That about summed it up: the laws were not necessarily fascist Gestapo racist pigs (words largely unknown in Texas), but they were people who would find it a relief if bothersome and rebellious individualism disappeared, however bloody the disappearance might be. If you were ornery enough, the laws would bushwhack you—shoot you dead from ambush, without a chance to surrender, as they did to Miss Parker and Mr. Barrow—but even if you were merely a mildly larcenous hoaxter like Dr. Naismith, they would be much cheered to put you someplace where you couldn’t throw any more entropy into the functioning of the Machine they served. And so, recognizing laws, Dr. Naismith narrowed his eyes, thought deeply, and when they began their questioning, lied as only an unregenerate old-school Texas confidence man can lie.
“You got it from somebody who had body contact with you. So either you were in a very crowded elevator or you got it from a prostitute. Which was it?”
Naismith thought of the collision on the sidewalk with the Midget and the weasel-faced character with the big suitcase, but he also thought that the questioner leaned heavily on the second possibility. They were looking for a woman; and, if you tell the laws what they want to hear, they don’t keep coming back and asking more personal questions. “I was with a prostitute,” he said, trying to sound embarrassed.
“Can you describe her?”
He thought back over the pros he had seen with other VSR delegates, and one stood out. Being a kindly man, he didn’t want to implicate an innocent whore in this messy business (whatever it was), so he combined her with another woman, the first that he ever successfully penetrated in his long-ago youth in the 1950s.
Unfortunately for Dr. Naismith’s kindly intentions, the laws never expect an eyewitness description to match the person described in all respects, so when his information was coded into an IBM machine, three cards came out. Each one had more similarities to his fiction than differences from it, and they came from a card file of several hundred prostitutes whose descriptions had been gathered and coded in the past twenty-four hours. Running the three cards through a different sorting in the machine, limited to outstanding bodily characteristics most commonly remembered correctly, the technicians emerged, after all, with Bonnie Quint. Forty-five minutes later she was in Esperando Despond’s office, nervously twirling her mink stole, picking at the hem of her mini-skirt, evading questions nimbly and remembering intensely Carmel’s voice saying, “I’ll use the belt. So help me, God. I’ll use the belt.” She was also smarting from the injection.
“You don’t work free-lance,” Despond told her, nastily, for the fifth time. “In this town, the Maf would put a knife up your ass and break off the handle if you tried that. You’ve got a pimp. Now, do we throw the book at you or do we get his name?”
“Don’t be too hard on her,” Tobias Knight said. “She’s only a poor, confused kid. Not twenty yet, are you?” he asked her kindly. “Give her a chance to think. She’ll do the right thing. Why should she protect a lousy pimp who exploits her all the time?” He gave her a reassuring glance.
“Poor confused kid, my ass!” Despond exploded. “This is a matter of life and death and no Nigra whore is going to sit here lying her head off and get away with it.” He did a good imitation of a man literally trembling with repressed fury. “I’d like to kick her head in,” he screamed.
Knight, still playing the friendly cop, looked shocked. “That’s not very professional,” he said sadly. “You’re overtired, and you’re frightening the child.”
Three hours later—after Despond had nearly done a complete psycho schtick and virtually threatened to behead poor Bonnie with his letter opener, and Knight had become so fatherly and protective that both he and she were beginning to feel that she was actually his very own six-year-old daughter being set upon by Goths and Vandals—a sobbing but accurate description of Carmel emerged, including his address.
Twelve minutes later, Roy Ubu, calling via car radio, reported that Carmel was not in his house and had been seen driving toward the Southwest in a jeep with a large suitcase beside him.
In the next eighteen hours, eleven men in jeeps were stopped on various roads southwest of Las Vegas, but none of them was Carmel, although most of them were around the height and weight and general physical description given by Bonnie Quint, and two of them even had large suitcases. In the twenty-four hours after that, nearly a thousand men of all sizes and shapes were stopped on roads, north, south, east and west, in cars not remotely like jeeps and some driving toward, not away from, Las Vegas. None of them was Carmel either.
Among all the men wandering around the Desert Door base and the city of Las Vegas with credentials from the U.S. Public Health Service, one who really was employed by USPHS, had a long lean body, a mournful countenance, a general resemblance to the late great Boris Karloff, and the name Fred Filiarisus. By special authority of the White House, Dr. Filiarisus was able to gain access to everything known by the scientists at Desert Door, including the course of the disease in those originally infected, among whom two had died before the antidote took effect and three had shown a total lack of symptoms even though exposed along with the others. He also had access to both FBI and CIA information as it came in, without having to bug either office. It was he, therefore, who finally put together the correct picture, on April 30, and reported directly to the White House at eleven that morning.
“Some people are naturally immune to Anthrax Leprosy Pi, Mr. President,” Filiarisus said. “Unfortunately, they serve as carriers. We found three like that at the base, and it is mathematically, scientifically certain that a fourth is still at large.
“Everybody was lying to the FBI and CIA, sir. They were all afraid of punishment for various activities forbidden by our laws. No variation or permutation on their stories will hang together reasonably. Each witness lied about something, and usually about several things. The truth is other than it appeared. In short, the government, being an agency of punishment, acted as a distorting factor from the beginning, and I had to use information-theory equations to determine the degree of distortion present. I would say that what I finally discovered may have universal application: no governing body can ever obtain an accurate account of reality from those over whom it holds power. From the perspective of communication analysis, government is not an instrument of law and order, but of law and disorder. I’m sorry to have to say this so bluntly, but it needs to be kept in mind when similar situations arise in the future.”
“He sounds like an effing anarchist,” the Vice President muttered.
“The true picture, with a ninety-seven percent probability, is this,” Filiarisus continued. “Dr. Mocenigo had only one contact, and she died. The FBI hypothesis is correct: her body was then hidden, probably in the desert, by an associate wishing to avoid involvement with law enforcement agencies. If prostitution were legal, we might never have had this nightmare.”
“I told you he was an effing anarchist,” the Vice President growled. “And a sex maniac, too!”
“The associate who hid the body,” Filiarisus went on, “is our fourth carrier, personally immune but lethal to others. It was this person who infected Mr. Chaney and Dr. Naismith. This person was probably not a prostitute. These men lied, among other reasons, because they knew what the government agents wanted them to say. When power is wielded over people, they say as well as do what they think is expected of them—another reason government always finds it difficult to learn the truth about anything.
“The only hypothesis that mathematical logic will accept, when all the known data was fed into a computer, is that the fourth carrier is the procurer who disappeared, Mr. Carmel. Experiencing no symptoms himself, he is unaware that he carries the world’s most dangerous disease. For reasons of his own, which we cannot guess, he has been hiding since he disposed of the woman’s body. Probably, he feared that the corpse might be found and a case of manslaughter or homicide could be made against him. Or he might have a motive completely unrelated to her death. Only t
wice has he contacted other human beings. I would suggest that his contact with Miss Quint was typical of their professional relationship; he either hit her or had sex relations with her. His contact with Dr. Naismith and Mr. Chaney was some sort of accident—perhaps the crowded elevator that has been suggested by Mr. Despond. Otherwise, he had been, as it were, underground.
“This is why we only found three cases instead of the thousands or millions we feared.
“However, the problem still remains. Carmel is immune, will never know he has the disease unless he is told it, and will eventually surface somewhere. When he does, we will learn of it through the outbreak of Anthrax Leprosy Pi cases in the vicinity. At that point, the whole nightmare begins again, sir.
“Our best hope, and the computer backs me on this, is public disclosure. The panic we tried to avoid will have to be faced. Every medium of communication in the nation must be given the full facts, and Camel’s description must be circulated everywhere. This is our last chance. The man is a walking biological Doomsday Machine and he must be found.
“Psychologists and social psychologists have fed all the relevant facts about this case, and about previous panics and plagues, into the computer also. The conclusion, with ninety-three percent certainty, is that the panic will be nationwide and martial law will have to be declared everywhere. Liberals in Congress should be placed under house arrest as the first step, and the Supreme Court must be stripped of its powers totally. The Army and the National Guard will have to be sent into every city with authority to override any policies of local officials. Democracy, in short, must cease until the emergency is ended.”
“He’s not an anarchist,” the Secretary of the Interior said. “He’s a goddam fascist.”
“He’s a realist,” said the President, clear-minded, crisp, quick on the uptake and stoned clear round the corner of schizophrenia by his usual three tranquilizers, a stronger dose of amphetamines than usual, and loads of those happy little Demerol tablets. “We start implementing his suggestions right now.”
And so those few tattered remnants of the Bill of Rights which had survived into the fourth decade of the Cold War were laid to rest—temporarily, it was thought by those present. Dr. Filiarisus, whose name in the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria was Gracchus Gruad, had completed on the day known as May Eve or Walpurgisnacht the project begun when the first dream of Anthrax Leprosy Pi was planted in Dr. Mocenigo’s mind on the day known as Candelmas. These dates were known by much older names in the Illuminati, of course, and the burial of the Bill of Rights was expected, by them, to be permanent.
(Two hours before Dr. Filiarisus spoke to the President, four of the world’s five Illuminati Primi met in an old graveyard in Ingolstadt; the fifth could not be present. They agreed that all was going as scheduled, but one danger remained: nobody in the order, however developed his or her ESP, had been able to trace Carmel. Leaning on a tombstone—where Adam Weishaupt had once performed rites so unique that the psychic vibration had bounced off every sensitive mind in Europe, leading to such decidedly peculiar literary productions as Lewis’s The Monk, Maturin’s Melmoth, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein, and DeSade’s One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom—the eldest of the four said, “It can still fail, if one of the mehums finds the pimp before he infects a city or two.” Mehums was an abbreviation for all descendants of those not part of the original Unbroken Circle; it meant mere humans.
“Why can none of our ultra-sensitives find him?” a second asked. “Does he have no ego or soul at all?”
“He has a vibration but it’s not distinctly human. Whenever we seem to have a fix on it, we’re usually picking up a bank vault or the safe of some paranoid millionaire,” the eldest replied.
“We have that problem with an increasing number of Americans,” the third commented morosely. “In that nation, we have done our work too well. The conditioning to those pieces of paper is so strong that no other psychic impulse remains to be read.”
The fourth spoke. “Now is no time for trepidation, my brothers. The plan is virtually realized, and this man’s lack of ordinary mehum qualities will prove an advantage when we do fix on him. No ego, no resistance. We will be able to move him at our whim. The stars are right, He Who Is Not To Be Named is impatient, and now we must be intrepid!” She spoke with fervor.
The others nodded. “Heute die Welt, Morgens das Sonnensystem!” the eldest cried out fiercely.
“Heute die Welt” all repeated, “Morgens das Sonnensystem!”)
But two days earlier, as the Leif Erikson left the Atlantic and entered the underground Ocean of Valusia beneath Europe, George Dorn was listening to a different kind of chorus. It was, Mavis had explained to him in advance, the weekly Agape Ludens, or Love Feast Game, of the Discordians, and the dining hall was newly bedecked with pornographic and psychedelic posters, Christian and Buddhist and Amerindian mystic designs, balloons and lollypops dangling from the ceiling on Day-Glo-dabbed strings, numinous paintings of Discordian saints (including Norton I, Sigismundo Malatesta, Guillaume of Aquitaine, Chuang Chou, Judge Roy Bean, various historical figures even more obscure, and numerous gorillas and dolphins), bouquets of roses and forsythia and gladiolas and orchids, clusters of acorns and gourds, and the inevitable proliferation of golden apples, pentagons and octopi.
The main course was the best Alaskan king crab Newburg that George had ever tasted, only lightly dusted with a mild hint of Panamanian Red grass. Dozens of trays of dried fruits and cheeses were passed back and forth among the tables, together with canapes of an exquisite caviar George had never encountered before (“Only Hagbard knows where those sturgeon spawn,” Mavis explained) and the beverage was a blend of the Japanese seventeen-herb Mu tea with Menomenee Indian peyote tea. While everyone gorged, laughed and got gently but definitely zonked, Hag-bard—who was evidently satisfied that he and FUCKUP had located “the problem in Las Vegas”—merrily conducted the religious portion of the Agape Ludens.
“Rub-a-dub-dub,” he chanted, “O hail Eris!”
“Rub-a-dub-dub,” the crew merrily chorused, “O Hail Eris!”
“Sya-dasti” Hagbard chanted. “All that I tell you is true.”
“Sya-dasti” the crew repeated, “O hail Eris!” George looked around; there were three, or five, races present (depending upon which school of physical anthropology you credited) and maybe half a hundred nationalities, but the feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood transcended any sense of contrast, creating instead a blend, as in musical progression.
“Sya-davak-tavya” Hagbard chanted now. “All that I tell you is false.”
“Sya-davak-tavya,” George joined in, “O hail Eris!”
“Sya-dasti-sya-nasti” Hagbard intoned. “All that I tell you is meaningless.”
“Sya-dasti-sya-nasti” all agreed, some jeeringly, “O hail Eris!”
If they had services like this in the Baptist church back in Nutley, George thought, I never would have told my mother religion is all a con and had that terrible quarrel when I was nine.
“Sya-dasti-sya-nasti-sya-davak-tav-yaska” Hagbard sang out. “All that I tell you is true and false and meaningless.”
“Sya-dasti-sya-nasti-sya-davak-tav-yaska,” the massed voices replied, “O hail Eris!”
“Rub-a-dub-dub,” Hagbard repeated quietly. “Does anyone have a new incantation?”
“All hail crab Newburg,” a Russian-accented voice shouted.
That was an immediate hit. “All hail crab Newburg,” everyone howled.
“All hail these bloody fucking beautiful roses,” an Oxfordian voice contributed.
“All hail these bloody fucking beautiful roses,” all agreed.
Miss Mao arose. “The Pope is the chief cause of Protestantism,” she recited softly.
That was another roaring success; everybody chorused, and one Harlem voice added, “Right on!”
“Capitalism is the chief cause of socialism,” Miss Mao chanted, more confident. That we
nt over well, too, and she then tried, “The State is the chief cause of anarchism,” which was another smashing success.
“Prisons are built with the stones of law, brothels with the bricks of religion,” Miss Mao went on.
“PRISONS ARE BUILT WITH THE STONES OF LAW, BROTHELS WITH THE BRICKS OF RELIGION,” the hall boomed.
“I stole that last one from William Blake,” Miss Mao said quietly and sat down.
“Any others?” Hagbard asked. There was none, so he went on after a moment, “Very well, then, I will preach my weekly sermon.”
“Balls!” cried a Texas voice.
“Bullshit!” added a Brazilian female.
Hagbard frowned. “That wasn’t much of a demonstration,” he commented sadly. “Are the rest of you so passive that you’re just going to sit here on your dead asses and let me bore the piss out of you?”
The Texan, the Brazilian lady and a few others got up. “We are going to have an orgy,” the Brazilian said briefly, and they left.
“Well, sink me, I’m glad there’s some life left on this old tub,” Hagbard grinned. “As for the rest of you— who can tell me, without uttering a word, the fallacy of the Illuminati?”
A young girl—she was no more than fifteen, George guessed, and the youngest member of the crew; he had heard she was a runaway from a fabulously rich Italian family in Rome—slowly raised her hand and clenched her fist.
Hagbard turned on her furiously. “How many times must I tell you people: no faking! You got that out of some cheap book on Zen that neither the author nor you understood a damned word of. I hate to be dictatorial, but phony mysticism is the one thing Discordianism can’t survive. You’re on shitwork, in the kitchen for a week, you wise-ass brat.”
The girl remained immobile, in the same position, fist raised, and only slowly did George read the slight smile that curled her mouth. Then he started to smile himself.
Hagbard lowered his eyes for a second and gave a Sicilian shrug. “O oi che siete in piccioletta barca,” he said softly, and bowed. “I’m still in charge of nautical and technical matters,” he announced, “but Miss Portinari now succeeds me as episkopos of the Leif Erikson cabal. Anyone with lingering spiritual or psychological problems, take them to her.” He lunged across the room, hugged the girl, laughed with her happily for a moment and placed his golden apple ring on her finger. “Now I don’t have to meditate every day,” he shouted joyously, “and I’ll have more time for some thinking.”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 47