"This is George Dorn," said George. "Who is this?"
"Well, who the hell did you think it was? You dialed my number."
"Oh, Christ," said George. "Look, I'm in a place where I don't trust the phones. I have to be sure I'm really talking to you. So I want you to identify yourself without my telling you who you're supposed to be. Do you understand?"
"Of course I understand. You don't have to use that grade school language. This is Peter Jackson, George, as I presume you intended that it should be. Where the hell are you? Are you still in Mad Dog?"
"I'm at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."
"Knowing your bad habits, I'm not surprised. Have you heard about what happened to us? Is that why you're calling?"
"No. What happened?" George gripped the telephone tighter.
"The office was blown up by a bomb early this morning. And Joe has disappeared."
"Was Joe killed?"
"Not as far as we know. There weren't any bodies in the wreckage. How about you- are you okay?"
"I'm getting into an unbelievable story, Peter. It's so unbelievable that I'm not going to try to tell you about it. Not till I get back. If you're still running a magazine there then."
"As of now there's still a magazine, and I'm running it from my apartment," said Peter. "I only hope they don't decide to blow me up."
"Who?"
"Whoever. You're still on assignment. And if this has anything to do with what you've been doing down in Mad Dog, Texas, you're in trouble. Reporters are not supposed to go around getting their boss's magazines bombed."
"You sound pretty cheerful, considering Joe might be dead."
"Joe is indestructible. By the way, George, who's paying for this call?"
"A wealthy friend, I think. He's got a corner on flax or something like that. More on him later. I'm going to sign off now, Pete. Thanks for talking."
"Sure. Take care, baby."
George handed the phone to Hagbard. "Do you know what's happened to Joe? Do you know who bombed Confrontation? You knew about this before I called. Your people are pretty handy with explosives."
Hagbard shook his head. "All I know is, the pot is coming to a boil. Your editor, Joe Malik, was onto the Illuminati. That's why he sent you to Mad Dog. As soon as you show your face down there, you get busted and Malik's office is bombed. What do you think?"
"I think that what you've been telling me is the truth, or a version of it. I don't know whether to trust you completely. But I've got my sign. If the Bavarian Illuminati don't exist, something does. So, then, where do we go from here?"
Hagbard smiled. "Spoken like a true homo neophilus, George. Welcome to the tribe. We want to recruit you, because you are so gullible. That is, gullible in the right way. You're skeptical about conventional wisdom, but attracted to unorthodox ideas. An unfailing mark of homo neophilus. The human race is not divided into the irrational and the rational, as some idealists think. All humans are irrational, but there are two different kinds of irrationally- those who love old ideas and hate and fear new ones, and those who despise old ideas and joyfully embrace new ones. Homo neophobus and homo neophilus. Neophobus is the original human stock, the stock that hardly changed at all for the first four million years of human history. Neophilus is the creative mutation that has been popping up at regular intervals during the past million years, giving the race little forward pushes, the kind you give a wheel to make it spin faster and faster. Neophilus makes a lot of mistakes, but he or she moves. They live life the way it should be lived, ninety-nine percent mistakes and one percent viable mutations. Everyone in my organization is neophilus, George. That's why we're so far ahead of the rest of the human race. Concentrated neophilus influences, without any neophobe dilution. We make a million mistakes, but we move so fast that none of them catch up with us. Before you get any deeper, George, I'd like you to become one of us."
"Which means what?"
"Become a Legionnaire in the Legion of Dynamic Discord."
George laughed. "Now that sounds like a gas. But it's hard to believe that an organization with an absurd name like that could build anything as serious as this submarine, or work for such a serious end as foiling the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria."
Hagbard shook his head. "What's serious about a yellow submarine? It's right out of a rock song. And everybody knows people who worry about the Bavarian Illuminati are crackpots. Will you join the Legion- in whatever spirit you choose?"
"Certainly," said George promptly.
Hagbard clapped him on the back. "Ah, you're our type, all right. Good. Back through the door you came, then turn right and through the golden door."
"Is there someone lifting a lamp beside it?"
'There are no honest men on this voyage. Get along with you now." Hagbard's full lips curled in a leer. "You're in for a treat."
("Every perversion," Smiling Jim screamed. "Men having sex with men. Women having sex with women. Obscene desecrations of religious articles for deviant purposes. Even men and women having sex with animals. Why, friends, the only thing they haven't gotten around to yet is people copulating with fruits and vegetables, and I guess that'll be next. Some degenerate getting his kicks with an apple!" The audience laughed at the wit.)
"You've got to run very fast to catch up with the sun. That's the way it is, when you're lost out here," the old woman said, stressing the last five words in a kind of childish singsong… The woods were incredibly thick and dark, but Barney Muldoon stumbled after her… "It's getting darker and darker," she said darkly, "but's always dark, when you're lost out here"… . "Why do we have to catch the Sun?" Barney asked, perplexed. "In search of more light," she cackled gleefully. "You always need more light, when you're lost out here"….
Behind the golden door stood the lovely black receptionist. She had changed into a short red leather skirt that left all of her long legs in view. Her hands rested lightly on her white plastic belt.
"Hi, Stella," said George. "Is that your name? Is it really Stella Maris?"
"Sure."
"No honest men on this voyage is right Hagbard was talking to me telepathically. He told me your name."
"I told you my name when you boarded the sub. You must have forgotten. You've been through a lot. And sad to say you'll be going through a lot more. I must ask you to remove your clothing. Just shed it on the floor, please."
George unhesitatingly did as he was told. Total or partial nudity was required in lots of initiation rituals; but a twinge of anxiety ran through him. He was trusting these people simply because they hadn't done anything to him yet. But there was really no telling what kind of freaks they might be, what kind of ritual torture or murder they might involve him in. Such fears were part of initiation rituals, too.
Stella was grinning at him, eyebrows raised, as he dropped his shorts. He understood the meaning of the grin, and he felt the blood rush hot as a blush to his penis, which grew thicker and heavier in an instant. Being aware that he was standing nude with the start of an erection in front of this beautiful and desirable woman, who was enjoying the spectacle, made him swell and harden still more.
"That's a good-looking tool you've got there. Nice and thick and pink and purple." Stella sauntered over to him, reached out and touched her fingers to the underside of his cock, just where it met his scrotum. He felt his balls draw up. Then her middle finger ran down the central cord, flicking the underside of the head. George's penis rose to full staff in salute to her manual dexterity.
"The sexually responsive male," said Stella. "Good, good, good. Now you're ready for the next chamber. Right through that green door, if you please."
Naked, erect, regretfully leaving Stella behind, George walked through the door. These people were too healthy and good-humored to be untrustworthy, he thought. He liked them and you ought to trust your feelings.
But as the green door slammed shut behind him, his anxiety came back even stronger than before.
In the center of the room was
a pyramid of seventeen steps, alternating red and white marble. The room was large, with five walls that tapered together in a gothic arch thirty feet above the pentagonal floor. Unlike the pyramid in the Mad Dog jail, this one had no huge eye goggling down at him. Instead there was an enormous golden apple, a sphere of gold the height of a man with a foot-long stem and a single leaf the size of an elephant's ear. Cut into the side of the apple was the word KALLISTI in Greek letters. The walls of the room were draped with enormous gold curtains that looked like they'd been stolen from a Cinerama theater, and the floor was covered with lush gold carpet into which George's bare feet sank deeply.
This is different, George told himself to quiet his fear. These people are different. There's a connection with the others, but they're different.
The lights went out. The golden apple was glowing in the dark like a harvest moon. KALLISTI was etched in sharp black lines.
A voice that sounded like Hagbard boomed at him from all sides of the room: "There is no goddess but Goddess, and she is your goddess."
This is actually an Elks Club ceremony, George thought. But there were strange, un-BPOE fumes drifting into his nostrils. An unmistakable odor. High-priced incense these people use. An expensive religion, or lodge, or whatever it is. But you can afford the best when you're a flax tycoon. Flax, huh? Hard to see how a man could make such big money in the flax biz. Did you corner the market, or what? Now, mutual funds, that was more down to earth than flax. I do believe I'm feeling the effects. They shouldn't drug a man without his consent.
He found he was holding his penis, which had shrunk considerably. He gave it a reassuring pull.
Said the voice, "There is no movement but the Discordian movement, and it is the Discordian movement."
That would appear to be self-evident. George rolled his eyes and watched the giant, golden-glowing apple wheel and spin above him.
"This is a most sacred and a most serious hour for Discordians. It is the hour when the great, palpitating heart of Discordia throbs and swells, when She What Began It All prepares to ingest into her heaving, chaotic bosom another Legionnaire of the Legion of Dynamic Discord. O minerval are ye willing to make a commitment to Discordia?"
Embarrassed at being addressed directly, George let go of his wang. "Yes," he said, in a voice that sounded muffled to him.
"Are ye a human being, and not a cabbage or something?"
George giggled. "Yes."
"That's too bad," the voice boomed. "Do ye wish to better yerself?"
"Yes."
"How stupid. Are ye willing to become philosophically illuminated?"
Why that word, George wondered briefly. Why illuminated? But he said, "I suppose so."
"Very funny. Will ye dedicate yerself to the holy Discordian movement?"
George shrugged, "As long as it suits me."
There was a draft against his belly. Stella Maris, naked and gleaming, stepped out from behind the pyramid. The soft glow from the golden apple illuminated the rich browns and blacks of her body. George felt the blood charging back into his penis. This part was going to be OK. Stella walked toward him With a slow, stately stride, gold bracelets sparkling and tinkling on her wrists. George felt hunger, thirst, and a pressure as if a balloon were slowly being inflated in his bowels. His cock rose, heartbeat by heartbeat. The muscles in his buttocks and thighs tightened, relaxed, and tightened again.
Stella approached with gliding steps and danced around him in a circle, one hand reaching out to brush his bare waist. He stepped forward and held out his hands to her. She danced away on tiptoes, spinning, arms over her head, heavy conical breasts with black nipples tilted upward. For once George understood why some men like big boobs.
His eyes moved to the globes of her buttocks, the long muscular shadows in her thighs and calves. He stumbled toward her. She stopped suddenly, legs slightly apart forming an inverse with her patch of very abundant hair at the Royal Arch, her hips swaying in a gentle circular motion. His tool pulled him to her as if it were iron and she were magnetized; he looked down and saw that a little pearl of fluid, gleaming gold in the light from the apple, had appeared in the eye. Polyphemus wanted very much to get into the cave.
George walked up to her until the head of the serpent was buried in the bushy, prickly garden at the bottom of her belly. He put his hands out and pressed them against the two cones, feeling her ribcage rise and fall with heavy breathing. Her eyes were half closed and her lips slightly open. Her nostrils flared wide.
She licked her lips and he felt her fingers lightly circling his cock, lightly brushing it with a friction strong enough to gently electrify it. She stepped back a bit and pushed her finger into the moisture on his tip. George put his hand into the tangle of her pubic hair, feeling the lips hot and swollen, feeling her juices slathering his fingers. His middle finger slid into her cunt, and he pushed it in past the tight opening all the way up to his knuckle. She gasped, and her whole body writhed around his finger in a spiral motion. "Wow, God!" George whispered. "Goddess!" Stella answered fiercely. George nodded. "Goddess," he said hoarsely, meaning Stella as much as the legendary Discordia.
She smiled and drew away from him. "Try to imagine that this is not me, Stella Maris, the youngest daughter of Discordia. She is merely the vessel of Goddess. Her priestess. Think of Goddess. Think of her entering me and acting through me. I am her now!" All the while she was stroking Polyphemus gently but insistently. It was already ferocious as a stallion, but it seemed to be getting more inflamed, if that were possible.
"I'm going to go off in your hand in a second," George moaned. He gripped her slender wrist to stop her. "I've got to fuck you, whoever you are, woman or goddess. Please."
She stepped back from him, her tan palms turned toward him, her arms held away from her sides in a receiving, accepting gesture. But she said, "Climb the steps now. Climb up to the apple." Her feet twinkling on the thick carpet, she ran backward away from him and disappeared behind the pyramid.
He climbed the seventeen steps, old one-eye still swollen and aching. The top of the pyramid was broad and flat, and he stood facing the apple. He put a hand out and touched it, expecting cold metal, surprised when the softly glowing texture felt warm as a human body to his touch. About half a foot below the level of his waist he saw a dark, elliptical opening in the side of the apple, and a sinister suspicion formed in his mind.
"You got it, George" said the booming voice that presided over his initiation. "Now you're supposed to plant your seeds in the apple. Go to it, George. Give yourself to Goddess."
Shit man, George thought. What a silly idea! They get a guy turned on like this and then they expect him to fuck a goddamn golden idol. He had a good mind to turn his back on the apple, sit down on the top step of the pyramid and jack-off to show them what he thought of them.
"George, would we let you down? It's nice there in the apple. Come on, stick it in. Hurry up."
I am so gullible, thought George. But a hole is a hole. It's all friction. He stepped up to the apple and gingerly placed the tip of his cock in the elliptical opening, half expecting to be sucked in by some mechanical force, half fearing it would be chopped off by a miniature guillotine. But there was nothing. His cock didn't even touch the edges of the hole. He took another small step, and put it halfway in. Still nothing. Then something warm and wet and hairy squirmed up against the tip of his cock. And, whatever it was, he felt it give as he reflexively pushed forward. He pushed some more and it pushed back, and he slid into it. A cunt by all the high hidden Gods, a cunt!- and by the feel it was almost surely Stella's.
George exhaled a deep sigh, planted his hands on the smooth surface of the apple to support himself and began thrusting. The pumping from inside the apple was as fierce. The metal was warm against his thighs and belly. Suddenly the pelvis inside slammed up against the hole, and a hollow scream resounded from the inside of the apple. The echo effect made it seem to hang in the air, containing all the agony, spasm, itch, twitch, moo
n madness, horror, and ecstasy of life from the ocean's birth to now.
George's prick was stretched like the skin of a balloon about to burst. His lips drew back from his teeth. The delicious electricity of orgasm was building in his groin, in the deepest roots of his penis, in his quick. He was coming. He cried out as he fired his seed into the unseen cunt, into the apple, into Goddess, into eternity.
There was a crash above. George's eyes opened. A nude male body at the end of a rope came hurtling at him from the vaulted ceiling. It jerked to a stop with a horrible crack, its feet quivering above the stem of the apple. Even as the leaps of ejaculation still racked George's body, the penis over his head lifted and spurted thick white gobbets of come, like tiny doves, arcing out over George's uplifted, horrified head to fall somewhere on the side of the pyramid. George stared at the face, canted to one side, the neck broken, a hangman's knot behind the ear. It was his own face.
George went ape. He pulled his penis out of the apple and nearly fell backward down the stairs. He ran down the seventeen steps and looked back. The dead figure was still hanging, through a trap in the ceiling, directly above the apple. The penis had subsided. The body slowly rotated. Enormous laughter boomed out in the room, sounding very much like Hagbard Celine.
"Our sympathies," said the voice. "You are now a legionnaire in the Legion of Dynamic Discord."
The hanging figure vanished soundlessly. There was no trapdoor in the ceiling. A colossal orchestra somewhere began to play Pomp and Circumstance. Stella Maris came round from the back of the pyramid again, this time clothed from head to foot in a simple white robe. Her eyes shone. She was carrying a silver tray with a steaming hot towel on it. She put the tray on the floor, knelt, and wrapped George's relaxing dick in the towel. It felt delicious.
"You were beautiful," she whispered.
"Yeah, but- wow!" George looked up at the pyramid. The golden apple gleamed cheerfully.
"Get up off the floor," he said. "You're embarrassing me."
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Page 23