The illuminatus! trilogy (81 page)

“Malik,” Roosevelt said thoughtfully. “That would be the Malik of
Confrontation
magazine?” John nodded, and Roosevelt sat back in his wheelchair, smiling. “This is a lead-pipe cinch. We’ve got an agent in his office.”

(But neither of them realized that ten days later a dolphin swimming through the ruins of Atlantis would discover that no Dragon Star had ever fallen. Nor could they have guessed how Hagbard Celine would reevaluate Illuminati
history when that revelation was reported to him, and they had no clue of the decision he would then make, which would change everybody’s conspiracies shockingly and unexpectedly.)

“Here are the five alternate histories,” Gruad said, his wise old eyes crinkling humorously. “Each of you will be responsible for planting the evidence to make one of these histories seem fairly credible. Wo Topod, you get the Carcosa story. Evoe, you get the lost continent of Mu.” He handed out two bulky envelopes. “Gao Twone, you get this charming snake story—I want variations of it scattered throughout Africa and the Near East.” He handed out another envelope. “Unica, you get the Urantia story, but that one isn’t to be released until fairly late in the Game.” He picked up the fifth envelope and smiled again. “Kajeci, my love, you get the Atlantis story, with certain changes that make us out to be the most double-dyed bastards in all history. Let me explain the purpose behind that …”

And in 1974 the four members of the American Medical Association gazed somberly down at Joe Malik from his office wall. It looked to be a long day, and there was nothing to anticipate as exciting as last night had been. There was a thick manuscript in a manila envelope in the IN box; he noticed that the stamps had been removed. That was doubtless Pat Walsh’s work; her kid brother was a stamp collector. Joe smiled, remembering the diary he’d kept when he was a teen-ager. In case his parents found it, he always referred to masturbation as stamp collecting. “Collected five stamps today—a new record.” “After five days of no stamps, collected a beauty in several colors. Enormous, but the negotiations were tiring.” Doubtless today’s kids, if they kept diaries (they probably used casette tape recorders), either talked openly about it or considered it too incidental to mention. Joe shook his head. The Catholic teen-ager he had been in 1946 was no more remote than the crumbling liberal he’d been in 1968. And yet, in spite of all he’d been through, much of the time he felt that all of the knowledge didn’t make a difference. People like Pat and Peter still treated him as if he were the same man, and he still did the same job in the same way.

He took the heavy manuscript out and shook the envelope. Damn it, there was no return envelope. Well, working at a magazine like
Confrontation
, whose contributors were
mostly radicals and the kind of kooks who were willing to write for no bread, you didn’t really expect them to enclose stamped self-addressed envelopes. There was a covering letter. Joe sucked in his breath when he saw the golden apple embossed in the upper left-hand corner.

(Down the hall in the lady’s room, bolting the door for privacy, Pat Walsh takes her transistorized transmitter from her pantyhose and broadcasts to the receiver at the Council on Foreign Relations headquarters half a block east. “I’m still writing lots of Illuminati research papers, and they’ll give him plenty of false leads. The big news today is an article on Erisian economics by a Fernando Poo national. It came with a covering letter signed ‘Mal,’ and from the context,
I feel fairly certain it’s the original—Malaclypse the Elder himself. If not, at last we’ve got a lead on that damned elusive Malaclypse the Younger. The envelope was postmarked Mad Dog, Texas …”)

Joe put down Mal’s letter, trying to remember the obscure references to Fernando Poo before the movie last night. Someone had said something was going to happen there. Maybe he should get a stringer on the island, or even send somebody over. A malicious grin crossed his face: It might be interesting to send Peter. First some AUM, then a trip to Fernando Poo. That might fix Peter up.

Joe flipped through the Lobengula manuscript quickly, scanning. There were no fnords. That was a relief. He had become painfully conscious of them since Hagbard had removed the aversion reflex, and each fnord had sent a pang through him that was a ghost of the low-grade emergency in which he had previously lived. He turned back to the first page and began to read in earnest:

VAMPIRISM, THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY AND THE GOLD STANDARD
by Jorge Lobengula
Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law

Joe stopped. That sentence had been used in the Black Mass in Chicago and further back, he knew, it was the code of the Abbey of Theleme in Rabelais; but there was something else about it that chewed at his consciousness, something that suggested a hidden meaning. This was not just a first axiom of anarchism—there was something else there, something more hermetic. He looked back at Mal’s letter: “Remember what I told you about the goose in the bottle.”

That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it in there and feed it, until it is a full-grown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottle’s neck. The question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?

Neither riddle seemed to shed much light on the other.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
.

How do you get the goose out of the bottle?

“Holy God.” Joe laughed. “Do what
thou
wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

The goose gets out of the bottle the same way John Dillinger got out of the “escape-proof” Crown Point jail.

“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” Joe gasped.
“It’s alive!”

JUST LIKE A TREE THAT’S STANDING BY THE WAAATER

WE SHALL NOT WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED

The only place where all five Illuminati Primi met was the Great Hall of Gruad in Agharti, the thirty-thousand-year-old Illuminati center on the peaks of the Tibetan Himalayas, with a lower-level water front harbor on the vast underground Sea of Valusia.

“We will report in the usual order,” said Brother Gracchus Gruad, pressing a button in the table before him so his words would automatically be recorded on impervium wire for the Illuminati archives. “First of all, Fernando Poo. Jorge Lobengula, having decided that the combined resources of Fernando Poo and Rio Muni can be reallocated so as to increase the per-capita wealth of citizens of both provinces, has accordingly broken with the Fernando Poo separatists and returned to Rio Muni, where he hopes to persuade Fang leaders to go along with his schemes for economic redevelopment. Our plans now center on a Captain Ernesto Tequila y Mota, one of the few Caucasians left on Fernando Poo. He has good contacts among the wealthier Bubi, the ones who favor separatism, and he is inordinately ambitious. I don’t think we need contemplate a change in timetable.”

“I should hope not,” said Brother Marcus Marconi. “It would be such a shame not to immanentize the Eschaton on May first”

“Well, we can’t count on May first,” said Brother Gracchus Gruad. “But with three distinct plans pointing in that direction, one of them is bound to hit. Let’s hear from you, Brother Marcus.”

“Charles Mocenigo has now reached Anthrax Leprosy Mu. A few more nightmares at the right moment and he’ll be home.”

Sister Theda Theodora spoke next. “Atlanta Hope and God’s Lighting are becoming more powerful all the time. The President will be scared shitless of her when the time comes, and he’ll be ready to be even more totalitarian than her, just to keep her from taking over.”

“I don’t trust Drake,” said Brother Marcus Marconi.

“Of course,” said Brother Gracchus Gruad. “But he has builded his house by the sea.”

“And he who builds by the sea builds on sand,” said Brother Otto Ogatai. “My turn. Our record,
Give, Sympathize, Control
is an international hit. Our next tour of Europe should be an extraordinary success. Then we can begin, very slowly and tentatively, negotiations for the
Walpurgisnacht
festival. Anyone who tries to develop the idea prematurely, of course, will have to be deflected.”

“Or liquidated,” said Brother Gracchus Gruad. He looked down the long table at the man who sat by himself at the far end. “Now you. You’ve been silent all this time. What do you have to say?”

The man laughed. “A few words from the skeleton at the feast, eh?” This was the fifth and most formidable Illuminatus Primus, Brother Henry Hastur, the only one who would have the gall to name himself after a lloigor. “It is written,” he said, “that the universe is a practical joke by the general at the expense of the particular. Do not be too quick to laugh or weep, if you believe this saying. All I can say is, there is a serious threat in being to ail your plans. I warn you. You have been warned. You may all die. Are you afraid of death? You need not answer—I see that you are. That in itself may be a mistake. I have tried to explain to you about not fearing death, but you will not listen. All your other problems follow from that.”

The other four Illuminati Primi listened in cold, disdainful silence and did not reply.

“If all are One,” the fifth Illuminatus added significantly, “all violence is masochism.”

“If all are One,” Brother Otto replied nastily, “all sex-is masturbation. Let’s have no more
mehum
metaphysics here.”

HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE

“George!”

Then George was here, with Celine, in Ingolstadt. This was going to be tricky. George’s head was bent over an earthenware stein, doubtless full of the local brew.

“George!” Joe called again. George looked up, and Joe was astonished. He had never seen George like this before. George shook his shoulder-length blond hair to clear it away from his face, and Joe looked deep into his eyes.
They were strange eyes, eves without fear or pity or guilt, eyes that acknowledged that the natural state of man was one of perpetual surprise, and therefore could not be greatly surprised by any one thing, even the unexpected appearance of Joe Malik. What has Celine done to him in the past seven days? Joe wondered. Has he destroyed his mind or has he—illuminated him?

Actually, it was George’s tenth stein of beer that day, and he was very, very drunk.

HARRY ROBOT HARRY HARRY

(Civil liberties were suspended and a state of national emergency declared during a special presidential broadcast on all channels between noon and 12:30 on April 30. Fifteen minutes later the first rioting started in New York, at the Port Authority on Forty-first Street, where a mob attempted to overrun the police and steal buses in which to escape to Canada. It was 6:45 P.M. just then in Ingolstadt, and Count Dracula and His Brides were giving forth a raga-rock version of an old Walt Disney cartoon song…And in Los Angeles, where it was 9:45 A.M., a five-person Morituri group, hurriedly convened, decided to use up all its bombs against police stations immediately. “Cripple the motherfucker before it’s
heavy,”
said their leader, a sixteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth…Her idiom, in standard English, meant: “Paralyze the fascist state before it’s entrenched”…and Saul, trusting the pole-vaulter in the unconscious, was leading Barney and Markoff Chaney into the mouth of Lehman Cavern…Carmel, nearly a kilometer south of them, and several hundred feet closer to the center of the earth, still clutched his briefcase and its five million green gods, but he did not move…Near him were the bones of a dozen bats he had eaten …)

Joe Malik, hit by the raga rock as if by an avalanche of separate notes which were each boulders, felt his body dissolve. Count Dracula wailed it again (YOU’RE NOT A THING AT ALL), and Joe felt mind crumble along with body and could find no center, no still point in the waves of sound and energy; the fucking acid was Hagbard’s ally and had turned against him, he was dying; even the words “Hey
that cat’s on a bummer” came from far away, and his effort to determine if they really meant him collapsed into an effort to remember what the words were, which imploded into an uncertainty about what effort he was trying to make, mental or physical, and why. “Because,” he cried out, “because, because—”…but “because” meant nothing.

YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING

NOTHING BUT A NOTHING

“But I can’t take acid now,” George had protested. “I’m so damned drunk on this Bavarian beer, it’s sure to be a down trip.”

“Everybody takes acid,” Hagbard said coldly. “Those are Miss Portinari’s orders, and she’s right. We can only face this thing if our minds are completely open to the Outside.”

“Hey, dig,” Clark Kent said. “That French cat eating the popsicle.”