The illuminatus! trilogy (79 page)

“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 goggle-eyed. It was the passwords of the

“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 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:

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.)

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
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
was up to. I’m not flexible as you, though, and my loyalties tend to stay fairly constant—chiefly I was reporting to
what I gleaned from Naval Intelligence. I did believe in the
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
, 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 Cart-wright of the Mad Dog Cabal.”

“Tobias Knight,” I said, “of the FBI, the CIA, the
and the Illuminati.”