The illuminatus! trilogy (58 page)

“The robot,” he said, glancing finally at Hagbard, “is easily upset”

“Don’t put your hand in that fire,” Hagbard warned, unimpressed. “You’ll get burned.” He watched; he waited; George could not tear his glance from (hose eyes and in them, then, he saw the merriment of Howard, the dolphin, the contempt of his grade school principal (“A high IQ, Dorn, does not justify arrogance and insubordination”), the despairing love of his mother, who could never understand him, the emptiness of Nemo, his tomcat of childhood days, the threat of Billy Holtz, the school bully, and the total otherness of an insect or a serpent. More: he saw the child Hagbard, proud like himself of intellectual superiority and frightened like himself of the malice of stupider but brawnier boys, and the very old Hagbard, years hence, wrinkled as a reptile but still showing an endless searching intelligence. The ice melted; the mountain, with a roar of protest and defiance, crumbled; and George was borne down, down in the river racing toward the rapids where the gorilla howled and the mouse trotted quickly, where the saurian head raised above the Triassic foliage, where the sea slept and the spirals of DNA curled backward toward the flash that was this radiance now, this raging eternally against the quite impossible dying of the light, this storm and this centering.

“Hagbard …” he said at last.

“I know. I can see it. Just don’t fall back into that other thing. It’s the Error of the Illuminati.”

George smiled weakly, still not quite back into the world of words. “‘Eat and ye shall be as gods’?” he said.

“I call it the no-ego ego trip. It’s the biggest ego trip of all, of course. Anybody can learn it. A child of two months, a dog, a cat. But when an adult rediscovers it, after the habit of obedience and submission has crushed it out of him for years or decades, what happens can be a total disaster. That’s why the Zen Roshtis say, ‘One who achieves supreme illumination is like an arrow flying straight to hell.’ Keep in mind what I said about caution, George. You can release at any moment. It’s great up there, and you need a mantra to keep you away from it until you learn how to use it. Here’s your mantra, and if you knew the peril you are in you’d brutally burn it into your backside with a branding iron to make sure you’d never forget it: I Am The Robot. Repeat it.”

“I Am The Robot.”

Hagbard made a face like a baboon and George laughed again, at last. “When you get time,” Hagbard said, “look into my little book,
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing
—there are copies all over the ship. That’s
my
ego tip. And keep it in mind: you are the robot and you’ll never be anything else. Of course, you’re also the programmer, and even the meta-programmer; but that’s another lesson, for another day. For now, just remember the mammal, the robot.”

“I know,” George said. “I’ve read T. S. Eliot, and now I understand him. ‘Humility is endless.’”

“And humanity
is
created. The…other … is not human.”

George said then, “So I’ve arrived. And it’s just another starting place. The beginning of another trip. A harder trip.”

“That’s another meaning in Heracleitus. ‘The end is the beginning.’” Hagbard rose and shook himself like a dog. “Wow,” he said. “I better get to work with
FUCKUP. You can stay here or go to your own room, but I suggest that you don’t rush off and talk about your experience to somebody else. You can talk it to death that way.”

George remained in Hagbard’s room and reflected on what had happened. He had no urge to scribble in his diary, the usual defense against silence and aloneness since his early teens. Instead, he savored the stillness of the room and of his inner core. He remembered Saint Francis of Assisi called his body “Brother Ass,” and Timothy Leary used to say when exhausted, “The robot needs sleep.” Those had been their mantras, their defenses against the experience of the mountaintop and the terrible arrogance it triggered. He remembered, too, the old classic underground press ad: “Keep me high and I’ll ball you forever.” He felt sorry for the woman who had written that: pitiful modern version of the maddened Saint Simon on his pillar in the desert. And Hagbard was right: any dog or cat could do it, could make the jump to the mountaintop and wait without passion until the robot, Brother Ass, survived the ordeal or perished in it. That was what primitive rites of initiation were all about—driving the youth through sheer terror to the point of letting go, the mountaintop point, and then bringing him back down again. George suddenly understood how his generation, in rediscovering the sacred drugs, had failed to rediscover their proper use…had failed, or had been prevented. The Illuminati, it was clear, didn’t want any competition in the godmanship business.

You could talk it to death in your own head as well as in conversation, he realized, but he went back over it again trying to dissect it without mutilating it. The homosexuality bit had been a false front (with its own reality, of course, like all false fronts). Behind that was the conditioned terror against the Robot: the fear, symbolized in Frankenstein and dozens of other archetypes, that if it were let loose, unrestrained, the Robot would run amok, murder, rape, go mad…And then Hagbard had waited until the Alamout Black
brought him to freedom, showed him the peak, the place where the cortex at last could idle, as a car motor or a dog or cat idles, the last refuge where the catatonic hides. When George was safely in that harbor, Hagbard produced the gun—in a more primitive, or more sophisticated, society, it would have been the emblem of a powerful demon—and George saw that he could, indeed, idle there and not blindly follow the panic signals from the Robot’s adrenalin factory. And, because he was a human and not a dog, the experience had been ecstasy to him, and temptation, so Hagbard, with a few words and a glance from those eyes, pushed him off the peak into…what?

Reconciliation was the word. Reconciliation with the robot, with the Robot, with himself. The peak was not a victory; it was the war, the eternal war against the Robot, carried to a higher and more dangerous level. The end of the war was his surrender, the only possible end to that war, since the Robot was three billion years old and couldn’t be killed.

There were two great errors in the world, he perceived: the error of the submissive hordes, who fought all their lives to control the Robot and please their masters (and who always sabotaged every effort without knowing it, and were in turn sabotaged by the Robot’s Revenge: neuroses, psychoses and all the tiresome list of psychosomatic ailments); and the error of those who recaptured the animal art of letting the Robot run itself, and who then tried to maintain this split from their own flesh indefinitely, until they were lost forever in that eternally widening chasm. One sought to batter the Robot to submission, the other to slowly starve it; both were wrong.

And yet, on another plane of his still-zonked mind, George knew that even this was a half truth; that he was, indeed, just beginning his journey, not arriving at his destination. He rose and walked to the bookshelves and, as he expected, found a stack of Hagbard’s little pamphlets on the bottom:
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing
, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H. He wondered
what the H.M. and S.H. stood for, then flipped open to the first page, where he found only the large question:

George laughed out loud. The Robot, of course. Me. George Dorn. All three billion years’ worth of evolution in every gene and chromosome of me. And that, of course, was what the Illuminati (and all the petty would-be Illuminati who made up power structures everywhere) never wanted a man or woman to realize.

George turned to the second page and began reading:

That was all, except for an abstract drawing on page three that seemed to suggest an enemy figure moving out toward the viewer. About to turn to page four, George got a shock: from another angle, the drawing was two figures engaged in attacking each other. I and It. The Mind and the Robot. His memory leaped back twenty-two years and he saw his mother lean over the crib and remove his hand from his penis. Christ, no wonder I grab it when I’m frightened: the Robot’s Revenge, the Return of the Repressed.

George started to turn the page again, and saw another trick in Hagbard’s abstraction: from a third angle,
it might be a couple making love. In a flash, he saw his mother’s face above his crib again, in better focus, and recognized the concern in her eyes. The cruel hand of repression was moved by love: she was trying to save him from Sin.

And Carlo, dead three years now, together with the rest of that Morituri group—what had inspired Carlo when he and the four others (all of them less than eighteen, George remembered) blasted their way into a God’s Lightning rally and killed three cops and four Secret Service agents in their attempts to gun down the Secretary of State? Love, nothing but mad love …

The door opened and George tore his eyes from the text. Mavis, back again in her sweater and slacks outfit, walked in. For a proclaimed right-wing anarchist, she sure dresses a lot like a New Leftist, George thought; but then Hagbard wrote like a cross between Reichian Leftist and an egomaniacal Zen Master—there was obviously more to the Discordian philosophy than he could grasp yet, even though he was now convinced it was the system he himself had been groping toward for many years.

“Mmm,” she said, “I like that smell. Alamout Black?”

“Yeah,” George said, having trouble meeting her eyes. “Hagbard’s been illuminating me.”

“I can tell. Is that why you suddenly feel uncomfortable with me?”

George met her eyes, then looked away again; there was tenderness there but it was, as he had expected, sisterly at best. He muttered, “It’s just that I realize our sex” (why couldn’t he say fucking or, at least, balling?) “was less important to you than to me.”

Mavis took Hagbard’s chair and smiled at him affectionately. “You’re lying, George. You mean it was
more
important to me than to you.” She began to refill the pipe;
Christ God
, George thought,
did Hagbard send her in to take me to the next stage, whatever it is?

“Well, I guess I mean both,” he said cautiously. “You were more emotionally involved than I was
then
,
but
now
I’m more emotionally involved. And I know that what I want, I can’t have. Ever.”

“Ever is a long time. Let’s just say you can’t have it now.”

“‘Humility is endless,’” George repeated.

“Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve discovered that love is more than a word in poetry, and you want it right away. You just had two other things that used to be just words to you—
sunyata
and
satori
. Isn’t that enough for one day?”

“I’m not complaining. I know that ‘humility is endless’ also means surprise is endless. Hagbard promised me a happy truth and that’s it.”

Mavis finally got the pipe lit and, after toking deeply, passed it over. “You can have Hagbard,” she said.

George, sipping very lightly since he was still fairly high, mumbled “Hm?”

“Hagbard will love you as well as ball you. Of course, it’s not the same. He loves everybody. I’m not at that stage yet. I can only love my equals.” She grinned wickedly. “Of course, I can still get horny about you. But now that you know there’s more than that, you want the whole package deal, right? So try Hagbard.”

George laughed, feeling suddenly lighthearted. “Okay! I will.”

“Bullshit,” Mavis said bluntly. “You’re putting us both on. You’ve liberated some of the energies and right away, like everybody else at this stage, you want to prove that there are no blocks anywhere anymore. That laugh was not convincing, George. If you have a block, face it. Don’t pretend it isn’t there.”

Humility is endless
, George thought. “You’re right,” he said, unabashed.

“That’s better. At least you didn’t fall into feeling guilty about the block. That’s an infinite regress. The next stage is to feel guilty about feeling guilty…and pretty soon you’re back in the trap again, trying to be the governor of the nation of Dorn.”

“The Robot,” George said.

Mavis toked and said, “Mm?”

“I call it the Robot.”

“You picked that up from Leary back in the mid-’60s. I keep forgetting you were a child prodigy. I can just see you, with your eyeglasses and your shoulders all hunched, poring over one of Tim’s books when you were eight or nine. You must have been quite a child. They’ve sure mauled you over since then, haven’t they?”

“It happens to most prodigies. And nonprodigies, too, for that matter.”

“Yeah. Eight years’ grade school, four high school, four college, then postgraduate studies. Nothing left but the Robot at the end. The ever-rebellious nation of Me with poor old I sitting on the throne trying to govern it.”

“There’s no governor anywhere,” George quoted.

“You
are
coming along nicely.”

“That’s Chuang Chou, the Taoist philosopher. But I never understood him before.”

“So that’s where Hagbard stole it! He has little cards that say, ‘There is no enemy anywhere.’ And ones that say, ‘There is no friend anywhere.’ He said once he could tell in two minutes which card was right for a particular person. To jolt them awake.”

“But words alone can’t do it. I’ve known most of the words for years …”

“Words can help. In the right situation. If they’re the wrong words. I mean, the right words. No, I
do
mean the wrong words.”

They laughed, and George said, “Are we just goofing, or are you taking up the liberation of the nation of Dorn where Hagbard left off?”

“Just goofing. Hagbard did tell me that you had passed one of the gateless gates and that I might drop in,
after
you had a while alone.”