The Illuminatus! Trilogy Part 24

He took out the p.o.r.nographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for his o.r.g.a.s.m, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let's have a Markoff Chain masturbation to start with, he thought with an evil grin.

And, thus, without ever contacting the Legion of Dynamic Discord, the Erisian Liberation Front or even the Justified Ancients of Mummu, Markoff Chaney began his own crusade against the Illuminati, not even knowing that they existed.

His first overt act-his Fort Sumter, as it were-began in Dayton the following Sat.u.r.day. He was in Norton's Emporium, a glorified 5 & 100 store, when he saw the sign: NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR. THE MGT.

What!, he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can't find a superior? Years of school came back to him ("Please, may I leave the room, sir?") and rituals which had appeared nonsensical suddenly made sense in a sinister way. Mathematics, of course. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah! not for nothing had he spent a semester in Professor "Sheets" Kelly's intensive course on textual a.n.a.lysis of modern poetry. The following Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton's and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. A few moments later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place: NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR OR GO TO THE DOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR. HE MGT.

He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, n.o.body questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process; Marx had been wrong, lacking cybernetics to enlighten him. Marx was like the engineers of his time, who thought of electricity in terms of work done, before Marconi thought of it in terms of information transmitted. Nothing signed "the mgt." would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pa.s.s himself off as the Management.

At the same time, he noticed that the workers were more irritable; the shoppers picked this up and became grouchier themselves; sales, he guessed correctly; were falling off. Poetry was the answer: poetry in reverse. His interpolated phrase, with its awkward internal rhyme and its pointlessness, bothered everybody, but in a subliminal, preconscious fashion. Let the market researchers and statisticians try to figure this one out with their computers and averages.

His father had been a stockholder in Blue Sky Inc., generally regarded as the worst turkey on the Big Board (it produced devices to be used in making landings on low-gravity planets); profits had soared when John Fitzgerald Kennedy had announced that the U.S. would put a man on the moon before 1970; the Midget now had a guaranteed annuity amounting to thirty-six hundred dollars per year, three hundred dollars per month. It was enough for his purposes. Revenge, in good measure, he would have. He would have revenge.

Living in Spartan fashion, dining often on a tin of sardines and a pint of milk from a machine, traveling always by Greyhound bus, the Midget criss-crossed the country constantly, placing his improved surrealist signs whenever the opportunity presented itself. A slowly mounting wave of anarchy followed in his wake. The Illuminati never got a fix on him: he had little ego to discover, burning all his energies into Drive, like a dictator or a great painter-but, unlike a dictator or a great painter, he had no desire for recognition. For years, the Illuminati attributed his efforts to the Discordians, the JAMs or the esoteric ELF. Watts went up, and Detroit; Birmingham, Buffalo, Newark, a flaming picnic blanket spread across urban America as the Midget's signs burned in the stores that had flaunted them; one hundred thousand marched to the Pentagon and some of them tried to expel the Demon (the Illuminati foiled that at the last minute, forbidding them to form a circle); a Democratic convention was held behind barbed wire; in 1970 a Senate committee announced that there had been three thousand bombings in the year, or an average of ten per day; by 1973 Morituri groups were forming in every college, every suburb; the SLA came and came back again; Atlanta Hope was soon unable to control G.o.d's Lightning, which was going in for its own variety of terrorism years before Illuminati planning had intended.

"There's a random factor somewhere," technicians said at Illuminati International; "There's a random factor somewhere," Hagbard Celine said, reading the data that came out of f.u.c.kup; "There's a random factor somewhere," the Dealy Lama, leader of ELF, said dreamily in his underground hideout beneath Dealy Plaza.

Drivers on treacherous mountain roads swore in confusion at signs that said: SLIPPERY WHEN WET MAINTAIN 50 M.P.H. FALLING ROCK ZONE DO NOT LITTER.

Men paid high initiation fees to revel in the elegance of all-WASP clubs whose waiters were carefully trained to be almost as sn.o.bbish as the members, then felt vaguely let down by signs warning them: WATCH YOUR HAT AND COAT NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST PROPERTY. THE MGT.

The Midget became an electronic wizard in his spare time. All over the country, pedestrians stood undecided on curbs as electric signs said walk while the light was red and then switched to don't walk when the light Went green. He branched out and expanded his activities; office workers received memos early in the morning (after he had spent a night with a Xerox machine) and puzzled over: 1. All vacation requests must be submitted in triplicate to the Personnel Department at least three weeks before the planned vacation dates.2. All employees who change their vacation plans must notify Personnel Department by completing Form 1472, Vacation Plan Change, and submitting it three weeks before the change in plans.3. All vacation plans must be approved by the Department Supervisor and may be changed if they conflict with the vacation plans of employees of higher rank and/or longer tenure.4. Department Supervisors may announce such cancellations at any time, provided the employee is given 48 hours notice, or two working days, whichever is longer, as the case may be. (Employees crossing the International Date Line, see Form 2317.)5. Employees may not discuss vacation plans with other employees or trade preferred dates.6. These few simple rules should prevent a great deal of needless friction and frustration if all employees cooperate, and we will all have a happy summer.

THE MGT.

On April 26 of the year when the Illuminati tried to immanentize the Eschaton, the Midget experienced aches, pains, nausea, spots before his eyes, numbness in his legs and dizziness. He went to the hotel doctor, and a short while after describing his symptoms he was rushed in a closed car to a building that had a Hopi Indian Kachina Doll Shop in front and the Las Vegas CIA office in the back. He was fairly delirious by then, but he heard somebody say, "Ha, we're ahead of the FBI and and the Cesspool Cleaners on this one." Then he got an injection and began to feel better, until a friendly silver-haired man sat down by his cot and asked who "the girl" was. the Cesspool Cleaners on this one." Then he got an injection and began to feel better, until a friendly silver-haired man sat down by his cot and asked who "the girl" was.

"What girl?" the Midget asked irritably.

"Look, son, we know you've been with a girl. She gave you this."

"Was it the clap?" the Midget asked, dumbfounded. Except for his p.o.r.nographic Tarot cards, he was still a virgin (the giant women were all so d.a.m.ned patronizing, but his own female equivalents bored him; the giantesses were the Holy Grail to him, but he had never had the courage to approach one). "I never knew the clap could be this bad," he added, blushing. His greatest fear was that somebody would discover his virginity.

"No, it wasn't the clap," said the kindly man (who didn't deceive the Midget one bit; if this guy couldn't pump him, he knew, they would send in the mean, tough one; the nice cop and the nasty cop; oldest con in the business). "This girl had a certain, uh, rare disease, and we're with the U.S. Public Health Service." The gentle man produced forged credentials to "prove" this last allegation. Horses.h.i.t, the Midget thought. "Now," the sweet old codger went on, "we've got to track her down, and see that she gets the antidote, or a lot of people will get this disease. You understand?"

The Midget understood. This guy was Army Intelligence or CIA and they wanted to crack this before the FBI and get the credit. The disease was started by the government, obviously. Some f.u.c.kup in one of their biological war laboratories, and they had to cover it up before the whole country got wise. He hesitated; none of his projects had ever been consciously intended to lead to death, just to make things a little unpredictable and spooky for the giants.

"The U.S. Public Health Service will be eternally grateful to you." the grandfatherly man said, eyes crinkling with sly affection. "It isn't often that a little little man gets a chance to do such a man gets a chance to do such a big big job for his country." That did it. "Well," the Midget said, "she was blonde, in her mid-twenties I guess, and she told me her name was Sarah. She had a scar on her neck-I suppose somebody tried to cut her throat once. She was, let's see, about five-five and maybe 110-115 pounds. And she was superb at giving head," he concluded, thinking that was a very plausible Las Vegas wh.o.r.e he had just created. His mind was racing rapidly; they wouldn't want people running around loose knowing about this. The antidote had been to keep him alive while they pumped him. He needed insurance. "Oh, and here's a real lead for you," he said "I just remembered. First, I want to explain something about, uh, people who are below average in stature. We're very s.e.xy. You see, our s.e.x gland or whatever it's called works extra, because our growth gland doesn't work. So we never get enough." He was making this up off the top of his head and enjoying it. He hoped it would spread; he had a beautiful vision of bored rich women seeking midgets as they now seek blacks. "So you see," he went on, "I kept her a long time, having encores and encores and encores. Finally, she told me she'd have to raise her price, because she had another customer waiting. I couldn't afford it so I let her go." Now the clincher. "But she mentioned his name. She said, 'Joe Blotz will be p.i.s.sed if I disappoint him,' only the name wasn't Joe Blotz." job for his country." That did it. "Well," the Midget said, "she was blonde, in her mid-twenties I guess, and she told me her name was Sarah. She had a scar on her neck-I suppose somebody tried to cut her throat once. She was, let's see, about five-five and maybe 110-115 pounds. And she was superb at giving head," he concluded, thinking that was a very plausible Las Vegas wh.o.r.e he had just created. His mind was racing rapidly; they wouldn't want people running around loose knowing about this. The antidote had been to keep him alive while they pumped him. He needed insurance. "Oh, and here's a real lead for you," he said "I just remembered. First, I want to explain something about, uh, people who are below average in stature. We're very s.e.xy. You see, our s.e.x gland or whatever it's called works extra, because our growth gland doesn't work. So we never get enough." He was making this up off the top of his head and enjoying it. He hoped it would spread; he had a beautiful vision of bored rich women seeking midgets as they now seek blacks. "So you see," he went on, "I kept her a long time, having encores and encores and encores. Finally, she told me she'd have to raise her price, because she had another customer waiting. I couldn't afford it so I let her go." Now the clincher. "But she mentioned his name. She said, 'Joe Blotz will be p.i.s.sed if I disappoint him,' only the name wasn't Joe Blotz."

"Well, what was it?"

"That's the problem," the Midget said sadly. "I can't remember. But if you leave me alone awhile," he added brightly, "maybe it'll come back to me." He was already planning his escape.

And, twenty-five hours earlier, George Dorn, quoting Pilate, asked, "What is Truth?" (Barney Muldoon just then, was lounging in the lobby of the Hotel Tudor, waiting for Saul to finish what he had called "a very important, very private conversation" with Rebecca; Nkrumah Fubar was experimentally placing a voodoo doll of the president of American Express inside a tetrahedron-their computer was still annoying him about a bill he'd paid over two months ago, on the very daynight that Soapy Mocenigo dreamed of Anthrax Leprosy Pi; R. Buckminster Fuller, unaware of this new development in his geodesic revolution, was lecturing the Royal Inst.i.tute of Architects in London and explaining why there were no nouns in the real world; August Personage was breathing into a telephone in New York; Pearson Mohammed Kent was exuberantly balling a female who was not only (Barney Muldoon just then, was lounging in the lobby of the Hotel Tudor, waiting for Saul to finish what he had called "a very important, very private conversation" with Rebecca; Nkrumah Fubar was experimentally placing a voodoo doll of the president of American Express inside a tetrahedron-their computer was still annoying him about a bill he'd paid over two months ago, on the very daynight that Soapy Mocenigo dreamed of Anthrax Leprosy Pi; R. Buckminster Fuller, unaware of this new development in his geodesic revolution, was lecturing the Royal Inst.i.tute of Architects in London and explaining why there were no nouns in the real world; August Personage was breathing into a telephone in New York; Pearson Mohammed Kent was exuberantly balling a female who was not only white white but but from Texas; from Texas; the Midget himself was saying "Rude b.a.s.t.a.r.d, isn't he?" to Dr. Naismith; and our other characters were variously pursuing their own hobbies, predilections, obsessions and holy missions). the Midget himself was saying "Rude b.a.s.t.a.r.d, isn't he?" to Dr. Naismith; and our other characters were variously pursuing their own hobbies, predilections, obsessions and holy missions). But Hagbard, with uncharacteristic gravity, said But Hagbard, with uncharacteristic gravity, said, "Truth is the opposite of lies. The opposite of most of what you've heard all your life. The opposite of most of what you've heard from me."

They were in Hagbard's funky stateroom and George, after his experience at the demolished Drake mansion, found the octopi and other sea monsters on the wall murals distinctly unappetizing. Hagbard, as usual, was wearing a turtleneck and casual slacks; this time the turtleneck was lavender-an odd, f.a.ggoty item for him. George remembered, suddenly, that Hagbard had once told him, anent h.o.m.os.e.xuality, "I've tried it, of course," but added something about liking women better. (Goodness, was that only two mornings ago?) George wondered what it would be like to "try it" and if he would ever have the nerve. "What particular lies," he asked cautiously, "are you about to confess?"

Hagbard lit a pipe and pa.s.sed it over. "Alamout Black hash," he said croakingly, holding the smoke down. "Ha.s.san i Sabbah's own private formula. Does wonders when heavy metaphysics is coming at you."

George inhaled and felt an immediate hit hit like cocaine or some other forebrain stimulant. "Christ, what's this s.h.i.t cut with?" he gasped, as somebody somewhere seemed to turn colored lights on in the gold-and-nautical-green room and on that outasight lavender sweater. like cocaine or some other forebrain stimulant. "Christ, what's this s.h.i.t cut with?" he gasped, as somebody somewhere seemed to turn colored lights on in the gold-and-nautical-green room and on that outasight lavender sweater.

"Oh," Hagbard said casually, "a hint of belladonna and stramonium. That was old Ha.s.san's secret, you know. All that c.r.a.p in most books about how he had turned his followers on with hash, and they'd never had it before so they thought it was magic, is unhistorical. Hashish was known in the Mideast since the neolithic age; archeologists have dug it up in tombs. Seems our ancestors buried their priests with a load of hash to help them negotiate with their G.o.ds when they got to Big Rock Candy Mountain or wherever they thought they were going. Ha.s.san's originality was blending hashish with just the right chemical cousins to produce a new synergetic effect."

"What's synergetic?" synergetic?" George asked slowly, feeling seasick for the first time aboard the George asked slowly, feeling seasick for the first time aboard the Leif Erikson Leif Erikson.

"Nonadditive. When you put two and two together and get five instead of four. Buckminster Fuller uses synergetic gimmicks all the time in his geodesic domes. That's why they're stronger than they look." Hagbard took another toke and pa.s.sed the pipe again.

What the h.e.l.l? George thought. Sometimes increasing the dose got you past the nausea. He toked, deeply. Hadn't they started out to discuss Truth, though? George thought. Sometimes increasing the dose got you past the nausea. He toked, deeply. Hadn't they started out to discuss Truth, though?

George giggled. "Just as I suspected. Instead of using your G.o.ddam prajna prajna or whatever it is to spy on the Illuminati, you're just another dirty old man. You use it to play Peeping Tom in other people's heads." or whatever it is to spy on the Illuminati, you're just another dirty old man. You use it to play Peeping Tom in other people's heads."

"Heads?" Hagbard protested, laughing. "I never scan the Hagbard protested, laughing. "I never scan the heads heads. Who the h.e.l.l wants to watch people eliminating their wastes?"

"I thought you were going to be Socrates," George howled between lunatic peals of tin giggles, "and I was prepared to be Plato, or at least Glaucon or one of the minor characters. But you're as stoned as I am. You can't tell me anything important. All you can do is make bad puns."

"The pun," Hagbard replied with dignity (ruined somewhat by an unexpected chortle), "is mightier than the sword. As James Joyce once said."

"Don't get pedantic."

"Can I get semantic?"

"Yes. You can get semantic. Or antic. But not pedantic."

"Where were we?"

"Truth."

"Yes. Well, Truth is like marijuana, my boy. A drug on the market."

"I'm getting a hard-on."

"You too? That's the way the balling bounces. At least, with Alamout Black. Nausea, then microamnesia, then the laughing jag, then s.e.x. Be patient. The clear light comes next. Then we can discuss Truth. As if we haven't been discussing it all along."

"You're a h.e.l.l of a guru, Hagbard. Sometimes you sound even dumber than me."

"If the Elder Malaclypse were here, he'd tell you a few about some other gurus. And geniuses. Do you think Jesus never whacked off? Shakespeare never got on a crying jag at the Mermaid Tavern? Buddha never picked his nose? Gandhi never had the crabs?"

"I've still got a hard-on. Can't we postpone the philosophy while I go look for Stella-I mean, Mavis?"

"That's Truth."

"What is Truth?"

"Up in the cortex it makes a difference to you whether it's Stella or Mavis. Down in the glands, no difference. My grandmother would do as well."

"That's not Truth. That's just cheap half-a.s.sed Freudian cynicism."

"Oh, yes. You saw the mandala with Mavis."

"And you were inside my head somehow. Dirty voyeur."

"Know thyself."

"This will never take its place beside the Platonic Dialogues, not in a million years. We're both stoned out of our gourds."

"I love you, George."

"I guess I love you, too. You're so d.a.m.ned overwhelming. Everybody loves you. Are we gonna f.u.c.k?"

(Mavis had said, "Wipe the come off your trousers." Fantasizing Sophia Loren while he m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed. Or fantasizing that he m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed while actually ...) "No. You don't need it. You're starting to remember what really happened in Mad Dog jail."

"Oh, no." Coin's enormous, snaky c.o.c.k...the pain...the pleasure ... ...

"I'm afraid so."

"d.a.m.n it, now I'll never know. Did you put that in my head, or did it really happen? Did I fantasize the interruption then or did I fantasize the rape just now?"

"Know thyself."

"Did you say that twice or did I just hear it twice?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. I don't know, right now. I just don't know. Is this some devious h.o.m.os.e.xual seduction?"

"Maybe. Maybe it's a murder plot. Maybe I'm leading up to cutting your throat."

"I wouldn't mind. I've always had a big self-destructive urge. Like all cowards. Cowardice is a defense against suicide."

Hagbard laughed. "I never knew a young man who had so much p.u.s.s.y and risked death so often. And there you sit, still worrying about being whatever it was they called you when you first started letting your hair grow long in your early teens."

"Sissy. That was the word in good old Nutley, New Jersey. It meant both f.a.ggot and coward. So I've never cut my hair since then, to prove they they couldn't intimidate couldn't intimidate me" me"

"Yeah. I'm tracking a black guy now, a musician, who's balling a white lady, a fair flower from Texas. Partly, because she really turns him on. But partly because she could have a brother who might come after him with a gun. He's proving they they can't intimidate can't intimidate him." him."

"That's the Truth? We spend all our time proving we can't be intimidated? But all the time we are intimidated on another level?" The colors were coming back strong again; it was that kind of trip. Every time you thought you were the pilot, it would go off in an unexpected direction to remind you that you were just a pa.s.senger.

"That's part of the Truth, George. Another part is that every time you think you're intimidated you're really rebelling on another level. Oh, what idiots the Illuminati really are, George. I once collected statistics on industrial accidents in a sample city-Birmingham, England, actually. Fed all the relevant facts into f.u.c.kUP and got just what I expected. Sabotage. Unconscious sabotage. Every case was a blind insurrection. Every man and woman is in rebellion, but only a few have the guts to admit it. The others jam the system by accident, har har har, or by stupidity, har har har again. Let me tell you about the Indians, George."

"What Indians?"

"Did you ever wonder why nothing works right? Why the whole world seems completely f.u.c.ked up all the time?"

"Yeah. Doesn't everybody?"

"I suppose so. Pardon me, I've got to get more stoned. In a little while, I go into f.u.c.kUP and we put our heads together-literally, I attach electrodes to my temples-and I'll try to track down the problem in Las Vegas. I don't spend all all my time on random voyeurism," Hagbard p.r.o.nounced with dignity. He refilled the pipe, asking pettishly, "Where was I?" my time on random voyeurism," Hagbard p.r.o.nounced with dignity. He refilled the pipe, asking pettishly, "Where was I?"

"The Indians in Birmingham. How did they get there?"

"There weren't any f.u.c.king Indians in Birmingham. You're getting me confused." Hagbard toked deeply.

"You're getting yourself confused. You're bombed out of your skull."

"Look who's talking." Hagbard toked again. "The Indians. The Indians weren't in Birmingham. Birmingham was where I did the study that convinced me most industrial accidents are unconscious sabotage. So are most misfiled doc.u.ments among white-collar workers, I'd wager. The Indians are another story. I was a lawyer once, when I first came to your country and before I went in for piracy. I usually don't admit that, George. I usually tell people I played the piano in a wh.o.r.ehouse or something else not quite so disreputable as the truth. If you want to know why nothing makes sense in government forms, remember there are two hundred thousand lawyers working for the bureaucracy these days.

"The Indians were a band of Shoshones. I was defending them against the Great Land Thief, or as it pretentiously t.i.tles itself, the Government, in Washington. We were having a conference. You know what an Indian conference is like? n.o.body talks for hours sometimes. A good yoga. When somebody does finally speak, you can be sure it comes from the heart. That old movie stereotype, 'White man speak with forked tongue,' has a lot of truth in it. The more you talk, the more your imagination colors things. I'm one of the most long-winded people alive and one of the worst liars." Hagbard toked again and finally held the pipe out inquiringly; George shook his head. "But the story I wanted to tell was about an archeologist. He was hunting for relics of the Devonian culture, the Indians who lived in North America just before the ecological catastrophe of 10,000 B.C. He found what he thought was a burial mound and asked to dig into it. Grok this, George. The Indians looked at him. They looked at me. They looked at each other. Then the oldest man spoke and, very gravely, gave permission. The archeologist hefted his pick and shovel and went at it like John Henry trying to beat that steam drill. In two minutes he disappeared. Right into a cesspool. Then the Indians laughed.

"Grok, George. I knew them as well as any white man ever knows Indians. They had learned to trust me, and I, them. And yet I sat there, while they played their little joke, and I didn't get a hint of what was about to happen. Even though I had begun to discover my telepathic talents and even focus them a little. Think about it, George. Think about all the pokerfaced blacks you've seen. Think about every time a black has done something so fantastically, outrageously stupid that you had a flash of racism-which, being a radical, you were ashamed of, right?-and wondered if maybe they are are inferior. And think of ninety-nine percent of the women in the Caucasian world, outside Norway, who do the Dumb Dora or Marilyn Monroe act all the time. Think a minute, George. Think." inferior. And think of ninety-nine percent of the women in the Caucasian world, outside Norway, who do the Dumb Dora or Marilyn Monroe act all the time. Think a minute, George. Think."

There was a silence that seemed to stretch into some long hall of near-Buddhist emptiness-George recognized a glimpse, at last! at last!, into the Void all his acidhead friends had tried to describe-and then he remembered this was not the trip Hagbard was pushing him toward. But the silence lingered as a quietness of spirit, a calm in the tornado of those last few days, and George found himself ruminating with total dispa.s.sion, without hope or dread or smugness or guilt; if not totally without ego, or in full darshana darshana, at least without the inflamed and voracious ego that usually either leaped forward or shrunk back from naked fact. He contemplated his memories and was unmoved, objective, at peace. He thought of blacks and women and of their subtle revenges against their Masters, acts of sabotage that could not be recognized clearly as such because they took the form of acts of obedience; he thought of the Shoshone Indians and their crude joke, so similar to the jokes of oppressed peoples everywhere; he saw, suddenly, the meaning of Mardi Gras and the Feast of Fools and the Saturnalia and the Christmas Office Party and all the other limited, permissible, structured occasions on which Freud's Return of the Repressed was allowed; he remembered all the times he had gotten his own back against a professor, a high school princ.i.p.al, a bureaucrat, or, further back, his own parents, by waiting for the occasion when, by doing exactly what he was told, he could produce some form of minor catastrophe. He saw a world of robots, marching rigidly in the paths laid down for them from above, and each robot partly alive, partly human, waiting its chance to drop its own monkey wrench into the machinery. He saw, finally, why everything in the world seemed to work wrong and the Situation Normal was All f.u.c.ked Up. "Hagbard," he said slowly. "I think I get it. Genesis is exactly backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created."

Hagbard, more hawk-faced than ever, said carefully, "You are approaching Truth. Walk cautiously now, George. Truth is not, as Shakespeare would have it, a dog that can be whipped out to kennel. Truth is a tiger. Walk cautiously, George." He turned in his chair, slid open a drawer in his Danish Modern quasi-Martian desk and took out a revolver. George watched, as cool and alone as a man atop Everest, as Hagbard opened the chamber and showed six bullets inside. Then, with a snap, the gun was closed and placed on the desk blotter. Hagbard did not glance at it again. He watched George; George watched the pistol. It was the scene with Carlo all over again, but Hagbard's challenge was unspoken, gnomic; his level glance did not even admit that a contest had begun. The gun glittered maliciously; it whispered of all the violence and stealth in the world, treacheries undreamed of by Medici or Machiavelli, traps set for victims who were innocent and blameless; it seemed to fill the room with an aura of its presence, and yes, it even had the more subtle menace of a knife, weapon of the sneak, or of a whip in the hands of a man whose smile is too sensual, too intimate, too knowing; into the middle of George's tranquility it had come, inescapable and unexpected as a rattlesnake in the path on the afternoon of the sweetest spring day in the world's most manicured and artificial garden, George heard the adrenalin begin to course into his bloodstream; saw the "activation syndrome" moisten his palms, accelerate his heart, loosen his sphincter a micrometer; and still, high and cool on his mountain, felt nothing.

"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 princ.i.p.al ("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 Tria.s.sic 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 G.o.ds'?" 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 h.e.l.l.' 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 p.i.s.sing Never Whistle While You're p.i.s.sing-there are copies all over the ship. That's my 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." 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 is created. The...other ... is not human." 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 f.u.c.kUP. 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 a.s.sisi called his body "Brother a.s.s," 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sion until the robot, Brother a.s.s, 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 compet.i.tion in the G.o.dmanship 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 h.o.m.os.e.xuality 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 p.i.s.sing Never Whistle While You're p.i.s.sing, 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: WHO.

IS THE ONE.