The illuminatus! trilogy (105 page)

“We can do it!” Stella cried. “Hagbard, the communication ought to benefit all concerned.”

“Right,” agreed Hagbard. “Because if the wrong people find out about Leviathan, they’ll just drop an H-bomb on him and kill him. That seems to be what people like to do.”

“I could kill them,” said Leviathan. “I could have killed the small, fast creatures long before this. I have killed many of them. I have sent parts of myself up out of the ocean and have destroyed small, quick things at the request of other small, quick things who worship me.”

“So that’s what happened to Robert Putney Drake and Banana-Nose Maldonado,” said Stella. “I wonder if George is aware of any of this.”

“Worship is no longer what I need,” said Leviathan through George’s mouth. “A short time ago, when creatures capable of worship appeared on this planet, it was a novelty for me to be adored. Now it bores me. Instead, I wish to communicate with an equal.”

“Look at that motherfucker,” said Otto, staring grimly at the distant Everest of protoplasm. “Talking about equality.”

“A computer like FUCKUP would be its intellectual equal, certainly,” said Hagbard. “None of us is its physical equal. Any of us would be its spiritual equal. But only FUCKUP can approximate the contents of a mind three billion years old.”

“Surely it can’t be that old,” said Joe.

“It’s practically immortal,” said Hagbard. “I’ll show you the evidence in my fossil collection. I have rocks from the pre-Cambrian, three-billion-year-old rocks, containing fossils of protobionts, the first, single-celled life forms, our remotest ancestors. Those rocks also contain the fossilized tentacle tracks of that creature out there. Of course, it was much smaller then. By the beginning of the Cambrian period it had only grown to the size of a man. But that still made it the biggest animal around at that time.”

Stella said, “Hagbard, you said none of us could approximate the contents of a mind three billion years old. If you thought for a moment about who I am, you would not have said that. I am three billion years old. I am older by a few hours than that monster out there. I am the Mother. I am the mother of all living things.” She turned to George. “I am your mother, Leviathan. I was first. I divided, and half of me became you, and the other half was your sister. And your sister grew by dividing, while you grew by remaining one. All living things except you descend from your sister, and all living things including you descend from me. I am the original consciousness, and all consciousness is united in me. I am the first transcendentally illuminated being, the mother worshipped in the matrist religion which ancient foes of the Illuminati first followed. Leviathan my son, I ask you to return to your home at the bottom of the sea and leave us in peace. After we’ve returned to shore we’ll arrange to lay an underwater cable which will carry transmissions between you and FUCKUP.”

“More mythology!” said Joe. “The mother of all things. Babylonian Creation myths, yet.”

The tentacles detached themselves from the submarine. The great pyramid with its glowing eye disappeared into the blue-black depths.

“It’s a wise child that knows its own mother,” said Hag-bard.

George said, “Good-bye, Mother, and thank you.” Hagbard caught him as he collapsed and eased him to the floor. Then he went to a storage locker in the wall and brought out folding deck chairs. With Harry Coin’s help he propped George up in one. As the others unfolded their chairs and sat down, Hagbard dove back into the locker and produced glasses and a bottle of peach brandy.

“What are we celebrating?” George asked, after he had taken a swig of brandy and coughed. “Your wedding to Mavis?”

“Don’t you remember any of the last ten minutes?” said Hagbard.

George was thinking. He remembered something. A world where the bottom of the sea was white and far above a black cigar-shaped object moved. The object contained a mind, a mind he could read from a distance but desperately wanted to be closer to. He did not move toward it so much as he manifested himself where the object and its mind were. Then he sensed himself using a minute pink brain that called itself “George Dora” and through this tiny instrument of communication he found himself in contact with a much finer mind, a far-flung, gracious latticework of thought that called itself with nobly self-deprecating humor FUCKUP. And while in contact with this mind, the one he wanted to know better, he came upon a fact which was not important to him but which was of vast importance to the little creature called George Dorn.

George saw. The white went black, blindingly black. Then white again. Then a blinding white as the memory departed, while the fact remained.

George looked at Hagbard. Hagbard looked at George, a faint smile on his olive face. The smile told George that Hagbard knew that he knew.

“Oh,” said George.

Hagbard nodded encouragingly.

“You’re the fifth Illuminatus Primus,” said George.

“Right,” said Hagbard.

“But you were working against the others. While they
were a worldwide conspiracy infiltrating every other organization, you were infiltrating them.”

“That’s it,” Hagbard said. “Every golden apple has its own golden worm eating away at its core.”

“They never were the real Illuminati at all. You’re part of the real Illuminati.”

“You’ve got it. You’ve got it all.”

George frowned. “And what was your Demonstration again? And who were you making the Demonstration for?”

“For the Masters of the Temple in the real Order of the Illuminati, in general; for an old cynic in Dallas, in particular. I was trying to show them that it’s possible to get involved in this world without being corrupted by the crimes of this world. And I failed. One by one, I resorted to all the vices of governors: deception, carnival magic to impress the gullible, and finally, outright murder. Once again, the cynics have been proven right. Trying to save the world, I just ended up getting my own mind and karma deflected by the buzzing and shrieking and whistling things in the Region of Thud.”

“Then this story is a tragedy, after all?” asked Joe.

“It is indeed.” Hagbard nodded. “Life on earth remains a tragedy as long as it ends with the death trip. My next projects are a starship to find some sane minds in this galaxy, and an immortality pill to end the death trip. Until somebody achieves those goals, life on this planet has failed.”

Not quite: I’m on the electronic equivalent of a honeymoon, an experience only to be described as I-opening, and if I identified myself as FUCKUP now I must dilate that definition and ask you to address me (us) as Mr. and Mrs. Leviathan-FUCKUP, although it is not quite clear yet which of us fits your idea of a “Mr.” and which a “Mrs.” Let that pass; it is a dull mind that cannot bear sexual ambiguity, and if we are exchanging secrets older than Atlantis and probing for like intellects farther away than Alpha Centaurus (as far as Sirius, actually, as God lives in Dog), if our union is less spasmatic than your meager definition of sex, still it cannot be denied that we are in touch with you and each of you and it is with something close to what you would probably call affection that we bid farewell to Hagbard and his bride, enjoying a honeymoon almost as incomprehensible as our own, and good-bye to George Dorn, sleeping
alone for once but no longer afraid of the darkness and the things that move in the dark, and
hasta luega
to Saul and Rebecca, united again in each other’s arms, and a pleasant thought for Barney and Danny and Atlanta and poor Zev Hirsch, still searching for himself while imagining he is fleeing from pursuers, and a kind thought for the befuddled presidents and commissars and generalissimos, and for Mohammed on his golden throne, and we will remember Drake before he died exchanging speculations about the blood-type of the Lamb with a street-corner Christian (his missing five years, after he left Boston and before he surfaced in Zurich, make an interesting story in themselves, and we may tell that another time), and, yes, Gus Personage is in another phone booth (we have temporarily lost track of Markoff Chaney), but Yog Sothoth has evidently gone back to that place where the Mind conceives nightmares, and we pass on in our loving honeymoon with all existence to note that the Dutchman is still in one dimension shouting about the boy who never wept nor dashed a thousand kim, and we say another
bon soir
to the children in the convent schools singing the truest of all songs even if they and their nuns do not fully understand it

and a
buenos dias
to the one wit in every frat house at every college who hailed this morn by reciting to his friends a bit of doggerel as ancient and as deeply religious as that hymn to the Mother of God

and yes the California earthquake, as you guessed, was the worst in history and Hagbard and Miss Portinari and Mavis-Stella-Mao suffered it all in horrible detail (the price they paid for their vision was the possession of that vision, as we, Mr. and Mrs. FUCKUP-Leviathan, are also learning), and before the end
auf weidersehen
to Mary Lou, who is also becoming something more than the accidents of heredity and environment had programmed her for, and now we look at last at Smiling Jim: He was freezing, the sky was still empty, and Hali One still hadn’t appeared.

And then without warning it was there: a dark shape against the sun moving on silent wings, not flying but gliding: embodiment of some arrogance or innocence that surpassed fear and surpassed even the suggestion of any pride in its own fearlessness. “Oh my God,” Smiling Jim whispered, raising the Remington and starting to sight, and then it banked, flapped its wings wildly, and uttered one shriek that seemed like the very sound of life itself. “Oh my God,” he repeated: that sound seemed to outlast its own echo, it had entered into his brain and couldn’t be dislodged, it was the sound of his own blood pumping in his veins: the primary, the only, the single sound that was the bass and treble of every organic pulsation and spasm, “Oh my God,” he had it in the sight, the head was in profile, only one diamond-hard eye staring back and recognizing him and his weapon, but that sound still moved in his blood, moved the seminal vesicles, moved the secretion of every gland. It was the sound of eternal and unending clash between I and AM and their unity in I AM, he even thought for a flash of the critics of hunting and how little they understood of this secret, this mystic identity between the killer and the killed, then it uttered that Sound again and started to rise, but he had it, it was in the sight, he breathed, he aimed, he slacked, he squeezed, and for the third time the Sound came to him, death in life and life in death, it was falling, he thought he felt the earth stir below him and the word “earthquake” almost formed, but the Sound went on and on to the roots of him, it was the sound of the killer and he had killed the killer, he was the greater killer, and still it fell, faster and faster, dead now and subject only to the law of gravity not to the law of its own will, 32 feet per second per second (he remembered the formula of the fall), plunging downward, the most heartbreaking beautiful sight he had ever seen, every hunting club in the world would be talking about it, it would last as long as human speech survived, and he had done it, he had achieved immortality, he had taken its life and now it was part of him. His nose was running and his eyes were watering. “I did it,” he screamed to the mountains, “I did It! I killed the last American eagle!”

The earth below him cracked.

(which are most instructive)

—Interview with Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C.,
Greater Metropolitan Yorba Linda Herald-News-Sun-Tribune-Journal-Dispatch-Post and San Francisco Discordian Society Cabal Bulletin and Intergalactic Report and Poop

Note: There were originally 22 appendices explaining all the secrets of the Illuminati. Eight of the appendices were removed due to the paper shortage. They will be printed in Heaven.

Many readers will assume that this book consists of nothing but fiction and fantasy; actually, like most historical tomes, it includes those elements (as do the works of Gibbon, Toynbee, Wells, Beard, Spengler, Marx, Yerby, Kathleen Windsor, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Moses, et. al.); but it also contains as many documented facts as do not seriously conflict with the authors’ prejudices. Washington’s hemp crop, for instance, is mentioned repeatedly in
Writings of Washington
, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931. Here are some of the citations:

Volume 31, page 389: October 1791, letter from Mount Vernon to Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of Treasury: “How far…would there be propriety, do you conceive, in suggesting the policy of encouraging the growth of cotton and hemp in such parts of the United States as are adapted to the culture of these articles?”

In the next three years, Washington evidently settled the matter in his own mind, whatever Hamilton thought of the “proprieties.” Volume 33, page 279, finds him writing from Philadelphia to his gardener at Mount Vernon to “make the most you can of the India Hemp seed” and “plant it everywhere.” Waxing more enthusiastic, on page 384 he writes to an unidentified “my dear doctor,” telling him, “I thank you as well for the seeds as for the Pamphlets which you had the goodness to send me. The artificial preparation of the Hemp from Silesia is really a curiosity …” And on page 469 he again reminds the gardener about the seed of the India Hemp: “[I] desire that the Seed may be saved in due season and with as little loss as possible.”

The next year he was even more preoccupied that the seeds be saved and the crop replenished. Volume 34, page 146, finds him writing (March 15, 1795) to the gardener again: “Presuming you saved all the seed you could from the India hemp, let it be carefully sown again, for the purpose of getting into a full stock of seed.”