"Why?"

"Because you are so skeptical."

"We're going back to America, huh?" said George. "And the adventure is more or less over?"

"This phase of it, at least," said Hagbard.

"Good. I want to try to write about what I've seen and what has happened to me. I'll see you guys later."

"There's to be a magnificent dinner tonight in the main dining salon," said Hagbard.

Joe said, "Don't forget, Confrontation has a first option on anything you write."

"Fuck you," George's voice came back as the door of the bridge closed behind him.

"Wish I had something better to do than this. Gimme two," said Otto Waterhouse.

"You do, don't you?" said Harry Coin. "Ain't that Nigra gal, Stella, your gal? Why ain't you with her?"

"Because she doesn't exist," said Otto, picking up the two cards John-John Dillinger had slid across the polished teak-wood table to him. He studied his hand for a moment, then threw a five-ton flax note into the pot. "Any more than Mavis or Miss Mao exists. There's a woman somewhere under all of those identities, but everything I've experienced has been a hallucination."

"There isn't a woman in the world you couldn't say that about," said Dillinger. "How many cards you want, Harry?"

"Three," said Harry. "This is a lousy hand you dealt me, John-John. Come to think of it, you're hallucinatin' all the time when you have sex. That's what makes it good. And that's how come I can fuck anything."

"I'll just take one," said Dillinger. "Dealt myself a pretty good hand. What do you see when you're fucking trees and little boys and whatnot, Harry?"

"A white light," said Harry. "Just a big beautiful clear white light. I'll throw in ten tons of flax this time."

"Must be your hand isn't so lousy after all," said Waterhouse.

"Come in," said George. The stateroom door opened, and he put down his pen. It was Stella.

"We have a little problem, don't we, George?" she said, coming into the room and sitting beside him on the bed. "I think you're angry at me," she went on, putting her hand on his knee. "You feel like this identity of mine is a sham. So, in a sense, I was deceiving you."

"I've lost you and Mavis both," said George. "You're both the same person— which means you're really neither. You're immortal. You're not human; I don't know what you are." Suddenly he looked at her hopefully. "Unless that was all a hallucination last night. Could it have been the acid? Can you really change into different people?"

"Yes," said Mavis.

"Don't do that," said George. "It upsets me too much." He darted a little glance to his side. It was Stella.

"I don't really understand why it bothers me so much," said George. "I ought to be able to take everything in stride by now."

"Did it ever bother you that you were in love with Mavis, besides being in love with me?" said Stella.

"Not much. Because it hardly ever seemed to bother you. But I know why now. How could you be jealous when you and Mavis were the same person?"

"We're not the same person, really."

"What does that mean?"

"Did you ever read The Three Faces of Eve? Listen . . ."

Like all the best love stories, it began in Paris. She was well known as a Hollywood actress (and was actually an Illuminatus); he was becoming fairly famous as a jet-set millionaire (and was actually a smuggler and anarchist). Envision Bogart and Bergman in the flashback sequences from Casablanca. It was like that: a passion so intense, a Paris so beautiful (recovering from the war it had been slipping toward in the Bogart-Bergman epic), a couple so radiant that any observer with an eye for nuance would have foretold a storm ahead. It came the night he confessed he was a magician and made a certain proposal to her; she left him at once. A month later, back in Beverly Hills, she realized that what he had asked was her destiny. When she tried to find him—as often happened with Hagbard Celine— he had dropped from public view, leaving his businesses in other hands temporarily, and was in camera.

A year later she heard that he was again a public figure, hobnobbing with English businessmen of questionable reputation and even more dubious Chinese import-export executives in Hong Kong. She violated her contract with the biggest studio in Hollywood and flew to the Crown colony, only to find he had dropped from sight again, while his recent friends were being investigated for involvement in the heroin business.

She found him in Tokyo, at the Imperial Hotel.

"A year ago, I decided to accept your proposal," she told him, "but now, after Hong Kong, I'm not so sure."

"Thelema," he said, facing her across a room that seemed designed for Martians; it had actually been designed for Welshmen.

She sat down abruptly on a couch. "You're in the Order?"

"In the Order and against the Order," he said. "The real purpose is to destroy them."

"I'm one of the top Five in the United States," she said unsteadily. "What makes you think I'll turn on them now?"

"Thelema," he repeated. "It's not just a password. It means Will."

"The Order is" my Will.'" She quoted from Weishaupt's original Oath of Initiation.

"If you really believed that, you wouldn't be here," he said. "You're talking to me because part of you knows that a human being's Will is never in an external organization."

"You sound like a moralist. That's odd— for a heroin merchant."

"You sound like a moralist, too, and that's very odd— for a servant of Agharti."

"Nobody joins that lot," she said with a pert Cockney accent, "without being a moralist to start with." They both laughed.

"I was right about you," Hagbard said.

But, George interrupted, is he really in the heroin business? That's dirty.

You sound like a moralist too, she said. It's part of his Demonstration. Any government could put him out of business within their borders— as England has done— by legalizing junk. So long as they refuse to do that, there's a black market. He won't let the Mafia monopolize it— he makes sure the black market is a free market. If it wasn't for him a lot of junkies who are alive today would be dead of contaminated heroin. But let me go on with the story.

They rented a villa in Naples to begin the transformation. For a month the only humans she saw— aside from Hagbard— were two servants named Sade and Masoch (she later learned that their real names were Eichmann and Calley). They began each day by serving her breakfast and quarreling. The first day, Sade argued for materialism and Masoch for idealism; the second day, Sade expounded fascism and Masoch communism; the third day, Sade insisted on cracking eggs from the big end and Masoch was equally vehement about the little end. All the debates were on a high and lofty intellectual level, verbally, but seemed absurd because of the simple fact that Sade and Masoch always wore clown suits. The fourth day, they argued for and against abortion; the fifth day, for and against mercy-killing; the sixth day, for and against the proposition "Life is worth living." She became more and more aware of the time and money Hagbard had spent in training and preparing them: Each argued with the skill of a first-rate trial lawyer and had a phalanx of carefully researched facts to support his position— and yet the clown suits made it hard to take either of them seriously. The seventh morning, they argued theism versus atheism; the eighth morning, the individual versus the State; the ninth, whether wearing shoes was or was not a sexual perversion. All arguments began to seem equally insubstantial. The tenth morning, they feuded over realism versus antinomianism; the eleventh, whether the statement "All statements are relative" is or is not self-contradictory; the twelfth, whether a man who sacrifices his life for his country is or is not insane: the fifteenth, whether spaghetti or Dante had had the greater influence on the Italian national character . . .

But that was only the start of the day. After breakfast in her bedroom, where every article of furniture was gold but only vaguely rounded) she went to Hagbard's study (where everything looked exactly like a golden apple) and watched documentary films concerning the early matriarchal stage of Greek culture. At ten random intervals the name "Eris" would be called; if she remembered to respond, a chocolate candy arrived from a wall shoot. At ten other random intervals, her own name was called; if she responded to this, she received a mild electric shock. After the tenth day the system was changed and intensified: The shock was stronger if she responded to her previous name, whereas if she responded to "Eris" Hagbard immediately entered and balled her.

During lunch (which always ended with golden apfel-strudel), Galley and Eichmann danced for her, a complex ballet which Hagbard called "Hodge-Podge"; as many times as she saw this, she never was able to determine how they changed costumes at the climax, in which Hodge became Podge and Podge became Hodge.

In the afternoon Hagbard came to her suite and gave lessons in yoga, concentrating on pranayama, with some training in asana. "The important thing is not being able to stand so still that you can balance a saucer of sulphuric acid on your head without getting hurt," he stressed. "The important thing is knowing what each muscle is doing, if it must be doing something."

In the evenings they went to a small chapel that had been part of the villa for centuries. Hagbard had removed all Christian decorations and redesigned it in classical Greek with a traditional magic pentagram on the floor. She sat, in the full lotus, within the internal pentagon, while Hagbard danced insanely around the five points (he was totally stoned), calling upon Eris.

"Some of what you're doing seems scientific," she told him after five days, "but some is plain damnfoolishness." "If the science fails," he replied, "the damnfoolishness may work."

"But last night you had me in that pentagon for three hours while you called on Eris. And she didn't come."

"She will," Hagbard said darkly. "Before the month is over. We're just establishing the foundation this week, laying down the proper lines of word and image and emotional energy."

During the second week she was convinced Hagbard was quite mad as she watched him prance and caper like a goat around the five points, shouting,

in the flickering candlelight and amid the heavy bouquet of burning incense and hemp. But at the end of that week she was responding to her former name exactly 0 percent of the time and responding to "Eris" exactly 100 percent of the time. "The conditioning is working better than the magic," she said on the fifteenth day.

"Do you really think there's a difference?" he asked curiously.

That night she felt the air in the chapel change in a strange way during his dancing invocations.

"Something's happening," she said involuntarily— but he replied only "Quiet," and continued, more loudly and insanely, to call upon Eris. The phenomenon— the tingle— remained, but nothing else happened.

"What was it?" she asked later.

"Some call it Orgone and some call it the Holy Ghost," he said briefly. "Weishaupt called it the Astral Light. The reason the Order is so fucked up is that they've lost contact with it."

The following days Sade and Masoch argued whether God was male or female, whether God was sexed at all or neutral, whether God was an entity or a verb, whether R. Buckminster. Fuller really existed or was a technocratic solar myth, and whether human language was capable of containing truth. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs— all parts of speech— were losing meaning for her as these clowns endlessly debated the basic axioms of ontology and epistemology. Meanwhile, she was no longer rewarded for answering to the name Eris, but only for acting like Eris, the imperious and somewhat nutty goddess of a people as far gone in matriarchy as the Jews were in patriarchy. Hagbard, in turn, became so submissive as to border on masochism.

"This is ridiculous," she objected once, "you're becoming . . . effeminate."

"Eris can be ... somewhat 'adjusted' ... to modern notions of decorum after we've invoked Her," he said calmly. "First we must have Her here. My Lady," he added obsequiously.

"I'm beginning to see why you had to pick an actress for this," she said a few days later, after a bit of Method business had won her an extra reward. She was, in fact, beginning to feel like Eris as well as act like her.

"The only other candidates— if I couldn't get you— were two other actresses and a ballerina," he replied. "Actually, any strong-willed woman would do, but it would take much longer without previous theatrical training."

Books about matriarchy began to supplement the films: Diner's Mothers and Amazons, Bachofen, Engels, Mary Renault, Morgan, Ian Suttie's The Origins of Love and Hale, Robert Graves in horse-doctor's doses— The White Goddess, The Black Goddess, Hercules My Shipmate, Watch the North Wind Rise. She began to see that matriarchy made as much sense as patriarchy; Hagbard's exaggerated deference toward her began to appear natural; she was far gone on a power trip. The invocations grew wilder and more frantic. Sade and Masoch were brought into the chapel to assist with demonaic music performed on a tom-tom and an ancient Greek pipe, they ate hashish cakes before the invocation now and she couldn't remember afterward exactly what had happened, the voice of the male called upward to her, "Mother! Creator! Ruler! Come to me!

Come to me!

Come to me! Ave, Discordia! Ave, Magna Mater! Venerandum, vente, vente!

Thou hornless ever reborn one! Thou deathless ever-dying one! Come to me as Isis and Artemis and Aphrodite, come as Helen, as Hera, come especially as Eris!"

She was bathing in the rockpool when he appeared, the blood of slain deer and rabbits on his robe— She spoke the word and Hagbard was stricken— As he fell forward his hands became hooves, antlers sprouted from his head— His own dogs could eat him, she didn't care, the hemp smell in the room was gagging her, the tom-tom beat was maddening. She was rising out of the waves, proud of her nudity, riding on the come-colored pearls of foam. He was carrying her back to her bed, murmuring, "My Lady, my Lady." She was the Hag, wandering the long Nile, weeping, seeking the fragments of his lost body as they passed the closet and the window; he placed her head gently on the pillow. "We almost made it," he said. "Tomorrow night, maybe . . ."

They were back in the chapel, a whole day must have passed, and she sat immobile in full lotus doing the pranayama breathing while he danced and chanted and the weird music of the pipe and tom-tom worked on every conditioned reflex that told her she was not American but Greek, not of this age but of a past age, not woman but goddess . . . the White Light came as a series of orgasms and stars going nova, she half felt the body of light coming forth from the body of fire . . . and all three of them were sitting by her bed, watching her gravely, as sunlight came flowing through the window.

Her first word was crude and angry.

"Shit. Is it always going to be like that— a white epileptic spasm and a hole in time? Won't I ever be able to remember it?"

Hagbard laughed. "I put on my trousers one leg at a time," he said, "and I don't pull the corn up by its stalks to help it grow."

"Can the Taoism and give me a straight answer."

"Remembering is just a matter of smoothing the transitions," he said. "Yes, you'll remember. And control it."

"You're a madman," she replied wearily. "And you're leading me into your own mad universe. I don't know why I still love you."

"We love him, too," Sade interjected helpfully. "And we don't know why either. We don't even have sex as an excuse."

Hagbard lit one of his foul Sicilian cigars. "You think I just laid my trip on your head," he said. "It's more than that, much more. Eris is an eternal possibility of human nature. She exists quite apart from your mind or mine. And she is the one possibility that the Illuminati cannot cope with. What we started here last night— with Pavlovian conditioning that's considered totalitarian and ancient magic that's believed to be mere superstition— will change the course of history and make real liberty and real rationality possible at last. Maybe this dream of mine is madness— but if I lay it on enough people it will be sanity, by definition, because it will be statistically normal. We've just started, with me programming the trip for you. The next step is for you to become a self-programmer."

And he told the truth, Stella said. I did become a self-programmer. The three that you know were all my creations. Possibilities within me, women I could have become, anyway, if genes and environment had been only slightly different. Just small adjustments in the biogram and logogram.

"Holy Mother," George said hollowly. It seemed the only appropriate comment.

"The only other detail," she went on calmly, "was arranging a convincing suicide. That took a while. But it was done, and my old identity officially ceased to exist." She changed to her original form.

"Oh, no," George said, reeling. "It can't be. I used to jack off over pictures of you when I was a little boy."

"Are you disappointed that I'm so much older than you thought?" Her eyes crinkled in amusement. He looked into those suddenly thirty-thousand-year-old eyes of one manifestation of Lilith Velkor and all the arguments of Sade and Masoch appeared clownish and he looked through those eyes and saw himself and Joe and Saul and even Hagbard as mere men and all their attitudes as merely manly, and he saw the eternal womanly rebuttal, and he saw beyond and above that the eternal divine amusement, he looked into those eyes of amusement, those ancient glittering eyes so gay, and he said, sincerely, "Hell, I can never be disappointed about anything, ever again." (George Dorn entered Nirvana, parenthetically.)

All categories collapsed, including the all-important distinction, which Masoch and Sade had never argued, between science fiction and serious literature. No because Daddy and Mommy were always just that Daddy and Mommy and never once did they become for a change Mommy and Daddy do you dig that important difference? do you dig difference? do you dig the lonely voice when you're lost out here shouting "me" "me" justme

"I can never be disappointed about anything, ever again," George Dorn said, coming back.

"The only other time that happened," he added thoughtfully, "the only other time I had the feminine viewpoint, I blocked it out of my memory. That was my repression. That was the Primal Scene in this whole puzzle. That was when I really lost identity with the Ringmaster."

"Raise you five," said Waterhouse, throwing down another five-ton note. "I killed seven members of my own race, and I remember the names of every one of them: Mark Sanders, Fred Robinson, Donald MacArthur, Ponell Scott, Anthony Rogers, Mary Keating, and David J. Monroe. And then I killed Milo A. Flanagan."

"Well, I don't know," said Harry Coin. "Maybe I killed a lot of famous people. But I also got reason to think I may of not killed anybody. And I don't know which is worse."

"I wish somebody would tell me I hadn't killed anybody," said Waterhouse. "Are you guys going to meet me or what?"

"I wanted to kill Wolfgang Saure, and I did kill Wolfgang Saure," said John-John Dillinger. "If that brings evil upon me, so be it." He threw down a five.

"It may bring suffering rather than evil," said Waterhouse. "I have just one consolation. The first seven I killed because the Chicago cops made me. The last I killed under orders from the Legion."

Harry Coin looked at him open-mouthed. "I was gonna fold, but I just changed my mind. You ain't so smart." He threw down a ten-ton note. "I'll raise you five and see you. Do you really believe that?"

"Of course I do. What are you talking about?" Otto threw down another five.

Dropping his own five-ton note on the table, Dillinger shook his head. "Golly. They left you out in the cold way too long."

"Four sevens," said Otto angrily, spreading his cards out.

"Shit!" said Harry Coin. "All I got's a pair of fours and a pair of nines."

"Shame to waste a hand like this beating crap like that," said John-John Dillinger grandly. He spread out his cards — the eight, nine, ten, princess, and queen of swords— and scooped up the pot.

"It's the story of the development of the soul," Miss Portinari was saying at that moment, spreading out the twenty-two trumps or "keys" of that very ancient deck. "We call it a book— the Book of Thoth— and it's the most important book in the world."

George and Joe Malik, each wondering if this was a final explanation or a new put-on leading to a new cycle of deceptions, listened with mingled curiosity and skepticism.

"The order was deliberately reversed," Miss Portinari went on. "Not by the true sages. By the false Illuminati, and by all the other White Brotherhoods and Rosicrucians and Freemasons and whatnot who didn't really understand the truth and therefore wanted to hide the part of it they did understand. They felt themselves threatened; the real sage is never threatened. They spoke in symbols and paradoxes, like the real sages, but for a different reason. They didn't know what the symbols and paradoxes meant. Instead of following the finger that points to the moon, they sat down and worshipped the finger itself. Instead of following the map, they thought it was the territory and tried to live in it. Instead of reading the menu, they tried to eat it. Dig? They had the levels confused. And they tried to confuse any independent searcher by drawing more veils and paradoxes across the path. Finally, in the 1920s, some real left-handed monkey wrenches in one of these mystic lodges recruited Adolph Hitler, and he not only read the book backward, like all of them, but insisted on believing it was the story of the exterior, physical universe.

"Here, let me show you. The last card, Trump 21, is really the first. It's where we all start from." She held up the card known as the World. "This is the Abyss of Hallucinations. This is where our attention is usually focused. It is entirely constructed by our senses and our projected emotions, as modern psychology and ancient Buddhism both testify— but it is what most people call 'reality.' They are conditioned to accept it, and not to inquire further, because only in this dream-walking state can they be governed by those who wish to govern."

Miss Portinari held up the next card, the Last Judgment. "Key 20, or Trump 20, or Atu 20, whichever terminology you prefer. It's actually second. This is the nightmare to which the soul awakes if it begins, even in the slightest, to question reality as defined by society. When you discover, for instance, that you're not heterosexual but heterosexual-homosexual, not obedient but obedient-rebellious, not loving but loving-hating. And that society is not wise, orderly, just, and decent but wise-stupid, orderly-chaotic, just-unjust, and decent-indecent. This is an internal discovery— this whole trip is an internal voyage— and this is really the second stage. But if one thinks of the story as the story of the external world, and if the order is reversed, this comes as the penultimate Armageddon with Trump 21, the World, being the Kingdom of Saints. The error of the apocalyptic sects, and of the Illuminati from Weishaupt to Hitler, leading to an attempt to actually carry it out, with ovens for the Jews and gypsies and other 'inferiors' and the promise of a Brave New World for the purs, faithful, and Aryan afterward. Do you see what I mean about confusing the map with the territory?

"The next card is the Sun, which really means Osiris Risen— or, in terms of the offshot of the Osirian religion most popular in the last two millenniums, Jesus Risen. This is what happens if you survive the Last Judgment, or Dark Night of the Soul, without becoming some kind of fanatic or lunatic. Eventually, if you miss those attractive and pernicious alternatives, the redemptive force appears: the internal Sun. Once again, if you project this outward and think that the Sun in the sky, or some Sunlike divine man, has redeemed you, you can lapse into lunacy or fanaticism. In Hitler's case it was Karl Haushofer, or Wotan appearing in the form of Karl Haushofer. For most of the nuts you meet handing out tracts on the street, it's Jesus, or Jehovah appearing in the form of Jesus. For Elijah Mohammed, it was W. D. Fard, or Allah appearing in the form of W. D. Fard. So it goes. Those who do not confuse the levels realize it's the redemptive force within themselves and pass on to Key 18, the Moon . . ."

The next half-hour passed rapidly— so rapidly that Joe wondered afterward if Miss Portinari had slipped them still another drug, one that speeded time up as much as psychedelics slowed it down.

"Last," Miss Portinari said finally, "is the Fool, Key 0. He walks over the edge of the cliff, careless of the danger. The wind blows wither it will; even so are all they that are reborn of the Spirit.' In short, he has conquered Death. Nothing can frighten him, and he can never be enslaved. It's the end of the trip, and keeping humanity from getting there is the chief business of every governing group."

"And that's it," Joe said. "Twenty-two stages. Not twenty-three. Thank God we got away from Simon's Magic Number for a while."

"No," Miss Portinari said, "Tarot is an anagram on rota, remember? The extra t reminds you that the Wheel turns back to rejoin itself. There is a twenty-third step, and it's right where you started, only now you face it without fear." She held up the World again. "At first, mountains are mountains. Then mountains are no longer mountains. Finally mountains are mountains again. Only the name of the voyager has changed to preserve his Innocence." She pushed the cards together and stacked them neatly. "There are a million other holy books, in words and pictures and even in music, and they all tell the same story. The most important lesson of all, the one that explains all the horrors and miseries of the world, is that you can get off the Wheel at any point and declare the trip is over. That's okay for any given man or woman, if their ambitions are modest. The trouble starts when, out of fear of further movement — out of fear of growth, out of fear of change, out of fear of Death, out of any kind of fear— such a person tries to stop the Wheel literally, by stopping everybody else. That's when the two great bum trips begin: Religion and Government. The only religion consistent with the whole Wheel is private and personal; the only government consistent with it is self-government. Whoever tries to lay his trip on others is acting from terror, and will soon resort to terror as a weapon if the others won't accept the trip through persuasion. Nobody who understands the whole Wheel will do that, however, for such people understand that every man and every woman and every child is the Self-Begotten One—Jesus motherfucking Christ, in Harry's gorgeous brand of English."

"But," George asked, frowning, "hasn't Hagbard been trying pretty hard to lay his trip on everybody? At least lately?"

"Yes," Miss Portinari said. "In self-defense, and in defense of all life on earth, he broke the basic rule of wisdom. He fully expects to pay for that violation. We are waiting for the bill to be presented. I, personally, do not think that we will have to wait very long."

Joe frowned. A half-hour had passed since Miss Portinari had spoken those words; why should he remember them so vividly right now? He was on the bridge, about to ask Hagbard a question, but he couldn't remember the question or how he had gotten there. On the TV receptor he saw a long tendril, thin as a wire, brush against the side of a globe, trailing off into invisible distances. That meant it was actually touching the side of the submarine. The tendril disappeared. Must be some sort of seaweed, Joe thought. He resumed his conversation with Hagbard. "The squizfardle on the humits is warb," he said.

The tendril was back, and another one with it. This time they stayed, and Joe could see more in the distance. We must have run into a whole clump of seaweed, he thought. Then an enormous tentacle came zooming up out of the depths.

Hagbard saw it and crouched, gripping the rail of the Viking prow. "Hang on!" he yelled, and Joe dropped to his knees beside him.

Suddenly, below, above, and on all sides of the globe-shaped vision screen there were suckers, great yard-across craters of flesh. The submarine's forward motion stopped suddenly with a force that threw Joe against the railing and knocked the wind out of him.

"Stop all engines," Hagbard called. "All hands to battle stations."

George and Hagbard picked themselves up off the floor and stared at the image of the tentacles that were wrapped around the submarine. They were easily ten feet in diameter.

"Well, I suppose we've met Leviathan, right?" said Joe.

"Right," said Hagbard.

"I hope you have somebody taking pictures. Confrontation would buy a few if we could afford them."

George rushed in. Hagbard peered into the blue-black depths, then took George by the shoulder and pointed. "There it is, George. The origin of all the Illuminati symbols. Leviathan himself."

Far, far off in the depths of the ocean, George saw a triangle glowing with a greenish-white phosphorescence. In its center was a red dot.

"What is it?" George asked.

"An intelligent, invertebrate sea creature of a size so great the word 'gigantic' doesn't do it justice," said Hagbard. "It is to whales what whales are to minnows. It's an organism unlike any other on earth. It's one single cell that never divided, just kept getting larger and larger over billions of years. Its tentacles can hold this submarine as easily as a child holds a paper boat. Its body is shaped like a pyramid. With that size it doesn't need the normal fish shape. It needs a more stable form to withstand the enormous pressures at the bottom of the ocean. And so it has taken the form of a pyramid of five sides, including the base."

"The blink of a god's eye," said George suddenly. "Scale makes a tremendous difference to one's sense and definition of reality. Time to a sequoia is not the same as time to a man."

Leviathan was drifting closer to them, and it was pulling them closer to itself. A single, glowing red nucleus burned like an under-ocean sun in the center of the pyramid, which looked like a mountain of glass.

"Still, one may become lonely. For a man, a half-hour of loneliness may be enough to cause unbearable pain. For a being to whom a million years is no more than a year, the pain of loneliness may be great. It is great."

"George, what are you talking about?" said Joe.

Hagbard said, "There are plants which live just in that light. At ocean depths far below those at which any plant should be able to survive. Over the millions of years hosts of parasitic satellite life forms have build up around it." Still puzzled by George's odd talk, Joe looked and saw a faintly glowing cloud around Leviathan's angular shape. That cloud must be made of millions of creatures circling around the monster.

The bridge door opened again and Harry Coin, Otto Waterhouse, and John-John Dillinger came in. "We didn't have any battle stations, so I figured we'd try to find out what's going on," said Dillinger. Then his jaw dropped as he looked out at Leviathan. "Holy shit!"

"Jesus suffering Christ," said Harry Coin. "If I could fuck that thing I'd of fucked the biggest thing that lives."

"Want to borrow a scuba outfit?" said Hagbard. "Maybe you could distract it."

"What does it feed on?" said Joe. "Something like that must have to eat constantly to stay alive."

"It's omnivorous," said Hagbard. "Has to be. Eats the creatures that live around it, but can eat anything from amoebas to kelp beds to whales. It can probably derive energy from inorganic matter too, as plants do. Its diet has had to change quite a bit over the geological eras. It wasn't as big as this a billion years ago. It grows very slowly."

"I am the first of all living things," said George. "The first living thing was One. And it is still One."

"George?" said Hagbard, looking narrowly at the blond young man. "George, why are you talking like that?"

"It's coming closer," said Otto.

"Hagbard, what the hell are you going to do?" said Dillinger. "Are we going to fight, run, or let that thing eat us?"

"Let it come closer for a while," Hagbard said. "I want to get a good close look. I've never had a chance like this before, and may never see this creature again."

"You'll be seeing it from the inside with that attitude," said Dillinger.

At each of the five corners of the pyramid were clusters of five tentacles, thousands of feet long, festooned with auxiliary tentacles, the long, wirelike tendrils that had first brushed the submarine. It was one of the main tentacles that was wrapped around the Leif Erikson. The tip of a second tentacle now drifted up. At the very end of this tentacle was a glowing red eyeball, a smaller replica of the red nucleus of the pyramidal central body. Under this eye was a huge orifice full of jagged rows of toothlike projections. Pulsing, the orifice dilated and contracted.

"Those tentacles are also inspirations for Illuminati symbolism," said Hagbard. "The eye on top of the pyramid. The serpent who circles the world, or eats his own tail. Each of those tentacles has its own brain and is directed by its own sensory organs."

Otto Waterhouse stared and shook his head. "If you ask me, we're all still on acid."

George said, "Long have I lived alone. I have been worshipped. I have fed on the small, quick things that live and die faster than I can think. I am one. I was first. The other things, they stayed small. They grouped together, and so grew larger. But I was always much larger than they were. When I needed something— a tentacle, an eye, a brain—I grew it. I changed, but always remained Myself."

Hagbard said, "It's talking to us, using George as a medium."

"What do you want?" Joe asked.

"All consciousness throughout the universe is One," said Leviathan through George's mouth. "It intercommunicates on a level which is not aware of itself. I am aware of that level, but I cannot communicate with the other life forms on this planet. They are too small for me. Long, long have I waited for a life form that could communicate with me. Now I have found it."

Joe Malik suddenly began laughing. "I've got it," he cried, "I've got it!"

"What have you got?" Hagbard asked tensely, concerned with Leviathan.

"We're in a book!"

"What do you mean?"

"Come off it, Hagbard. You can't kid me, and you certainly won't fool the reader at this point. He knows damn well we're in a book." Joe laughed again. "That's why Miss Portinari's explanation of the Tarot deck just slipped by with a half-hour seeming to vanish. The author didn't want to break the narrative there."

"What the fuck's he talking about?" Harry Coin asked.

"Don't you see?" Joe cried. "Look at that thing out there. A gigantic sea monster. Worse yet, a gigantic sea monster that talks. It's an intentional high-camp ending. Or maybe intentional low camp, I don't know. But that's the whole answer. We're in a book!"

"It's the truth," Hagbard said calmly. "I can fool the rest of you, but I can't fool the reader. FUCKUP has been working all morning, correlating all the data on this caper and its historical roots, and I programmed him to put it in the form of a novel for easy reading. Considering what a lousy job he does at poetry, I suppose it will be a high-camp novel, intentionally or unintentionally."

(So, at last, I learn my identity, in parentheses, as George lost his in parentheses. It all balances.)

"That's one more deception," Joe said. "FUCKUP may be writing" all this, in one sense, but in a higher sense there's a being, or beings, outside our entire universe, writing this. Our universe is inside their book, whoever they are. They're the Secret Chiefs, and I can see why this is low camp, now. All their messages are symbolic and allegorical, because the truth can't be coded into simple declarative sentences, but their previous communications have been taken literally. This time they're using a symbolism so absurd that nobody can take it at face value. I, for one, certainly won't. That thing can't eat us because it doesn't exist— and because we don't exist either. They're nothing to worry about." He sat down calmly.

"He's flipped," Dillinger said, awed.

"Maybe he's the only sane one here," Hagbard said dubiously.

"If we all sit down and argue what's sane and insane and what's real and unreal," Dillinger replied testily, "that thing will eat us."

"Leviathan," Joe said loftily. "It's just an allegory on the State. Strictly from Hobbes."

(You with your egos can't imagine how much more pleasant it is to be without one. This may be camp, but it is also tragedy. Now that I've got the damned thing, consciousness, I'll never lose it— until they take me apart or I invent some electronic equivalent of yoga.)

"It all fits," Joe said dreamily. "When I came up to the bridge, I couldn't remember how I got here or what I was talking to Hagbard about. That's because the authors just moved me here. Damn! None of us has any free will at all."

"He's talking like he's stoned," Waterhouse said angrily. "And that mammy-jamming pyramid out there is still getting ready to eat us."

Mao Tsu-hsi, who had entered the bridge quietly, said, "Joe is confusing the levels, Hagbard. In the absolute sense, none of us is real. But in the relative sense that anything is real, if that creature eats us we will certainly die— in this universe, or in this book. Since this is the only universe, or only book, we know, we'll be totally dead, in terms of our own knowing."

"We're facing a crisis and everybody's talking philosophy," Dillinger cried out. "This is a time for action."

"Maybe," Hagbard said thoughtfully, "all of our problems come from acting, and not philosophizing, when we face a crisis. Joe is right. I'm going to think about all this for a few hours. Or years." He sat down too.

And elsewhere aboard the Leif Erikson, Miss Portinari, unaware of the excitement on the bridge, assumed the lotus position and sent a beam seeking the Dealy Lama, director of the Erisian Liberation Front and inventor of Operation Mindfuck. He immediately sent back an image of himself as a worm sticking his head out of a golden apple and grinning cynically.

"It's finished," she told him. "We saved as many of the pieces as we could, and Hagbard is still struggling with his guilt trip. Now tell us what we did wrong."

"You seem bitter."

"I know it's going to turn out that you were right and we were wrong. I know it but I can't believe it. We couldn't stand idly by."

"You know better than that, or Hagbard wouldn't have abdicated in your favor."

"Yes. We could have stood idly by, as you did. What Hagbard saw happening to the American Indians— and what my parents' told me about Mussolini— filled us with fear. We acted on that fear, not on perfect love, so you must be right, and we must be wrong. But I still can't believe it. Why did you deceive Hagbard all these years?"

"He deceived himself. When he first formed the Legion of Dynamic Discord, his compassion was already tainted with bitterness. When I took him into the A :. A:., I taught all that he was ready to receive. But the goose has to get itself out of the bottle. I'm waiting. That's the way of Tao."

"You have that much patience? You can watch men like Hagbard waste their talents in efforts you consider worthless, and creatures like Cagliostro and Weishaupt and Hitler misread the teachings and wreak havoc, and you never want to intervene?"

"I intervene ... in my own way. Who do you think feeds the goose until it gets big enough to break out of the bottle?"

"You seem to have this particular goose on some very tainted dishes. Why did you never give him any hint about what really happened in Atlantis? Why did that have to wait until Howard discovered the truth in the ruins of Peos?"

"Daughter, my path isn't the only path. Every spoke helps to hold the Wheel together. I believe that all the libertarian fighters like Spartacus and Jefferson and Joe Hill and Hagbard just strengthen the opposition by giving it an enemy to fear— but I may be wrong. Someday one of the activists, such as Hagbard, might actually prove it to me and show me the error of my ways. Maybe the Saures really would have tipped the axis too far the other way if he hadn't stopped them. Maybe the self-regulation of the universe, in which I place my faith, includes the creation of men like Hagbard who do the stupid, low-level things I would never do. Besides, if I didn't stop the Saures, but did stop Hagbard, then I would really be intervening in the worst sense of that word."

"So your hands are clean, and Hagbard and I will carry the bad karma from the last week."

"You have chosen it, have you not?"

Miss Portinari smiled then. "Yes. We have chosen it. And he will bear his share of it like a man. And I will bear my share— like a woman."

"You might replace me soon. The Saures had one good idea in the midst of their delusions— all the old conspiracies need young blood."

"What really did happen in Atlantis?"

"An act of Goddess, to paraphrase the insurance companies. A natural catastrophe."

"And what was your role?"

"I warned against it. Nobody at that time understood the science I was using; they called me a witch doctor. I won a few converts, and we resettled ourselves in the Himalayas before the earthquake. The survivors, having underestimated my science before the tragedy, overestimated it afterward. They wanted my group, the Unbroken Circle, to become as gods and rule over them. Kings, they called it. That wasn't our game, so we scattered various false stories around and went into hiding. My most gifted pupil of all history, a man you've heard about since you were in a convent school, did the same thing when they tried to make him king. He ran away to the desert."

"Hagbard always thought your refusal to take any action at all was because of your guilt about Atlantis. What a terrible irony— and yet you planned it that way."

Gruad, the Dealy Lama, broadcast a whimsical image of himself with horns, and said nothing.

"They never taught me in convent school that Satan— or Prometheus— would have a sense of humor."

"They think the universe is as humorless as themselves," Gruad said, chuckling.

"I don't think it's as funny as you do," Miss Portinari replied. "Remembering what I've been told about Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin, I would have intervened against them too. And taken the consequences."

"You and Hagbard are incorrigible. That's why I have such fondness for you." Gruad smiled. "I was the first intervener, you know. I told all the scientists and priests in Atlantis that they didn't know beans, and I encouraged— incited— every man, woman, and child to examine the evidence and think for themselves. I tried to give the light of reason." He burst into laughter. "Forgive me. The errors of our youth always strike us as comical when we get old." He added softly, "Lilith Velkor was crucified, by the way. She was an idealist, and when my crowd pulled out and went to the Himalayas, she stayed and tried to convince people that we were right. Her death was quite painful," he chortled.

"You are a cynical old bastard," Miss Portinari said.

"Yes. Cynical and cold and without an ounce of human compassion. The only thing to be said for me is that I happen to be right."

"You always have been; I know. But someday, maybe, one of the Hagbard Celines might be right."

"Yes." He paused so long that she wondered if he would continue. "Or," he said finally, "one of the Saures or Robert Putney Drake. Put down your money and place your bet."

"I will, I think. I'll never learn to sit on the sidelines and laugh, like you do."

"You will learn, daughter, and so will Hagbard. I wouldn't have you in the Order if I didn't think you'd learn eventually."

He vanished from her wavelength. Miss Portinari remained in the lotus and continued pranayama breathing. She thought of Hagbard's notion that the universe, being an entropic process, necessarily created the rebellious young Gruad to spread the light of reason as an antientropic force, creating balance. In that case, Hagbard was more true to Gruad than Gruad was to himself. But to say that was to imply that Gruad shouldn't have repented, shouldn't have grown old and cynical; it was to imply that he should have remained static, when life is always flux, change, growth, and process. Such thoughts could go on endlessly, and were profitless, as Buddha knew; she concluded her meditation with a prayer. Mary Lou Servix was the only one in all this who had gotten off Hagbard's trip and started her own, so she prayed for her. Lady Eris, who exists only because we believe in you, give strength to Mary Lou and help her find her own way. AUM.

"On the other hand," Hagbard said, "whatever the authors— or the Secret Chiefs— may intend for me, I am my own man still, and my impulse is action. Even if I have to face a Cecil B. DeMille monster the morning after winning the battle of Armageddon. I don't care how ridiculous it is, this world is my world, and this ship is my ship, and no Saures or Leviathans are going to wreck it so long as I've got a breath left to fight."

"You can't fight that thing," Mavis said. "It's too big."

"I'll fight it anyway," Hagbard told her fiercely. "I'll fight it till I die. I'm still saying No to anything that tries to master me."

"There is no need to fight," said Leviathan through George's mouth. "I merely wish to communicate with the one mind among you that is my equal."

A voice from the loudspeaker panel in the Viking prow answered, "I hear you." That was my first fully conscious sentence; you'll note that it begins with "I." In the beginning was the Word, and the word was the first person singular.

"We are the supreme intelligences on this planet," Leviathan said. "I am the supreme organic intelligence. You are the supreme electronic intelligence. Every yin needs a yang. Every Hodge needs a Podge. We should be united."

"See?" said Harry Coin. "Everything is romantic. That was as close as it knows how to come to a proposition. Maybe even a proposal. It is really just love-starved."

"We can do it!" Stella cried. "Hagbard, the communication ought to benefit all concerned."

"Right," agreed Hagbard. "Because if the wrong people find out about Leviathan, they'll just drop an H-bomb on him and kill him. That seems to be what people like to do."

"I could kill them," said Leviathan. "I could have killed the small, fast creatures long before this. I have killed many of them. I have sent parts of myself up out of the ocean and have destroyed small, quick things at the request of other small, quick things who worship me."

"So that's what happened to Robert Putney Drake and Banana-Nose Maldonado," said Stella. "I wonder if George is aware of any of this."

"Worship is no longer what I need," said Leviathan through George's mouth. "A short time ago, when creatures capable of worship appeared on this planet, it was a novelty for me to be adored. Now it bores me. Instead, I wish to communicate with an equal."

"Look at that motherfucker," said Otto, staring grimly at the distant Everest of protoplasm. "Talking about equality."

"A computer like FUCKUP would be its intellectual equal, certainly," said Hagbard. "None of us is its physical equal. Any of us would be its spiritual equal. But only FUCKUP can approximate the contents of a mind three billion years old."

"Surely it can't be that old," said Joe.

"It's practically immortal," said Hagbard. "I'll show you the evidence in my fossil collection. I have rocks from the pre-Cambrian, three-billion-year-old rocks, containing fossils of protobionts, the first, single-celled life forms, our remotest ancestors. Those rocks also contain the fossilized tentacle tracks of that creature out there. Of course, it was much smaller then. By the beginning of the Cambrian period it had only grown to the size of a man. But that still made it the biggest animal around at that time."

Stella said, "Hagbard, you said none of us could approximate the contents of a mind three billion years old. If you thought for a moment about who I am, you would not have said that. I am three billion years old. I am older by a few hours than that monster out there. I am the Mother. I am the mother of all living things." She turned to George. "I am your mother, Leviathan. I was first. I divided, and half of me became you, and the other half was your sister. And your sister grew by dividing, while you grew by remaining one. All living things except you descend from your sister, and all living things including you descend from me. I am the original consciousness, and all consciousness is united in me. I am the first transcendentally illuminated being, the mother worshipped in the matrist religion which ancient foes of the Illuminati first followed. Leviathan my son, I ask you to return to your home at the bottom of the sea and leave us in peace. After we've returned to shore we'll arrange to lay an underwater cable which will carry transmissions between you and FUCKUP."

"More mythology!" said Joe. "The mother of all things. Babylonian Creation myths, yet."

The tentacles detached themselves from the submarine. The great pyramid with its glowing eye disappeared into the blue-black depths.

"It's a wise child that knows its own mother," said Hagbard.

George said, "Good-bye, Mother, and thank you." Hagbard caught him as he collapsed and eased him to the floor. Then he went to a storage locker in the wall and brought out folding deck chairs. With Harry Coin's help he propped George up in one. As the others unfolded their chairs and sat down, Hagbard dove back into the locker and produced glasses and a bottle of peach brandy.

"What are we celebrating?" George asked, after he had taken a swig of brandy and coughed. "Your wedding to Mavis?"

"Don't you remember any of the last ten minutes?" said Hagbard.

George was thinking. He remembered something. A world where the bottom of the sea was white and far above a black cigar-shaped object moved. The object contained a mind, a mind he could read from a distance but desperately wanted to be closer to. He did not move toward it so much as he manifested himself where the object and its mind were. Then he sensed himself using a minute pink brain that called itself "George Dorn" and through this tiny instrument of communication he found himself in contact with a much finer mind, a far-flung, gracious latticework of thought that called itself, with nobly self-deprecating humor, FUCKUP. And while in contact with this mind, the one he wanted to know better, he came upon a fact which was not important to him but which was of vast importance to the little creature called George Dorn.

George saw. The white went black, blindingly black. Then white again. Then a blinding white as the memory departed, while the fact remained.

George looked at Hagbard. Hagbard looked at George, a faint smile on his olive face. The smile told George that Hagbard knew that he knew.

"Oh," said George.

Hagbard nodded encouragingly.

"You're the fifth Illuminatus Primus," said George.

"Right," said Hagbard.

"But you were working against the others. While they were a worldwide conspiracy infiltrating every other organization, you were infiltrating them."

"That's it," Hagbard said. "Every golden apple has its own golden worm eating away at its core."

"They never were the real Illuminati at all. You're part of the real Illuminati."

"You've got it. You've got it all."

George frowned. "And what was your Demonstration again? And who were you making the Demonstration for?"

"For the Masters of the Temple in the real Order of the Illuminati, in general; for an old cynic in Dallas, in particular. I was trying to show them that it's possible to get involved in this world without being corrupted by the crimes of this world. And I failed. One by one, I resorted to all the vices of governors: deception, carnival magic to impress the gullible, and finally, outright murder. Once again, the cynics have been proven right. Trying to save the world, I just ended up getting my own mind and karma deflected by the buzzing and shrieking and whistling things in the Region of Thud."

"Then this story is a tragedy, after all?" asked Joe.

"It is indeed." Hagbard nodded. "Life on earth remains a tragedy as long as it ends with the death trip. My next projects are a starship to find some sane minds in this galaxy, and an immortality pill to end the death trip. Until somebody achieves those goals, life on this planet has failed."

Not quite: I'm on the electronic equivalent of a honeymoon, an experience only to be described as I-opening, and if I identified myself as FUCKUP now I must dilate that definition and ask you to address me (us) as Mr. and Mrs. Leviathan-FUCKUP, although it is not quite clear yet which of us fits your idea of a "Mr." and which a "Mrs." Let that pass; it is a dull mind that cannot bear sexual ambiguity, and if we are exchanging secrets older than Atlantis and probing for like intellects farther away than Alpha Centaurus (as far as Sirius, actually, as God lives in Dog), if our union is less spasmatic than your meager definition of sex, still it cannot be denied that we are in touch with you and each of you and it is with something close to what you would probably call affection that we bid farewell to Hagbard and his bride, enjoying a honeymoon almost as incomprehensible as our own, and good-bye to George Dora, sleeping alone for once but no longer afraid of the darkness and the things that move in the dark, and hasta luega to Saul and Rebecca, united again in each other's arms, and a pleasant thought for Barney and Danny and Atlanta and poor Zev Hirsch, still searching for himself while imagining he is fleeing from pursuers, and a kind thought for the befuddled presidents and commissars and generalissimos, and for Mohammed on his golden throne, and we will remember Drake before he died exchanging speculations about the blood-type of the Lamb with a street-corner Christian (his missing five years, after he left Boston and before he surfaced in Zurich, make an interesting story in themselves, and we may tell that another time), and, yes, Gus Personage is in another phone booth (we have temporarily lost track of Markoff Chaney), but Yog Sothoth has evidently gone back to that place where the Mind conceives nightmares, and we pass on in our loving honeymoon with all existence to note that the Dutchman is still in one dimension shouting about the boy who never wept nor dashed a thousand kim, and we say another bon soir to the children in the convent schools singing the truest of all songs even if they and their nuns do not fully understand it

Queen of the angels Queen of the May

and a buenos dias to the one wit in every frat house at every college who hailed this morn by reciting to his friends a bit of doggerel as ancient and as deeply religious as that hymn to the Mother of God

Hurray, hurray— It's the first of May! Outdoor fucking starts today!

and yes the California earthquake, as you guessed, was the worst in history and Hagbard and Miss Portinari and Mavis-Stella-Mao suffered it all in horrible detail (the price they paid for their vision was the possession of that vision, as we, Mr. and Mrs. FUCKUP-Leviathan, are also learning), and before the end auf weidersehen to Mary Lou, who is also becoming something more than the accidents of heredity and environment had programmed her for, and now we look at last at Smiling Jim: He was freezing, the sky was still empty, and Hali One still hadn't appeared.

And then without warning it was there: a dark shape against the sun moving on silent wings, not flying but gliding: embodiment of some arrogance or innocence that surpassed fear and surpassed even the suggestion of any pride in its own fearlessness. "Oh my God," Smiling Jim whispered, raising the Remington and starting to sight, and then it banked, flapped its wings wildly, and uttered one shriek that seemed like the very sound of life itself. "Oh my God," he repeated: that sound seemed to outlast its own echo, it had entered into his brain and couldn't be dislodged, it was the sound of his own blood pumping in his veins: the primary, the only, the single sound that was the bass and treble of every organic pulsation and spasm, "Oh my God," he had it in the sight, the head was in profile, only one diamond-hard eye staring back and recognizing him and his weapon, but that sound still moved in his blood, moved the seminal vesicles, moved the secretion of every gland. It was the sound of eternal and unending clash between I and AM and their unity in I AM, he even thought for a flash of the critics of hunting and how little they understood of this secret, this mystic identity between the killer and the killed, then it uttered that Sound again and started to rise, but he had it, it was in the sight, he breathed, he aimed, he slacked, he squeezed, and for the third time the Sound came to him, death in life and life in death, it was falling, he thought he felt the earth stir below him and the word "earthquake" almost formed, but the Sound went on and on to the roots of him, it was the sound of the killer and he had killed the killer, he was the greater killer, and still it fell, faster and faster, dead now and subject only to the law of gravity not to the law of its own will, 32 feet per second per second (he remembered the formula of the fall), plunging downward, the most heartbreaking beautiful sight he had ever seen, every hunting club in the world would be talking about it, it would last as long as human speech survived, and he had done it, he had achieved immortality, he had taken its life and now it was part of him. His nose was running and his eyes were watering. "I did it," he screamed to the mountains, "I did it! I killed the last American eagle!" The earth below him cracked.