“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 passer-by 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 overcast 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 Je
suits, 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 projections 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 player 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.”
“Thanks,” 00005 said warmly, taking a long, cold, delightful swallow.
He had a very low threshhold for LSD. The world began to seem brighter, stranger, and more colorful within only a few minutes.
(The joker was actually Rhoda Chief, the vocalist who sang with the Heads of Easter Island, and who had inspired much admiration in the younger generation—and much horror in the older—when she named her out-of-wedlock baby Jesus Jehovah Lucifer Satan Chief. A former Processene and Scientologist, currently going the Wicca route, the buxom Rhoda was renowned through show biz for “giving head like no chick alive,” a reputation which often provoked certain Satanists on the Linda Lovelace for President Committee to send very deadly vibes in her direction, all of which bounced off due to her Wicca shield. She was also possibly the greatest singer of her generation, and firmly believed that most human problems would be solved if the whole world could be turned on to acid. She had been preparing for the Ingolstadt festival for several months, buying only the top-quality tabs from the most reliable dealers, and she had crept into the geodesic Kool-Aid station only a few moments earlier, dumping enough pure lysergic acid diethylamide to blow the minds of the population of a small country. Actually, the idea had been subtly planted in her consciousness by the leader of her Wiccan, an astonishingly beautiful woman with flaming red hair and smoldering green eyes who had once played a starring role in a Black Mass celebrated by Padre Pederastia at 2323 Lake Shore Drive. This woman called herself Lady Velkor, and often made jokes about her memories of 18th-century Bavaria, which Rhoda assumed were references to reincarnation.)
On April 10, while Howard made his discovery in the ruins of Atlantis and Tlaloc grinned in Mexico D.F., Tobias Knight, in his room at the Hotel Pan Kreston in Santa Isobel, concluded a broadcast to the American submarine in the Bight of Biafra. “The Russkies and Chinks have completed their withdrawal, and Generalissimo Puta is definitely friendly to our side, besides being popular with both the Bubi and the Fang. My work is definitely finished, and I’ll await orders to return to Washington.”
“Roger. Over and out.”
(Frank Sullivan, capitalizing on his only real asset, was operating in Havana as a Cuban Superman, using the name Papa Piaba, when the Brotherhood spotted his resemblance to John Dillinger. “Gosh,” he said when they made their offer, “five thousand dollars just to take two ladies to a movie one night? And it’s only a practical joke, you say?” “It’ll be a very funny joke,” Jaicapo Mocenigo promised him. And the Smithsonian acquired Mr. Sullivan’s asset as one of their most interesting relics.)
WE’LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER
(Hagbard was accompanied by Joe Malik when he returned to the stateroom. “You go to the beer hall in Munich,” he was saying, “and steal any item, anything at all, as long as it’s obviously old enough to have been there the night he tried the Putsch. Then you rejoin the rest of us in Ingolstadt. Understood?”
WE’LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER
Lady Velkor, wearing a green peasant blouse and green hotpants, looked around the geodesic Kool-Aid dome. A man in a green turtleneck sweater and green slacks caught her eye, and she walked over to him, asking, “Are you a turtle?”
“You bet your sweet ass I am,” he answered eagerly and so she had failed to make contact—and owed this oaf a free drink also. But she smiled pleasantly and concealed her annoyance.
WE’LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER WHEN SHE COMES
Robinson and Lehrman of the Homicide Department actually started the last phase of the operation. I was in New York to see Hassan i Sabbah X about a new phase of Laotian opium operation (I had just come from Chicago, after staging that conversation with Waterhouse for Miss Servix’s benefit), and I decided to check with them for those little nuances that can’t go into an official report We met in Washington Square and found a bench far enough from the chess nuts to give us some privacy.
“Muldoon is on to us,” Robinson told me right off. He was wearing a beard; I figured that meant he was currently in a Weather Underground group, since he was too old to pass for under twenty-one and get into Morituri.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He made the usual reply: “Who’s ever sure of anything in this business? But Barney is pure cop through and through,” he added, “and his instincts are like dowsing rods. Everybody on the force knows we’ve infiltrated them by now, anyway. They even make jokes about it ‘Who’s the CIA man in your department?’—that kind of thing.”
“Muldoon is on to us, all right,” Lehrman agreed. “But he’s not the one I worr
y about”
“Who is?” I brushed my walrus mustache nervously; being the first pentuple agent in the history of espionage was starting to grind me down. I really wasn’t sure which of my bosses should hear about this, although the CIA certainly had to be told, since for all I know Robinson and Lehrman might be reporting to them twice, having another contact as a fail-safe check on my own integrity.
“The head of Homicide North,” Lehrman said. “An old geezer named Goodman. He’s so damned smart, I sometimes wonder if he’s a double agent for the Eye themselves. His mind jumps ahead of facts just like an Adeptus Exemptus in the Order.”
I looked up at the statue of Garibaldi, remembering the old NYU myth that he would pull his sword the rest of the way out of the scabbard if a virgin ever walked through Washington Park. “Tell me more about this Goodman,” I said.
(“Check out the pair on that chick,” a Superman said enthusiastically.
(“Watermelons,” a second Superman agreed enthusiastically. “And you know how us cullud folk dig watermelons,” he added, licking his lips.
(“Skin!” the first cried.
(“Skin!” the second agreed.
(They slapped palms, and Clark Kent came out of his reverie. Having sampled the Kool-Aid a while earlier, he was beginning to float a little, although not yet aware of what was happening—he just felt a rather unusual tug of memory from his days as an anthropologist, and was deeply concerned with a new insight about the relationship between the black Virgin of Guadalupe, the Greek goddess Persephone, and his own sexual proclivities—and he came out of it with a start, looking at the woman whose breasts had inspired such reverence.
(“Son of a bitch,” he said piously, his mouth spreading in a grin.)
Rebecca Goodman left the house at 3 P.M., hauling a shopping cart and walking past the garage. The nearest supermarket was a good ten minutes on foot, and big enough to keep her busy for a half-hour finding what she wanted and getting through one of those checkout lines. I slipped out of the car and walked right to the back of the house, perfectly secure from neighboring eyes in my Bell Telephone overalls.
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 65