The Illuminatus! Trilogy полностью

"Okay," Mr. Lucky said. "You know about the Illuminati. You know what the Dutchman was trying to say to the police. You even seem to know about the Liberteri and Johnnie Dillinger. How much do you want?"

"Everything," Drake replied. "And you are all going to offer it to me. But not yet. Not tonight." And he hung up.

(The wheel of tune, as the Mayans knew, spins three ways; and just as the earth revolves on its own axis, simultaneously orbits about the sun and at the "same" time trails after the sun as that star traverses the galaxy's edge, the wheel of time, which is a wheel of ifs, is come round again, as Drake's phone clicks off, to Gruad the Grayface calculating the path of a comet and telling his followers: "See? Even the heavenly bodies are subject to law, and even the lloigor, so must not men and women also be subject to law?" And in a smaller cycle, Semper Cuni Linctus, centurion stationed in a godforsaken outpost of the Empire, listens in boredom as a subaltern tells him excitedly: "That guy we crucified last Friday-people all over town are swearing they've seen him walking around. One guy even claims to have put a hand through his side!" Semper Cuni Linctus smiles cynically. "Tell that to the gladiators," he says. And Albert Stern turns on the gas, takes one last fix, and full of morphine and euphoria, dies slowly, confident that he will always be remembered as the man who shot Dutch Schultz, not knowing that Abe Reles will reveal the truth five years later.)

Camp-town racetrack five miles long… During Joe's second trip on the Leif Erikson, they went all the way to Africa, and Hagbard had an important conference with five gorillas. At least, he said afterwards that it was important; Joe couldn't judge, since the conversation was in Swahili. "They speak some English," Hagbard explained back on the sub, "but I prefer Swahili, since they're more eloquent in it and can express more nuances."

"Are you the first man to teach an ape to speak," Joe asked, "in addition to your other accomplishments?"

"Oh, not at all," Hagbard said modestly. "It's an old Discordian secret. The first person to communicate with a gorilla was an Erisian missionary named Malaclypse the Elder, who was born in Athens and got exiled for opposing the imposition of male supremacy when the Athenians created patriarchy and locked up their women. He then wandered all over the ancient world, learning all sorts of secrets and leaving behind a priceless collection of mind-blowing legends- he's the Phoenix Madman mentioned in the Confucian scriptures, and he passed himself off as Krishna to recite that gorgeous Bible of revolutionary ethics, the Bhaga-vad Gita, to Arjuna in India, among other feats. I believe you met him in Chicago while he was pretending to be the Christian Devil."

"But how have you Discordians concealed the fact that gorillas talk?"

"We're rather close-mouthed, you might say, and when we do speak it's usually to put somebody on or blow their minds-"

"I've noticed that," Joe said.

"And the gorillas themselves are too shrewd to talk to anybody but another anarchist. They're all anarchists themselves, you know, and they have a very healthy wariness about people in general and government people in particular. As one of them told me once, 'If it got out that we can talk, the conservatives would exterminate most of us and make the rest pay rent to live on our own land; and the liberals would try to train us to be engine-lathe operators. Who the fuck wants to operate an engine lathe?' They prefer their own pastoral and Eristic ways, and I, for one, would never interfere with them. We do communicate, though, just as we communicate with the dolphins. Both species are intelligent enough to realize that it's in their interest, as part of earth's biosphere, to help the handful of human anarchists to try to stop, or at least slow down, the bloodletting and slaughter of our Aner-istic rulers and Aneristic mobs."

"Sometimes I still get confused about your theological terms- or are they psychological? The Aneristic forces, especially the Illuminati, are structure freaks: they want to impose their concept of order on everybody else. But I still get confused about the differences between the Erisian, the Eristic and the Discordian. Not to mention the JAMs."