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, moon 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 wh
ite 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.”
She stood up smiling at him, the broad grin of a woman whose lover has thoroughly satisfied her.
“I’m glad you liked it,” said George, his wildly disparate emotions gradually coalescing as anger. “What was the idea of that last little gag? To turn me off permanently on sex?”
Stella laughed. “George, admit it. Nothing could turn you off sex, right? So don’t be such a bad sport.”
“Bad sport? That sick trick is your idea of sport? What a goddam rotten dirty motherfucking thing to do to a man!”
“Motherfucking? No, that’s for when we ordain deacons.”
George shook his head angrily. She absolutely refused to be shamed. He was speechless.
“If you have any complaints, sweet man, take them to Episkopos Hagbard Celine of the Lief Erikson Cabal,” said Stella. She turned and started walking back toward the pyramid. “He’s waiting for you back the way you came. And there’s a change of clothes in the next room.”
“Wait a minute!” George called after her. “What the blazes does Kallisti mean?”
She was gone.
In the anteroom of the initiation chamber he found a green tunic and tight black trousers draped over a costumer. He didn’t want to put them on. It was probably some sort of uniform of this idiotic cult, and he wanted no part of it. But there weren’t any other clothes. There was also a beautiful pair of black boots. Everything fit perfectly and comfortably. There was a full-length mirror on the wall and he looked at himself and grudgingly admitted that the outfit was a gas. A tiny golden apple glinted on the left side of his chest. The only thing was that his hair needed washing. It was getting stringy.
Through two more doors and he was facing Hagbard.
“You didn’t like our little ceremony?” said Hagbard with exaggerated sympathy. “That’s too bad. I was so proud of it, especially the parts I lifted from William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade.”
“It’s sick,” said George. “And putting the woman inside the apple so I couldn’t have any kind of personal sex with her, so I had to use her as a receptacle, as, as an object. You made it pornographic. And sadistic pornography, at that.”
“Dig, George,” said Hagbard. “Thou art that. If there were no death, there would be no sex. If there were no sex, there would be no death. And without sex, there would be no evolution toward intelligence, no human race. Therefore death is necessary. Death is the price of orgasm. Only one being on all this planet is sexless, intelligent and immortal. While you were pumping your seeds into the symbol of life, I showed you orgasm and death in one image and brought it home to you. And you’ll never forget it. It was a trip, George. Wasn’t it a trip?”
George nodded reluctantly. “It was a trip.”
“And you know—in your bones—a little more about life than you did before, right, George?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, thank you for joining the Legion of Dynamic Discord.”
“You’re welcome.”
Hagbard beckoned George to the edge of the boat-shaped balcony. He pointed down. Far below in the blue-green medium through which they seemed to be flying George could see rolling lands, hills, winding riverbeds—and then, broken buildings. George gasped. Pyramids rose up below, as high as the hills.
“This is one of the great port cities,” Hagbard said. “Galleys from the Americas plied their trade to and from this harbor for a thousand years.”
“How long ago?”
“Ten thousand years,” said Hagbard. “This was one of the last cities to go. Of course, their civilization had declined quite a bit by then. Meanwhile, we’ve got a problem. The Illuminati are here already.”
A large, undulating, blue-gray shape appeared ahead of them, swam toward them, whirled and matched their speed so it seemed to drift alongside. George felt another momentary leap of fright. Was this another of Hagbard’s tricks?
“What is that fish? How does it keep up with us?” George asked.
“It’s a porpoise, not a fish, a mammal. And they can swim a lot faster than submarines can sail underwater. We can keep up with them, though. They form a film around their bodies that enables them to slide through the water without setting up any turbulence. I learned from them how to do it, and I applied it to this sub. We can cross the Atlantic under water in less than a day.”
A voice spoke from the control panel. “Better go transparent. You’ll be within range of their detectors when you’ve gone another ten miles.”
“Right,” said Hagbard. “We will maintain present course until further notice, so you’ll know where we are.”
“I’ll know,” said the voice.
Hagbard slashed his hand through the air disgustedly. “You’re so fucking superior.”
“Who are you talking to?” said George.
“Howard.”
The voice said, “I’ve never seen machines like this before. They look something like crabs. They’ve just about got the temple all dug up.”
“When the Illuminati do something on their own, they go first class,” said Hagbard.
“Who the hell is Howard?” said George.
“It’s me. Out here. Hello, Mr. Human,” said the voice. “I’m Howard.”
Unbelieving, yet knowing quite well what was happening, George slowly turned his head. The dolphin appeared to be looking at him.
“How does he talk to us?” said Hagbard.
“He’s swimming alongside the prow of the submarine, which is where we pick up his voice. My computer translates from Delphine to English A mike here in the control room sends our voices to the computer which translates into Delphine and broadcasts the correct sounds through the water to him.”
“Lady-oh, oh de-you-day, a new human being has come my way,” Howard sang. “He has swum into my ken. I hope he’s one of the friendly men.”
“They sing a lot,” said Hagbard. “Also recite poetry and make it up on the spot. A large part of their culture is poetry. Poetics and athletics—and, of course, the two are very closely related. What they do mostly is swim, hunt, and communicate with each other.”
“But we do all with artful complexity and rare finesse,” said Howard, looping the loop outside.
“Lead us to the enemy, Howard,” said Hagbard.
Howard swam out in front of them, and as he did so, he sang:
Right on, right on, a-stream against the foe
The sallying schools of the Southern seas make their course to go.
Attack, attack, with noses sound as rock
No shark or squid can shake us loose or survive our dour shock.
“Epics,” said Hagbard. “They’re mad for epics. They have their whole story for the past forty thousand years in epic form. No books, no writing—how could they handle pens with their fins, you know? All memorization. Which is why they favor poetry. And their poems are marvelous, but you must spend years studying their language before you know that. Our computer turns their works into doggerel. It’s the best it can do. When I have the time, I’ll add some circuits that can really translate poetry from one language to another. When the Porpoise Corpus is translated into human languages, it will advance our culture by centuries or more. It will be as if we’d discovered the works of a whole race of Shakespeares that had been writing for forty millennia.”
“On the other hand,” said Howard, “your civilizations may be demoralized by culture shock.”
“Not likely,” said Hagbard grumpily. “We’ve a few things to teach you, you know.”
“And our psychotherapists can help you over the anguish of digesting our knowledge,�
�� said Howard.
“They have psychotherapists?” said George.
“They invented psychoanalysis thousands of years ago as a means of passing the time on long migrations. They have highly complex brains and symbol-systems. But their minds are unlike ours in very important ways. They are all in one piece, so to speak. They lack the structural differentiation of ego, superego, and id. There is no repression. They are fully aware, and accepting, of their most primitive wishes. And conscious will, rather than parent-inculcated discipline, guides their actions. There is no neurosis, no psychosis among them. Psychoanalysis for them is an imaginative poetic exercise in autobiography, rather than a healing art. There are no difficulties of the mind that require healing.”
“Not quite true,” said Howard. “There was a school of thought about twenty thousand years ago that envied humans. They were called the Original Sinners, because they were like the first parents of your human race who, according to some of your legends, envied the gods and suffered for it. They taught that humans were superior because they could do many more things than dolphins. But they despaired, and most ended up by committing suicide. They were the only neurotics in the long history of porpoises. Our philosophers mostly hold that we live in beauty all the days of our lives, as no human does. Our culture is simply what you might call a commentary on our natural surroundings, whereas human culture is at war with nature. If any race is afflicted, it is yours. You can do much, and what you can do, you must do. And, speaking of war, the enemy lies ahead.”
In the distance George could make out what appeared to be a mighty city rising on hills surrounding a deep depression which must have been a harbor when Atlantis was on the surface. The buildings marched on and on as far as the eye could see. They were mostly low, but here and there a square tower reared up. The sub was heading for the center of the ancient waterfront. George stared at the buildings; he was able to see them better now. They were angular, very modern in appearance, whereas the other city they’d flown—sailed—over had a mixed Greek-Egyptian-Mayan quality to its architecture. Here there were no pyramids. But the tops of many of the structures were broken off, and many others were heaps of rubble. Still, it was remarkable that a city which had sunk so many thousands of feet to the bottom of the ocean in the course of what must have been an enormous earthquake should be this well preserved. The buildings must be incredibly durable. If New York went through a catastrophe like that there’d be nothing left of its glass-and-alloy skyscrapers.
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 24