The illuminatus! trilogy (50 page)

Malaclypse stood up with a little smile. “Come here, Joe.”

“What for?”

“Just come here.” Malaclypse held his hands away from his sides, palms turned toward Joe appealingly. Joe walked over and stood before him.

“Put your hand into my side,” said Malaclypse.

“Oh, come on,” said Joe. Pederastia snickered. Malaclypse just looked at him with a gentle, encouraging smile, so he reached out to touch Malaclypse’s shirt. His hands still felt nothing. He closed his eyes to verify that. There was no sensation whatever. Thin air. Eyes still shut, he moved his hand forward. He opened his eyes, and when he saw his arm sunk into Malaclypse’s body up to the elbow, he almost barfed his cookies.

He drew back. “It can’t be a movie. I’d be almost willing to say a moving holograph, but the illusion is too perfect. You’re looking right at me. To my eyes you are unquestionably there.”

“Try a few karate chops,” said Malaclypse. Joe obliged, swinging his hand like a scythe through Malaclypse’s waist, chest and head. For a finale, Joe brought his hand straight down through the top of the being’s head.

“I suspend judgment,” said Joe. “Maybe you are what you say you are. But it’s pretty hard to take. Can you feel anything?”

“I can create, temporary sensory organs for myself whenever I want to. I can enjoy just about anything a human enjoys or experiences. But my primary mode of perception is a very advanced form of what you would call intuition. Intuition is a kind of sensitivity in the mind to events and processes; what I have is a highly developed intuitional receptor which is completely controllable.”

Joe went back and sat down, shaking his head. “You
certainly are in an enviable position.”

“Like I said, it’s the real reason for human sacrifice,” said Malaclypse. He, too, sat down, and Joe now noticed that the soft upholstery of his chair didn’t sink beneath his weight. He seemed to rest on the surface of the cushions. “Any sudden or violent death releases a burst of consciousness energy, which can be controlled and channeled as any explosive energy can be. The Illuminati would all like to become as gods. That has been their ambition for longer than I care to say.”

“Which means they have to perpetrate mass murder,” said Joe, thinking of nuclear weapons, gas chambers, chemical-biological warfare.

Malaclypse nodded. “Now, I don’t disapprove of that on moral grounds, since morals are purely illusory. I do have a personal distaste for that sort of thing. Although, when you’ve lived as long as I have, you have lost so many friends and lovers that it is impossible not to take the deaths of humans as a matter of course. So it goes. And, since I achieved my own immortality and nonmateriality as the result of a mass murder, it would be hypocritical of me to condemn the Illuminati. For that matter, I don’t condemn hypocrisy, though it is also personally distasteful to me. But I do say that the method of the Illuminati is stupid and wasteful, since everybody is already everything. So, why fuck around with things? It is absurd to try to be something else when there is nothing else.”

“That kind of statement is simply beyond my comprehension,” said Joe. “I don’t know, maybe it’s my engineering training. But even after my own partial illumination in San Francisco with Dr. Iggy, this kind of talk doesn’t make any more sense than Christian Science to me.”

“Soon you’ll understand more,” said Malaclypse. “About the history of man, about some of the esoteric knowledge that has been lying around for tens of thousands of years. Eventually you’ll know all that’s worth knowing about absolutely everything.”

(Tobias Knight, the FBI agent monitoring the bugging equipment in Dr. Mocenigo’s home, heard the pistol shot the same time Carmel did. “What the hell?” he said out loud, sitting up straight. He had heard the door open and footsteps walking about and had been waiting for a conversation … and then, without warning, he had heard the shot. Now a voice spoke, “Sorry, Dr. Mocenigo. You were a great patriot, and this is a dog’s death. But I will share it with you.” Then there were more footsteps and
something else
… Knight recognized the sound: it was liquid being poured. The steps and the pouring liquid continued, and Knight abruptly tore himself out of his state of shock and pressed the intercom. “Knight?” asked a voice which he recognized as Esperando Despond, the Special Agent in Charge for Las Vegas. “Mocenigo’s house,” Knight said crisply. “Get a whole crew out there double-quick. Something is happening, one killing at least.” He released the intercom and listened, paralyzed, to the footsteps and the liquid sounds, which were now mixed with subdued humming. A man doing an unpleasant job, but trying to keep his cool. Knight recognized the tune, finally: “Camp-town Races.” The humming and walking and slurping continued. “Do-da-Do-da …” Then the voice spoke again: “This is General Lawrence Stewart Talbot, speaking to the CIA, the FBI and whoever else has this house bugged. I discovered at two this morning that several people in our Anthrax Leprosy Pi project have accidentally been subjected to live cultures. All of them are living at the installation, and can easily be isolated while the antidote works. I have already given orders to that effect. Dr. Mocenigo himself unknowingly received the worst dose, and was in advanced morbidity, a few minutes from death, when I arrived. His whole house, obviously, will have to be burned down, and I am also, due to my proximity while examining him, too far gone to be saved. I will therefore shoot myself after setting fire to the house. There is one remaining problem. I found evidence that a woman had been in Dr.
Mocenigo’s bed earlier—that’s what comes of allowing important people to live off base—and she must be found and given the antidote and each of her contacts must be traced. Needless to say, this must be done quietly, or there will be a nationwide panic. Tell the President to see that my wife gets the medal for this. Tell my wife that with my last breath I still insist she was wrong about that girl in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. In closing, I firmly believe that this is the greatest country in the history of the world, and can still be saved if Congress will lock up those damned college kids for once and for all. God bless America!” There was a scratching sound—my God! Knight thought, the match—and the sound of flames, in the midst of which General Talbot tried to add a postscript but couldn’t get the words out because he was screaming. Finally, the second shot came, and the screaming stopped. Knight raised his head, jaw clenched, repressed tears in his steely eyes. “That was a great American,” he said aloud.)

Over cigars and brandy, after George had been sent off to bed to be distracted by Tarantella, Richard Jung asked pointedly, “Just how sure are you that this Discordian bunch is a match for the Illuminati? It’s kind of late in the game to change sides.”

Drake started to speak, then turned to Maldonado. “Tell him about Italy in the 19th century,” he said.

“The Illuminati are just men and women,” Maldonado replied obligingly. “More women than men, in fact. It was Eve Weishaupt who started the whole show; Adam just acted as her front because people are used to taking orders from men. This Atlantis stuff is mostly bullshit. Everybody who knows about Atlantis at all traces his family, or his clan, or his club, back there. Some of the old dons in the Maf even try to trace
la Cosa Nostra
back there. All bullshit. Just like all the WASPs tracing themselves back to the
Mayflower
. For everyone who can prove it, like Mr. Drake, there’s a hundred who are just bluffing.

“You see,” Maldonado went on more intensely,
chewing his cigar ferociously, “originally the Illuminati was just a—how do you call it—a kind of 18th-century women’s liberation front. Behind Adam Weishaupt was Eve; behind Godwin, who started all this socialism and anarchism with his
Political Justice
book, was his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft, who started the woman revolution with a book called, uh …”

“Vindication of the Rights of Women,”
Drake contributed.

“And they got Tom Paine to write on women’s lib, too, and to defend their French Revolution and try to import it here. But that all fell through and they didn’t get a real controlling interest in the U.S. until they hoodwinked Woody Wilson into creating the Federal Reserve in 1914. And that’s the way it usually goes. In Italy they had a front called the Haute Vente, that was so damn secret Mazzini was a member all his life and never knew the control came from Bavaria. My grandpa told me all about those days. We had a three-way dogfight. The Monarchists on one side, the Haute Vente and the Liberteri, the anarchists, on the other, and the Maf in the middle trying to roll with the punches and figure out which way the bread was buttered, you know? Then the Liberteri got wise to the Haute Vente and split from it, and it was a four-way fight. You look it up in the history books, they tell it like it was except they don’t mention who ran the Haute Vente. And then the good old Law of Fives came into it, and we had the Fascisti and it was a five-way dogfight. Who won? Not the Illuminati. It wasn’t until 1937, manipulating the English government to discourage Mussolini’s peace plans and using Hitler to get Benito into the Berlin-Tokyo axis, that the Illuminati had some kind of control in Italy. And even then it was indirect. When we made our deal with the CIA—it was called the OSS back in those days—Luciano got out of the joint and we turned over Italy and delivered Mussolini dead.”

“And the point of all this?” Jung asked coldly.

“The point is,” Maldonado said, “the Maf has been
against the Illuminati more of the time than we’ve been with them, and we’re still doing business and we’re stronger than ever. Believe me, their bark is much worse than their bite. Because they know some magic, they scare everybody. We’ve had magicians and belladonnas—witches, to you—in Sicily since before Paris got hot pants for Helen, and believe me a bullet kills them as dead as it kills anybody else.”

“The Illuminati
do
have a bite,” Drake interjected, “but it is my judgment that they are going out with the Age of Pisces. The Discordians, I think, represent an Aquarian swing.”

“Oh, I don’t go for that mystic stuff,” Jung said. “Next thing you’ll be quoting
I Ching
at me, like my old man.”

“You’re an anal type, like most accountants,” Drake replied coolly. “And a Capricorn as well. Down-to-earth and conservative. I won’t attempt to persuade you about this aspect of the matter. Just take my word, I didn’t get where I am by ignoring significant facts just because they won’t fit on a profit-and-loss statement. On the profit-and-loss level, however, I have had reasons to believe that the Discordians can currently outbid the Illuminati. These reasons date back many months before the appearance of those marvelous statues today.”

Later, in bed, Drake turned the matter around in his head and looked at it from several sides. Lovecraft’s words came back to him: “I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants.” That was it, basically. He was an old man, and he was tired of being their servant, or satrap, or satellite. When he was thirty-three, he was ready to take them over, as Cecil Rhodes had once done. Somehow, he had been maneuvered into taking over just one section of their empire. If he could think, truthfully, that he owned the United States more thoroughly than any President in four decades, the fact remained that he did not own himself. Not until he signed his Declaration of Independence tonight by joining the Discordians. The other Jung, the
alter Zauber
in Zurich, had tried to tell him something about power once, but he had dismissed it as sentimental slop. Now he tried to remember it … and, suddenly, all the old days came back, Klee and his numinous paintings, the Journey to the East, old Crowley saying, “Of course, mixing the left-hand and right-hand paths is dangerous. If you fear such risks, go back to Hesse and Jung and those old ladies. Their way is safe and mine isn’t. All that can be said for me is that I have real power and they have dreams.” But the Illuminati had crushed Crowley, just as they smashed Willie Seabrook, when those men revealed too much.
“I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants”
Damn it, what was it Jung had said about power?

And he turned the card over, and on the back was an address on Beacon Hill with the words “8:30 tonight.” He looked up at the janitor, who backed away deferentially, saying, “Thank you, Mr. Drake, sir,” without a touch of irony in his face or voice. And it hadn’t surprised him at all that, for deliberate contrast, the Grand Master he met that night, one of the five Illuminati Primi for the U.S., was an official of the Justice Department. (And what had Jung said about power?) “A few of them will have to fall. Lepke, I would recommend. Perhaps Luciano also.” No mystical trappings: just a businesslike meeting. “Our interest is the same as yours: increasing the power of the Justice Department. An equal increment in the power of the other branches of government will proceed nicely when we get the war into gear.” Drake remembered his excitement: it was all as he had foreseen. The end of the Republic, the dawn of the Empire.

“After Germany, Russia?” Drake asked once.

“Very good; you are indeed farseeing,” the Grand Master replied. “Mr. Hitler, of course, is only a medium. Virtually no ego at all, on his own. You have no idea how dull and prosaic such types are, except when under proper Inspiration. Naturally, his supplied ego will collapse, he will become psychotic, and we will have no control over him at all, then. We are prepared
to help him fall. Our real interest now is here. Let me show you something. We do not work in general outlines; our plans are always specific, to the last detail.” He handed Drake a sheaf of papers. “The war will probably end in ’44 or ’45. We will have Russia built up as the next threat within two years. Read this carefully.”

Drake read what was to become the National Security Act of 1947. “This abolishes the Constitution,” he said almost in ecstasy.

“Quite. And believe me, Mr. Drake, by ’46 or ’47, we will have Congress and the public ready to accept it. The American Empire is closer than you imagine.”

“But the isolationists and pacifists—Senator Taft and that crowd—”