The illuminatus! trilogy (93 page)

“Onward!” roared Wolfgang, and, tanks in the van, they smashed through the festival fence, raced over the hills, troops trotting double-time, and unhesitatingly charged out onto the bridge. Wolfgang stood in the back seat of the von Rundstedt Mercedes, his black-gloved hands gripping the back of the front seat, the wind blowing through his crew cut like a field of wheat. Suddenly, beside him, Wilhelm screamed.

“What is it now?” yelled Wolfgang over the roar of his advancing army.

“The lives we are about to take,” the voice of the lloigor grated. “They are mine, yes? All mine?”

“Listen to me, you energy vampire. We have other debts to discharge, and other projects to complete. There are twenty-three of our faithful servants waiting in the Donau-Hotel to be transcendentally illuminated. They come first You’ll get yours. Wait your turn.”

“Farewell,” said the lloigor. “I shall see you at the hour of your death.”

“I will never die!”

“Fool!” the voice shrieked with Wilhelm’s mouth. Suddenly Wilhelm stood up, threw open the door of the car, and hurled himself out into the lake. He struck with a huge splash, then sank like a stone. A greenish glow spread in the black water where he had gone down.

And then there were four.

Hagbard stood atop a hill, watching the tanks roll across the bridge, followed by the black Mercedes, followed by troop carriers and artillery, followed by trotting foot soldiers.
He knelt beside a detonator and shoved down the handle.

From end to end the bridge and those upon it disappeared in geysers of white water. The thunder of the explosions—demolition charges placed by the porpoise horde under the direction of Howard—re-echoed through the hills around the lake.

The tanks went under first. As the front end of the command car sank under water, Werner Saure screamed, “My foot’s caught!” He went down with the car, while Wolfgang and Winifred, their tears mingling with the water of Lake Totenkopf, splashed about in the water with the few remaining Supernazis.

And then there were three.

Hagbard shouted, “I sank it! I sank the George Washington Bridge!”

“Is anything changed?” said George.

“Of course,” said Hagbard. “We’ve got them on the run. We’ll be able to finish them off in a few more minutes. Then there’ll be no more evil in the world. Everything will be
ginger-peachy”
His tone seemed sarcastic rather than victorious, George noted apprehensively.

“Now I’ll admit,” Fission Chips said reasonably, “that I’m under the influence of some bloody drug from the Kool-Aid. But this simply cannot all be hallucination. Very definitely, thirteen people took their clothes off and started dancing. I quite certainly heard them singing ‘Blessed be, blessed be,’ over and over. Then a simply gigantic woman rose up from somewhere and all the sirens and undines and mermaids went back into the water. If this was Armageddon, it was not precisely the way the Bible described it. Is that a fair summary of the situation?”

The tree he was talking to didn’t answer.

“Blessed be, blessed be,” Lady Velkor sang on, as she and her hastily assembled coven danced widdershins in their circle. The spell had worked: With her own eyes she had seen the Great Mother, Isis, rise up and smite the evil spirits of the dead Catholic Inquisitors whom the Illuminati had tried to revive. She knew Hagbard Celine would later be boasting in all the most chic occult circles that he had performed the miracle, and giving the credit to that destructive bitch Eris—but that didn’t matter. She with her own eyes had seen Isis, and that was enough.

“Now I ask you,” Fission Chips went on, addressing another tree, who seemed more communicative, “what the sulphurous hell did
you
see happening here tonight?”

“I saw a master Magician,” said the tree, “or a master con man—the two are the same—plant a few suggestions and get a bunch of acidheads running away from their own shadows.” The tree, who was actually Joe Malik and only looked like a tree to poor befuddled 00005, added, “Or I saw the final battle between Good and Evil, with Horus on both sides.”

“You must be drugged too,” Chips said pettishly.

“You bet your sweet ass I am,” said the tree, walking away.

…
I don’t know how the courts will ever untangle this. With five of them shooting at once, and the Secret Service shooting back right away, the best crime lab in the world will never get the trajectories of all the bullets right Who, among the survivors, will be tried for murder and who for attempted murder? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question and
…
what?
…
oh
…
And now, ladies and gentlemen, on this sad occasion
…
uh
…
in this tragic hour of our country’s history, let us all pay especially close attention to the new President, who will now address us
.

Who’s that jig standing over there?
the new Chief Exec was asking somebody off camera when he appeared on the TV screens.

The Chevrolet Stegosaurus drove into the empty concert grounds and came to a slow halt. The guitarist stuck his head out the window and yelled to Lady Velkor, “What the hell happened here?”

“There was some bad acid in the Kool-Aid,” she told him gravely. “Everybody freaked out and ran off toward town.”

“Hell,” he said, “and this was going to be our first big audience. We’re a new group, just formed. What lousy luck.”

He turned and drove off, and she read the sign on the back of the car: THE FERNANDO POO INCIDENT.

“How are you now, baby?” Simon asked.

“I know who I am,” Mary Lou said slowly, “and you might not like the results of that any more than the Chicago police force will.” Her eyes were distant and pensive.

Wolfgang and Winifred were very near shore when the
dark, humped shapes rose out of the water around them. Winifred shrieked, “Wolfgang! For the love of Gruad, Wolfgang! They’re pulling me down!” Her long blond hair floated for a moment after her head went under; then that too disappeared.

And then there were two.

The porpoises have her, Wolfgang thought to himself. He continued to swim madly toward shore. Something caught his trouser leg, but he kicked free. Then he was in the shallows, too close in for the sea beasts to follow. He stood up and waded ashore. And came face to face with John Dillinger.

“Sorry, pal,” said John, and squeezed the trigger of his Thompson submachine gun. Thirty silver bullets struck Wolfgang with the impact of clubs and threw him back into the water. All feeling was gone from his body, and he felt the foul tentacles closing around his mind and the murmuring, horrible laughter grew to a soundless roar, and the syrupy voice spoke to his mind:
Welcome to the place prepared for you from everlasting to everlasting. Now truly you will never die
. And the mind of Wolfgang Saure, imprisoned like a living fly in amber, knowing that it must remain so for billions upon billions of years, screamed and screamed and screamed.

And then there was one.

And Joe Malik, feeling as if he were sitting in an audience watching himself perform, walked over to that One and held out his hand. “Congratulations,” he said icily. “You really did it.”

Hagbard looked at the hand and said, “You were more intimate the last time around.”

“Very well,” said Joe. “My Lord, my enemy.” He leaned forward and kissed Hagbard full on the mouth. Then he took the gun out of his pocket and carefully fired directly into Hagbard’s brain. And then there were none.

It was quite real; Joe shook himself, stood up, and grinned. Walking over to Hagbard, he took out the gun and handed it to him.

“Surprise ending,” he said. “I read all the clues, just like you wanted me to. I know you’re the fifth Illuminatus Primus, and I know your motive for wiping out the other four is nothing like you’ve led us to believe. But I can’t play my role. I still trust you. You
must
have a good reason.”

Hagbard’s mouth fell open in completely genuine surprise. “Well,
sink
me!” he said, beginning to laugh.

Dawn was breaking; the Nine Unknown Men, most mysterious of all rock groups, ceremonially donned their football helmets and faced the East to chant:

The bursts to the moon and to the planets are also not historic events. They are the major evolutionary breakthroughs…Today when we speak of immortality and of going to another world we no longer mean these in a theological or metaphysical sense. People are now striving for physical immortality. People are now traveling to other worlds. Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality.

—F. M. E
SFANDIARY
,
Upwingers

As the earth turned on its axis and dawn reached city after city, hamlet after hamlet, farm after farm, mountain and valley after mountain and valley, it became obvious that May 1 would be bright and sunny almost everywhere. In Athens a classical scholar waking in the small cell where certain Platonic opinions had landed him felt a burst of unexpected hope and greeted Helios with rolling syllables from Sappho, crying through the bars,
“Brodadaktylos Eos!”
Birds, startled by the shout, took off from the jailyard below, filling the air with the flapping of their wings; the guards came and told him to shut up. He answered them gaily with
“Polyphloisbois thalassas!
You’ve taken everything else away from me, but you can’t take old Homer away!”

In Paris the Communists under the Red banner and the anarchists under the Black were preparing for the annual International Labor Solidarity Day, at which the usual factionalism and sectarianism would once again demonstrate the absolute lack of international labor solidarity. And in London, Berlin, a thousand cities, the Red and the Black would wave and the tongues of their partisans would wag, and the age-old longing for a classless society would once again manifest itself; while, in the same cities, an older name and an older purpose for that day would be commemorated in convent after convent and school after school where verses (far older than the name of Christianity) were sung to the Mother of God:

In the United States, alas, the usual celebrations of National Law Day had to be cancelled, since the rioting was not quite ended yet.

But everywhere, in Asia and Africa as in Europe and the Americas, the members of the Oldest Religion were returning from their festivals, murmuring “Blessed be” as they parted, secure in their knowledge that the Mother of God was indeed still alive and had visited them at midnight, whether they knew her as Dian, Dan, Tan, Tana, Shakti, or even Erzulie.

In Nairobi, Nkrumah Fubar picked up his mail from a friend employed at the post office. To his delight, American Express had relented and corrected their error, crediting him with his February 2 payment at last. This was, to his thinking, big magic, since the notification had been mailed from New York even before he began his geodesic spiels against the President of American Express on April 25. Obviously, such retroactive witchcraft was worthy of further investigation, and the key was the synergetic geometry of the Fuller tetrahedron in which he had kept his manikin during the spell-casting. Over breakfast, before leaving for the university, he opened Fuller’s
No More Second-Hand God
and again grappled with the arcane mathematics and metaphysics of omnidirectional halo. Finishing breakfast, he closed the book, shut his eyes, and tried to visualize the Fuller universe. The image formed, and, to his amazement and amusement, it was identical with certain symbols an old Kikuyu witch doctor had once drawn when explaining the doctrine of “fan-shaped destiny” to him.

As the book closed in Kenya, the drums of Orabi stopped abruptly. It was one in the morning there, and the visiting anthropologist, Indole Ringh, immediately asked how the dancers knew the ceremony was finished. “The danger is past,” an old Hopi told him patiently, “can’t you
feel
the difference in the air?” (Saul, Barney, and Markoff Chaney were racing toward Las Vegas in the rented Brontosaurus,
while Dillinger was leisurely driving back toward Los Angeles.) In Honolulu, as the clocks struck nine the previous evening, Buckminster Fuller, trotting between airplanes, suddenly caught a glimpse of a new geodesic structure fully incorporating omnidirectional halo…And, after a four-hour flight eastward, landing in Tokyo at the “same time” he left Honolulu, he had a detailed sketch finished (it looked somewhat fan-shaped) as the NO SMOKING FASTEN SEAT BELT sign flashed. (It was four A.M. in Los Angeles, and Dillinger, safely home—he thought—heard the gunfire dying out in the distance. The President must already be withdrawing the National Guard, at least in part, he thought.) The phone by Rebecca’s bed rang just then, eight o’clock New York time, and she answered it to hear Molly Muldoon shout excitedly, “Saul and Barney are on TV. Turn it on—they’ve saved the country!”