The illuminatus! trilogy (8 page)

Saul thought, suddenly, of Charlie Manson, and of the glorification of Manson by the Weatherman and Morituri bombers. He thought of the popularity of pot smoking and of the slogan “by any means necessary” with contemporary radical youth, even outside Weatherman. And he thought of Neitzsche’s slogans, “Be hard…. Whatever is done for love is beyond good and evil…. Above the ape is man, and above man, the Superman…. Forget not thy whip….” In spite of his own logic, which had proved that Malik’s theory was only
partly
true, Saul Goodman, a lifelong liberal, suddenly felt a pang of typically right-wing terror toward modern youth.

He reminded himself that Malik seemed to think the conspiracy emanated chiefly from Mad Dog—and that was God’s Lightning country down there. God’s Lightning had no fondness for marijuana, or for youth, or for the definitely anti-Christian overtones of the Illuminati philosophy.

Besides, Malik’s sources were only partly trustworthy.

And there were other possibilities: the Shriners, for instance, were part of the Masonic movement, were generally right-wing, had their own hidden rites and secrets, and used Arabic trappings that might well derive from Hassan i Sabbah or the Roshinaya of Afghanistan. Who could say what secret plots were hatched at Shriner conventions?

No, that was the intuitive pole vaulter in the right lobe at work again; and right now Saul was concerned with the plodding logician in the left lobe.

The key to the mystery was in getting a clearer definition of the purpose of the Illuminati. Identify the change they were trying to accomplish—in man and in his society—and then you would be able to guess, at least approximately, who they were.

Their aim was English domination of the world, and they were Rhodes Scholars—according to the Birchers.
That
idea, obviously, belonged with Saul’s own whimsey about a worldwide Shriner conspiracy. What then? The Italian Illuminati, under Fra Dolcino, wanted to redistribute the wealth—but the International Bankers, mentioned in the
Playboy
letter, presumably wanted to hold onto their wealth. Weishaupt was a “freethinker” according to the
Britannica
, and so were Washington and Jefferson— but Sabbah and Joachim of Florence were evidently heretical mystics of the Islamic and Catholic traditions respectively.

Saul picked up the ninth memo, deciding to get more facts (or pretended facts) before analyzing further—and then it hit him.

Whatever the Illuminati were aiming at had not been accomplished. Proof: If it had, they would not still be conspiring in secret.

Since almost everything has been tried in the course of human history, find out what hasn’t been tried (at least not on a large scale)—and that will be the condition to
which the Illuminati are trying to move the rest of mankind.

Capitalism had been tried. Communism has been tried. Even Henry George’s Single Tax has been tried, in Australia. Fascism, feudalism and mysticism have been tried.

Anarchism has never been tried
.

Anarchism was frequently associated with assassinations. It had an appeal for freethinkers, such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, but also for religious idealists, like Tolstoy and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. Most anarchists hoped, Joachim-like, to redistribute the wealth, but Rebecca had once told him about a classic of anarchist literature, Max Stirner’s
The Ego and His Own
, which had been called “the Billionaire’s Bible” because it stressed the advantages the rugged individualist would gain in a stateless society—and Cecil Rhodes was an adventurer before he was a banker. The Illuminati were anarchists.

It all fit: the pieces of the puzzle slipped together smoothly.

Saul was convinced.

He was also wrong.

“We’ll just get our troops out of Fernando Too,” the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party said on April 1. “A place that size isn’t worth world war.”

“But we don’t have any troops there,” an aide told him, “it’s the Russians who do.”

“Oh?” the Chairman quoted a proverb to the effect that there was urine in the rosewater. “I wonder what the hell the Russians want with Fernando Poo?” he added thoughtfully.

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost
godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and Russia.

(“And it’s not only a sin against God,” Mr. Mocenigo shouts, “but it gives you germs, too.” It is 1950, early spring on Mulberry Street, and young Charlie Mocenigo raises terrified eyes. “Look, look,” Mr. Mocenigo goes on angrily, “don’t believe your own father. See what the dictionary says. Look, look at the page. Here, see. ‘Masturbation: self-pollution.’ Do you know what self-pollution means? Do you know how long those germs last?” And in another spring, 1955, Charles Mocenigo, a pale, skinny, introverted genius, registers for his first semester at MIT and, coming to the square on the form that says “Religion,” writes in careful block capitals, atheist. He has read Kinsey and Hirschfeld and almost all the biologically oriented sexological treatises by this time—studiously ignoring psychoanalysts and such unscientific types—and the only visible remnant of that early adolescent terror is a habit of washing his hands frequently when under tension, which earns him the nickname “Soapy.”)

General Talbot looks at Mocenigo pityingly and raises his pistol to the scientist’s head
….

On August 6, 1902, the world produced its usual crop of new humans, all programmed to act more or less alike, all containing minor variations of the same basic DNA blueprint; of these, approximately 51,000 were female and 50,000 were male; and two of the males, born at the same second, were to play a large role in our story, and to pursue somewhat similar and anabatic careers. The first, born over a cheap livery stable in the Bronx, New York, was named Arthur Flegenheimer and, at the other end of his life, spoke very movingly about his mother (as well as about bears and sidewalks and French Canadian Bean
Soup); the second, born in one of the finest old homes on Beacon Hill in Boston, was named Robert Putney Drake and, at the other end of his life, thought rather harshly of his mother … but when the paths of Mr. Flegenheimer and Mr. Drake crossed, in 1935, one of the links was formed which led to the Fernando Poo Incident.

And, in present time, more or less, 00005 was summoned to meet W. in the headquarters of a certain branch of British Intelligence. The date was March 17, but being English, neither 00005 nor W. gave a thought to blessed Saint Patrick; instead, they spoke of Fernando Poo.

“The Yanks,” W. said crisply, “are developing evidence that the Russians or the Chinese, or both of them, are behind this Tequilla y Moto swine. Of course, even if that were true, it wouldn’t matter a damn to Her Majesty’s government; what do we care if a
speck
of an island that size turns Red? But you know the Yanks, 00005—they’re ready to go to war over it, although they haven’t announced that publicly yet.”

“My mission,” 00005 asked, the faint lines of cruelty about his mouth turning into a most engaging smile, “is to hop down to Fernando Poo and find out the real politics of this Tequilla y Mota bloke and if he is Red overthrow him before the Yanks blow up the world?”

“That’s the assignment. We can’t have a bloody nuclear war just when the balance of payments is almost straightened out and the Common Market is finally starting to work. So, hop to it, straightaway. Naturally, if you’re captured, Her Majesty’s government will have to disavow any knowledge of your actions.”

“It always seems to work out that way,” 00005 said ironically. “I wish for once you’d give me a mission where Her Majesty’s bleeding government would stand behind me in a tight spot.”

But 00005, of course, was merely being witty; as a loyal subject, he would follow orders under any circumstances, even if it required the death of every soul on Fernando Poo and himself as well. He rose, in his characteristic debonair fashion, and headed for his own office, where he began his preparations for the Fernando Poo mission. His first step was to check his personal worldwide travel notebook, seeking the bar in Santa Isobel which came closest to serving a suitable martini and the restaurant most likely
to prepare an endurable lobster Newburg. To his horror, there was no such bar and no such restaurant. Santa Isobel was bereft of social graces.

“I say,” 00005 muttered, “this is going to be a bit
thick.”

But he cheered up quickly, for he knew that Fernando Poo would be equipped at least with a bevy of tawny-skinned or coffee-colored females, and such women were the Holy Grail to him. Besides, he had already formed his own theory about Fernando Poo: he was convinced that BUGGER—Blowhard’s Unreformed Gangsters, Goons, and Espionage Renegades, an international conspiracy of criminals and double agents, led by the infamous and mysterious Eric “the Red” Blowhard—was behind it all. 00005 had never heard of the Illuminati.

In fact, 00005, despite his dark hair combed straight back, his piercing eyes, his cruel and handsome face, his trim athlete’s body, and his capacity to penetrate any number of females and defenestrate any number of males in the course of duty, was not really an ideal intelligence agent. He had grown up reading Ian Fleming novels and one day, at the age of twenty-one, looked in the mirror, decided he was everything a Fleming hero should be, and started a campaign to get into the spy game. After fourteen years in bureaucratic burrowing, he finally arrived in one of the intelligence services, but it was much more the kind of squalid and bumbling organization in which Harry Palmer had toiled his cynical days away than it was a berth of Bondage. Nevertheless, 00005 did his best to refurbish and glamorize the scene and, perhaps because God looks after fools, he hadn’t managed to get himself killed in any of the increasingly bizarre missions to which he was assigned. The missions were all weird, at first, because nobody took them seriously—they were all based on wild rumors that had to be checked out just in case there be some truth in them—but later it was realized that 00005’s peculiar schizophrenia was well suited to certain real problems, just as the schizoid of the more withdrawn type is ideal for a “sleeper” agent since he could easily forget what was conventionally considered his real self. Of course, nobody at any time ever took BUGGER seriously, and, behind his back, 00005’s obsession with this organization was a subject of much interdepartmental humor.

“Wonderful as it was,” Mary Lou said, “some of it was scary.”

“Why?” Simon asked
.

“All those hallucinations. I thought I might be losing my mind.”

Simon lit another joint and passed it over to her. “What makes you think, even now, that it was just hallucinations?” he asked
.

ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

“If that was real” Mary Lou said firmly, “everything else in my life has been a hallucination”

Simon grinned. “Now,” he said calmly, “you’re getting the point.”

And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above. In Las Vegas, Dr. Charles Mocenigo woke from another nightmare and went to the toilet to wash his hands. He thought of his date the next night with Sherri Brandi and, quite mercifully, had no inkling that it would be his last contact with a woman. Still seeking calm, he went to the window and looked at the stars—being a specialist, with no interest beyond his own field, he imagined he was looking up rather than out at them. In New Delhi aboard the afternoon TWA flight for Hong Kong, Honolulu, and Los Angeles, R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the few people to be aware that he lived on a spaceship, glanced at his three watches, showing local time (5:30 p.m.), time at Honolulu,
his point of destination (2:30 a.m. the next morning) and present time in his home at Carbondale, Illinois (3:30 a.m. the previous morning.) In Paris, the noon crowds were jostled by hordes of young people distributing leaflets glowingly describing the world’s greatest Rock Festival and Cosmic Love Feast to be celebrated on the shores of Lake Totenkopf near Ingolstadt at the end of the month. At Sunderland, England, a young psychiatrist left his lunch to rush to the chronic ward and listen to weird babble proceeding from a patient who had been decade-silent: “On
Walpurgasnacht
it’s coming. That’s when His power is strongest. That’s when you’ll see Him. Right at the very stroke of midnight.” In the middle of the Atlantic, Howard the porpoise, swimming with friends in the mid-morning sun, encountered some sharks and had a nasty fight. Saul Goodman rubbed tired eyes in New York City as dawn crept over the windowsill, and read a memo about Charlemagne and the Courts of the Illuminated; Rebecca Goodman, meanwhile, read how the jealous priests of Bel-Marduk betrayed Babylon to the invading army of Cyrus because their young king, Belshazzar, had embraced the love-cult of the goddess Ishtar. In Chicago, Simon Moon was listening to the birds begin to sing and waiting for the first cinnamon rays of dawn, as Mary Lou Servix slept beside him; his mind was active, thinking about pyramids and rain-gods and sexual yoga and fifth-dimensional geometries, but thinking mostly about the Ingolstadt Rock Festival and wondering if it would all happen as Hagbard Celine had predicted.