(At eight o'clock in Ingolstadt an unscheduled group called the Cargo Cult managed to get the mike and began blasting out their own outer-space arrangement of an old children's song:
SHE'LL BE COMING 'ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES
SHE'LL BE COMING 'ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES
And, in Washington, where it was still only two in the afternoon, the White House was in flames, while the National Guard machine-gunned an armed mob crossing the Mall in front of the Washington Monument, a single finger pointing upward in an eloquent and vulgar gesture which only the Illuminati knew meant "Fuck you!"… In Los Angeles, where it was eleven in the morning, the bombs started to go off in police stations… And in Lehman Cavern, Markoff Chaney disgustedly pointed out a graffito to Saul and Barney: HELP STAMP OUT SIZEISM: TAKE A MIDGET TO LUNCH.
"You see?" he demanded. "That's supposed to be funny. It's not funny at all. Not one damned bit")
SHE'LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES
SHE'LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES
SHE'LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES WHEN SHE COMES
On April 29 Hagbard invited George to join him on the bridge of the Leif Erikson. They had been sailing through a smooth-walled tubular passage that was completely filled with water and was both underground and below sea level It had been built by the Atlanteans and not only had survived the catastrophe but had been maintained in good condition for the next thirty thousand years by the Illuminati. There was even a salt lock, located, roughly, under Lyon, France, which served to keep the salt water of the Atlantic out of the further reaches of the passage and the underground freshwater Sea of Valusia. The underground waterways were connected with many lakes in Switzerland, Bavaria, and eastern Europe, Hagbard explained, and if salt water were found in all of those lakes the existence of the weird subsurface world of the Illuminati would be suspected. As the submarine approached a huge circular hatchway barring the passage, Hagbard turned off the devices that rendered the craft indetectable. Immediately the enormous round metal door swung toward them.
"Won't the Illuminati know we've activated this machinery?" said George.
"No. This works automatically," said Hagbard. "It's never occurred to them that anyone else might use this passageway."
"But they know you could. And you guessed wrong about their spider-ships being able to detect you."
Hagbard whirled on George, a hairy arm lifted to punch him in the chest. "Shut up about the fucking spider-ships! I don't want to hear any more about the spider-ships! Portinari's running the show now. And she says it's safe. Okay?"
"Commander, you're out of your fucking mind," George said firmly.
Hagbard laughed, his shoulders slumping slightly in relaxation. "All right. You can get off the sub any time you want to. Well just open the hatch and let you swim out."
"You're out of your fucking mind, but I'm stuck with you," said George, clapping Hagbard on the shoulder.
"You're either on the sub or off the sub," said Hagbard. "Watch this."
The Leif Erikson had sailed through the round metal gateway, which closed behind it Here the ceiling of the underwater passage was about fifty feet higher than it had been in the section they just left, and the tunnel was only partially filling with water. The air seemed to be coming from vents in the ceiling. There was another metal hatchway in the distance down the tunnel.
"This lock is pretty big," George said. "The Illuminati must have sailed some enormous submarines through here."
"And animals," said Hagbard.
The hatchway ahead of them opened, and fresh water came pouring in. The water level in the lock rose until it I reached the ceiling, and the Leif Erikson's engines turned over and began to propel it forward once more. Now George is writing in his diary again:
April 29
And what the hell does it mean to say that life shouldn't change too rapidly? How fast is evolution? Do you measure it in terms of lifetime? A year is more than a lifetime to many kinds of animals, while seventy years is an hour in the lifetime of a sequoia. And the universe is only ten billion years old. How fast do ten billion years go? To a god they might go very fast indeed. They might all happen at once. Suppose the lifetime of your typical basic god was a hundred quintillion years. The whole lifetime of this universe would be to him no more than the amount of time it takes us to watch a movie.
So, from the point of view of a god or of the universe, things evolve very quickly. It's like one of those Walt Disney films where you watch a plant growing before your eyes and the whole cycle from bud to fruit takes about two minutes. To a god, life is a single organism proliferating in all directions all over the earth, and now on the moon and Mars, and the whole process from the first of the protobionts to George Dorn and fellow humans takes no longer than…
Hagbard's voice over the intercom jolted him out of his reverie. "Come on back up, George. There's more to see."
This time Mavis was on the bridge with Hagbard. As George entered, Hagbard withdrew his hand from her left breast in an unhurried movement. George wanted to kill Hagbard, but he was thankful that he hadn't seen Mavis touching Hagbard in any sexual way. That would have been past bearing. He might have tested his new-found courage by taking a poke at Hagbard, and Goddess only knows what karate or yoga or magic would be the response. Besides, Mavis and Hagbard must be balling all the time. Who else but Hagbard would a woman like Mavis take for her regular lover? Who else but Hagbard could satisfy her?
Mavis greeted George with a comradely hug that made the entire front of his body ache. Hagbard pointed to an inscription carved into the wall of the cave. There was a row of symbols that George didn't recognize, but above them was something quite familiar: a circle with a downward-pointing trident carved inside it.
"The peace symbol," said George. "I didn't know it was that old."
"In the days when it was put up there," said Hagbard, "it was called the Cross of Lilith Velkor, and its meaning is simply that anyone who attempts to thwart the Illuminati will suffer from the most horrible torture the Illuminati can devise. Lilith Velkor was one of the first of their victims. They crucified her on a revolving cross that looked very much like that"
"You told me it wasn't really a peace symbol," said George, looking wistfully back at the carving, "but I didn't know what you meant."
"There was a Dirigens-grade Illuminatus in Bertrand Russell's circle who put it in somebody's mind that the circle and trident would be a good symbol for the Aldermaston marchers to carry. It was very cleverly and subtly done. If the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament had thought about it, what did they need any kind of a symbol for? But Russell and his people fell for it What they didn't know was that the circle-and-trident had been a traditional symbol of evil among left-hand-path Satanists for thousands of years. So many right-wingers are secret left-hand-path magicians and Satanists that of course they spotted the symbol for what it was right away. That made them think the Illuminati were behind the peace movement, which threw them off the track, and they accused the peaceniks of using a Satanist symbol, which to a small extent discredited the peace movement. A cute gambit."
"Why is it there on the wall?" said George.
"The inscription warns the passerby to purify his heart because he is about to enter the Sea of Valusia, which belongs exclusively to the Illuminati. Traveling across the Sea of Valusia, you come eventually to the underground port of Agharti, which was the first Illuminati refuge after the Atlantean catastrophe. We are emerging into the Sea of Valusia right now. Watch."
Hagbard gestured, and George watched, open-mouthed, as the walls of the cave that closed around them fell away. They were sailing out of the tunnel, but what they seemed to be entering was an infinite fog. The television cameras and their laser wave-guides penetrated just as far into this lightless ocean that they were about to navigate as they had into the Atlantic, but this ocean was neither blue nor green, but gray. It was a gray that seemed to extend infinitely in all directions, like an ove
rcast sky. It was impossible to gauge distance. The farthest depth of the gray around them might be hundreds of miles away, or it might be right outside the submarine.
"Where's the bottom?" he asked.
"Too far below us to see," said Mavis. "The top of this ocean is just a little above the level of the bottom of the Atlantic."
"You're so smart," said Hagbard, pinching her buttock and causing George to flinch.
"Don't pay any attention to him, George," said Mavis. "He's a little bit nervous, and it's making him silly."
"Shut the fuck up," said Hagbard.
Beginning to feel anxious himself, wondering if the noble mind of Hagbard Celine was being overthrown by the weight of responsibility, George turned to look out at the empty ocean. Now he saw that it wasn't quite empty. Fish swam by, some large, some small, many of them grotesque. All were totally eyeless. An octopoidal monster with extremely long, slender tentacles drifted past the submarine, feeling for its prey. There was a covering of fine hairs on the tips of the tentacles. A small fish, also blind, swam close enough to one tentacle to set up a current that disturbed the hairs. Instantly the octopus's whole body moved in that direction, the disturbed tentacle wrapped itself around the hapless fish, and several others joined in to help scoop it up. The octopus devoured the fish in three bites. George was glad to see that at least the blood of these creatures was red.
The door behind them opened, and Harry Coin stepped out onto the bridge. "Morning, everybody. I was just wondering if I might find Miss Mao up here."
"She's doing her stint in Navigation right now," said Hagbard. "But stay here and have a look at the Sea of Valusia, Harry."
Harry looked all around, slowly and thoughtfully, then shook his head. "You know, there's times when I start to think you're doing this."
"What do you mean, Harry?" asked Mavis.
"You know," Harry waved a long, snakelike hand, "doing this, like a science-fiction movie. You've just got us in an abandoned hotel somewheres, and you've got a big engine in the basement that shakes the whole place, and here you've got some movie cameras, only they point at the screen instead of away from you, if you know what I mean."
"Rear projection," said Hagbard. "Tell me, Harry, what difference would it make if it wasn't real?"
Harry thought a moment, his chinless face sour. "We wouldn't have to do what we think we have to do. But even if we don't have to do what we think we have to do, it won't make any difference if we do it Which means we should just go ahead."
Mavis sighed. "Just go ahead."
"Just go ahead," said Hagbard. "A powerful mantra."
"And if we don't go ahead," said George, "it doesn't matter either. Which means that we just do go ahead."
"Another powerful mantra," said Hagbard. "Just do go ahead."
George noticed a small speck in the distance. As it got closer, he reccognized it He shook his head. Was there no end to the surrealism he'd been subjected to in the last six days? A dolphin wearing scuba gear!
"Hi, man-friends," said Howard's voice over the loudspeaker on the bridge. George cast a glance at Harry Coin. The former assassin was standing open-mouthed and limp with astonishment
"Greetings, Howard," said Hagbard. "How goes it with the Nazis?"
"Dead, sleeping, whatever it is they are. I have a whole porpoise horde- most of the Atlantean Adepts- watching them."
"And ready to perform other tasks as needed, I hope," said Hagbard.
"Ready indeed," said Howard. He turned a somersault.
"All right," said Harry Coin softly. "All right," he said more firmly. "It's a talking fish. But why the hell is it wearing an oxygen tank and breathing through a fucking mask?"
"I see we have a new friend on the bridge," said Howard. "I got the mask from Hagbard's on-shore representative at Fernando Poo. After all, a porpoise has to breathe air. And there is no surface in most of this underground ocean. It's water all the way to the top of the cavernous chambers that contain it. The only place I can get air near here is by swimming up to the top of Lake Totenkopf."
"The Lake Totenkopf monster," said George with a laugh.
"We'll moor the submarine in Lake Totenkopf later today," said Hagbard. "Howard, I'd like you and your people to stand by tonight and tomorrow night. Tomorrow night be ready to do a lot of hard physical work. Meanwhile, stay out of the way of the Nazis- the protection they're under is particularly aimed at sea animals, since that was the presumed greatest danger to them. We'll have oxygen equipment as needed for any of your people who want it. Tell them to try to avoid surfacing on the lake unless absolutely necessary. We don't want to attract more attention than we have to."
"I salute you in the name of the porpoise horde," said Howard. "Hail and farewell." He swam away.
A little later, sailing on, they saw in the distance an enormous reptile with four paddles for swimming and a neck twice the length of its body. It was in hot pursuit of a school of blind fish.
"The Loch Ness monster," said Hagbard, and George remembered his little joke about Howard's surfacing in Lake Totenkopf. "One of Gruad's genetic experiments with reptiles," Hagbard went on. "He was really queer for reptiles. He filled the Sea of Valusia with these plesiosaurlike things. Blind, of course, so they could navigate in darkness. Think about that- eyes are a liability under certain conditions. Graud figured monsters like that would be another protection against anybody finding Agharti. But the Leif Erikson is too big for Nessie to tangle with, and she knows it."
At last there was a column of yellow light ahead. This was the light let into the Sea of Valusia by Lake Totenkopf. Hagbard explained that the lake was simply a place where the ceiling of rock over the Sea of Valusia had been soft and unstable enough to collapse. The resulting hole, being at sea level, filled with water. Debris falling down through the bottom of the lake had formed a mountain below the place where the roof of the Sea of Valusia was punctured.
"The Jesuits, of course, always knew that Lake Totenkopf connected with the Sea of Valusia and thus made possible easy contact with Agharti," Hagbard said. "That's why, when they gave Weishaupt the assignment of founding an overt branch of the Illuminati, they sent him to Ingolstadt, which is right by Lake Totenkopf. And there's the mountain under the lake."
It loomed ahead of them, dark and forbidding. As the submarine sailed over it, George saw a cloud of dolphins circling in the distance. The mountain top had been sheared off in a fashion that seemed too precise to be natural; it formed a plateau about two miles long and one mile wide. There were what appeared to be dark squares on this gray plateau. The submarine swooped down, and George saw that the squares were huge formations of men. In a moment they were hovering over the army, like a helicopter observing troops on parade. George could clearly see the black uniforms, the green tanks with black-and-white crosses painted on them, the long, dark, upjutting snouts of big guns. They stood there silent and immobile, thousands of feet below the surface of the lake.
"That's the weapon the Illuminati plan to use to immanentize the Eschaton?" asked George. "Why don't we destroy them now?"
"Because they're under a protective biomystic field," said Hagbard, "and we can't. I did want you to see them, though. When the electrical, Astral, and orgonomic vibrations of the American Medical Association, amplified by the synergetic clusters of sound, image, and emotional energy of all these young people responding to the beat, bring that Nazi legion back to life, it will call for nothing less than the appearance on the field of battle of the goddess Eris Herself to save the day."
"Hagbard," George protested disgustedly. "Are you telling me Eris is real? Really real and not just an allegory or symbol? I can't buy that any more than I can believe Jehovah or Osiris is really real."
But Hagbard answered very solemnly, "When you're dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as pro
jections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and that's a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you're actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer's Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble."
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES
Approaching the outskirts of the crowd, Fission Chips saw a group of musicians who were obviously English from their dress and hair style. Their name, he saw on the biggest drum, was Calculated Tedium, and the guitar play had a canteen strapped to his hip. It reminded 00005 of how thirsty he was, and he asked, "Pardon me, do you know where I could get some water or a soft drink?"
"Take a snort from my canteen," the guitarist said affably, passing it over. He pointed to the west. "See that geodesic plywood dome there? It's a bleeding giant Kool Aid station set up by the Kabouters and guaranteed to hold out even if the crowd doubles in size before this is over. I just filled the canteen from there, so it's fresh. You can get more over there any time you need it."
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Page 63