"Quite so. No need to shock our paid idealists and turn them into vulgar realists overnight. At the same time, is it absolutely necessary to state what we all know in such a manner as to imply a rather hostile and outside viewpoint? Who are you and what is your trade, sir?"
"Hagbard Celine. Import-export. Gold and Appel Transfers here in New York. A few other small establishments in other ports." As he spoke my image of piracy and Borgia stealth came back strongly. "And we're not children here," he added, "so why should we avoid frank language?"
The professor, taken aback a foot or so by this turn in the conversation, sat perplexed as Drake replied:
"So. Civilization is privilege- or Private Law, as you say so literally. And we all know where Private Law comes from, except the poor professor here- out of the barrel of a gun,' in the words of a gentleman whose bluntness you would appreciate. Is it your conclusion, then, that Adler is, for all his naivete, correct, and we have more in common with the Communist rulers than we have setting us at odds?"
"Let me illuminate you further," Celine said- and the way he pronounced the verb made me jump. Drake's blue eyes flashed a bit, too, but that didn't surprise me: anybody as rich as IRS thought he was, would have to be On the Inside.
"Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom- in anarchy- such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor- raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is- and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws- the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side- are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor.
The professor had a lot more to say in a hurry then, about the laws of society being the laws of nature and the laws of nature being the laws of God, but I decided it was time to circulate a bit more so I didn't hear the rest of the conversation. The IRS has a complete tape of it, I'm sure, since I had placed the bug long before the meal.
The next time I saw Robert Putney Drake was a turning point. I was being sent to New York again, on a mission for Naval Intelligence this time, and Winifred gave me a message that had to be delivered to Drake personally; the Order wouldn't trust any mechanical communication device. Strangely, my CIA drop also gave me a message for Drake, and it was the same message. That didn't jar me any, since it merely confirmed some of what I had begun to suspect by then.
I went to this office on Wall Street, near the corner of Broad (just about where I'd be toiling at Corporate Law, if my family had had its way) and I told his secretary, "Knigge of Pyramid Productions to see Mr. Drake." That was the password that week; Knigge had been a Bavarian baron and second-in-command to Weishaupt in the original AISB. I sat and cooled my heels awhile, studying the decor, which was heavily Elizabethan and made me wonder if Drake had some private notion about being a reincarnation of his famous ancestor.
Finally, Drake's door opened and who stood there but Atlanta Hope, looking kind of wild-eyed and distraught. Drake had his arm on her shoulder and he said piously, "May your work hasten the day when America returns to purity." She stumbled past me in a kind of daze and I was ushered into his office. He motioned me to an overstuffed chair and stared at my face until something clicked. "Another Knigge in the woodpile," he laughed suddenly. "The last time I saw you, you were a Pinkerton detective." You had to admire a memory like that; it had been a year since the CFR banquet and I hadn't done anything to attract his attention that night.
"I'm FBI as well as being in the Order," I said, leaving out a few things.
"You're more than that," he said flatly, sitting behind a desk as big as some kids' playgrounds. "But I have enough on my mind this week without prying into how many sides you're playing. What' s the message?"
"It comes from the Order and the CIA both," I said, to be clear and relatively above-board. "This it is: The Taiwan heroin shipments will not arrive on time. The Laotian opium fields are temporarily in the hands of the Pathet Lao. Don't believe the Pentagon releases about our troops having the Laotian situation under control. No answer required." I started to rise.
"Wait, damn it," Drake said, frowning. "This is more important than you realize." His face went blank and I could tell his mind was racing like an engine with governor off; it was impressive. "What's your rank in the Order?" he asked finally.
"Illuminatus Prelator," I confessed, humbly.
"Not nearly high enough. But you have more practical espionage experience than a great many higher members. You'll have to do." The old barracuda relaxed, having come to a decision. "How much do you know about the Cult of the Black Mother?" he asked.
"The most militant and most secret Black Power group in the country," I said carefully. "They avoid publicity instead of seeking it, because their strategy is based on an eventual coup d'etat, not on revolution. Until a minute ago, I thought no white man in the country even knew of their existence, except those of us in the FBI. The Bureau has never reported on them to other government agencies, because we're ashamed to admit we've never been able to keep an informer inside for long. They all die of natural causes, that's what bugs us."
"Nobody in the Order has ever told you the truth?" Drake demanded.
"No," I said, curious. "I thought what I just told you was the truth."
"Winifred is more closed-mouth than he needs to be," Drake said. "The Cult of the Black Mother is entirely controlled by the Order. They monitor ghetto affairs for us. Right now, they predict a revival of 1960s-style uprisings for late summer in Harlem, on the West Side of Chicago, and in Detroit. They need to up the addiction rate at least eighteen percent, hopefully twenty or twenty-five percent, in all those areas, or the property damage will be even more enormous than we are prepared to absorb.
"They can't do it, if they have to cut their present stock even more than it's already cut. There just has to be more junk in the ghettoes or all hell will break loose by August."
I began to realize that he had used the word "monitor" in its strict cybernetic meaning.
"There's only one alternative," Drake went on. "The black market. There's a very cunning and well-organized group that's been trying to crack the CIA-Syndicate heroin monopoly for quite a while now. The Cult, of the Black Mother will have to deal with them directly. I don't want the Order involved at all- that would make it messy, and besides we'll have to crush this group later, when we're able to pierce their cover."
The upshot of it was that I found myself on One Hundred Tenth Street in Harlem, feeling very white and un-bulletproof, entering a restaurant called The Signifying Monkey. Walking through a lot of hostile stares, I went direct to the coffee-colored woman at the c
ash register and said, "I've got a tombstone disposition."
She gave me a piercing look and muttered, "Upstairs, after the men's room, the door marked Private. Knock five times." She grinned maliciously, "And if you're not kosher, kiss your white ass good-bye, brother."
I went up the stairs, found the door, knocked five times, and one eye in an ebony face looked out at me stonily. "White," he said.
"Man," I replied.
"Native," he came back.
"Born," I finished. A bolt slipped on a chain and the door opened the rest of the way. I never did find out whose idea of a joke that password was- they had lifted it from the Ku Klux Klan, of course. The room I was in was heavy with marijuana smoke, but I could see that it was decently furnished and dominated by an enormous statue of Kali, the Black Mother; I had visions of weird Gunga Din rites and shouts of "Kill for the love of Kali!" There were four other men in the room, hi addition to the one who let me in, and two reefers were circulating, one deosil and one widder-shins.
"Who you from?" a voice asked in the murk.
"AISB," I answered carefully, "And I'm to speak to Hassan i Sabbah X."
"You're speaking to him," said the tallest and blackest character in the bunch, passing me a reefer. I took a quick, deep draw and, Christ, it was good. I'd been half addicted ever since the March on the Pentagon in 1967, where I walked right behind Norman Mailer part of the way, and later fell in with some hippies who were sitting on the steps smoking it. I say I was half addicted since then, because two of me believe, as a loyal government employee, that the old government publications claiming marijuana is addicting must be true or the government wouldn't have printed them. Fortunately, the other two of me know that it isn't addicting, so I don't go through very bad withdrawal when it's scarce.
I started to outline the situation to Hassan i Sabbah X but the other joint came around, widdershins, and I took a drag on that. "A man could get stoned doing this," I said facetiously.
"Yeah," a satisfied black voice agreed in the gloom.
Well, by the time I explained the problem to Hassan, I was so bombed that I immediately let him recruit me for the next step, on his rationalization that a white man could handle it easier than a black man. Actually, I was curious to contact this group of heroin pirates.
Hassan wrote the address carefully. "Now, here's the passwords," he said. "You say, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' Don't say 'Do what you will'- they can't stand anybody fucking around with the words, it has something to do with magic. She replies, 'Love is the law, love under will.' Then you finish it with 'Every man and every woman is a star.' Got it?"
You can bet your ass I got it. I was almost goggleeyed. It was the passwords of the A:.A:.
"One more thing," Hassan added, "be sure to ask for Miss Mao, not Mama Sutra. Mama isn't cleared for this."
(As the Braniff jet took off from Kennedy International, Simon was already deep into Telemachus Sneezed again. He didn't notice the preoccupied-looking red-headed young man who took the seat across the aisle; if he had, he would have immediately made the identification, cop. He was reading, "Factory smog is a symbol of progress, of the divine fire of industry, of the flaming deity of Heracleitus.")
HARRY KRISHNA HARRY KRISHNA HARRY HARRY
Harry Coin didn't know what the drug was; Miss Portinari had merely said, "It takes you further than pot," and handed him the tablet. It might be that LSD the hippies use, he reflected, or it might be something else entirely that Hagbard and FUCKUP had concocted in the ship's laboratory. Miss Portinari went on chanting:
HARRY RAMA HARRY RAMA HARRY HARRY
Obediently, he continued to stare into the aquamarine pool between them; she wore a yellow robe and sat placidly in the lotus position.
("I've gotta know," he had told her. "I can't go around with two sets of memories and never be sure which are real and which Hagbard just put in my head like a man puts a baby into a woman. Did I kill all those people or didn't I?"
"You must be in the proper frame of mind before you can accept the answer," she had replied remotely.)
HARRY COINSHA HARRY COINSHA HARRY HARRY
Was she changing the chant or was it the drug? He tried to keep calm and continue staring into the pool, as she had ordered, but the porcelain design around it was changing. Instead of two dolphins chasing each other's tails like the astrological sign of Pisces (the age that was ending, according to Hagbard), it was now one long serpentlike creature trying to swallow its own tail.
That's me, he thought. A lot of people have told me I'm as thin and long as a snake.
And it's everybody else, too (he realized suddenly). I'm seeing what George told me: the Self pursuing the Self and trying to govern it, the Self trying to swallow the Self.
But as he stared, fascinated, the pool turned red, blood red, the color of guilt, and he felt it reach out and try to pull him down into it, into red oblivion, a void made flush.
"It's alive," he screamed. "Jesus Motherfucking Christ!"
Miss Portinari casually stirred the pool, remote and calm, and its spiral inward slowly turned back to aquamarine. Harry felt himself blushing, it was only a hallucination, and muttered, "Pardon my language, ma'am."
"Don't apologize," she said sharply. "The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy. Think about what you said. Since it has five words and fits the Law of Fives, it is especially significant."
This is a weird bunch, but they know important things, Harry reminded himself. He looked deep into the blue spiral and silently repeated to himself, "It's alive, Jesus Motherfucking Christ, it's alive…"
Jesus, looking strangely hawk-faced and Hagbardian, rose from the pool. "This is my bodhi," he said, pointing. Harry looked and saw Buddha sitting beneath the bodhi-tree. "Tat TVam Asi," he said, and the falling leaves of the tree turned into millions of TV sets all broadcasting the same Laurel and Hardy movie. "Now look what you made me do," Hardy was saying… In a previous incarnation, Harry saw himself as a centurion, Semper Cuni Linctus, driving the nails into the cross. "Look," he said to Jesus, "nothing personal. I'm only following orders." "So am I," Jesus said, "My Father's orders. Aren't we all?"
"Look into the pool," Miss Portinari repeated. "Just look into the pool."
It was like each Chinese box had another Chinese box inside it; but the best of all belonged to Miss Mao Tsu-hsi. We were reclining in her trim but elegant pad on West Eighty-seventh Street, passing a joint back and forth and comparing multiple identities. We were naked on a bearskin rug, a dream come true, for she was my ideal woman. "I got into the A:.A:. first, Tobias," she was saying. "They recruited me at a Ba'Hai meeting- they have cruisers out, looking for likely prospects, in every mystical group from Subud to Scientology, you know. Then Naval Intelligence contacted me and I reported to them on what the A:.A:. was up to. I'm not flexible as you, though, and my loyalties tend to stay fairly constant- chiefly I was reporting to A:.A:. what I gleaned from Naval Intelligence. I did believe in the A:.A:. basically. Until I met Him"
"That reminds me," I said, jealous of the worshipful way she said Him as if talking about a god. "If he's coming soon, shouldn't we get up and put some clothes on?"
"If you want to be bourgeois," she said.
While we were dressing, I remembered something. "By the way," I asked casually, "who are you spying on Mama Sutra for- the A:.A:. Naval Intelligence, or Him?"
"All three of them." She was starting to pull her panties on, and I said suddenly, "Wait." I knelt and kissed her pussy one last time, "For the nicest Chinese box I've opened in this whole case," I said gallantly. That was my Illuminati training; as an FBI man, I was ashamed of such a perverted act.
We f
inished dressing and she was pouring some wine (a light German vintage from, of all places, Bavaria) when the knock came.
Miss Mao sidled over to the door in her slinky Chinese dress and said softly, "Hail Eris."
"All hail Discordia," came a voice from outside. She slipped the lock and a little fat man walked in. My first reaction was astonishment; he didn't look anything like the superintellectual superhero she had described.
"Hagbard couldn't come," he said briefly. "I'll handle the sale, and initiate you" with a glance at me, "into the Legion of Dynamic Discord, if you're really ready, as Miss Mao says, to battle every government on earth and the Illuminati to boot."
"I'm ready," I said passionately. "I'm tired being a puppet on four sets of strings." (Actually, I know I just wanted a fifth set.)
"Good," he said. "Put her there," and he held out his hand. As we shook, he said, "Episkopos Jim Cartwright of the Mad Dog Cabal."
"Tobias Knight," I said, "of the FBI, the CIA, the A:.A:. and the Illuminati."
He blinked briefly. "I've met double agents and triple agents, but you're the first quadruple agent in my experience. I guess this was inevitable, by the Law of Fives. Welcome to the fifth ring of the world's oldest continuous Five Ring Circus. Prepare for Death and Rebirth."
JESUS MOTHERFUCKING CHRIST IT'S ALIVE…
LEVIATHAN
The mutation from terrestrial to interstellar life must be made, because the womb planet itself is going to blow up within a few billion years… Planet Earth is a stepping stone on our time-trip through the galaxy. Life has to get its seed-self off the planet to survive…
There are also some among us who are bored with the amniotic level of mentation on this planet and look up in hopes of finding someone entertaining to talk to. -TIMOTHY LEARY, Ph.D., and L. WAYNE BRENNER, Terra II
THE NINTH TRIP, OR YESOD
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Page 59