The Illuminatus! Trilogy полностью

"You are risking something," said George, trying to control the quaver in his voice. "Those missiles will destroy us if the dolphins don't stop them."

At that moment, there were four blinding flashes where the orange lights had been. George gripped the railing, sensing that the shock wave of these explosions would be worse than that caused by the destruction of the spider ships. It came. George had been readying himself for it, but unable to tell when it would come, and it still took him by surprise. Everything shook violently. Then the bottom dropped out of his stomach, as if the submarine had suddenly leaped up. George grabbed the railing with both arms, clinging to it as the only solid thing near him. "O God, we're gonna be killed!" he cried.

'They got the missiles," Hagbard said. "That gives us a fighting chance. Laser crew, attempt to puncture the Zwack. Fire at will.

Howard reappeared outside the bubble. "How did your people do?" Hagbard asked him.

"All four of them were killed," said Howard. "The missiles exploded when they approached them, just as you predicted."

George, who was standing up straight now, thankful that Hagbard had simply ignored his episode of terror, said, "They were killed saving our lives. I'm sorry it happened, Howard."

"Laser-beam firing, Hagbard," a voice announced. There was a pause. "I think we hit them."

"You needn't be sorry," said Howard. "We neither look forward to death in fear nor back upon it in sorrow. Especially when someone has died doing something worthwhile. Death is the end of one illusion and the beginning of another."

"What other illusion?" asked George. "When you're dead, you're dead, right?"

"Energy can neither be created nor destroyed," said Hagbard. "Death itself is an illusion."

These people were talking like some of the Zen students and acid mystics George had known. If I could feel that way, he thought, I wouldn't be such a goddamned coward. Howard and Hagbard must be enlightened. I've got to become enlightened. I can't stand living this way any more. Whatever it took, acid alone wasn't the answer. George had tried acid already, and he knew that, while the experience might be wholly remarkable, for him it left little residue in terms of changed attitudes or behavior. Of course, if you thought your attitudes and behavior should change, you mimicked other acidheads.

"I'll try to find out what's happening to the Zwack," said Howard, and swam away.

"The porpoises do not fear death, they do not avoid suffering, they are not assailed by conflicts between intellect and feeling and they are not worried about being ignorant of things. In other words, they have not decided that they know the difference between good and evil, and in consequence they do not consider themselves sinners. Understand?"

"Very few humans consider themselves sinners nowadays," said George. "But everyone is afraid of death."

"All human beings consider themselves sinners. It's just about the deepest, oldest, and most universal human hangup there is. In fact, it's almost impossible to speak of it in terms that don't confirm it. To say that human beings have a universal hangup, as I just did, is to restate the belief that all men are sinners in different languages. In that sense, the Book of Genesis- which was written by early Semitic opponents of the Illuminati- is quite right. To arrive at a cultural turning point where you decide that all human conduct can be classified in one of two categories, good and evil, is what creates all sin- plus anxiety, hatred, guilt, depression, all the peculiarly human emotions. And, of course, such a classification is the very antithesis of creativity. To the creative mind there is no right or wrong. Every action is an experiment, and every experiment yields its fruit in knowledge. To the moralist, every action can be judged as right or wrong- and, mind you, in advance- without knowing what its consequences are going to be- depending upon the mental disposition of the actor. Thus the men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake knew they were doing good, even though the consequence of their actions was to deprive the world of a great scientist."

"If you can never be sure whether what you are doing is good or bad," said George, "aren't you liable to be pretty Hamlet-like?" He was feeling much better now, much less afraid, even though the enemy was still presumably out there trying to kill him. Maybe he was getting darshan from Hagbard.

"What's so bad about being Hamlet-like?" said Hagbard. "Anyway, the answer is no, because you only become hesitant when you believe there is such a thing as good and evil, and that your action may be one or the other, and you're not sure which. That was the whole point about Hamlet, if you remember the play. It was his conscience that made him indecisive."

"So he should have murdered a whole lot of people in the first act?"