? That’s dirty
.

You sound like a moralist too, she said. It’s part of his Demonstration. Any government could put him out of business within their borders—as England has done—by legalizing junk. So long as they refuse to do that, there’s a black market. He won’t let the Mafia monopolize it—he makes sure the black market is a free market. If it wasn’t for him a lot of junkies who are alive today would be dead of contaminated heroin. But let me go on with the story
.

They rented a villa in Naples to begin the transformation. For a month the only humans she saw—aside from Hagbard—were two servants named Sade and Masoch (she later learned that their real names were Eichmann and Calley). They began each day by serving her breakfast and quarreling. The first day, Sade argued for materialism and Masoch for idealism; the second day, Sade expounded fascism and Masoch communism; the third day, Sade insisted on cracking eggs from the big end and Masoch was equally vehement about the little end. All the debates were on a high and lofty intellectual level, verbally, but seemed absurd because of the simple fact that Sade and Masoch always wore clown suits. The fourth day, they argued for and against abortion; the fifth day, for and against mercy-killing; the sixth day, for and against the proposition “Life is worth living.” She became more and more aware of the time and money Hagbard had spent in training and preparing them: Each argued with the skill of a first-rate trial lawyer and had a phalanx of carefully researched facts to support his position—and yet the clown suits made it hard to take either of them seriously. The seventh morning, they argued theism versus atheism; the eighth morning, the individual versus the State; the ninth, whether wearing shoes was or was not a sexual perversion. All arguments began to seem equally insubstantial. The tenth morning, they feuded over realism versus antinomianism; the eleventh, whether the statement “All statements are relative” is or is not self-contradictory;
the twelfth, whether a man who sacrifices his life for his country is or is not insane; the fifteenth, whether spaghetti or Dante had had the greater influence on the Italian national character …

But that was only the start of the day. After breakfast (in her bedroom, where every article of furniture was gold but only vaguely rounded) she went
to
Hagbard’s study (where everything looked
exactly
like a golden apple) and watched documentary films concerning the early matriarchal stage of Greek culture. At ten random intervals the name “Eris” would be called; if she remembered to respond, a chocolate candy arrived from a wall shoot. At ten other random intervals, her own name was called; if she responded to this, she received a mild electric shock. After the tenth day the system was changed and intensified: The shock was stronger if she responded to her previous name, whereas if she responded to “Eris” Hagbard immediately entered and balled her.